Might want to avoid the Drobo, though. Those things are convenient in that you can switch up the number and capacity of disks without the rigidity of a normal RAID controller; but they are expensive, not very fast, and have some Serious Quirks. For a relatively large body of data, and a setup you really care about, some normal RAID flavor will be cheaper, faster, and way less likely to do something horrible on you.
In the spirit of curiosity, is your Atom board one of the early ones were Intel was pairing atoms with SiS chipsets, or one of the later with a 945, or one of the still later with the NM10, or whatever intel is calling their atom-specific chipset these days?
Quite possibly so. I just find the study of idiots and idiocy to be quite interesting(and, given their numbers and the fact that situational idiocy can crop up in basically anybody, also quite important).
Thus, even if true, "He was an idiot." is really just the start of the exploration.
Depends on price: HDDs are crazy cheap, for the capacity; but untrustworthy. However, thanks to the cheapness, redundancy, preferably in multiple locations, periodic testing/copying to newer disks/etc. is fairly affordable. Make sure that you have(either manually, at the utility level, or at the FS level, hashes/checksums) and hope for the best.
LTOs are rather more durable, having fewer moving parts in the storage media; but the cost of entry is substantially higher. All the same principles apply, though.
There are no truly reliable storage mechanisms for large quantities of digital data, only storage mechanisms cheap enough that you can duplicate your way to reliability.
While the assorted clever mechanisms for ensuring that trickle-up economics continues to work are fascinating(and important to keep an eye on), it's more complex than a mere ponzi scheme:
Ponzi schemes are zero to negative sum games with a fairly clear redistribution of a fixed amount of wealth among a population, with a heavy redistribution toward the top of the pyramid. The real economy, though, is stranger. If you look at the matter in terms of 'real' wealth(ie. the goods and services that people actually want for their own sake, rather than the assorted intermediary constructs), the world has basically never been better off, with the exception of unpleasant looking mid to longterm numbers on petrochemicals. And yet, the correct perturbations in the framework of legal fictions that we lay on top of that can actually make people, on average, worse off.
That's the part of economics where my intuition just sort of curls up and dies. Your classic "The crops failed, so the supply of wheat is at 50%, ergo famine" is easy. The "a fixed quantity of wealth is distributed among hypothetical investors, one of them starts a ponzi scheme, now the distribution is different." is also pretty easy. But when "We have so many available houses that getting a place to live is now cheaper than before!" becomes an international crisis, you know that your head is rammed so far up the ass of the twilight zone that comprehension is going to be difficult...
Hence my somewhat cowardly use of "necessarily". Given the fairly substantial standardization of core hardware in the x86 market(ie. either an Intel chip with an Intel chipset, or an AMD chip with either an AMD chipset or one of the remaining Nvidia ones, along with wired NIC by Intel or Broadcom and wireless by Intel, Broadcom, or a couple of others) it is hard to go too far wrong even with laptops; but laptops are the sorts of places were "realtek did something fucked up with the supposedly standardized 'HD Audio' subsystem, and now my speakers don't mute when I plug in headphones" or "the wlan device Just Doesn't Quite Wake Up Right about 10% of the time coming out of sleep" still tend to crop up with unpleasant regularity.
At least in my experience, OpenBSD's support for 'core' hardware tends to be about as good as Linux's(sometimes better, they've led the way on a few fully-open reverse engineering efforts, sometimes worse, they've axed support for a few mostly-working-but-not-quite things that linux hasn't, like the case with that one brand of RAID adapter); but definitely good enough on servers, workstations, and prosaic desktops. If, though, there is some dodgy ACPI issue or you want Nvidia binaries to work, or your specific model of laptop has a really weird audio output mapping, or something of that nature, Linux's larger userbase makes your odds of finding a solution somewhat better. Many laptops do work just fine; but if you had to do some serious googling and bodging to get a specific one to work under linux, you are likely to have a slightly worse time doing the same under BSD.
It is rather darkly fascinating how a series of movements of largely imaginary money has managed to so sharply affect the availability of actual products and services to actual people...
I was under the(apparently mistaken) impression that that ugly little notion had been settled:
Back during that 'myspace suicide case' drama, the prosecution made the argument that, by creating an account under a false name(which the defendant definitely had), she had violated the myspace terms of service(which, she also definitely had); but then went on to claim that accessing a website in a way contrary to the ToS was a violation of the CFAA. Thankfully, that... exceptionally broad... interpretation was shot down.
Whatever he was doing in a locked wiring closet may well have been some sort of trespassing; but ToS violations are a matter between you and the entity(and generally only worth terminating your relationship) not you and the feds.
If he was crashing servers, his rate-limiting was probably a little on the lax side, which is presumably didn't want directly associated with his account; but that still doesn't explain why he wouldn't just go with the distributed approach, along with a dash of patience.
Regardless of whether the tale in the indictment is true or not, it seems a weird way to go about just getting a whole bunch of jstor articles...
The defendant's record suggests a reasonable amount of tech savvy and some geek and activist cred. Combined, perhaps, with a little beer money, that should be enough to secure the cooperation of a few students at a great many of the colleges that have site licenses for jstor journals. Within trivial driving/MBTA distance of MIT alone, there are quite a few to choose from.
It seems like you could get entirely the same results, entirely above board, just by scraping a little more slowly, from slightly more endpoints, which would be easy to secure with the permission of their owners. While MIT is fairly laid back, cloak-and-daggering into their wiring closets risks the wrath of some resident BOFH, and it isn't legal. Mere scraping, on the other hand, is just a ToS violation at worst.
I suspect that it depends on what happens to them. Only the arrests, and the occasional fairly high-profile sentencings, make news.
If many of the arrests turn out to be made in error and quietly dropped, that would create a greater apparent than real risk. Similarly, if many of the grunts are vaguely disgruntled minors whose parents are glad that they aren't out on the street getting into real trouble, the legal repercussions might be fairly slight and sealed at majority.
I'm not following the matter closely; but I've seen a lot of stories about raids and arrests, but no roundeups yet of whether anybody is actually being convicted of anything.
For reporting purposes, "unemployment" counts only those who do not have; but are seeking, a job. Retirees, 'discouraged' former job seekers, students/children not seeking work, etc. don't count.
This is to say, things are generally worse than unemployment statistics indicate.
I share your skepticism about the prospects for facial recognition software. Humans are bad enough at it, despite millenia of evolutionary pressure, drivers' license photos aren't exactly masterpieces(and aren't updated all that often, certainly not as often as makeup or hairstyle or % bodyfat, even among people who are trying their hardest to keep those constant as they age), and computers probably aren't good enough.
It always just makes me nervous to see arguments pro or con complex systems based on anecdotes. In this case, the argument-from-anecdote is probably coincidentally correct; but it shares the same intrinsic caliber as the "If it saves even one life" argument that would inevitably emerge to counter it.
Unfortunately, as you say, I'm guessing that their fancy magic infallible computer will be opened to the scrutiny of independent subject-matter experts shortly after the earth is incinerated by the dying sun...
True; but very, very little of that cost is borne by the hypothetical pirate-hunter. All consumers of goods shipped through that area pay slightly higher prices because of increased insurance costs and occasional losses; but, per person, those are pretty tiny.
In the classic 'letter of marque' days, the loot obtained by the privateer operating under one was sufficient to provide an incentive for people to outfit ships and get their loot on, that is what made the system self-sustaining. In absence of such motivation, there would necessarily be some sort of mercenary/bounty system, which comes with its own set of issues.
My suspicion is that any one DNS server will be increasingly unlikely to provide 'unhampered access to the internet'(to the degree that there even remains a 'the internet' as opposed to great-firewall-of-$COUNTRY-ed intranets with limited commercial interconnects...); but that an ugly hack will continue to work fairly well:
Different countries flip out about different aspects of the internet. As long as each national blocking scheme(or major ISP implementation) has a predictable response to a DNS query for a forbidden domain(ie. a false NXDOMAIN or a redirect to some scary ICE page) your local DNS proxy can query multiple servers, in multiple jurisdictions that care about different things, and then return to local clients the cream of the results. Brutally ugly, won't help DNS latency at all, makes baby Vixie cry, etc; but its results should be fairly close to a 'real' picture of the internet, so long as the enforcement priorities of the world's states don't overlap too much.
Ultimately, the bigger threat is probably the fact that(barring assorted hackery that raises the difficulty level a fair bit and requires cooperation at both ends) DNS traffic isn't exactly rocket surgery to identify and either terminate or rewrite in flight. Just modifying the DNS server is the cheap and easy way, and gets it done much of the time; but if your ISP modifies their DNS server and then starts blocking DNS traffic from your IP that isn't going to your assigned nameserver, Have A Nice Day... Pending DNSSEC, any ISP willing to spend the cash could also just rewrite the DNS responses on their way back to you. That is hardly impossible to get around(SSH tunnel would do it in about a second, if you have suitable access to a host not suffering under such a policy, albeit at the cost of being a bit 'un-consumer' looking of you. If you needed to be stealthy, you could do something absolutely horrible like use an SSLed webapp, with your local DNS proxy issuing lookups encapsulated in xmlhttprequests, and the server doing the lookups, and then sending the results back down. Architecturally gross; but it'd be indistinguishable from a zillion stupid-but-legitimate 'web2.0' interfaces as far as your ISP is concerned...)
Barring some research on the reliability of the humans previously used(or, if no checks were done, estimates of likely false negatives), it's sort of hard to say.
It is well known that machine-vision is still rather dodgy outside of well-controlled applications(pick-and-place? the puny humans might as well surrender. general purpose object recognition in cluttered environments? not quite so good.); but it is also known that humans are quite fallible, and generally more fallible than they think.
An anecdote, however Kafkaesque, can't really tell you much about "improve[d] reliability and accuracy". It can tell you that customer service sucks, or that a department is taking a guilty-until-proven-innocent approach; but it can't tell you whether they were doing more or less of that than before...
The typical users will quickly learn how to set their DNS providers if this comes to pass.
Unfortunately, some unknown; but nontrivial, number of them will learn to set their DNS providers by obtaining from an incrementally more clueful friend and running "l33tt0rr3ntz_DNS_Crack.exe". This will, in fact, recofigure their system's DNS settings to point to somewhere in the free world; but it might, well, invite a few buddies in...
I hadn't considered the idea; but I suspect you are correct. On the other hand, with those selection criteria for pirate hunters, I think that I might want the pirates to win. The people at the intersection of "sociopathic thrill-killers" and "substantial disposable income" are not exactly the ones you want making it back from vacation alive.
Laundry list of distinguished security researchers: "This is a terrible plan, it won't achieve what you want, and it will set back the state of internet security quite dangerously."
MPAA Flack: "Shut up, nerd, the health and security of the internet is not even a secondary objective here."
Even if you have a sociopathic disregard for civilian casualties(after all, pirates are a pain to find and sometimes fight back, while you can obtain villagers by the villageful...) you'd be an idiot to make such a bounty offer: anything high enough to motivate sufficiently competent people to take on the risk and time commitment of doing some actual pirate hunting would be well above the cost to an unscrupulous operator of securing a few corpses, some cheap small arms, and a dinghy of some description. Heck, even the pirates might get into the game of bundling casualties and/or enemies with junked hardware and bounty-ing the package off for a tidy profit!
They have made some upgrades; but not nearly to the point where condemning and selling off their used gear would make up for the cost of capturing it in the first place... Worse, from the perspective of powers interested in trade security and stability(rather than just getting some blood in the water and reveling in the righteous vengeance), history suggests that low-budget privateers are often little better than pirates themselves and 'respectable' mercenaries get really expensive.
I think you might be a little confused there: plank-walking was a highly irregular practice, only indulged in by pirates and similar types on rare occasion. State-sanctioned naval executions were usually hangings.
Given that the pirates are using any old junk to mount their attacks, I'm guessing that there would be no economic incentive to hunt them down under the historical mechanism of condemnation and sale. Some sort of bounty-based alternative, in addition to the cost, would amount to offering to pay anybody who can come up with a few rusty Kalashnikovs and a boat full of dead Somalis. What could possibly go wrong?
In practice, of course, NCAA rules are approximately as effective in ensuring that collegiate competition occurs among 'amateur student-athletes' as Olympic rules are in encouraging similar fantasies of 'amateur' competition.
Luckily, as long as we keep pretending, there is room for rampant hypocrisy and more or less continual rule breaking, so that's a win...
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Might want to avoid the Drobo, though. Those things are convenient in that you can switch up the number and capacity of disks without the rigidity of a normal RAID controller; but they are expensive, not very fast, and have some Serious Quirks. For a relatively large body of data, and a setup you really care about, some normal RAID flavor will be cheaper, faster, and way less likely to do something horrible on you.
In the spirit of curiosity, is your Atom board one of the early ones were Intel was pairing atoms with SiS chipsets, or one of the later with a 945, or one of the still later with the NM10, or whatever intel is calling their atom-specific chipset these days?
Quite possibly so. I just find the study of idiots and idiocy to be quite interesting(and, given their numbers and the fact that situational idiocy can crop up in basically anybody, also quite important).
Thus, even if true, "He was an idiot." is really just the start of the exploration.
Depends on price: HDDs are crazy cheap, for the capacity; but untrustworthy. However, thanks to the cheapness, redundancy, preferably in multiple locations, periodic testing/copying to newer disks/etc. is fairly affordable. Make sure that you have(either manually, at the utility level, or at the FS level, hashes/checksums) and hope for the best. LTOs are rather more durable, having fewer moving parts in the storage media; but the cost of entry is substantially higher. All the same principles apply, though.
There are no truly reliable storage mechanisms for large quantities of digital data, only storage mechanisms cheap enough that you can duplicate your way to reliability.
While the assorted clever mechanisms for ensuring that trickle-up economics continues to work are fascinating(and important to keep an eye on), it's more complex than a mere ponzi scheme:
Ponzi schemes are zero to negative sum games with a fairly clear redistribution of a fixed amount of wealth among a population, with a heavy redistribution toward the top of the pyramid. The real economy, though, is stranger. If you look at the matter in terms of 'real' wealth(ie. the goods and services that people actually want for their own sake, rather than the assorted intermediary constructs), the world has basically never been better off, with the exception of unpleasant looking mid to longterm numbers on petrochemicals. And yet, the correct perturbations in the framework of legal fictions that we lay on top of that can actually make people, on average, worse off.
That's the part of economics where my intuition just sort of curls up and dies. Your classic "The crops failed, so the supply of wheat is at 50%, ergo famine" is easy. The "a fixed quantity of wealth is distributed among hypothetical investors, one of them starts a ponzi scheme, now the distribution is different." is also pretty easy. But when "We have so many available houses that getting a place to live is now cheaper than before!" becomes an international crisis, you know that your head is rammed so far up the ass of the twilight zone that comprehension is going to be difficult...
Hence my somewhat cowardly use of "necessarily". Given the fairly substantial standardization of core hardware in the x86 market(ie. either an Intel chip with an Intel chipset, or an AMD chip with either an AMD chipset or one of the remaining Nvidia ones, along with wired NIC by Intel or Broadcom and wireless by Intel, Broadcom, or a couple of others) it is hard to go too far wrong even with laptops; but laptops are the sorts of places were "realtek did something fucked up with the supposedly standardized 'HD Audio' subsystem, and now my speakers don't mute when I plug in headphones" or "the wlan device Just Doesn't Quite Wake Up Right about 10% of the time coming out of sleep" still tend to crop up with unpleasant regularity.
At least in my experience, OpenBSD's support for 'core' hardware tends to be about as good as Linux's(sometimes better, they've led the way on a few fully-open reverse engineering efforts, sometimes worse, they've axed support for a few mostly-working-but-not-quite things that linux hasn't, like the case with that one brand of RAID adapter); but definitely good enough on servers, workstations, and prosaic desktops. If, though, there is some dodgy ACPI issue or you want Nvidia binaries to work, or your specific model of laptop has a really weird audio output mapping, or something of that nature, Linux's larger userbase makes your odds of finding a solution somewhat better. Many laptops do work just fine; but if you had to do some serious googling and bodging to get a specific one to work under linux, you are likely to have a slightly worse time doing the same under BSD.
It is rather darkly fascinating how a series of movements of largely imaginary money has managed to so sharply affect the availability of actual products and services to actual people...
Not necessarily fun to shoehorn onto a laptop; but if the hardware comes with rack rails, generally just fine.
I was under the(apparently mistaken) impression that that ugly little notion had been settled:
Back during that 'myspace suicide case' drama, the prosecution made the argument that, by creating an account under a false name(which the defendant definitely had), she had violated the myspace terms of service(which, she also definitely had); but then went on to claim that accessing a website in a way contrary to the ToS was a violation of the CFAA. Thankfully, that... exceptionally broad... interpretation was shot down.
Whatever he was doing in a locked wiring closet may well have been some sort of trespassing; but ToS violations are a matter between you and the entity(and generally only worth terminating your relationship) not you and the feds.
If he was crashing servers, his rate-limiting was probably a little on the lax side, which is presumably didn't want directly associated with his account; but that still doesn't explain why he wouldn't just go with the distributed approach, along with a dash of patience.
Regardless of whether the tale in the indictment is true or not, it seems a weird way to go about just getting a whole bunch of jstor articles...
The defendant's record suggests a reasonable amount of tech savvy and some geek and activist cred. Combined, perhaps, with a little beer money, that should be enough to secure the cooperation of a few students at a great many of the colleges that have site licenses for jstor journals. Within trivial driving/MBTA distance of MIT alone, there are quite a few to choose from.
It seems like you could get entirely the same results, entirely above board, just by scraping a little more slowly, from slightly more endpoints, which would be easy to secure with the permission of their owners. While MIT is fairly laid back, cloak-and-daggering into their wiring closets risks the wrath of some resident BOFH, and it isn't legal. Mere scraping, on the other hand, is just a ToS violation at worst.
I suspect that it depends on what happens to them. Only the arrests, and the occasional fairly high-profile sentencings, make news.
If many of the arrests turn out to be made in error and quietly dropped, that would create a greater apparent than real risk. Similarly, if many of the grunts are vaguely disgruntled minors whose parents are glad that they aren't out on the street getting into real trouble, the legal repercussions might be fairly slight and sealed at majority.
I'm not following the matter closely; but I've seen a lot of stories about raids and arrests, but no roundeups yet of whether anybody is actually being convicted of anything.
For reporting purposes, "unemployment" counts only those who do not have; but are seeking, a job. Retirees, 'discouraged' former job seekers, students/children not seeking work, etc. don't count.
This is to say, things are generally worse than unemployment statistics indicate.
I share your skepticism about the prospects for facial recognition software. Humans are bad enough at it, despite millenia of evolutionary pressure, drivers' license photos aren't exactly masterpieces(and aren't updated all that often, certainly not as often as makeup or hairstyle or % bodyfat, even among people who are trying their hardest to keep those constant as they age), and computers probably aren't good enough.
It always just makes me nervous to see arguments pro or con complex systems based on anecdotes. In this case, the argument-from-anecdote is probably coincidentally correct; but it shares the same intrinsic caliber as the "If it saves even one life" argument that would inevitably emerge to counter it.
Unfortunately, as you say, I'm guessing that their fancy magic infallible computer will be opened to the scrutiny of independent subject-matter experts shortly after the earth is incinerated by the dying sun...
True; but very, very little of that cost is borne by the hypothetical pirate-hunter. All consumers of goods shipped through that area pay slightly higher prices because of increased insurance costs and occasional losses; but, per person, those are pretty tiny.
In the classic 'letter of marque' days, the loot obtained by the privateer operating under one was sufficient to provide an incentive for people to outfit ships and get their loot on, that is what made the system self-sustaining. In absence of such motivation, there would necessarily be some sort of mercenary/bounty system, which comes with its own set of issues.
My suspicion is that any one DNS server will be increasingly unlikely to provide 'unhampered access to the internet'(to the degree that there even remains a 'the internet' as opposed to great-firewall-of-$COUNTRY-ed intranets with limited commercial interconnects...); but that an ugly hack will continue to work fairly well:
Different countries flip out about different aspects of the internet. As long as each national blocking scheme(or major ISP implementation) has a predictable response to a DNS query for a forbidden domain(ie. a false NXDOMAIN or a redirect to some scary ICE page) your local DNS proxy can query multiple servers, in multiple jurisdictions that care about different things, and then return to local clients the cream of the results. Brutally ugly, won't help DNS latency at all, makes baby Vixie cry, etc; but its results should be fairly close to a 'real' picture of the internet, so long as the enforcement priorities of the world's states don't overlap too much.
Ultimately, the bigger threat is probably the fact that(barring assorted hackery that raises the difficulty level a fair bit and requires cooperation at both ends) DNS traffic isn't exactly rocket surgery to identify and either terminate or rewrite in flight. Just modifying the DNS server is the cheap and easy way, and gets it done much of the time; but if your ISP modifies their DNS server and then starts blocking DNS traffic from your IP that isn't going to your assigned nameserver, Have A Nice Day... Pending DNSSEC, any ISP willing to spend the cash could also just rewrite the DNS responses on their way back to you. That is hardly impossible to get around(SSH tunnel would do it in about a second, if you have suitable access to a host not suffering under such a policy, albeit at the cost of being a bit 'un-consumer' looking of you. If you needed to be stealthy, you could do something absolutely horrible like use an SSLed webapp, with your local DNS proxy issuing lookups encapsulated in xmlhttprequests, and the server doing the lookups, and then sending the results back down. Architecturally gross; but it'd be indistinguishable from a zillion stupid-but-legitimate 'web2.0' interfaces as far as your ISP is concerned...)
Barring some research on the reliability of the humans previously used(or, if no checks were done, estimates of likely false negatives), it's sort of hard to say.
It is well known that machine-vision is still rather dodgy outside of well-controlled applications(pick-and-place? the puny humans might as well surrender. general purpose object recognition in cluttered environments? not quite so good.); but it is also known that humans are quite fallible, and generally more fallible than they think.
An anecdote, however Kafkaesque, can't really tell you much about "improve[d] reliability and accuracy". It can tell you that customer service sucks, or that a department is taking a guilty-until-proven-innocent approach; but it can't tell you whether they were doing more or less of that than before...
The typical users will quickly learn how to set their DNS providers if this comes to pass.
Unfortunately, some unknown; but nontrivial, number of them will learn to set their DNS providers by obtaining from an incrementally more clueful friend and running "l33tt0rr3ntz_DNS_Crack.exe". This will, in fact, recofigure their system's DNS settings to point to somewhere in the free world; but it might, well, invite a few buddies in...
I hadn't considered the idea; but I suspect you are correct. On the other hand, with those selection criteria for pirate hunters, I think that I might want the pirates to win. The people at the intersection of "sociopathic thrill-killers" and "substantial disposable income" are not exactly the ones you want making it back from vacation alive.
Laundry list of distinguished security researchers: "This is a terrible plan, it won't achieve what you want, and it will set back the state of internet security quite dangerously."
MPAA Flack: "Shut up, nerd, the health and security of the internet is not even a secondary objective here."
Even if you have a sociopathic disregard for civilian casualties(after all, pirates are a pain to find and sometimes fight back, while you can obtain villagers by the villageful...) you'd be an idiot to make such a bounty offer: anything high enough to motivate sufficiently competent people to take on the risk and time commitment of doing some actual pirate hunting would be well above the cost to an unscrupulous operator of securing a few corpses, some cheap small arms, and a dinghy of some description. Heck, even the pirates might get into the game of bundling casualties and/or enemies with junked hardware and bounty-ing the package off for a tidy profit!
They have made some upgrades; but not nearly to the point where condemning and selling off their used gear would make up for the cost of capturing it in the first place... Worse, from the perspective of powers interested in trade security and stability(rather than just getting some blood in the water and reveling in the righteous vengeance), history suggests that low-budget privateers are often little better than pirates themselves and 'respectable' mercenaries get really expensive.
I think you might be a little confused there: plank-walking was a highly irregular practice, only indulged in by pirates and similar types on rare occasion. State-sanctioned naval executions were usually hangings.
'Letter of Marque and Reprisal'.
Given that the pirates are using any old junk to mount their attacks, I'm guessing that there would be no economic incentive to hunt them down under the historical mechanism of condemnation and sale. Some sort of bounty-based alternative, in addition to the cost, would amount to offering to pay anybody who can come up with a few rusty Kalashnikovs and a boat full of dead Somalis. What could possibly go wrong?
In practice, of course, NCAA rules are approximately as effective in ensuring that collegiate competition occurs among 'amateur student-athletes' as Olympic rules are in encouraging similar fantasies of 'amateur' competition.
Luckily, as long as we keep pretending, there is room for rampant hypocrisy and more or less continual rule breaking, so that's a win...