Ok well I love PC games just as much as the next guy (LAN Parties, RPG, BF1942, etc) but the end of PC Games could be a positive for Linux and a negative for Microsoft. Lets look at a big driver of PC sales... games. Driver of PC hardware... games. Why home users often use Windows vs Linux... games. Before I get flamed about "yada yada games exist for Linux", there is only a small number of commercial Linux games and those are not available in your local Best Buy/CompUSA/GameStop/etc. Joe Blow wants to have his games run on his PC with a minimal amount of fuss. So that's why Windows is often seen on home user's PCs. Governments are moving away from Linux since they don't have a large investment in gaming where as you average home user does. That and they're sick of dealing with the security holes on Windows The one issue that I see with the movement away from PC games to Console games is the modding community, which, as we all know, is becomming an industry unto itself. This could be mitigated with modding tools on the PC (developer mode) and network based distribution to the console.
Ahh but what about this... Keep a table of all the email that gets sent out. Use some sort of algo to determine the spammer script address (i.e. similar address n times with x distribution, relay email, else don't) Spam script writers will get smarter but this is reality. We can adapt. There's more of us than there are of them.
Ok SCO is out of control. Lawsuits in this country are getting out of control! I mean did you all hear that Metallica is suing a Canadian band for the use of the E-F chord in their song. Maybe our old friend Lars is at the helm here. If he is, God help us all. What's next Diznee suing the United States for the use of Red, White, and Blue in the flag since it was used in one of their cartoons. Hmm better not give them any ideas:)
The IETF is an international body. It just happens to meet in the US for convience. I have, however, noticed that a big chunk of the people at the IETF meeting are from other countries. The problems with having IETF meetings abroad is that you tend to get people who are looking for nice and pretty places to go instead of the hard core geeks. My experience has been that the IETF in San Diego appeared to get less done than the IETF in Minneapolis (though don't quote me... I'm still an IETF newbie). Hence if you have an IETF in say, Paris, you're going to get the marketing guys that want to go to Paris for a conference instead of the engineers that want to do some work (though Paris does sound nice ).
There has been informal discussion about having more international IETF meetings but that was mostly people chatting over a few beers.
It is a shame that the IETF is hindered by patents and you'd be amazed by how many companies try to push their proprietary technology into the IETF!
One of the latest developments in the war again DOS attacks has been with a working group at the IETF that is trying to create ICMP Traceback messages.
Essentially what these messages do is generate an ICMP packet with the previous IP address and the present IP address with, I believe, the first 60 bytes of the packet for every 20,000 packets that pass through the router. This packet will be sent to the source address so whoever the poor victim is can figure out who the REAL culprit is and not have to chase after spoofed IP addresses. Of course this should only be done on the edge routers and not the core so as to not generate unnessary traffic and to keep the internals of a service provider secret.
Now when this would happen is somewhat up in the air. Those of you that have attended IETF meetings know how slowly things can move (my personal experience is with diffserv... shudder, 4 years to argue about 6 bits of data in the IP header). Not to mention every single router vendor has to implement this and on top of this, the service providers have to update their routers with the software updates that support ICMP traceback messages.
Hold on a second... Steve Bellovin's area of research consists of DOS attacks. Should we immediatly suspect someone who does research in this area. This is exactly like saying all Sys Admins are script kiddies. If he were such a suspect I can assure you that he probably would not be chairing the ICMP Traceback working group at the IETF. Come on Slashdot... this should practically be flamebait. Let's not chastize the researchers that are trying to prevent DOS attacks.
A feature that allows throttling of traffic has existed for many years now and is actually a pretty hot topic in networking circles. Cicso does have one of these features implemented in their routers. Keep in mind though that there are many other companies which have traffic management algorithms out there (such as Class Based Queueing) which I feel are far more effective (and more open) than Cicso's scheme. Of course I am a little biased since I write code for the Class Based Queueing feature of a competing router;). But there are solutions which prevent a network from getting flooded with ICMP requests while still allowing ICMP traffic. The actual paper that explains Class Based Queueing is at http://www.aciri.org/floyd/papers/link.pdf
Perhaps the gov't could give all of that technology to inner city schools that can't afford it. Or they could just turn it into a massive Beowolf array just for the sake of coolness;) Better yet, give the Beowolf array to a school!
Gotta love it when the government gets involved in things that they don't understand. I wonder when the time will come that the old farts in congress actually understand what they are doing with technology. It seems that the government needs to wake up an realize that the 'net is a different world that moves faster than they do (or any of us for that matter). It would be nice if they just realized that the old rules no longer apply.
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Ok well I love PC games just as much as the next guy (LAN Parties, RPG, BF1942, etc) but the end of PC Games could be a positive for Linux and a negative for Microsoft. Lets look at a big driver of PC sales... games. Driver of PC hardware... games. Why home users often use Windows vs Linux... games.
Before I get flamed about "yada yada games exist for Linux", there is only a small number of commercial Linux games and those are not available in your local Best Buy/CompUSA/GameStop/etc. Joe Blow wants to have his games run on his PC with a minimal amount of fuss. So that's why Windows is often seen on home user's PCs. Governments are moving away from Linux since they don't have a large investment in gaming where as you average home user does. That and they're sick of dealing with the security holes on Windows
The one issue that I see with the movement away from PC games to Console games is the modding community, which, as we all know, is becomming an industry unto itself. This could be mitigated with modding tools on the PC (developer mode) and network based distribution to the console.
Ahh but what about this...
Keep a table of all the email that gets sent out. Use some sort of algo to determine the spammer script address (i.e. similar address n times with x distribution, relay email, else don't)
Spam script writers will get smarter but this is reality. We can adapt. There's more of us than there are of them.
Ok SCO is out of control. Lawsuits in this country are getting out of control! I mean did you all hear that Metallica is suing a Canadian band for the use of the E-F chord in their song. Maybe our old friend Lars is at the helm here. If he is, God help us all. What's next Diznee suing the United States for the use of Red, White, and Blue in the flag since it was used in one of their cartoons. Hmm better not give them any ideas :)
The IETF is an international body. It just happens to meet in the US for convience. I have, however, noticed that a big chunk of the people at the IETF meeting are from other countries. The problems with having IETF meetings abroad is that you tend to get people who are looking for nice and pretty places to go instead of the hard core geeks. My experience has been that the IETF in San Diego appeared to get less done than the IETF in Minneapolis (though don't quote me... I'm still an IETF newbie). Hence if you have an IETF in say, Paris, you're going to get the marketing guys that want to go to Paris for a conference instead of the engineers that want to do some work (though Paris does sound nice ). There has been informal discussion about having more international IETF meetings but that was mostly people chatting over a few beers. It is a shame that the IETF is hindered by patents and you'd be amazed by how many companies try to push their proprietary technology into the IETF!
One of the latest developments in the war again DOS attacks has been with a working group at the IETF that is trying to create ICMP Traceback messages.
Essentially what these messages do is generate an ICMP packet with the previous IP address and the present IP address with, I believe, the first 60 bytes of the packet for every 20,000 packets that pass through the router. This packet will be sent to the source address so whoever the poor victim is can figure out who the REAL culprit is and not have to chase after spoofed IP addresses. Of course this should only be done on the edge routers and not the core so as to not generate unnessary traffic and to keep the internals of a service provider secret.
Now when this would happen is somewhat up in the air. Those of you that have attended IETF meetings know how slowly things can move (my personal experience is with diffserv... shudder, 4 years to argue about 6 bits of data in the IP header). Not to mention every single router vendor has to implement this and on top of this, the service providers have to update their routers with the software updates that support ICMP traceback messages.
Hold on a second... Steve Bellovin's area of research consists of DOS attacks. Should we immediatly suspect someone who does research in this area. This is exactly like saying all Sys Admins are script kiddies. If he were such a suspect I can assure you that he probably would not be chairing the ICMP Traceback working group at the IETF. Come on Slashdot... this should practically be flamebait. Let's not chastize the researchers that are trying to prevent DOS attacks.
A feature that allows throttling of traffic has existed for many years now and is actually a pretty hot topic in networking circles. Cicso does have one of these features implemented in their routers. Keep in mind though that there are many other companies which have traffic management algorithms out there (such as Class Based Queueing) which I feel are far more effective (and more open) than Cicso's scheme. Of course I am a little biased since I write code for the Class Based Queueing feature of a competing router ;). But there are solutions which prevent a network from getting flooded with ICMP requests while still allowing ICMP traffic. The actual paper that explains Class Based Queueing is at http://www.aciri.org/floyd/papers/link.pdf
Perhaps the gov't could give all of that technology to inner city schools that can't afford it. Or they could just turn it into a massive Beowolf array just for the sake of coolness ;) Better yet, give the Beowolf array to a school!
Gotta love it when the government gets involved in things that they don't understand. I wonder when the time will come that the old farts in congress actually understand what they are doing with technology. It seems that the government needs to wake up an realize that the 'net is a different world that moves faster than they do (or any of us for that matter). It would be nice if they just realized that the old rules no longer apply.