Slashback: Slammer, Frames, Pop-Ups

Slashback tonight with more on SBC's claim to own patents covering basic Web navigation techniques, an eyebrow-raising look at Slammer's spread, bad news for Ogg streams from the BBC, and more. Read on for the details. Update: 02/04 00:13 GMT by T : And late-breaking good news from SDF regarding its Public Access UNIX System.

FedEx should take notes. nweaver writes "We have completed our preliminary analysis of the Sapphire/Slammer SQL worm. This worm required roughly 10 minutes to spread worldwide, scanning at a peak rate of over 55 million IP addresses per second, making it by far the fastest worm to date and nearly two orders of magnitude faster than Code Red. It infected at least 75,000 victims and possibly considerably more. The remarkable speed was due to the use of a bandwidth-limited scanner. There were also two bugs in the random number generator. Copies of our analysis are available from CAIDA, Silicon Defense, and UC Berkeley."

"Sir, this patent application needs to filled out in ink. Not Crayon." We recently posted that the company SBC was calling in the chips on patents it holds which the company claim cover certain types of navigation links found on many web pages. Dan Gillmor writes "Noticed the link to Cringley's piece. Well, I did ask readers for prior art and got quite a bit, some of which I've posted..."

Speaking of SBC, theodp writes "The SBC Intellectual Property folks are back in the news, this time for donating a $7.3 million virus screening patent to the University of Texas. While patent donations are one of the latest twists on corporate philanthropy, the practice has aroused the curiosity of the IRS as a possible tax avoidance scheme."

I wonder how much they'd feel justified in writing off if they donated their web patent portfolio to the FSF.

Can we call this an on-again, off-again relationship? Albanach writes "It seems the BBC who had pioneered Ogg Vorbis broadcasting on a serious scale have abandoned Ogg indefinitely. They say other work commitments make Ogg support no longer a priority. Their statement can be read here"

What, and let all my pigeons escape? FedeTXF writes "We already love pop-up blocking in Mozilla and some other related browsers, now Blogzilla is reporting a great trick to get rid of embedded ads (banners and iframes) using plain CCS and the always amazing Mozilla flexibility and openness. Go check this page if you are anxious to see how to set it up."

Did you have your video camera trained on Columbia? Finally, Child of Apollo writes ""For anyone who has recorded video or taken photos that they believe may be of aid in the investigation of the Space Shuttle Columbia accident, NASA has established a special location on the Web where Internet users may upload their media files to be reviewed by NASA." Although sad news all around, thanks to pleasant for the link."

Here's the late-breaker. fonixmunkee writes "looks like SDF will return soon. a message stating that they negotiated a new contract graced the single page in the "members area" of the temporary www.lonestar.org, but did not cite who specifically with. a few different ideas were tossed around for hosting, so only time will tell with who. i also just today got an e-mail from the Washington State Attorney General's Office that offered a small ray (read: none) of hope for assistance with SDF's run-in with NWLink. (NWLink breached SDF's contract.) hope all is well soon." This is good news, especially so soon after SDF got the rug yanked from under them.

Comments

Re:Ah, yes

[mrjive]

Seems like it would be a lot easier just to use a popup stopper instead. This is what I did with IE until I installed mozilla.

Panicware has a good one that's freely downloadable. I still have it installed at home but just leave it disabled now (since Mozilla catches them all).

Re:Ah, yes

[Anonymous Coward]

A serious question ... do you feel the internet should be a free experience? Do you experience any feelings at all concerning the revenue impacting mode in which you operate?

So you want a "structured document browser"?

[Pac]

I will give you a "structured document browser". Its name was Gopher and it was the structured document browser" before fancy graphics and godammed blinking text took the servers by storm. Will you have a coke with that prior art, sir?

SBC and Money

[Valiss]

"The SBC Intellectual Property folks are back in the news, this time for donating a $7.3 million virus screening patent to the University of Texas. While patent donations are one of the latest twists on corporate philanthropy, the practice has aroused the curiosity of the IRS as a possible tax avoidance scheme."

SBC should seriously consider burning in hell. I mean how low can they go? Is M$ thier model company? First off, thier whole Frames(tm)(r)(c) is complete bull, and we all know it. I doubt that will win, and they must know this, so why do it? What do they have to gain?

Now seeminly random donations to the of Texas (nothing against U of T). Perhaps they should just focus on having the DSL lines up 24/7 and not persuing meaningless lawsuits and then attempting to cover them up with some bs donation. Someone want to explain to me what "patent donations" are? If it's what I think then I'm calling shenanagens on them.

Re:Ah, yes

[teetam]

I use IE and Mozilla and honestly, Mozilla kicks butt. Even with a 404, your desktop will still be cluttered with too many windows (pop ups, unders etc.)

With Mozilla, not only do I get no popups, but I also have only one window open when I navigate multiple websites using tabbed browsing.

Try it out.

Re:Finally?

[Zillatron]

What's with this "finally" stuff? Have people been holding their breath to hear what Child of Apollo has to say or something?

Um... Since the item after it is listed as late-breaking, I'm guessing that at one point the item in question was the final item...

Re:And in other news..

[jo_ham]

so females aren't covered?

There's no way even SBC would have the balls to attempt to patent the female genitals and associated plumbing. It's far too beautiful.

Re:Ah, yes

[pla]

Why would you want to look at a website that has been sanitized?

Kudos for making your point (nice and sharp... I approve), but ads do not count as part of the artistic merit of a movie/website/landscape. Usually the director/author/wildlife don't even know what ads will end up appearing in their creation, so unless the intent of a work involves making fun of ads, the ads just detract from it. Skipping commercials does not mean "sanitizing".

Re:That Slammer analysis paper is quite interestin

[AndroidCat]

The fact that each infected machine suddenly switched to max bandwidth sending was bad enough. The ATMs, 911, etc probably failed due to congestion at bottlenecks.

At least "wormy" was nice (for small values of nice) enough to launch it over a weekend. What if the next one gets launched during something like 9/11 or Desert Storm II?

Re:'Photos Show Odd Images Near Shuttle'

[uhoreg]

"...taken with a Nikon-880 digital camera..."

"...but it showed up clear and bright on the film when I developed it..."

Huh?

Re:'Photos Show Odd Images Near Shuttle'

[Anonymous Coward]

The Photographer was using a digital camera buthe is quoted as saying:
"I couldn't see the discharge with own eyes, but it showed up clear and bright on the film when I developed it,"

How exactly do you develop film from a digital camera?

NASA doesn't need more video

[eclectro]

They need to cancel the shuttle program and replace it.

Here is an article from 1980

And here is an article from this same author this last weekend.

We all love the space program and grew up with it. But no significant science is being gained from continuing to send man into space. Having to send man into space is a cold-war relic of the space-race. And so for the cries "we need to send man back to the moon" or "we need to send man to mars" is looking for something for man to do in space, not accomplish science. Because that science can be accomplished with unmanned probes just as well.

I am not saying kill the space program. I am saying that a major reorganizing is appropriate. And I am not saying stop space science. I am saying that spending billions on continued shuttle flights and space station to achieve it is not justified and fiscally irresponsible. NASA would get far better science by increasing probes to the planets.

It's so irrelevant that the general public never notices the shuttle program unless there is a disaster. That was same in 1986 and its true this past weekend.

The statement by NASA administrator O'Keefe that "We will find out what is wrong, fix the problem, and continue flying" particularly saccharin. Is everybody's eyes so glassed over with the idea of a man in space that they are willing to go forward until this tragedy repeats itself for a third time, and another seven astronauts die?? What then? Is spider's spinning their webs and ants digging tunnels in weightlessness worth seven men dying? Doesn't the technology exist that this could be done on an ummanned rocket?

From a scientific perspective that NASA seems to sorely lack, the Space Shuttle is something that needs to be retired now.

Re:NASA doesn't need more video

[crhernandez]

From a scientific perspective, perhaps. But we're humans. We do or don't do a lot of things for completely unscientific reasons: art, adventure, beauty.

Isn't there something wondrous about a person floating unsupported? About seeing a sunrise every 90 minutes? About knowing that star you see has a crew?

I think these things are worth billions of dollars, and a proportional share of my income.

Re:NASA doesn't need more video

[KewlPC]

Aside from the no-immediate-use stuff like "How do ants behave in space?" (answer: they dig like crazy), sooner or later we are going to have to send humans off-planet on a permanent/extended trip. Maybe we decide to start mining asteroids, or whatever, but it will most certainly require a human to be present.

There is only so much that a probe can do. A human geologist on-site could learn more about Mars' geology in a short while than a probe could over the course of its entire mission. You're forgetting that if you landed a probe on Mars, it would be extremely difficult to maneuver it, because of things like a 20 minute communications lag, the fact that you can only communicate with the probe for part of the day, and the limited computing power of the probe's computer.

The onboard computer is limited because it has to not only be extremly reliable, but it also has to be rad-hardened (maybe not once on Mars, but to survive the trip), which means using slower technology (it's slower because, in order to decrease the odds of cosmic radiation flipping bits, the gates and transistors have to be larger).

Besides all that, there is the "being there" aspect of it. Seeing what the earth looks like from the moon, school children communicating with astronauts (and even thinking up experiments to try in space, like the ants thing I mentioned above), and things like that, which may not have a direct and immediate scientific value, are no less important.

Or we could listen to you and just sit here, think small, look up at the stars and planets, but never visit them, because you think it's too expensive and dangerous.

Your post reminded me of something someone once said:
"We choose to do these things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard."
-John F. Kennedy

I must be alone but...

[Stigmata669]

Sometimes I like banner adds if they aren't insane flashing gifs. I visit thinkgeek from slashdot banners sometimes when I see something cool, and often use banners on PC hardward sites to find good online vendors for 'specialized' parts.

I find tasteful or site specific banners helpful rather than hurtful to my browsing experiance. Plus, I think the user can help keep the ad supported web alive if they don't kill all ads.

I believe that the model is failing because websites are too indiscriminate in chosing ads to run.

Re:More on the Shuttle

[anubi]

I think they hit the nail on the head.

"Faster, Better, Cheaper."

I think the pizza driver who is coerced into unsafe practices to deliver $10 worth of pizza knows it firsthand. If he doesn't deliver, they will find someone else who says they will.

NASA was forced to "cut corners" to save "costs". But maintain "productivity".

We did not allocate enough resources to do it right. Now we will have to do it over.

Its a lesson we have to learn over and over.

RE: Mozilla CSS Trick - I hate to say it, but...

[thecampbeln]

... wouldn't "solutions" like this hinder mozilla-esque support adoption amongst major sites? I mean ads are how most web sites pay for the content that we otherwise get for free. Except for the annoying as hell pop-over/iframe and Flash ads, I can't say I mind banners at all. If a lot of users implement this kind of thing (which is virtually undecidable from the web server's POV thanks to it being client-side CSS), what would stop the marketing drones from saying "if Mozilla won't show the ads, lets not allow access from Mozilla browsers"? Or worse implement the click-thru style of advertising that some site have already begun using!?

Do note that I am implementing this CSS on Phoenix as we speak ;) But still, I'm happy with the current paradigm of banner ads, is it a good idea to futz with that paradigm for fear of something even more annoying?

Re:What is /. thinking?

[KalvinB]

Since many sites are too dense to use ads in a non visitor annoying fashion and many visitors are too stupid/ignorant to accept the fact that it costs money to run a quality web-site and passivly help offset the costs by putting up with the ads on their favorite sites, many major web-sites are forcing visitors to take an active role in paying for costs or forcing them away. The method of choice seems to be subscriptions of some form or another with a crippled free service.

Pick your poison: suck up the ads or start getting used to paying up.

I switched IcarusIndie.com over to a subscription model at the beginning of the year for the most bandwidth intensive sections and it was probably the best thing I could have done for the site. My Alexa ranking is up, bandwidth costs are being offset significantly, bandwidth usage has been drastically reduced.

If a significant number of users stop viewing the ads on Slashdot I wouldn't be surprised if you had to start paying the membership fee to see everything.

Ben

worm speed/automatic defenses

[stinky wizzleteats]

From TFA:

Sapphire reached its peak scanning rate of over 55 million scans per second across the Internet in under 3 minutes... worm defenses need to be automatic; there is no conceivable way for system administrators to respond to threats of this speed

That statement borders in irresponsible. There is no reasonable way to deal with a threat like this after the fact, however fast your gee-whiz IDP solution claims to shut down an anomaly incident. Don't even get me started on the estimated response speed of a federal Internet crisis center. The bottom line is that more public thought needs to go into making long term security decisions, starting with what software is selected for a particular purpose and how effectively and strictly that software is managed.

All this statement is going to do is give the executive level FUD meisters at (insert your favorite security/network gear company here) more ammo to shut down the ability of IT administrators to do their job.

Re:Ah, yes

[slick_rick]

A serious question ... do you feel the internet should be a free experience?

The internet experience is not free. I pay $50 a month for my DSL service. Even if you don't count my quasi-fixed investment in the computer itself and the network that it operates on the internet is in no way "free".

Do you experience any feelings at all concerning the revenue impacting mode in which you operate?

There were web sites before there was an ad supported revenue model, and there will still be web sites after all the ad supported sites are dead and gone (RIP).