Slashdot Mirror
A Look Inside the BBC's Network
the-dark-kangaroo writes "The BBC have provided the entire internet with a look inside their amazing network. It shows everyone the almighty web power they are with over 40 webservers and 12 firewalls and their 8Gbps intersite connections. All this seems to running some form of *NIX with perl underlying their powerful website delivery. Take a look at those load graphs!"
As anyone who listened to the now defunct Vorbis streams of BBC radio, this has been here for many years. Nevertheless, it's still impressive.
It shows everyone the almighty web power they are with over 40 webservers and 12 firewalls
Well, it's rather a lot, but "almighty?" What ever happened to British undertatement?
One man's -1 Flamebait is another man's +5 Funny.
This is not considered incorrect. "BBC" can be considered a collective noun, and as a Brit, I can say with some certainty that we would use the third person plural pronoun - i.e. "they" to refer to that company without naming it.
:P
In fact, this is commonplace for any company/body corporate/corporation...any group, surely? Consider: Microsoft are evil. They are bastards.
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All those moaning it's slashdotted must be missing the fact that the rest of the BBC pages are still loading pretty damned fast. Browsing BBC News isn't a problem for me. Try a bit harder if you want to Slashdot the BBC.
This isn't a fair question, support.bbc.co.uk is probably hosted on some cast-off machine on someones desk, not on the servers that they are talking about - of course it can be brought down by Slashdot.
Just try that on news.bbc.co.uk, Slashdot won't even make it break a sweat.
A latent existence
But they're not government controlled. Their Royal Charter provides them autonomy. They are obligated to be politically neutral wherever possible - just look at the criticism of all three major UK political parties they carry on their news pages.
...it's possible to use tax funding to do some really intensely cool stuff. The BBC has a much better grasp of production (technical as well as aesthetic) in all forms of media than any of the pay services here in the U.S. Too bad we have the sadly underfunded NPR and PBS here. It could be so much better. NPR needs a lot more dramatic and comedy programming. PBS needs more popular entertainment that they haven't snagged from the BBC. But without the funding, we're stuck with the crap on HBO and Showtime. There is a definite lack of quality in US production. The same goes for HBO and Showtime's web presence. They have nothing on the BBC.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
'It is always accurate to call a forced payment to the government a "tax".'
Which is why the licence is payed to the BBC and not the government.
(The BBC has it's own tax raising powers, similar to the taxes raised by trading companies in our colonies under previous Monarchs)
It is not part of the Government at all, it is run by a board of governors who ensure standards are maintained.
It is not accountable to the Government, instead it answers to the public and increasingly the British telecoms regulator OFCOM.
The governemt have no input on the editorial of the organisation.
Because Sky (That's FOX to you American lot) is a pile of crap and has no poltitcal integrity whatsoever, unlike an accountable public service such as the Beeb. Also it's a complete rip off, the BBC is far cheaper. Just take a look at the costs of Sky subscription and you have to put up with ads as well, despite already paying through the nose. Oh but wait, the BBC is state funded so it must be evil.
In what way is the Beeb providing a public service (as it should according to its original mandate) by offering Net based information that a private agency, be it Sky, Reuters or some blogger could just as easily offer?
Any public serivce could theoretically be provided by a private contractor instead, you idiot. This in itself is not an argument against providing a particular public service.
All this equipment may be very pretty to look at, but where is the value for money and why should I be made to subsidize the costs incurred in providing BBC information to those users who are accessing it from outside of the UK?
It would probably cost more money to restrict access to within the UK in some cases. I presume the general reason for the BBC providing services to outside the UK is good will. You know, the same reason we give aid to foreign countries, or hold receptions for foreign dignataries, etc.
Freedom is not increased by mere diminuation of government. Anarchy is freedom for the strong and slavery for the weak.
Oh shock horror, the BBC managed to not make a natual disaster all about the Americans.
Tell me, did FOX news even bother reporting the Tsunami at all, or did they just mention some high wind in Califoria.
' NPR is not "official US government news" by any stretch.'
NPR is propped up and funded by tax money. The same is true of PBS.
PBS receives most of its funding from (80% ) from private donations (sponsors and members); some government funding does come in via the Corporation for Public Broadcasting in the form of grants, but not much of it.
NPR gets most of its funding from licensing fees paid by member stations. Even these memberships stations average maybe 15% government funding, at most.
For an interesting contrast, Raytheon gets something on the order of 80% of its funding from government or "defense" sources; since all "defense" money ultimately comes from the US government (even foreign defense revenue must be approved by the US government, and I can almost guarantee you that the foreign defense revenue does not come to more than a fraction of the US defense revenue), I think we can characterize all 80% or so (I'm rounding the number to account for leaner and fatter years) as "government funding." So I guess that we can say, by your logic, that Raytheon is part of the government.
So, to summarize, PBS and NPR are independent non-profit organizations that receive some federal grant money: nowhere near as much as most of their detractors seem to think.
I must have seen different BBC news coverage to the guys at The Telegraph, because mine had American helicoptors landing at Red Cross camps to deliver aid. Can't let any facts get in the way of a good Murdoch sponsered rant against the competition..err, BBC..can we?
> Just remember, security by obscurity is bad! ;)
All security is by obscurity, that is a fundamental truth of any system whose state can be altered. You have to know how to get its state to change and if you know how then you can change its state.
The issue is how much knowledge do you need to be able to change the state of a part of the system, and how much effort do you have to put in to get that information. Also how likely are you to be caught attempting to learn how, and how much of the system can you break into with that information before you have to learn more information (essentially the value of that information).
Strong cryptographic authentication uses a mathematical formula to produce a *different* method of access for each key, and the key is a description of the method. Thus, cracking one key gives you access only to the systems that use the method that that key describes. For a weak cypher, it is relatively easy to determine the correct method to access a system.
Similarly for *all* communication with a computer. If you know what software is used, and you know how to get it to respond, then you have access. So, since you are *always* relying on attackers not knowing the method to access your systems, you must ensure there is a different method for each system to limit damage when the method is no longer obscure.
"Security Through Obscurity" refers to the technique where many system use the same method and depend on none of the other systems being cracked. This is risky: ie, chances of cracking are small, but cost of cracking is extremely expensive as all systems become vulnerable. Though chances are not so small as one may think as the value of the knowledge needed to access the systems is extremely high, and thus more effort tends to be dedicated to its discovery.
This is why open source software will tend to become more secure over time (provided that there is a sufficient interest in its security - ie popularity). While it is less costly to discover the information necessary to crack a system, it is also less costly for the organisations that use it to discover that information, thus the systems tend to be fixed. That also devalues the knowledge from the perspective of the cracker. How many organisations will send their disks to MS for analysis vs how many can do the analysis with reference to the source code.
All those little factors cause the initial risk of open source software to be much higher, but the risk of a mature and popular system to be lower. Compare with closed source, which for new and unpopular software the risk is low, and for mature and popular software, the risk is high.
The best opportunity (as the world begins to realise the value of security) for closed source producers is to be cheap to market, quick to help mature an open source competitor, and quick to help your customers migrate to the open source alternative, siphoning a lucrative support and development contract as you move onto new product as restart the cycle.
Erm, SunOS is Solaris.
No, it isn't. SunOS =5 is SVR4 and always distributed in bundle called "Solaris". Sun did distribute a late release of SunOS 4.x with Openwindows and called it Solaris 1.0 but most people confine the term "Solaris" to versions 2 and higher.
The version reported in SunOS 4. That means that, at best, they running on 9 year old hardware. I don't beleive that.