Slashdot Mirror
SCO DOS Harming Innocent Bystanders
An anonymous reader writes "The SCO-IBM-Linux controversy has certainly caused quite a stir. Unfortunately the vigilantes conducting the DOS attacks against SCO are harming innocent by-standers as described in this e-Week story. " Choice conspiracy theory quote: 'Given SCO's behavior recently, it's just as likely that they're attacking themselves in their continued attempt to pump up their stock price'
Yes, MS-DOS was created in Redmond.
Yes, I am a pedantic geek.
Please use DoS for Denial of Service, and DOS for Disk Operating System. "of" shouldn't be capitalized.
Too bad the Deptartment of Transportation had to screw up my little world with DOT. Quit shouting "dot!"
LSD more often sparks insight or provides a novel point of view rather than causing outright delusions. Cocaine and amphetamines on the other hand can cause outright schizophreniform psychosis if taken for too long. This and the correlation between D2 receptor antagonism and antipsychotic potency is why schizophrenia is thought to be a largely dopaminergic disorder. Though it's becoming clear that glutaminergic and cholinergic systems play a significant role.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
What makes that even more funny is that Caldera really did used to own DOS (DR DOS to be precise), but the assets went to Lineo during a coorporate re-org, and from there to DeviceLogics. Some details here and some more here. Embedded DOS? Jeez, and I thought WinCE was bad!
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
Well, sort of anyway. Center 7 is actually their hosting company, but Center 7 is one of Canopy's main companies, in fact it may be one of the only ones that really makes money which Canopy then uses to fund all the other ones.
So while Centershift may want to change ISPs, Canopy will probably sue them if they do. Hell, they may even sue them if they don't. That's what seems to happen to anyone that has a contract with a Canopy company.
infested with jello like fishes no melotron wishes
My company hosts at the same Data Center. That center is a professional setup. They have good redundant internet pipes from multiple providers. A DoS attack based on flooding would be quite difficult. Some other big players are there as well. No one has recieved this collateral damage. I believe CenterShift is having trouble with poor server administration, maybe even some problems with Sobig or variants and are trying to blame someone else for their down time. We keep a close eye on things and if something is happening to SCO it is not hitting other customers.
On another note, the center is also owned by the Canopy Group and is very Linux friendly. Many of thier comercial offerings involve Linux and their monitoring is based on Cricket. I wonder how they (and other Canopy Group companies) are feeling about this whole mess.
Actually, DR-DOS was a beautiful thing. Multitasking 32 Bit DOS :-) You could actually switch between running DOS applications on it.
"The strong will do what they want, the weak will do what they must."
-Thucydides
I work for a small logo design and creative services shop in a Canopy Group office building (emphasis: we're not a Canopy company, we just rent office space here, because the combination of connectivity and nice space makes sense). A call to our ISP verified last Friday's attack was real; the effects were undeniable. We lost the ability to get in or out of the network for much of the day.
That might not seem too significant, until I mention the fact that all our sales happen through the web -- not to mention most of our project management interaction with our customers. Hence, we were paralyzed pretty well by the attack. If Friday was going to be a typical day, we lost $4000-$5000 is sales. Not to mention lost money due to lost productive time on projects.
I don't know how SCO's bottom line was hit, but that was ours, and because we don't have huge padded bank accounts or support of shell-game investors, we really can't afford that.
Not to mention that the bad publicity is real. Sure, some of us here understand the situation and understand the childish folks who undertook the attack only represent a small portion of open source contributors, users, and supporters. But our VP of tech had some negative things to say about them.
Moral of the story: yep, DoS attacks hurt innocent bystanders, even some slashdot fanboys who dislike SCO's tactics as much as the next guy but spent too much time unemployed last year and really don't want their current employer hurt. And transitively, DoS attacks hurt the rep of the Open Source community. Really. If you're one of the people inclined to do something like that, think twice.
Tweet, tweet.
L-Dopa is not dopamine, but a close relative, which gets turned into Dopamine by a couple of enzymes, one of which is in the brain. The reason that you give L-Dopa instead of dopamine is that you have to give high doses to get across what is known as the blood-brain barrier, so it can get into the brain tissue. Dopmaine in the doses you'd need to give, will make you incredibly sick, L-dopa doesn't do this to the same extent.
Therefore by giving L-Dopa to parkinson's patients, you can get the L-Dopa into the brain, get it converted to Dopamine, and let it work it's magic.
"'Stepping aside from the issues of how, architecturally, this would have spilled over into Centershift's domain, it should be known that bystanders are being injured as this war rages on,' Hafen added."
Problem is, you can't really "step aside" from the architectural issues given the point he is making. The DDoS attacks on SCO have been exclusively aimed, as far as I can tell from the reports, at their *web* sites -- which appear to be located in a Denver co-location.
If the attacks had been aimed at SCO's mail server, or local ISP connection, then then Hafen might have a point. But unless he's using the Denver co-lo for his office connection and e-mail, then I think he just has a problem with his ISP that is unrelated to the DDoS attacks on SCO.
Besides which, I'm still not convinced SCO experienced any kind of DoS last weekend. I think they just came down for maintenance, and have since used misleading - but not outright mendacious - statements to "confirm" that they were attacked:
a) "SCO considered issuing a formal statement in the matter,
said Stowell, but decided against it."
Because a formal statement would have been a denial of the
attack?
b) Stowell has also told the press that the "latest" attack
has been reported to "law enforcement authorities".
If the "latest" attack was in May, then Stowell's statement
would remain as true as if the attack was in August. Note also
the vague phrase "law enforcement authorities" rather than
specifying which agency was contacted, as if Stowell didn't
want anyone following up on the matter. In the May attack,
Stowell was very specific as to which agency the attack had
been reported to - the FBI Cyber Crimes division.
c) When called, people working for SCO either don't know why the
web site is down, or say it was down for an upgrade or
maintenance. I know, because I was one of the people who
called, and I documented the conversation at Groklaw
(http://radio.weblogs.com/0120124/, about 2/3 down the page).
d) The recent outages generally start during non-business hours.
SCO possibly had a short DoS attack on Friday afternoon, but
there is no way it kept them down for 3 days; the utter
vagueness of their public announcements regarding it do not
lend confidence to the idea that they experienced any DoS
attack at all; their own employees have consistently told
callers that the site is/was down for maintenance; sites on
the same Center 7 network (canopy.com) were responding
without problems during the SCO outages; and even SCO's
public statements have confirmed that outages since the
weekend outage were for maintenance:
The outage prompted Netcraft to declare that
SCO was again the target of a DoS attack. However,
the outage was actually due to preventative
measures taken by SCO and its hosting service to
mitigate the effects of future attacks, according
to company spokesman Marc Modersitzki.
(http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,3959,1233231,00.a sp)
So, in short, I think that a) SCO didn't experience any DoS attacks, and b) that Centershift / Hafen has problems with their ISP and should get a new one rather than making statements to the press that their Internet problems are due to inadequately verified DoS attacks on SCO's webserver in Denver, hundreds of miles away from Centershift's Salt Lake City offices.
The old SCO versions used to come with a utility called "floodping" for doing network stress testing. I was always wary of this thing as it sounded kind of dangerous to me.
BTW If this DOS attack is being done by anyone reading this: cut it out. Linux is slowly gaining ground among even conservative IS leadership types. The WORST thing we can do now is let ourselves be perceived as a community of people who have no respect for other people's livelihoods.