JT Foundation/Oliver Williams Research

JT Foundation/Oliver Williams Research

Originally posted by CaryP+Oct 11 2004, 01:50 AM--><div class='quotemain'><!--QuoteBegin-Paul J. Lyon@Oct 10 2004, 08:13 PM
If you were to find a great deal of interest by intelligence agencies, it would tend to corroborate the theory of some of us that Titor is a government disinformation operation, and that there is interest in how well it is now doing.
​
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Uh, yup. That's what I'm thinking. Big brother and sister are looking hard. Does that qualify me for the Homeland Security "blue list"?

Cary
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I wonder whether there has been any perceptible government interest in this site, or if it would be possible to find out. For example, those members who are in the government service and use work computers to log on to the forum are subject to screening of internet activity, right?
 
JT Foundation/Oliver Williams Research

Spoofing your IP is not uncommon in certain circles, but there are programs that can get past Spoofs. Depending on how high up the feeding chain you are, monitoring where you go by a supervisor or Sys Op would depend on policy. As Far as I know a server can take a "snapshot" of connections every few moments depending on what you set the parameters to. You would need a real hotdog that could get into a server and have it answer questions or spit out information due to faults in its current running programs. Depending on what program you are using, there can be many ways to gain access or have your status changed to someone that can manipulate information.

I would not expect a Govt based system to use windows based equipment. Windows is full of security problems. I would wager that 35 to 45 % of their programs are REM statements rather than actual language. Linux or Unix a open source programing, strangely is way safer. Then there is Apple. a very safe system. Could you respect someone that left their IP alone that showed a .gov in the address?

I would defer to Jedi on this as I do not know to much about specifics.
 
JT Foundation/Oliver Williams Research

I received an e-mail this evening from, sieler, the current high bidder on ebay.

I had asked if he was interested in John Titor and if he would like to join our community.

I'm not, although I've heard about him in early 2003.

(At that time, I was pointed towards
http://www.anomalies.net/time_travel/john.html)

I collect antique computers, and have a special interest in the
5100
because it has APL.

BTW, IIRC the \"time-travel\" story correctly, the time-traveller
should
be equally interested in an IBM 5110 or IBM 5120, which are
essentially
the same computers (a bit more memory, and with a floppy disk
(and optional
tape cartridge)). You see 5110 and 5120 computer more often on
eBay.


In 2003, I was told by someone (\"Paul\"?):
?
Posted by John Titor on 02-10-2001 09:49 AM
?I believe the 5100 is unique in its ability to run assembler
language on
?the 360-machine platform and still be portable. I?m not sure
if that
?fact was ever made public so it?s the best ?proof? I have.
Click to expand...

That doesn't pass first muster...it's fairly well known that the
5100
(at least for APL) emulates a 360 ... it's running APL/360,
after all!
(I.e., it isn't a hidden secret.)

Also, there are a number of 360 emulators you can get for free
that will
run on a standard PC ... you can probably get one that will run
under DOS,
(a quick google search implies that at least one existed in the
mid 1980s),
which means that you could run it on an HP 200LX (and APL, too),
a computer
that your hypothetical time traveler could put in his pocket.
Maybe that's
why 200LX's are still so popular on eBay? :)
Even if there's no 16-bit emulator, Hercules will definitely run
on
an IBM PC 110, which is a 75 MHz Windows computer that fits in
your pocket.
Click to expand...
 
JT Foundation/Oliver Williams Research

Has anyone thought about what a large, powerful, concentrated magnetic field would do to a computer built back then? It takes almost nothing, with the natural electricity produced by the human body/ or the static charge held, to fry some circuits on a motherboard if your are handling it without a ground wire on. How possible is it that this early comp survived the trip? What are the chances that spare motherboards or even circuits of this era survived to facilitate repairs?

From the previous post, we have information regarding various other computers that could do the job just as well. Forget about the use of a 'flopy drive', to even consider flopy disks surviving that long exceeds the limits of reality.

Again, this segment of the tall tale points to one of the several participants involved in the fabrication of a plausible time travel story that had enough knowledge to make it interesting.
 
JT Foundation/Oliver Williams Research

Originally posted by StarLord@Oct 12 2004, 03:34 PM
Has anyone thought about what a large, powerful, concentrated magnetic field would do to a computer built back then? It takes almost nothing, with the natural electricity produced by the human body/ or the static charge held, to fry some circuits on a motherboard if your are handling it without a ground wire on. How possible is it that this early comp survived the trip? What are the chances that spare motherboards or even circuits of this era survived to facilitate repairs?

From the previous post, we have information regarding various other computers that could do the job just as well. Forget about the use of a 'flopy drive', to even consider flopy disks surviving that long exceeds the limits of reality.

Again, this segment of the tall tale points to one of the several participants involved in the fabrication of a plausible time travel story that had enough knowledge to make it interesting.
​
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You know, a year ago they sputtered on and on about this on Anomalies, and I don't believe any one of the crew of hotshot knowitalls there ever mentioned the magnetic threat to the old computer. Maybe Titor wanted to just get the thing itself, to copy or examine, not intending for it to function-- sort of like the way most of the Titorries on the other sites snatched up the Titor posts.
 
JT Foundation/Oliver Williams Research

UPDATED RESEARCH:


Decided to look in the direction of the developers. I did a random search and found a Dr. Bernard Dimsdale who wrote the languages for these computers. There was a memo that he wrote to a man named Paul Chessin in 1999and it went something like this:

Subject: Eniac story
Date: Sat, 23 Jan 1999 21:02:17 -0800
From: Bernard Dimsdale
To: Paul Chessin


"I am very interested in your query about Aberdeen Proving Grounds. I have some vivid memories of that, and while I have written nothing down as yet I intend doing so, and will send it along when ready. I wasn't involved there with Herman Goldstine, but directly with Von Neumann. Also it was Dick Clippinger not Ray . And the subject was the Eniac, not the 709, which was years later.


How I happened to get involved with Aberdeen Proving Ground and the Eniac follows. Several months before this happened I had gotten out of the Army, and took a jog teaching at Purdue. I discovered that I simply didn,t have patience for all the meatheads I was stuck with, so I quit and took sme post doctoral work at Colunbia. I also met Syl and married her ? which suggested I needed a real job. Somebody mentioned a Dr. Dederick, who was hiring personnel for something called an Eniac Computer. I talked to the man,got interested and applied for the job, which, in 1947 paid the princely annual wage of $5000. Lo and behold I was informed that I was overqualified at that price and they offered me $6000, which I hastened to accept. This kind of thing never happened to me again, of course.

I arrived at Aberdeen early in 1947, was greeted by Dr. Dederick, who handed me a stack of wiring diagrams, about 15 incmes thick as I recall, and said go compute. Believe me, I was terrified, particularly since the head of the physics department handed me a non linear partial differntial equatio n to deal with. They were gettig nowhere with the thing. My confidence was somewhat boosted by a problem the "programmers' came running to me with. It seems that they were running some sort of statistical calculation, it was suppose to converge to 1, and they said just shot by 1.. I asked where it got to and they hadn't bothered to find out, so I said lets find out. Sure enough it started to converge to 1.4142 etc. whereupon I called the statistician and asked him if he let the sqaure root of 2 out of his denominator. He came back and said he sure did, and how did I find out. I made some sort of reference to my genius for this sort of thing. I got rid of the partial differenc equation by making, by the grace of God a transformation that showed a solution existed only in the unit circle, which is where they didn't want one, so I suggested they might want to restate their problem. The problem with this gadget, the Eniac, was that it was an enormous plug borad machine with literally thousands of entry points. Once all the connections had been made, and hundreds of switches set, it was started by giving it a pulse of electricity somewhere. If a mistake was made at that point, it would start off doing God knows what, and it took a major effort to stop the thing so you could try again ? something on the order of 'whos' of first, of baseball fame. In retrospect it was almost a miracle getting anything out of that machine. Therre was no way to check your "program". It either worked or it didn't ,so go figure. Besides which there was no power control , so one would frequently blow vacuum tubes - in .large batches ? remember there were twenty thousand vacuum tubes in the machine. It also turned out to be a very nervous machine ? that is you neeeded to be very careful around it ? certainly don't lean on anything. At turned out that it got less nervous over the years as whole rows of unsoldered connections were found And because of no power control it was only possible to get anywhere with the machine from about midnight to first electric lights etc. in the neighborhood. We all got in a hell of a lot of bridge, listening to the card punch, which was the only output from the thing and somehow told us when things were going wrong.

That is when we started up with Von Neumann and spent a very interesting year or two making the machine programmable in the sense of von Neumann.
More later."

Everyone knows who John Von Neumann was, right? Philadelphia Experiment. Time and space, ect.

Dr. Dimsdale has pasted away but he did have a son and daughter.....Judith and Jerry. JT said that he was chosen for the mission because he was "related to a key fugure in the development of the IBM 5100:. This is where the research is at the moment. More to come.
 
JT Foundation/Oliver Williams Research

Thank you Cary!!!


Okay, I know everyone is looking at Titshaw. well, here it is....Titshaw Sr. was born in 1921, mother 1920, Titshaw Jr is 1948 and Ms. Haber 1957...Looks to me like Titshaw Jr is Ms. Habers older brother. Also, I don't see a Ms. Titshaw Jr. Looks like he is not married. At least not at this time.
 
JT Foundation/Oliver Williams Research

Originally posted by StarLord@Oct 11 2004, 02:59 PM
I would not expect a Govt based system to use windows based equipment. Windows is full of security problems. I would wager that 35 to 45 % of their programs are REM statements rather than actual language. Linux or Unix a open source programing, strangely is way safer. Then there is Apple. a very safe system. Could you respect someone that left their IP alone that showed a .gov in the address?
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This is incorrect. A vast majority of government 'equipment', i.e. workstations, are Windows based systems. However, a lot of DNS servers and routers are not. You'll find a mixture of UNIX, Windows, and even FreeBSD as edge servers for DNS and such. At the desktop, you'll find Windows. Linux is not considered 'ready-for-Primetime' and as such it has not been rolled out on a large scale. In some 'scientific labs', Linux is used.

Windows source code is hardly wasted space nor '35 to 45 %' REM statements. (LOL! ' REM statements '.. give me a break.) I am involved in the 'Shared Source Initiative' and I have seen a large portion of the Microsoft Windows source code for W2k3 and XP and I currently test for them on Longhorn.
Apple isn't all that safe... check the statistics at CERT for how many reported issues there are for each O/S... they're all vulnerable and the comparisons are pretty upsetting. It's more a matter of how many eyes are looking at breaking the system. Apple has maybe 3% to 6% of the marketplace... hardly a tasty target for cracking.

I would expect that kind of rhetoric at Slashdot... not here, though.

To answer Paul's question, *most* government (military is what I am most familiar with as of late) users are indeed proxied like crazy and there is a huge amount of monitoring. However, you'd be surprised how little of them are actually spoofed or obfuscated to the outside world. Perhaps it is a manpower issue as even the best systems require wetware (people) to audit what's going on.

Now... if I were to don my 'paranoia cap', I would say that some of the 'three-letter agencies' out there indeed obfuscate and spoof. The last network of that type that I was able to have some 'drive time' on was at the beginning of this year and they did some nifty things.
Some of the three-letter agency folks do work through off-site networks and you'll find that they appear in logs or stats pages as home users on networks like Comcast, Verizon, etc. The Department of Navy has some very interesting toys and pride themselves on the networks that they build. Their security and counter-cyberterrorism folks are young, smart, and work all hours... but you probably won't see them show up in logs... or easily recognize it. Regular military and government? Yep, they show up.

I do web hosting as a revenue stream for my business and my girlfriend sells 'Middle Eastern Belly Dance' supplies at her website (on my servers)... hmmm... I wonder why all those .mil and .gov IP addresses show up there? LOL! Methinks 'Middle Eastern' might have caught their attention... especially since I do some government contracting... but then again, if it were really serious, I doubt that the generic government addresses would be what I should worry about... :)
 

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