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Domain: uidaho.edu

Stories and comments across the archive that link to uidaho.edu.

Comments · 105

  1. Aren't you forgetting the "Hummer Project"? by Netsnipe · · Score: 5 · on Sandia's Distributed Anti-Cracking Bot
    It's not that I'm discrediting the guys over at Sandia, but the idea of bots that "runs on multiple computers in a network...constantly compare notes to determine if any unusual requests or commands have been received from external or internal sources" is not unique or a first.

    There is in fact two noticable examples of distributed network monitoring/Intrusion Detection Tools out there already that sound very similar to Sandia's new tool. They include the HummingBird System and MOM

    The Hummer Project led by Dr. Deborah Frincke has been around since early 1998 and their main project, the HummingBird System is now in version 3.4. It is a complex toolkit that gives an administrator the power to distribute security and intrustion detection information between several hosts (including Solaris and NT machines as well as Linux) in which multiple attackers and targets are mixed and matched.

    The other example I know of is MOM which unfortunately been out of further development for over a year now.

    The main similarity between the two's functionality is that they both have:

    • A main process that runs on a central machine that gathers, sorts, and reports on data received from children on other hosts.
    • On other hosts, a child client process runs which reports anomalies to the central host and;
    • On all hosts, agents run that perform various maintenance, diagnostic, and intrusion detection tasks.

    So as you can see, distributed anti-cracknig and IDS tools have been around longer than you think and are quite refined. Good luck setting them up, and for those developing them

    Keep up the great work.

  2. I Must Protest! by Spud+Zeppelin · · Score: 3 · on On Usage of "Hacker vs. Cracker"

    Some people have suggested vandal, which is fine since they're all dead and won't write any e-mail complaints to the CBC.

    Umm... what about those of us who are University of Idaho Vandals?? Hmmm?? I would think that among people currently at my graduate alma mater, the people at the CSDS might have just as many (valid) issues with "vandal" being used as we in the obsessive-compulsive programmer community do with "hacker".

    Personally, I don't see any good reason not to use "cracker". Applying a term that is basically a racial epithet for "poor white trash" to a different class of trash entirely seems ironically appropriate; perhaps it's actually not-so ironic -- has anyone done a study to determine how many system intruders grow up in environments conducive to being bereft of both values and motivation?


    My opinion only, IANAL.

  3. Re:quark-gluon plasma by Maserati · · Score: 1 · on Creating New Matter: Primordial Soup @ CERN
    Now we know what's inside Happy Fun Ball

    Pity, happyfunball.com seems to be offline.

  4. The BEST argument for using WYSIWYG tools by Zico · · Score: 4 · on Ask Slashdot: Which Web Authoring Tool is the Best?

    Just take a look at the web pages designed by the "WYSIWYG editors are a crock for the ignorant!" crowd. Just for kicks, I took at the web pages of the people holding that attitude in this thread, and the most striking thing about all of them is how absolutely ugly and/or simplistic (read: uninteresting) they are -- usually just a bunch of links in a list, with a smattering of images. Wheeee! It's as if they're existing in a time warp from way back in the first year of the web, so I can understand them thinking that a text editor is the be-all-end-all in HTML design. One thing that is clear is that if any of these people's jobs depended on making quality web pages, they'd be out on the street begging for spare change. Hey, don't believe me? Just follow the links for yourself and see. The people coming out against WYSIWYG editors, who also had links to their own web pages:

    In other words, for those of you complaining that WYSIWYG HTML editors are for unsophisticated dummies, I can only look at your own web pages and wonder just what your idea of sophistication is. If I had seen even one of you using some interesting HTML techniques, you might have a better chance of persuading me. Fact is, anybody can make ugly web pages, whether they're using vi or DreamWeaver, but most (not all) of the better-looking and interesting sites that I see out there are using tools other than just text editors. Most importantly, if you're going to come out and bash people for using WYSIWYG editors, you might wanna check your own sites first.

    Me? FrontPage 2000 and DreamWeaver 2, using UltraEdit and vi for quick-and-dirty changes.

    Cheers,
    ZicoKnows@hotmail.com

  5. Windows already had this problem - check this out by El+Guapo · · Score: 1 · on Killer Asteroid

    Im performing an experiment on my laptop (Dell Latitude LX4100D) to take windows to the 49.7 day mark. Im already up to 34 days. Check out the page here.

    Its got an uptime counter on it, as well as a research-paperesque introduction page.

    -----------------------------------
    Whats so hot about chili?