Cache Servers Keeping Exploit Code Alive

1960's architecture writes, "At last some evidence that exploit code is hiding on servers used to cache website content. According to Techworld, Israeli outfit Finjan has come up with evidence that real exploits have hidden on cache servers used by large search engines, effectively extending their life for periods of weeks after the original website had been taken down. The exploits detailed are from 2003-2004, but the principle would still apply to any exploit website around today, and any cache servers used by any one of the three unnamed search engines. It's almost literally malware 'life after death.'"

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1994 called, they want their Hugo Winner back

[abb3w]

Excerpts from Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon The Deep

How to explain? How to describe? Even the omniscient viewpoint quails.

A singleton star, reddish and dim. A ragtag of asteroids, and a single planet, more like a moon. In this era the star hung near the galactic plane, just beyond the Beyond. The structures on the surface were gone from normal view, pulverized into regolith across a span of aeons. The treasure was far underground, beneath a network of passages, in a single room filled with black. Information at the quantum density, undamaged. Maybe five billion years had passed since the archive was lost to the nets.

The curse of the mummy's tomb, a comic image from mankind's own prehistory, lost before time. They had laughed when they said it, laughed with joy at the treasure ... and determined to be cautious just the same. They would live here a year or five, the little company from Straum, the archaeologist programmers, their families and schools. A year or five would be enough to handmake the protocols, to skim the top and identify the treasure's origin in time and space, to learn a secret or two that would make Straumli Realm rich. And when they were done, they would sell the location; perhaps build a network link (but chancier that -- this was beyond the Beyond; who knew what Power might grab what they'd found).

So now there was a tiny settlement on the surface, and they called it the High Lab. It was really just humans playing with an old library. It should be safe, using their own automation, clean and benign. This library wasn't a living creature, or even possessed of automation (which here might mean something more, far more, than human). They would look and pick and choose, and be careful not to be burned.... Humans starting fires and playing with the flames.

The archive informed the automation. Data structures were built, recipes followed. A local network was built, faster than anything on Straum, but surely safe. Nodes were added, modified by other recipes. The archive was a friendly place, with hierarchies of translation keys that led them along. Straum itself would be famous for this.

[...]

"Then you know that an archive is a fundamentally vaster thing than the database on a conventional local net. For practical purposes the big ones can't even be duplicated. The major archives go back millions of years, have been maintained by hundreds of different races -- most now extinct or Transcended into Powers. Even the archive at Relay is a jumble, so huge that indexing systems are laid on top of indexing systems. Only in the Transcend could such a mass be well organized and even then only the Powers could understand it."

"So?"

"There are thousands of archives in the Beyond -- tens of thousands if you count the ones that have fallen into disrepair or dropped off the Net. Along with unending trivia, they contain important secrets and important lies. There are traps and snares." Millions of races played with the advice that filtered unsolicited across the Net. Tens of thousands had been burned thereby. Sometimes the damage was relatively minor, good inventions that weren't quite right for the target environment. Sometimes it was malicious, viruses that would jam a local net so thoroughly that a civilization must restart from scratch. Where-Are-They-Now and Threats carried stories of worse tragedies: planets kneedeep in replicant goo, races turned brainless by badly programmed immune systems.

P