That's so Microsoft. Add cruft to a bad design so it's sort of fixed.
The right answer first appeared in Jerry Popek's UCLA Locus in the 1980s, and has been in some IBM UNIX systems since IBM bought the technology. It really ought to be in Linux.
It works like this. When you open an existing file for writing, you actually start to write a new file. But unchanged blocks are shared, using a copy on write approach. If you close the file normally, the new file replaces the old file.
If the program or system crashes, the old file remains intact and unchanged. So there's always a good copy of the file. No special action is required in the program to make this happen.
The program can also call "commit", to force the new version to replace the old one immediately, or "revert", to roll the file back to the "old" state. But that's optional. A program might do this after finishing some transaction, for example.
That "commissioner subpoena" is deliberately deceptive. It's written as if signed by a judge, but it's only signed by an assistant U.S. attorney acting under 28 USC 1782.
"The district court of the district in which a person resides or is found may order him to give his testimony or statement or to produce a document or other thing for use in a proceeding in a foreign or international tribunal, including criminal investigations conducted before formal accusation. The order... may direct that the testimony or statement be given, or the document or other thing be produced, before a person appointed by the court. By virtue of his appointment, the person appointed has power to administer any necessary oath and take the testimony or statement.... To the extent that the order does not prescribe otherwise, the testimony or statement shall be taken, and the document or other thing produced, in accordance with the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure."
The point is that the real order came from a district court judge, and if Rackspace wanted to object to it, they had the right to raise any of the objections in the federal rules of civil procedure that would apply in a deposition, like "it costs too much", "the request is overreaching", "the request would interfere with the operation of our business", etc. And they're raised before that judge, not the "commissioner".
Note that civil procedure applies, even though this is a criminal case. There's no arrest authority implicit in this.
Now this is standard DOJ procedure. But it's more intimidation than actual legal authority. The use of the "commissioner" term is pure intimidation. Especially if the "commissioner subpoena" was delivered without the court order from a real judge that authorizes it.
The "computer security" industry has turned into a volume business aimed at annoyance attacks. The very profitable "wait for high-volume exploit and patch" mindset into which the industry has settled is useless against serious attackers.
A serious attack has a specific target and attacks it quietly. Serious attackers aren't going to show up in the "top 10 virus" lists. They're probably not going to use an attack that appears in some known signature list. They may have the ability to craft their own attacks, or at least modify known ones beyond recognition. The volume-oriented defense techniques won't work.
Military security people are very aware of this issue. You don't want to tie up all your resources chasing kids who are throwing rocks at the airfield fence. The real threat is probably being quietly mounted elsewhere.
Who's going to design a new one? Who's still working who's designed a successful large rocket? Anybody?
The first time around, they had to use von Braun's team to get the US space and missile program going. They'd learned how to build rockets by blowing up a few hundred of them before they got one that worked. Apollo and the Shuttle were designed by people who had worked on US ICBMs, and there were dozens of failures in the early days there.
All those guys are dead or retired. The next big spacecraft will have to be designed by people who haven't done it before.
There aren't even many aircraft designers left.
In the 1940s and 1950s, aircraft were designed and built at a frantic wartime rate, with many failures and some great successes. This produced a huge group of trained aircraft designers and builders. The Apollo program hired several thousand from Canada, when Avro went out of business. Today, there are few people with a track record of designing a novel flying machine.
Other than Burt Rutan's people, almost nobody gets to design more than one kind of flying machine.
Buran the Soviet space shuttle, is more rugged than the US one. The thermal protection system is tougher. Buran, for example, can be flown through a rainstorm. Maybe the US should have Energia run off some more copies of Buran.
Buran isn't a copy of the US shuttle, although it looks similar. Buran has no main engine; it's launched on the back of an Energia booster. So there are more expendable components, but it's simpler.
Ironically, the most readily available sources of accurate online information on bomb-making are the websites of the radical American militia.
Ah, yes, the right wingnuts. Remember the Oklahoma City bombing. Pure American right wing. The anthrax attack? Unclear, but it was somebody who had access to the US's weaponized anthrax.
Fun militia sites:
The Michigan Militia. Protecting Michigan from, well, somebody. Canada, maybe? "Training Schedule for Saturday, August 6th: 0800 Rifle zero, 0930 Camo check, 1000 Tactical walk, 1100 Fire team formation."
These over-armed groups are left alone by the Bush Administration. But when some Arab guys played paintball in Virgina, one of them was sent to jail for decades.
There's been a boom in militia activity in recent years. This may reflect the changing role of the National Guard. It used to be a one-weekend a month thing with a two week summer camp. If you join the National Guard today, they send you off to the real wars. So the guys who just want to play soldier on weekends don't join the Guard any more.
We have three Linksys boxes running the Sveasoft firmware (for which we paid). The things clobber TCP packets whenever there are more than about three in flight at one time. We've actually put a packet sniffer on both sides to check this.
I think their firewall is rewriting packets, and badly, even when it's supposedly turned off.
Want to drive yourself nuts? Put a pair of Sveasoft-hacked Linksys WiFi units between a PC and a server, and try to do something intensive like a CVS checkout. The thing works OK when it's not the bottleneck, which is the case when you're talking over some low-bandwidth link to the outside world. But when the WiFi link is the bottleneck, something breaks in queuing.
Yeah, we tried Sveasoft support. They're in denial about the problem, and we don't have time to debug it for them.
Yeah, it's lame. At first, I thought he was going to put the whole machine behind the wall plate, in an electrical box. But no, that's just the cable outlet. The machine is on the floor on a piece of cardboard.
An "electrical box in the wall" form factor for computers might be useful. Machines are getting small enough.
Well, of course Google is getting all the good people in Silicon Valley. Who else is left? DEC SRL and WRL are gone, Interval is gone, PARC has been spun off and is looking for work, HP just canned their R&D operation, and SGI is in limbo.
After reading the slides, it's clear that IOS is tackier than I thought. Their approach to buffer overflow prevention involves magic values on the stack and periodic processes that check them. That's a containment effort for transient hardware errors and a debug tool, not a security measure.
Apparently buffer overflows within IOS aren't that hard to create, and so all the usual attack approaches can be used. That's the real story.
And apparently IOS is a single-address-space unprotected OS, so anything can clobber anything.
There's so much stuff in IOS now that there just has to be trouble.
Now I see why they're switching their larger routers to QNX, which is a protected-mode microkernel OS.
Microsoft would really, really like to kill off OpenGL, and force everyone to use Direct-X. That would make it nearly impossible to build portable graphics programs. That's what this is really about. Many of the high-end graphics programs, especially those with an SGI legacy, use OpenGL. Which means they can be ported to run on Unix, Linux, or MacOS X without too much trouble.
That's the real issue here. Control of the platform.
The great thing about the Internet is that it's dumb. All the actual Internet has to do is get IP packets from source to destination. That's what makes it cheap, extensible, and general.
Telcos and ISPs hate this, because they add so little value. They keep trying bundle "content", from AOL, Yahoo, or the RIAA. Customers just want a cheap pipe. It's the fact that power comes from the endpoints, and that anybody can add an endpoint, that makes the whole thing go.
Most importantly, it's what pushes prices down to just above the actual cost of providing the service. Hosting service, for example, is incredibly cheap. Hosting services would love to force you to buy stuff you don't want to get their services, but they're not in a position to do so.
That's what's so great about the Internet.
Wired, remember, is basically a gadget catalog. For overpriced high-margin stuff you don't need. So this is the sort of thing you'd expect from Wired.
The downside is that browsers don't give programmers full access to a computer's resources such as memory, process power and hard disk space. This is a bottleneck the engineer sees being removed in future,
He doesn't get it. The whole point of HTML is to keep the web site at arm's length from the user's machine. The browser is an interface, not a platform.
Microsoft, Netscape, and Sun have all tried (incompatibly) to make the browser a "platform".
We've suffered through Active-X controls, the Netscape plug-in platform, and client side Java. What we got were adware, spyware, and new attack vectors. Now, most firewalls block that stuff.
We may need more expressive power in HTML, but it should be descriptive, not programmable. That's the strength of HTML. You can do more than run it. You can index it, reformat it for another medium, translate it to another language, and simplify it for small devices. Try doing that with a Java applet or a Flash file.
JavaScript is as far as site-driven programmability of the browser should go. There's hostile JavaScript, but the browser can usually contain the attack.
There are hundreds of other cases listed.
And that's at the high school level. The college level is even worse.
Not only does football make rapists, multiple rape coverups involving high school, college, and NFL officials are on record. It's time for a serious crackdown.
Protect the children from steroid-enhanced monsters!
NSA (not NASA) had cyrogenic computing back in the late 1960s. The general in charge of NSA famously said
"I want a thousand megacycle computer. I'll get you the money". And they actually did get gigahertz cyrogenic components in the 1970s.
The devices were fast, but not small enough to compete with integrated circuits. The technology had a magnetic component, with a coil, so it had an inherent lower size limit. So that turned out to be a dead end. IBM spent almost two decades struggling with that technology under contract to NSA. It reportedly worked, but didn't have the potential for improvement that CMOS ICs did.
IBM had another go at cyrogenic computing with the Josephson junction in the 1980s, but that never worked out either.
Did you notice the line
"Over the past seven weeks or so, I've been making sure I understand that business."
This is the new guy just put in charge of the NonStop systems, making pronouncements about somehow bringing them closer to the Linux product line. This is not good.
HP's last few decisions about the Tandem line haven't worked out too well. After acquiring Tandem, they moved that product line over to PA-RISC. (Remember PA-RISC, HP's very own microprocessor line?) As PA-RISC sank, they had to move to another processor.
There are two provisions in Californa law that helped build Silicon Valley.
Business and Professions Code section
16600. Except as provided in this chapter, every contract by which
anyone is restrained from engaging in a lawful profession, trade, or
business of any kind is to that extent void.
The exceptions are all for people who owned and sold a business, not employees. So you can change jobs.
The other provision is famous. This is why you can do a startup on your own time, and your employer can't do anything about it afterward.
Labor Code section 2870.
(a) Any provision in an employment agreement which provides
that an employee shall assign, or offer to assign, any of his or her
rights in an invention to his or her employer shall not apply to an
invention that the employee developed entirely on his or her own time
without using the employer's equipment, supplies, facilities, or
trade secret information except for those inventions that either:
(1) Relate at the time of conception or reduction to practice of
the invention to the employer's business, or actual or demonstrably
anticipated research or development of the employer; or
(2) Result from any work performed by the employee for the
employer.
(b) To the extent a provision in an employment agreement purports
to require an employee to assign an invention otherwise excluded from
being required to be assigned under subdivision (a), the provision
is against the public policy of this state and is unenforceable.
Those provisions had a big role in the success of Silicon Valley. They're one of the reasons the venture capital community is based here, and why there are so many startups.
Kay's Dynabook concept was more like a PDA or tablet than a laptop.
No, it was a laptop. In Kay and Goldberg's 1977 Xerox PARC booklet, "Personal Dynamic Media", which I have somewhere, there's a picture of a woman sitting on the grass with what looks like a largeish laptop. It's a cardboard mockup, with a dummy keyboard and screen. At the time, it seemed fantastic. Now, it looks clunky.
I visited Xerox PARC in 1975, and heard Kay's pitch. Back then, what Kay really had in mind was visual simulation. They had a little simulation of a hospital, where patients went in with problems ("I am a victim of bowlerthumb"), and were passed from Admitting to Surgery to Ward to Discharge, possibly with trips to X-Ray and such. This came with some very crude animations. Since Smalltalk was based on Simula 67, at the time it looked like object-oriented programming was for discrite-event simulation.
Simulation turned out to be less important in general computing than Kay expected. But, of course, it's the basis of most games today.
One of Osama's stated goals is to destroy, through holy war, America (the Great Satan). One of the things that made us great was our Constitution, that great document which protects our freedoms. Yet here goes the House of Representatives, doing exactly what bin Laden wants: Taking away our freedom. In fact, doing the one thing that Osama can never do.
That's exactly right. bin Laden has written quite a bit, and you can read much of it. It's worth reading, because he's quite clear on what he wants to do, and made it clear a decade ago. It's striking how effectively Bush is doing what bin Laden wants.
Note that a similar strategy has been successful against Israel. Israel used to be a liberal, well-governed country. Ongoing terrorist attacks have resulted in hard-line governments, fanatical right-wing movements, and the mainstreaming of what used to be marginal religious positions.
Remember CB? "Citizen's Band?". Talk for free to anybody within a few miles?
Where is it now? Unless you drive a big rig, you probably don't have one. This may happen to the Internet.
Internet usage may already have peaked. AOL peaked a while back, having finally run out of suckers. A few reports indicate that overall time online has peaked. It's hard to tell; broadband "online time" reports often include idle computers.
The combination of viruses, worms, spam, popups, scams, and ads hardly makes it worth it any more.
Verisign has a back door into the control network for the US phone system. Using this, they can divert, block, or intercept calls as desired. When a call is placed, Verisign's database is checked to see if it requires special handling. For telemarketing companies that use this service, Verisign checks their database to see if the destination is on the do-not-call list, and if so, blocks the call. Similarly, for wiretapping requests, the call is forwarded to a wiretapping center to be fed out to some agency over a T1 line, per CALEA standards.
It's all done at the central office switch level via the SS7 network; there's no gear on customer premises at all.
He's right. Operating system design is so stuck.
Everything looks too much like UNIX, circa 1978.
Where are the transaction processing operating systems? The secure microkernels? The systems that just don't crash, ever. All of those things have been done at least once.
Here's a 1990 paper on Tandem system uptime. Unix/Linux data center users, read it and weep. They have systems with MTBFs in measured in years. Sometimes decades.
Slashdot Mirror
The right answer first appeared in Jerry Popek's UCLA Locus in the 1980s, and has been in some IBM UNIX systems since IBM bought the technology. It really ought to be in Linux.
It works like this. When you open an existing file for writing, you actually start to write a new file. But unchanged blocks are shared, using a copy on write approach. If you close the file normally, the new file replaces the old file.
If the program or system crashes, the old file remains intact and unchanged. So there's always a good copy of the file. No special action is required in the program to make this happen.
The program can also call "commit", to force the new version to replace the old one immediately, or "revert", to roll the file back to the "old" state. But that's optional. A program might do this after finishing some transaction, for example.
That's how to do it right.
"The district court of the district in which a person resides or is found may order him to give his testimony or statement or to produce a document or other thing for use in a proceeding in a foreign or international tribunal, including criminal investigations conducted before formal accusation. The order ... may direct that the testimony or statement be given, or the document or other thing be produced, before a person appointed by the court. By virtue of his appointment, the person appointed has power to administer any necessary oath and take the testimony or statement. ... To the extent that the order does not prescribe otherwise, the testimony or statement shall be taken, and the document or other thing produced, in accordance with the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure."
The point is that the real order came from a district court judge, and if Rackspace wanted to object to it, they had the right to raise any of the objections in the federal rules of civil procedure that would apply in a deposition, like "it costs too much", "the request is overreaching", "the request would interfere with the operation of our business", etc. And they're raised before that judge, not the "commissioner". Note that civil procedure applies, even though this is a criminal case. There's no arrest authority implicit in this.
Now this is standard DOJ procedure. But it's more intimidation than actual legal authority. The use of the "commissioner" term is pure intimidation. Especially if the "commissioner subpoena" was delivered without the court order from a real judge that authorizes it.
A serious attack has a specific target and attacks it quietly. Serious attackers aren't going to show up in the "top 10 virus" lists. They're probably not going to use an attack that appears in some known signature list. They may have the ability to craft their own attacks, or at least modify known ones beyond recognition. The volume-oriented defense techniques won't work.
Military security people are very aware of this issue. You don't want to tie up all your resources chasing kids who are throwing rocks at the airfield fence. The real threat is probably being quietly mounted elsewhere.
The first time around, they had to use von Braun's team to get the US space and missile program going. They'd learned how to build rockets by blowing up a few hundred of them before they got one that worked. Apollo and the Shuttle were designed by people who had worked on US ICBMs, and there were dozens of failures in the early days there.
All those guys are dead or retired. The next big spacecraft will have to be designed by people who haven't done it before.
There aren't even many aircraft designers left. In the 1940s and 1950s, aircraft were designed and built at a frantic wartime rate, with many failures and some great successes. This produced a huge group of trained aircraft designers and builders. The Apollo program hired several thousand from Canada, when Avro went out of business. Today, there are few people with a track record of designing a novel flying machine. Other than Burt Rutan's people, almost nobody gets to design more than one kind of flying machine.
Buran isn't a copy of the US shuttle, although it looks similar. Buran has no main engine; it's launched on the back of an Energia booster. So there are more expendable components, but it's simpler.
Ah, yes, the right wingnuts. Remember the Oklahoma City bombing. Pure American right wing. The anthrax attack? Unclear, but it was somebody who had access to the US's weaponized anthrax.
Fun militia sites:
-
The Michigan Militia. Protecting Michigan from, well, somebody. Canada, maybe? "Training Schedule for Saturday, August 6th: 0800 Rifle zero, 0930 Camo check, 1000 Tactical walk, 1100 Fire team formation."
-
Militia of Montana. More into selling stuff. Order your bomb-making manual here.
-
The Indiana Militia. Offers custom dog tags.
Currently feuding with the Indiana Citizens Volunteer Militia. Promotes National Ammo Day.
These over-armed groups are left alone by the Bush Administration. But when some Arab guys played paintball in Virgina, one of them was sent to jail for decades.There's been a boom in militia activity in recent years. This may reflect the changing role of the National Guard. It used to be a one-weekend a month thing with a two week summer camp. If you join the National Guard today, they send you off to the real wars. So the guys who just want to play soldier on weekends don't join the Guard any more.
Want to drive yourself nuts? Put a pair of Sveasoft-hacked Linksys WiFi units between a PC and a server, and try to do something intensive like a CVS checkout. The thing works OK when it's not the bottleneck, which is the case when you're talking over some low-bandwidth link to the outside world. But when the WiFi link is the bottleneck, something breaks in queuing.
Yeah, we tried Sveasoft support. They're in denial about the problem, and we don't have time to debug it for them.
An "electrical box in the wall" form factor for computers might be useful. Machines are getting small enough.
Well, of course Google is getting all the good people in Silicon Valley. Who else is left? DEC SRL and WRL are gone, Interval is gone, PARC has been spun off and is looking for work, HP just canned their R&D operation, and SGI is in limbo.
Apparently buffer overflows within IOS aren't that hard to create, and so all the usual attack approaches can be used. That's the real story. And apparently IOS is a single-address-space unprotected OS, so anything can clobber anything. There's so much stuff in IOS now that there just has to be trouble.
Now I see why they're switching their larger routers to QNX, which is a protected-mode microkernel OS.
That's the real issue here. Control of the platform.
MoneyFast: REFI TODAY GET QUIK $$$
TopHits: TOP HITS LIST SMS HITS TO 2254 ONLY $2
Seoul3: FREE FREE (Korean char set)
Telcos and ISPs hate this, because they add so little value. They keep trying bundle "content", from AOL, Yahoo, or the RIAA. Customers just want a cheap pipe. It's the fact that power comes from the endpoints, and that anybody can add an endpoint, that makes the whole thing go.
Most importantly, it's what pushes prices down to just above the actual cost of providing the service. Hosting service, for example, is incredibly cheap. Hosting services would love to force you to buy stuff you don't want to get their services, but they're not in a position to do so. That's what's so great about the Internet.
Wired, remember, is basically a gadget catalog. For overpriced high-margin stuff you don't need. So this is the sort of thing you'd expect from Wired.
He doesn't get it. The whole point of HTML is to keep the web site at arm's length from the user's machine. The browser is an interface, not a platform.
Microsoft, Netscape, and Sun have all tried (incompatibly) to make the browser a "platform". We've suffered through Active-X controls, the Netscape plug-in platform, and client side Java. What we got were adware, spyware, and new attack vectors. Now, most firewalls block that stuff.
We may need more expressive power in HTML, but it should be descriptive, not programmable. That's the strength of HTML. You can do more than run it. You can index it, reformat it for another medium, translate it to another language, and simplify it for small devices. Try doing that with a Java applet or a Flash file.
JavaScript is as far as site-driven programmability of the browser should go. There's hostile JavaScript, but the browser can usually contain the attack.
Some highlights:
There are hundreds of other cases listed. And that's at the high school level. The college level is even worse.
Not only does football make rapists, multiple rape coverups involving high school, college, and NFL officials are on record. It's time for a serious crackdown.
Protect the children from steroid-enhanced monsters!
Did you notice that the article is from 1997?
NSA (not NASA) had cyrogenic computing back in the late 1960s. The general in charge of NSA famously said "I want a thousand megacycle computer. I'll get you the money". And they actually did get gigahertz cyrogenic components in the 1970s.
The devices were fast, but not small enough to compete with integrated circuits. The technology had a magnetic component, with a coil, so it had an inherent lower size limit. So that turned out to be a dead end. IBM spent almost two decades struggling with that technology under contract to NSA. It reportedly worked, but didn't have the potential for improvement that CMOS ICs did.
IBM had another go at cyrogenic computing with the Josephson junction in the 1980s, but that never worked out either.
HP's last few decisions about the Tandem line haven't worked out too well. After acquiring Tandem, they moved that product line over to PA-RISC. (Remember PA-RISC, HP's very own microprocessor line?) As PA-RISC sank, they had to move to another processor.
They picked the Itanium. Oops.
NonStop customers are getting very nervous.
Top contributors
Any questions?
Except as provided in this chapter, every contract by which anyone is restrained from engaging in a lawful profession, trade, or business of any kind is to that extent void.
The exceptions are all for people who owned and sold a business, not employees. So you can change jobs.
The other provision is famous. This is why you can do a startup on your own time, and your employer can't do anything about it afterward.
(a) Any provision in an employment agreement which provides that an employee shall assign, or offer to assign, any of his or her rights in an invention to his or her employer shall not apply to an invention that the employee developed entirely on his or her own time without using the employer's equipment, supplies, facilities, or trade secret information except for those inventions that either:
(1) Relate at the time of conception or reduction to practice of the invention to the employer's business, or actual or demonstrably anticipated research or development of the employer; or
(2) Result from any work performed by the employee for the employer.
(b) To the extent a provision in an employment agreement purports to require an employee to assign an invention otherwise excluded from being required to be assigned under subdivision (a), the provision is against the public policy of this state and is unenforceable.
Those provisions had a big role in the success of Silicon Valley. They're one of the reasons the venture capital community is based here, and why there are so many startups.
No, it was a laptop. In Kay and Goldberg's 1977 Xerox PARC booklet, "Personal Dynamic Media", which I have somewhere, there's a picture of a woman sitting on the grass with what looks like a largeish laptop. It's a cardboard mockup, with a dummy keyboard and screen. At the time, it seemed fantastic. Now, it looks clunky.
I visited Xerox PARC in 1975, and heard Kay's pitch. Back then, what Kay really had in mind was visual simulation. They had a little simulation of a hospital, where patients went in with problems ("I am a victim of bowlerthumb"), and were passed from Admitting to Surgery to Ward to Discharge, possibly with trips to X-Ray and such. This came with some very crude animations. Since Smalltalk was based on Simula 67, at the time it looked like object-oriented programming was for discrite-event simulation.
Simulation turned out to be less important in general computing than Kay expected. But, of course, it's the basis of most games today.
That's exactly right. bin Laden has written quite a bit, and you can read much of it. It's worth reading, because he's quite clear on what he wants to do, and made it clear a decade ago. It's striking how effectively Bush is doing what bin Laden wants.
Note that a similar strategy has been successful against Israel. Israel used to be a liberal, well-governed country. Ongoing terrorist attacks have resulted in hard-line governments, fanatical right-wing movements, and the mainstreaming of what used to be marginal religious positions.
Where is it now? Unless you drive a big rig, you probably don't have one. This may happen to the Internet.
Internet usage may already have peaked. AOL peaked a while back, having finally run out of suckers. A few reports indicate that overall time online has peaked. It's hard to tell; broadband "online time" reports often include idle computers.
The combination of viruses, worms, spam, popups, scams, and ads hardly makes it worth it any more.
Verisign has a back door into the control network for the US phone system. Using this, they can divert, block, or intercept calls as desired. When a call is placed, Verisign's database is checked to see if it requires special handling. For telemarketing companies that use this service, Verisign checks their database to see if the destination is on the do-not-call list, and if so, blocks the call. Similarly, for wiretapping requests, the call is forwarded to a wiretapping center to be fed out to some agency over a T1 line, per CALEA standards. It's all done at the central office switch level via the SS7 network; there's no gear on customer premises at all.
Here's a 1990 paper on Tandem system uptime. Unix/Linux data center users, read it and weep. They have systems with MTBFs in measured in years. Sometimes decades.
That's nothing. This is a serious subwoofer.