I'm glad to see that more and more antique classic texts are becoming available online in good quality. This reminds me of Octavo, whose business is creating high resolution scans of such books and selling them--at least someone's archiving them. Narrative artifacts like these books, the Bayeux Tapestry (warning: cheesy graphics) and other nice books should be more visible to casual browsers--they're really impressive to see in person, but it's great to be able to actually "touch" them or page through them.
I visited Bologna in Italy two weeks ago, and as it was shitty rainy weather, we ducked into St. Peter's cathedral to have a look around. There's a little museum near the back, with some absolutely unfuckingbelievable mediaeval illuminated manuscripts under glass.
Unfortunately, the things are sort of chaotically stored, opened to random pretty pages, on top of each other--you can tell that they probably just lacked the funding to display them properly in some super duper high tech low light argon case. I'd have loved to have a look through them using something like this British Library site.
It pains me to think how many more books/paintings/manuscripts/tapestries/whatever are lying in dusty badly kept display cases or storage crates around the world.
By the way, if slashdotters have contacts to people who do this kind of archiving, the books in that cathedral would be a great treasure to preserve.
Ya you're absolutely right, but in most western countries, it's considered a bit of a faux pas to nail someone with a rocket launcher in public unless he's carrying a bomb.
With all this bitching about how religion X is so gory and religion Y is peaceful and video games make people violent satanists and religious lunatics are hypocrites and bla bla bla, I got to thinking.
I wonder whether training a whole generation of pimply high school students on proper counterterrorism tactics wouldn't actually be a pretty handy thing to have around when your civilization is under threat from bomb carrying suicidal maniacs?
HOWEVER, e-mail has had the ability to "alias" and thus redirect an address almost from the very first day. The thing is, ISPs don't want to have to maintain a system (read: anything at all) for people who are no longer a paying customer; and those who inherit all these aliases certainly won't.
Err..your own domain costs about 10 bucks per year. Email forwarding services for a given domain about the same. Am I missing something here? I've had my address for about 8 years now, including moving between several services and servers.
If anything, keeping your email address should be the dirt simplest thing you can possibly think of, as you can have full control over DNS/MX records, the actual addresses, etc. (as opposed to a phone company controlling where your number goes to.) If you don't like your ISP, you simply go to your domain registrar and change the nameservers, what's so exotic there?
No, you're absolutely right, I can't argue my point based on statistics as we have not had any such attacks since. But then again, we didn't have any such attacks in the same timeframe before either, so at this point it's just twisting statistics to support whatever point you're trying to make.
Regarding the bitching, I agree with you. However, I think that there are ways to seriously go about security, such as increased intelligence about financial flows between various groups, human intelligence, whatever, and there are measures which serve no appreciable end against terrorism, such as taking peoples' fingerprints or profiling passengers.
The old argument applies that it won't do you much good to collect the fingerprints of a terrorist who's never committed a crime before. Ayman Al-Zawahiri (spelling?) published a guide for aspiring jihadis, the gist of which was basically "keep your nose clean and the bastards won't see you coming."
The best argument you could make to support your point is that the intimidation factor would suffice to drive a really determined bomber to attack another target, such as a train or a ship or a highway tunnel.
Please don't get me wrong, I'm not against security measures per se; it's just that a large percentage of them seem to fall either into the category of "stuff the government should know which probably won't stop bad things but which it can _really_ use against you if it ever decides to" (fingerprinting, profiling) or that of "feel-good measures to let people see that we're doing something, anything!" (removing your shoes at airports.)
I am far more worried about government misuse of information about my whereabouts (oh no trust us, we'll never abuse the information!) than I am about terrorist whom such information collection wouldn't catch anyway.
The issue isn't as much the sharing of data with the gub'mint (although that _is_ a valid discussion, it's one for elsewhere); it's the fact that a contractor gave it to other companies at the government's bidding without AA's knowledge or consent.
And regarding your "conclusion", this poor schmuck's paranoia is not trumped by "the government" wanting to know that I'm travelling from point a to point b. What have CAPPS & friends (fingerprinting/photography at airports, massive visa lines at embassies, whatever) done besides terribly annoy a lot of possibly desirable immigrants and tourists, who'll now go vote with their wallets and go elsewhere? "Let 'em", you may say. "Fine, they will" I reply.
Here in CH you also have a 100 CHF fine for using your phone without a handsfree set in the car. And here in CH you also have people (like me) who spend quite a bit of time on the phone with other people at the same time as working on a laptop in a train or at a desk away from a fixed line where I could plug in a bulky headset. Not to mention those of us who don't like untangling cables all the time.
So I appreciate the fact that you said "most of the people" instead of "all the people".
What's really funny is that a lot of people using cheap wired mikes end up holding the damn mouthpiece up to their face anyway while talking:)
Regardless, I haven't seen a single bluetooth headset where the battery doesn't go to shit after a few months of use--my Sony Ericcson, while it was useful during its (short) life, is now basically a fairly expensive bit of drawer-filling junk.
-The insipid ringtones (hi, Britney!) -The shouting -The uniformity of the conversation (I'M ON A TRAIN! WHERE ARE YOU?) -The blandness of what's being said (YES WELL I WAS SAYING TO MARGE THAT I REALLY LIKE THE FLOWERS AND MARGE SAID...)
I've noticed that the people who speak more quietly on phones tend to make a more educated and lucid impression--they stick to a conversation, for them a phone chat isn't some HYPER-/<3WL 5H1T D00D, but a tool, and they understand that they don't have to yell to be heard.
Maybe talking face to face with someone makes it easier for them to smack you upside the head when you say something idiotic.
To be perfectly honest, when idiots converse loudly in person, it's equally irritating. But then, that's probably just me.
I mean, male game developers get crucified for portraying a female character as helpless, feminine, whatever.
Then, they go and make a gung-ho asskicker--university educated, genius, speaks multiple Asian languages fluently, is a straight shot, knows several martial arts, drives cars like Fangio, jumps off bridges, climbs buildings, and generally unleashes whupass.
And lo and behold, pandemonium breaks loose among the PC crowd, just because she's clad in a tiny thong and miniskirt and has enormous bazoombas? I mean geez, make up your minds....
No, you are not. Plenty of us abroad who like the whole "with liberty and justice for all" bits and bobs, but who object to things like -being taxed for income that has nothing to do with anything in the US -coming from a country that is the object of ridicule in much of the civilized world, thereby pretty much invalidating the more virtuous and worthwhile stuff "we" try to accomplish around the world -treating supposedly valued guests like criminals -having American legal "standards" forced on the rest of the world -etc cetera -ad nauseum
Frankly I'm happy to live in a country where you get n3kk1d gurlz in prime time TV shampoo commercials, where my (low-ish) taxes go towards nice schools and working public transportation, and where my girlfriend won't get arrested for taking off her top at the beach.
When you are operating at light speed from something as un-exotic as "coffee", your synapses don't just fire, they fire in ALL DIRECTIONS. At the SAME TIME. You don't think straight anymore.
Granted, drinking two large pots of coffee is a pretty stupid thing to do, but if you're going about it in a casual manner (while doing an all-night paper session) you probably won't associate the same sort of substance abuse stupidity with it as, say, drinking two large pots of vodka.
Not to make excuses, but the poison control room is probably the last thing on anyone's mind when going through that sort of space warp:)
Ooh ooh ooh someone else who did this! I house-sitted at my mom's place in college once, and decided I'd use the time for an all-night paper writing session. Somehow the 2 big pots of coffee ended up being 0 big pots of coffee. I ended up typing EXTREMELY FAST--by the time I finished, around 5 a.m., I tried to go to bed but found myself floating above the mattress.
I took BART across the bay and walked back into my house after staring madly at everyone, doing a lot of sweating and twitching, and generally feeling completely nuclear and insane.
Walked into a friend's room and basically grabbed him and shouted HELP MEEEE. He dropped a couple of valiums or some other random downers (I don't "usually" do drugs, so I have no clue what they were) into my hand, and I basically downed half the package while he looked on in horror.
Funny enough, instead of doing an Elvis, I felt myself slowing down to normal speed (like the Millenium Falcon coming out of light speed) and spent the rest of the day normally...
Bummer, you're probably right about the Merc, and I'm sorry to hear about how the burglars/phone co./cops treated you.
However, a friend's GSM phone was stolen in Italy (out of her car, along with a lot of other stuff.) TIM helped them find it after they called the phone. The police located a bunch of Romanian illegals living in an apartment in Milan, showed up with a couple of burly cops, got most of the goods back, and beat the living unholy shit out of the guys, several times, threw them in a cell for a couple of days and deported them, with a very clear message that if they ever ran into them again in Italy, they'd wish they'd never laid eyes on the country.
Whoever modded this flamebait should sit down and re-read it.
I'm an American citizen--I would have ditched the passport long ago if it didn't it inordinately difficult to visit what family I have left there. I simply don't need it.
I agree with the ideals the US is founded on--freedom, tolerance, individual responsibility, yada yada yada. I disagree with a lot of US politics, and frankly feel very little association with the place. That's just me. I'm proud as a human being when the US kicks the crap out of some petty tyrant, and I am equally proud as a human being when, say, Australia stands up and says "NO" to demands to prosecute people on flimsy grounds, or when the EU stands up and says "NO" to unreasonable demands for airline passenger data. It makes no difference to me.
The whole America-bashing thing is pretty tiresome and unoriginal.
I've seen them used fairly frequently by people who wear suits a lot. A lot of fabrics don't take happily to ironing, and after a few wearings, suit trousers will wrinkle up, especially behind the knees.
Hotels will have them quite frequently for business travellers, and you will find them at most cleaners' as well (generally you don't need to get a suit/pants cleaned as often as just pressed.)
How will we respond if low Earth orbit becomes too dangerous for reliable operation of satellites or manned spaceflight?
Easy--We'll have General Rieekan order the ion cannon to blast a path free for our transports to leave orbit once all the dropping nuclear crap takes out our shield generators.
I just nearly wet myself there. That's the funniest thing I've read all day...
Seems Like the Wrong Way to Do Things
on
ICANN Meets Annan
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
ICANN's not perfect, the US govt. is not perfect, but to be perfectly honest, Auerbach's right when he says that the US has never really taken a ham-handed approach to the Internet and to "cutting off" anyone it doesn't like.
Sounds to me like the lesser of two evils--we've all seen the types of politics involved in the UN. Frankly, I'm not entirely sure I _want_ more democracy in how the "Internet" is run. And let's be straight about it--they're not talking about peering arrangements, IP address space, whatnot--they're talking about the DNS.
The current hierarchical system has its problems, but the increasing number of non-US root servers should at least disabuse anyone of the notion that an overly zealous US could, at the drop of a hat, just turn things off.
What I'd like to see from the UN, maybe, is increased sponsorship of things like discussion on proposed standards, dissemination of information, encouragement of the spread of technology and freedom of information to certain restrictive third world countries, whatnot. I'd rather not have it involved in the technical development of our dear, functional, essentially stupid network.
Wasn't there some discussion about provisions in the CAN-SPAM act to exempt "informative" political messages?
At that level, I wouldn't be surprised if popup blockers and filters against political spam were somehow to run afoul of DMCA (circumvention devices!) and friends. You MUST view this popup, we're checking! Honest!:)
In quite a few of these situations a big part of the problem is Western, especially US, interference in local government and politics. e.g. trying to make sure the "right" set of warlords get in power.
Rwanda? Bosnia? Ivory Coast? Nagorno-Karabach? *cough*. I'm no friend of stunts like this extradition shit, and I'm ambiguous about Iraq (not that the US shouldn't have done it, but rather that they should have been honest about why they did it--one less asshole in the world), but I am deeply shamed as a human being first and an American second that "we" didn't intervene in a lot of African countries for whose shitty situation "we" bear zero, null, negatory responsibility.
And while we're at it, I recall hearing more incredulity from Europeans (yes, I live here) in 1991 about not finishing off a certain bearded troglodyte once and for all than about going to war in the first place.
For some reason the US insists on continuing the same kind of policies which got thousands of people killed one September morning.
Cheap shot, fallacious equation, and wrong. Criminal, psychotic and antisocial atavism got thousands of people killed one September morning. And one March morning, for that matter. The people who did this hate you, me, my friends, what I wear, what I watch on TV, what I think. They are insane animals, and do not need the type of flimsy rationale you provide to try and kill you and me. And, assuming that you're not American, don't believe for a second that this makes you exempt.
Regarding the extradition bit, I applaud the Australians for not knuckling under, as I condemn the UK for signing their treaty. However, I unfortunately see this as a one-off; we've seen enough cases where evil-doers in the US may have instigated things abroad (think Jon Johansson or the Australian mp3 busts recently), but as much monkey feces belongs flung at the countries who tolerated this.
Good form. Breezy and fluffy, but original enough to provide a convincing imitation of insight.
Don't fall into the common trap of judging historical patterns by what you know today. Virus/worm attacks, beyond the coordinated DDoS Stacheldraht/Trinoo/TFN a few years back have been the work of one or a few individuals just releasing to see what happens. There are a lot of indicators that worms are being released with schedules and goals.
If MDCP-1 "revolutionized" the MC, maybe that says more about the Marines...
Once again, exercise caution in generalizing. Sun Tzu, von Clausewitz, Napoleon, Guderian may have had and propagated fantastic ideas about warfare, but the reason the latter were so successful was because nobody else thought of implementing those ideas. What seems painfully obvious to you/me today was not always so.
No it doesn't. If you have any predictions about what'll come next, state them.
Once again, I disagree. If what we're seeing with Netsky/MyDoom is a pattern of testing viruses with escalating degrees of sophistication and effectiveness, it's possible to create some (quite possibly mistaken) conclusions about future attack patterns, the identities and goals of the people writing them, and maybe, if you're really lucky, general avenues of attack.
The whole concept of virus-scanning is flawed.
Flawed, yes. Unnecessary, no. The reason we have any security at all is as a combined response to past incidents and exploits and theoretical future weaknesses. If you see virus scanning as a be-all end-all solution, you've got a problem. As you do if you decry individual security components out of hand because they don't do things they're simply not designed to do (i.e. be psychic about what's next.)
Nothing significantly better about it's spread rate.
No, but just looking at the spread rate is to use a flawed metric. What's interesting is the initial population, although I'll agree with you that distributed attack networks are nothing new, and the fairly novel target selection. That's what worries me.
Yes, it's a bit far-fetched to apply military analogies to worms; the goals are different, as are the means, the motivation, etc etc etc. However, considering that concepts like 'planning', 'strategy' and 'dynamic adaptation' _are_ fairly novel concepts in the worm world (see my first points) it might not be such a stretch after all.
Slashdot Mirror
This is superb.
I'm glad to see that more and more antique classic texts are becoming available online in good quality. This reminds me of Octavo, whose business is creating high resolution scans of such books and selling them--at least someone's archiving them. Narrative artifacts like these books, the Bayeux Tapestry (warning: cheesy graphics) and other nice books should be more visible to casual browsers--they're really impressive to see in person, but it's great to be able to actually "touch" them or page through them.
I visited Bologna in Italy two weeks ago, and as it was shitty rainy weather, we ducked into St. Peter's cathedral to have a look around. There's a little museum near the back, with some absolutely unfuckingbelievable mediaeval illuminated manuscripts under glass.
Unfortunately, the things are sort of chaotically stored, opened to random pretty pages, on top of each other--you can tell that they probably just lacked the funding to display them properly in some super duper high tech low light argon case. I'd have loved to have a look through them using something like this British Library site.
It pains me to think how many more books/paintings/manuscripts/tapestries/whatever are lying in dusty badly kept display cases or storage crates around the world.
By the way, if slashdotters have contacts to people who do this kind of archiving, the books in that cathedral would be a great treasure to preserve.
...you drop the thing?
Micrometer precision engineering indeed. I'll take the $5 Butterfly Yo-Yo anyday, once Shep the friendly Golden Retriever takes a liking to it...
Ya you're absolutely right, but in most western countries, it's considered a bit of a faux pas to nail someone with a rocket launcher in public unless he's carrying a bomb.
Which brings up a pretty valid point:
With all this bitching about how religion X is so gory and religion Y is peaceful and video games make people violent satanists and religious lunatics are hypocrites and bla bla bla, I got to thinking.
I wonder whether training a whole generation of pimply high school students on proper counterterrorism tactics wouldn't actually be a pretty handy thing to have around when your civilization is under threat from bomb carrying suicidal maniacs?
HOWEVER, e-mail has had the ability to "alias" and thus redirect an address almost from the very first day. The thing is, ISPs don't want to have to maintain a system (read: anything at all) for people who are no longer a paying customer; and those who inherit all these aliases certainly won't.
Err..your own domain costs about 10 bucks per year. Email forwarding services for a given domain about the same. Am I missing something here? I've had my address for about 8 years now, including moving between several services and servers.
If anything, keeping your email address should be the dirt simplest thing you can possibly think of, as you can have full control over DNS/MX records, the actual addresses, etc. (as opposed to a phone company controlling where your number goes to.) If you don't like your ISP, you simply go to your domain registrar and change the nameservers, what's so exotic there?
No, you're absolutely right, I can't argue my point based on statistics as we have not had any such attacks since. But then again, we didn't have any such attacks in the same timeframe before either, so at this point it's just twisting statistics to support whatever point you're trying to make.
Regarding the bitching, I agree with you. However, I think that there are ways to seriously go about security, such as increased intelligence about financial flows between various groups, human intelligence, whatever, and there are measures which serve no appreciable end against terrorism, such as taking peoples' fingerprints or profiling passengers.
The old argument applies that it won't do you much good to collect the fingerprints of a terrorist who's never committed a crime before. Ayman Al-Zawahiri (spelling?) published a guide for aspiring jihadis, the gist of which was basically "keep your nose clean and the bastards won't see you coming."
The best argument you could make to support your point is that the intimidation factor would suffice to drive a really determined bomber to attack another target, such as a train or a ship or a highway tunnel.
Please don't get me wrong, I'm not against security measures per se; it's just that a large percentage of them seem to fall either into the category of "stuff the government should know which probably won't stop bad things but which it can _really_ use against you if it ever decides to" (fingerprinting, profiling) or that of "feel-good measures to let people see that we're doing something, anything!" (removing your shoes at airports.)
I am far more worried about government misuse of information about my whereabouts (oh no trust us, we'll never abuse the information!) than I am about terrorist whom such information collection wouldn't catch anyway.
...a Quantas flight carrying 357 passengers and crew plummeted to its destruction for unknown reasons.
Sydney air traffic control reports picking up garbled radio traffic fragments, but is still trying to decode the meaning of "D00D! U G0T PWNT!!!"
RTFA, didya?
The issue isn't as much the sharing of data with the gub'mint (although that _is_ a valid discussion, it's one for elsewhere); it's the fact that a contractor gave it to other companies at the government's bidding without AA's knowledge or consent.
And regarding your "conclusion", this poor schmuck's paranoia is not trumped by "the government" wanting to know that I'm travelling from point a to point b. What have CAPPS & friends (fingerprinting/photography at airports, massive visa lines at embassies, whatever) done besides terribly annoy a lot of possibly desirable immigrants and tourists, who'll now go vote with their wallets and go elsewhere? "Let 'em", you may say. "Fine, they will" I reply.
Here in CH you also have a 100 CHF fine for using your phone without a handsfree set in the car. And here in CH you also have people (like me) who spend quite a bit of time on the phone with other people at the same time as working on a laptop in a train or at a desk away from a fixed line where I could plug in a bulky headset. Not to mention those of us who don't like untangling cables all the time.
:)
So I appreciate the fact that you said "most of the people" instead of "all the people".
What's really funny is that a lot of people using cheap wired mikes end up holding the damn mouthpiece up to their face anyway while talking
Regardless, I haven't seen a single bluetooth headset where the battery doesn't go to shit after a few months of use--my Sony Ericcson, while it was useful during its (short) life, is now basically a fairly expensive bit of drawer-filling junk.
They're annoying because..they're annoying.
-The insipid ringtones (hi, Britney!)
-The shouting
-The uniformity of the conversation (I'M ON A TRAIN! WHERE ARE YOU?)
-The blandness of what's being said (YES WELL I WAS SAYING TO MARGE THAT I REALLY LIKE THE FLOWERS AND MARGE SAID...)
I've noticed that the people who speak more quietly on phones tend to make a more educated and lucid impression--they stick to a conversation, for them a phone chat isn't some HYPER-/<3WL 5H1T D00D, but a tool, and they understand that they don't have to yell to be heard.
Maybe talking face to face with someone makes it easier for them to smack you upside the head when you say something idiotic.
To be perfectly honest, when idiots converse loudly in person, it's equally irritating. But then, that's probably just me.
I mean, male game developers get crucified for portraying a female character as helpless, feminine, whatever.
Then, they go and make a gung-ho asskicker--university educated, genius, speaks multiple Asian languages fluently, is a straight shot, knows several martial arts, drives cars like Fangio, jumps off bridges, climbs buildings, and generally unleashes whupass.
And lo and behold, pandemonium breaks loose among the PC crowd, just because she's clad in a tiny thong and miniskirt and has enormous bazoombas? I mean geez, make up your minds....
No, you are not. Plenty of us abroad who like the whole "with liberty and justice for all" bits and bobs, but who object to things like
-being taxed for income that has nothing to do with anything in the US
-coming from a country that is the object of ridicule in much of the civilized world, thereby pretty much invalidating the more virtuous and worthwhile stuff "we" try to accomplish around the world
-treating supposedly valued guests like criminals
-having American legal "standards" forced on the rest of the world
-etc cetera
-ad nauseum
Frankly I'm happy to live in a country where you get n3kk1d gurlz in prime time TV shampoo commercials, where my (low-ish) taxes go towards nice schools and working public transportation, and where my girlfriend won't get arrested for taking off her top at the beach.
Yer not alone, not by a long shot.
Yes, but it would make for an absolutely wicked case mode, wouldn't it?
I just hesitate to consider where you'd attach peripherals...
When you are operating at light speed from something as un-exotic as "coffee", your synapses don't just fire, they fire in ALL DIRECTIONS. At the SAME TIME. You don't think straight anymore.
:)
Granted, drinking two large pots of coffee is a pretty stupid thing to do, but if you're going about it in a casual manner (while doing an all-night paper session) you probably won't associate the same sort of substance abuse stupidity with it as, say, drinking two large pots of vodka.
Not to make excuses, but the poison control room is probably the last thing on anyone's mind when going through that sort of space warp
Ooh ooh ooh someone else who did this! I house-sitted at my mom's place in college once, and decided I'd use the time for an all-night paper writing session. Somehow the 2 big pots of coffee ended up being 0 big pots of coffee. I ended up typing EXTREMELY FAST--by the time I finished, around 5 a.m., I tried to go to bed but found myself floating above the mattress.
I took BART across the bay and walked back into my house after staring madly at everyone, doing a lot of sweating and twitching, and generally feeling completely nuclear and insane.
Walked into a friend's room and basically grabbed him and shouted HELP MEEEE. He dropped a couple of valiums or some other random downers (I don't "usually" do drugs, so I have no clue what they were) into my hand, and I basically downed half the package while he looked on in horror.
Funny enough, instead of doing an Elvis, I felt myself slowing down to normal speed (like the Millenium Falcon coming out of light speed) and spent the rest of the day normally...
Bummer, you're probably right about the Merc, and I'm sorry to hear about how the burglars/phone co./cops treated you.
However, a friend's GSM phone was stolen in Italy (out of her car, along with a lot of other stuff.) TIM helped them find it after they called the phone. The police located a bunch of Romanian illegals living in an apartment in Milan, showed up with a couple of burly cops, got most of the goods back, and beat the living unholy shit out of the guys, several times, threw them in a cell for a couple of days and deported them, with a very clear message that if they ever ran into them again in Italy, they'd wish they'd never laid eyes on the country.
So there is always the off chance...
Whoever modded this flamebait should sit down and re-read it.
I'm an American citizen--I would have ditched the passport long ago if it didn't it inordinately difficult to visit what family I have left there. I simply don't need it.
I agree with the ideals the US is founded on--freedom, tolerance, individual responsibility, yada yada yada. I disagree with a lot of US politics, and frankly feel very little association with the place. That's just me. I'm proud as a human being when the US kicks the crap out of some petty tyrant, and I am equally proud as a human being when, say, Australia stands up and says "NO" to demands to prosecute people on flimsy grounds, or when the EU stands up and says "NO" to unreasonable demands for airline passenger data. It makes no difference to me.
The whole America-bashing thing is pretty tiresome and unoriginal.
I've seen them used fairly frequently by people who wear suits a lot. A lot of fabrics don't take happily to ironing, and after a few wearings, suit trousers will wrinkle up, especially behind the knees.
Hotels will have them quite frequently for business travellers, and you will find them at most cleaners' as well (generally you don't need to get a suit/pants cleaned as often as just pressed.)
How will we respond if low Earth orbit becomes too dangerous for reliable operation of satellites or manned spaceflight?
Easy--We'll have General Rieekan order the ion cannon to blast a path free for our transports to leave orbit once all the dropping nuclear crap takes out our shield generators.
I just nearly wet myself there. That's the funniest thing I've read all day...
ICANN's not perfect, the US govt. is not perfect, but to be perfectly honest, Auerbach's right when he says that the US has never really taken a ham-handed approach to the Internet and to "cutting off" anyone it doesn't like.
Sounds to me like the lesser of two evils--we've all seen the types of politics involved in the UN. Frankly, I'm not entirely sure I _want_ more democracy in how the "Internet" is run. And let's be straight about it--they're not talking about peering arrangements, IP address space, whatnot--they're talking about the DNS.
The current hierarchical system has its problems, but the increasing number of non-US root servers should at least disabuse anyone of the notion that an overly zealous US could, at the drop of a hat, just turn things off.
What I'd like to see from the UN, maybe, is increased sponsorship of things like discussion on proposed standards, dissemination of information, encouragement of the spread of technology and freedom of information to certain restrictive third world countries, whatnot. I'd rather not have it involved in the technical development of our dear, functional, essentially stupid network.
Wasn't there some discussion about provisions in the CAN-SPAM act to exempt "informative" political messages?
:)
At that level, I wouldn't be surprised if popup blockers and filters against political spam were somehow to run afoul of DMCA (circumvention devices!) and friends. You MUST view this popup, we're checking! Honest!
Well, you should have some basic knowledge of speaking English
"...of spoken English".
mean the same whether here or another English speaking country
"...or in another English speaking country.
Written English doesn't hurt, either.
Ok, I'll bite, load up your offtopic mod points.
In quite a few of these situations a big part of the problem is Western, especially US, interference in local government and politics. e.g. trying to make sure the "right" set of warlords get in power.
Rwanda? Bosnia? Ivory Coast? Nagorno-Karabach? *cough*. I'm no friend of stunts like this extradition shit, and I'm ambiguous about Iraq (not that the US shouldn't have done it, but rather that they should have been honest about why they did it--one less asshole in the world), but I am deeply shamed as a human being first and an American second that "we" didn't intervene in a lot of African countries for whose shitty situation "we" bear zero, null, negatory responsibility.
And while we're at it, I recall hearing more incredulity from Europeans (yes, I live here) in 1991 about not finishing off a certain bearded troglodyte once and for all than about going to war in the first place.
For some reason the US insists on continuing the same kind of policies which got thousands of people killed one September morning.
Cheap shot, fallacious equation, and wrong. Criminal, psychotic and antisocial atavism got thousands of people killed one September morning. And one March morning, for that matter. The people who did this hate you, me, my friends, what I wear, what I watch on TV, what I think. They are insane animals, and do not need the type of flimsy rationale you provide to try and kill you and me. And, assuming that you're not American, don't believe for a second that this makes you exempt.
Regarding the extradition bit, I applaud the Australians for not knuckling under, as I condemn the UK for signing their treaty. However, I unfortunately see this as a one-off; we've seen enough cases where evil-doers in the US may have instigated things abroad (think Jon Johansson or the Australian mp3 busts recently), but as much monkey feces belongs flung at the countries who tolerated this.
Good form. Breezy and fluffy, but original enough to provide a convincing imitation of insight.
Don't fall into the common trap of judging historical patterns by what you know today. Virus/worm attacks, beyond the coordinated DDoS Stacheldraht/Trinoo/TFN a few years back have been the work of one or a few individuals just releasing to see what happens. There are a lot of indicators that worms are being released with schedules and goals.
If MDCP-1 "revolutionized" the MC, maybe that says more about the Marines...
Once again, exercise caution in generalizing. Sun Tzu, von Clausewitz, Napoleon, Guderian may have had and propagated fantastic ideas about warfare, but the reason the latter were so successful was because nobody else thought of implementing those ideas. What seems painfully obvious to you/me today was not always so.
No it doesn't. If you have any predictions about what'll come next, state them.
Once again, I disagree. If what we're seeing with Netsky/MyDoom is a pattern of testing viruses with escalating degrees of sophistication and effectiveness, it's possible to create some (quite possibly mistaken) conclusions about future attack patterns, the identities and goals of the people writing them, and maybe, if you're really lucky, general avenues of attack.
The whole concept of virus-scanning is flawed.
Flawed, yes. Unnecessary, no. The reason we have any security at all is as a combined response to past incidents and exploits and theoretical future weaknesses. If you see virus scanning as a be-all end-all solution, you've got a problem. As you do if you decry individual security components out of hand because they don't do things they're simply not designed to do (i.e. be psychic about what's next.)
Nothing significantly better about it's spread rate.
No, but just looking at the spread rate is to use a flawed metric. What's interesting is the initial population, although I'll agree with you that distributed attack networks are nothing new, and the fairly novel target selection. That's what worries me.
Yes, it's a bit far-fetched to apply military analogies to worms; the goals are different, as are the means, the motivation, etc etc etc. However, considering that concepts like 'planning', 'strategy' and 'dynamic adaptation' _are_ fairly novel concepts in the worm world (see my first points) it might not be such a stretch after all.