Human-Nets-Request%rutgers@brl-bmd.UUCP (Human-Nets-Request@rutgers) (01/05/84)
HUMAN-NETS Digest Thursday, 5 Jan 1984 Volume 7 : Issue 1
Today's Topics:
Administrivia - Testimony of Willis Ware,
Query - The Plethora of Networks,
Input Devices - Keyboards (5 msgs),
Computer Security - Passwording (2 msgs),
Computers and People - Augmented Global Consciousness
News Article - Doomsday Clock
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Date: 4 Jan 84 13:21:47 EST
From: Charles <MCGREW@RUTGERS.ARPA>
Subject: Testimony of Willis Ware
I have received a transcript of testimony of Mr. Willis Ware on
Information Systems, Security and Privacy before a Congressional
Subcommittee that may be of interest to Human-nets readers. The file
containing the testimony is too large for digesting (40,000
characters), so I offer it to human-nets folks for FTPing. For
ARPAnet readers, the file is on RUTGERS, in:
<mcgrew.human-nets>testimony.txt.
To FTP it, you should use login name ANONYMOUS, with any password.
For those who receive the digest on through a redistribution gateway,
you can FTP the file from your gateway. Consult the following table.
Gateway File
-------- ------------------
SU-SCORE <MDP>TESTIMONY.TXT
OFFICE-3 <ZELLICH>TESTIMONY.TXT
MIT-OZ SRC:<Common>testimony.txt
Login with name Anonymous, any Password. Those who receive digests
via DEC-MARLBORO have already received a copy. Due to some sort of
unfortunate mix-up at PARC-MAXC, those who receive digests via that
path will have a delay being able to FTP the file.
Thanks,
Charles
------------------------------
Date: Wed 28 Dec 83 21:59:55-PST
From: David Rogers <DRogers@SUMEX-AIM.ARPA>
Subject: plethora of networks
Um, excuse me if this has already been asked, but would someone
care to take a stab at the multitude of networks, given a 1-2 line
explanation of who is connected to who, who pays the bills, types of
institutions on it, etc? Or is there some central network "document"
that can be FTP'd? I find myself lost with ARPAnet, MILnet, USEnet,
CSNET, BITNET, UUCP, ... (And is there a simple way to decode those
arf!woof!rowf!etc addresses I keep seeing?)
David Rogers
------------------------------
Date: 28 Dec 1983 22:47:08 PST
From: <lars@ACC>
Subject: Keyboards ...
This recent talk about qwerty vs dvorak keyboards makes me think
of another kind of keyboards that you-all see every day ...
Have you ever noticed that there are two flavors of numeric only
keyboards: The kind you have on the right side of your terminal
and the kind you have on your phone ?
Apparently the guy who designed the phone keypad way not aware
of the existence of calculators, so he laid out a keypad that
he felt was nice - and it ended up becoming an international
standard for touch-tone telephones.
In my native Denmark, however, they did not get touch-tone tele-
phones until AFTER the japanese pocket calculator revolution,
and a smart guy at the phone company insisted that the new telephones
be in accordance with the numeric keypads people were used to,
so in Denmark, a telephone keypad looks like this:
7 8 9
4 5 6
1 2 3
* 0 #
(When these phones are sold in the US, however, they are
fitted with crazy AT&T keypads).
Lars Poulsen <Lars@ACC>
------------------------------
Date: 29 Dec 1983 05:22-PST
Subject: DVORAK Keyboards
From: CDR Jeff Ackerson (ACKERSON@USC-ISI)
The January 1984 issue of "Digital Review", a relatively new
magazine for DEC microcomputer users, has an article on keyboard
ergonomics in it. Page 121 has a picture of a DVORAK keyboard
layout (mapped to the DEC standard keyboard). You should be able
to find the magazine at a local computer store at $3.95 (if they
won't let you browse).
------------------------------
Date: Thursday, 29 December 1983 10:22 est
From: Chris Jones <CLJones@MIT-MULTICS.ARPA>
Subject: Dvorak keyboards
The following is taken from "New England Business" magazine (sorry,
all I have is a copy which doesn't include date or page numbers).
[begin article]
Farewell to Qwerty
Just when you thought you had finally mastered the standard
typewriter keyboard, what do they do to you? They change the location
of the keys. The standard location of keys is called Qwerty, named
after the first six letters on the keyboard, and dates back to the
19th century. On a Qwerty keyboard, the most frequently struck keys
were spread out. That was designed to purposely slow the operator
down so the arms of the old typewriter wouldn't jam. But there's no
need for that anymore with modern computers. The new keyboard layout,
called the Dvorak after August Dvorak, isn't really new. Dvorak, a
time-motion scientist, copyrighted the design in 1936. It places the
most frequently used keys on the same row ("home row"), greatly
reducing the distance the fingers must travel, and therefoby
increasing speed.
Virginia Russell, president of the Dvorak International
Federation, said the current interest in going Dvorak and the large
number of computer makers that are including Dvorak capability, leads
here to believe conversion will be swift and widespread. The leading
support for conversion, she says, comes from the American National
Standards Institute--those folks who bring us 8-1/2 by 11 paper and
all the other common standards in use. Members include
manufacturers, technical societies, consumer groups and government
agencies. "Every day, I hear about someone new using it," she said.
Harvard University has equipped all of its computer keyboards with the
capability to convert to the Dvorak system. She estimated that there
are now 10,000 people nationwide who use it.
"We're not shoving it down anyone's throat," she said. But the
Dvorak is so much faster, gives the operator so much less fatigue, and
produces so few errors that its use is inevitable, she said. A person
using Dvorak can type 32 times more words on its home row than on
Qwerty's home row (A, S, D, F ...).
Russell estimates that a person who now types 100 words a minute
will increase speed to 120 words a minute. (An average person types
closer to 60 words a minute.) It will take a typist who has converted
to Dvorak about 40 hours of typing to get back to original speed, she
said, and then the improvement comes after that. A beginning typist
using Dvorak, she said, will reach 40 words a minute in 18 hours. The
best way for a typist to convert is to start all over, to start from
scratch as if you never typed before.
[end of article]
There is a diagram which goes with the article which I've attempted to
reproduce below. It gives the layout of the Dvorak keyboard. My copy
is blurred, but it looks like the number keys are in the same place
and have the standard Selectric symbols over them (although I don't
know if Dvorak copyrighted that or not). I can't tell what's to the
right of the zero or to the left of the comma. The diagram has + over
=, ? over /, _ over -, and : over ;.
Dvorak Keyboard layout
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 =
, . P Y F G C R L /
A O E U I D H T N S -
; Q J K X B M W V Z
------------------------------
Date: Thu 29 Dec 83 18:11:28-PST
From: David Rogers <DRogers@SUMEX-AIM.ARPA>
Subject: DVORAK keyboards
For you DEC20 hackers, there is a hidden command in the standard
DEC PTYCON program which is (you guessed it!) DVORAK. It makes the
standard QWERTY keyboard emulate a DVORAK keyboard, so that you can
"talk" to your pseudojob with a pseudo-DVORAK keyboard. I would guess
that this kind of front-end would be simple to write for almost any
computer system... well, ALMOST any....
David
------------------------------
Date: 2 January 1984 02:49 EST
From: Jerry E. Pournelle <POURNE @ MIT-MC>
Subject: DVORAK Keyboards
You exaggerate the gains made by switching to Dvorak keyboard.
They're impressive, but not anything (on average) like 100%;
more like a constant 25% gain in productivity. The problem is
not learning Dvorak but in going back to qwerty if you have to
alternate.
------------------------------
Date: Thu 29 Dec 83 23:29:23-PST
From: Ken Laws <Laws@SRI-AI.ARPA>
Subject: Re: Passwords - An alternative
I once read that the inter-character timing profile (suggested by
Paul Bame) was being investigated by the Pentagon; it was reported
to work well. Telegraphers and ham operators can similarly be
identified by their "fists".
-- Ken Laws
------------------------------
Date: 30 December 1983 04:09 EST
From: Robert Elton Maas <REM @ MIT-MC>
Subject: Passwords
Your claim that a 4-letter password is as good as a 9-letter password
is false. Your claim is equivalent to saying all possible passwords
are equally likely so any is as good as any other. But in fact most
people are lazy and pick meaningful and/or short passwords, so
password crackers start with short and/or meaningful passwords when
guessing, because it improves their odds in general, so if you pick a
long meaningless password they are less likely to guess it than if you
pick a short or meaningful one. If everyone else in the world picked
totally random maximum-length passwords, there'd be no advantage to
guessing short or meaningful ones first, in fact there'd be a
disadvantage guessing short ones, so the longer ones would be tried
first, and in random order, when guessing. Then your claim that
4-letter passwords are fine would be valid (providing you never opened
your mouth or fingers that you were using a short password of course;
lest the crackers modify their program to guess short passwords just
for your account). But as things stand now, being lazy like others is
the best way to let a cracker into your account.
------------------------------
Date: 26-Dec-83 16:59 PST
From: Kirk Kelley <KIRK.TYM@OFFICE-2>
Subject: why a self-referential collaboration?
In response to the message proposing an augmented global consciousness
project, someone wanted clarified why the lifetime of the project was
chosen rather than some other topic for simulation. I can think of a
few motivations off the top of my head.
* the focus for the simulation must start somewhere.
* all of the technology on which a tele-collaborated simulation
would depend makes it a nice springboard out to other issues.
* it would be a worthy first goal and test if the collaboration
could justify its own existence.
* pulling itself up by the bootstraps gives the collaboration a
form of self sufficiency (local dependency, really) that
accelerates viable development.
* self reference may be an essential ingredient of consciousness.
Also requested were details on how the simulation would be formed and
run, and how people would interact to refine it. Any ideas?
-- kirk
------------------------------
Date: Mon 2 Jan 84 05:07:41-CST
From: Werner Uhrig <CMP.WERNER@UTEXAS-20.ARPA>
Subject: DOOMSDAY CLOCK at 3 minutes to midnight !!
DOOMSDAY CLOCK NOW 3 TICKS TO HOLOCAUST
--------------------------------------
Washington (AP) - In a gesture of despair and with a prediction that
worse is yet to come in 1984, the editors of the Bulletin of the
Atomic Scientists have advanced the minute hand of their famous
"doomsday clock" as a symbol of humanity's advance toward the nuclear
abyss.
The movement of the hands as they appear on the face of each issue of
the magazine symbolize the editors' evaluation of the danger of
nuclear warfare.
The hands are now fixed at 3 minutes to midnight. They have been
closer to midnight only once in their 37 year history - in 1953, after
the development of the hydrogen bomb by the US and the USSR.
The 1-minute advance Thursday was the first change since 1981, when
the editors cited the development of nuclear weapons designed for
fighting war instead of deterring war as a dangerous step.
At a news conference here, James Cracraft, an expert on the Soviet
Union and a professor of history at the University of Illinois at
Chicago, said, "1983 was a bad year for US-Soviet relations and 1984
promises to be even worse."
He cited the suspension and possible breakdown in all American-Soviet
negotiations and the prospect that progress will be frozen in 1984 by
the imponderables of leadership questions, with a new election in the
US and a succession struggle likely in the Kremlin.
The doomsday clock was created when the magazine was started in 1947
by scientists who had worked on the Manhattan Project, which developed
the atomic bomb.
The hands were then set at seven minutes to midnight. They have been
moved 10 times since, mostly to move closer to midnight.
They were pushed back in 1960, with a thaw in the Cold War; in 1963
with the signing of a partial test ban treaty; in 1969 with the
ratification of the non-proliferation treaty; and, for the last time,
in 1972 with the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty.
The setting is changed in consultation with a committee of 47
sponsors, including 18 Nobel prize winners.
In an editorial, the magazine, which has a circulation of about
25,000, explained the reasoning for advancing the minute hand:
"The point is not simply that discussions have proved difficult, that
negotiations have been slow and protracted, that talks have been
impeded by distrust. It is, rather, that the US and the USSR seem,
for the moment at least, to have given up on the possibility of
serious talks. They are, it appears, at the point of abandoning
altogether the effort to seek accommodation through negotiation."
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End of HUMAN-NETS Digest
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