The problem is that this is an illogical response. What are they going to actually do with this patriotic attack system? DDoS a zombie? A few zombies? A hundred zombies?
At some point, the battle becomes worse than the attack. The attacker has thousands (hundreds of thousands? a million?) zombies. What use is "attacking" them like this?
No, you did not understand. The headers from the spam showed that it came from their server. MessageLabs' servers. Those were the servers connecting to my server and sending the spam to me.
I had to break out the headers to specifically show them that. I had to do that because they seemed incapable of reading the headers themselves.
I had a problem with spam from one of their clients and they kept claiming that even though it came from one of their servers, it was not "from" them so they could not do anything about it.
Their tech support people really knew nothing of SMTP. Even when I mailed the headers to them, they still couldn't understand it. I had to spell it out for them.
Any legitimate "email provider" must have some way to handle complaints about their customers sending spam. MessageLabs did not.
And I have to agree that since the advent of LiveCD's (and modern packaging systems) the entire process has gotten so easy that there is no excuse to NOT repair a Linux installation.
Linux is designed so that if you can boot the box, you can (99.999% of the time) fix the problem. Whether you boot with floppy, CD, DVD or USB...
Recently I was bitten by the Ubuntu libc bug in beta. No problem! Boot the LiveCD, grab the package, follow some simple instructions and you're back up and working. http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=722886 Skip to the last page. There's a LOT of discussion of that.
But since the patent office will now take "patents" on "a system for..." that pretty much means that anyone can patent anything and then wait for someone to actually invent the device.
I can patent a perpetual motion machine... and then claim that a new battery system infringes upon my useless patent. As long as I'm willing to "license" my patent for less than an actual court case would cost, I'll make money.
And I'll hinder REAL innovation and progress.
That's the goal with that company. They aren't improving anything. They're abusing the patent system (with the patent system's willing support) to drain profits from real inventors.
... Further, we find that our system locates peers along paths that have two orders of magnitude lower latency and 30% lower loss rates than those picked at random...
And THAT is the problem with this work.
The current torrent clients do not RANDOMLY pick an address. They check latency and hops.
Sure, it's easy to get HUGE IMPROVEMENTS when you choose to compare yourself against something that no one does anyway.
I'll wait to see what their app does when compared to the current methodology of the clients. I'd guess that it would be WORSE than simply measuring the latency and hops. Which is already done and done rather more efficiently than their method of querying 3rd party servers.
They are looking at the PHYSICAL location of the machines.
As far as I am aware, most bittorrent clients already search for the machines with the fewest hops and lowest latency. Translation: machines on the same NETWORK as them.
Because if I am on Comcast at home and you have DSL through ATT at home and our homes are within 500' of each other... that means NOTHING with regard to hops and latency between us.
Microsoft doesn't care if they ever become prosperous enough to afford Microsoft software.
It's the "barrier to entry" that concerns Microsoft. If the kids are given a laptop, then it is just up to them to learn to program with the FOSS tools for the FOSS environment that they've been given. The "barrier to entry" has been, effectively, removed. And NOT in Microsoft's favour.
Microsoft wants to keep the "barrier to entry" just high enough so that Microsoft platforms look most appealing to anyone who manages to cross that barrier.
Consider the US, the European colonies didn't have to start over again and build up from the stone age.
That is correct. But when you're talking inter-stellar distances, it is meaningless.
Our previous colonies could look forward to resupplies within a couple of years (at the most). A colony in another solar system... your great-great-grandkids MIGHT see the resupply ship. You are on your own.
And THAT is even considering that you're on an Earth-clone planet. If you're on a space station (the way I believe it would work) then you're in even greater danger of dying out before help gets there.
The problem with our being alone in our galaxy is that it is improbable, without some limiting factor on space faring civilizations (read: a Great Filter).
No, it is very easy to understand when you understand the DISTANCES involved.
Even if we assume that it takes them 10,000 years to push 1 light year closer to us, and they happen to be at the exact opposite side of the galaxy from us, they should have been here 2 billion years ago.
Why? You are stating their starting time as if it were a fact.
IF species X started at location Y, Z years ago.
And IF species X traveled A lightyears every B years.
THEN species X would be at location C by date D.
Assuming no problems were encountered.
That species X is NOT at location C... that must mean... anything. It can mean ANYTHING. From us being the only ones to inter-stellar battles to species X stopping before they got here to... anything. And if you actually look at the only case we have available (us), you can see that we haven't died, yet we HAVE stopped seeking to expand.
And his theory is SO flawed that if we don't expand, that means that there IS a "Great Filter".
And if we die out and are replaced by intelligent dolphins, they they won't expand because of the "Great Filter" except that THEIR "Great Filter" will be completely different than ours. And so on and so forth.
Which kind of negates the "Great" aspect of the "Great Filter". Because there is not a SINGLE "filter" that would apply to both cases.
Suppose we find trilobite skeletons on Mars... and the next day an alien ship enters our system. In his work, those two are contradictory events. They cannot happen in the same universe. But there are all kinds of ways they COULD happen.
So his theory is flawed.
Now, whether a million years is significant or not...
It is not in the entire history of Life.
It is VERY significant in the history of any single species.
You assume that such civilization would instantly launch a ship to each and every star and that none of those ships would have problems in the million year long flight. Although many ships would have to cross our galactic core.
Rather, a civilization would colonize the area around it... develop that area... and then move out from that fringe in X years. So you would have a new fringe area every X years. And X would (given human life spans) be a few thousand years. Just long enough to get the colony's population up to where it could build a space program of its own.
So if we find trilobites on Mars... Mankind is doomed.
Because the trilobites couldn't find a way to get to the sweet Earth oceans before Mars dried up on them. And, therefore, there is a "Great Filter" that prevents us from colonizing the galaxy.
WTF ?!?
The "Great Filter" is DISTANCE. It takes a LONG TIME and a LOT OF ENERGY to travel from one solar system to the next. Extrapolating our demise from the failure of a bunch of imaginary trilobites' space program is... beyond stupid.
The galaxy is HUGE. Even if there are 100 billion stars in it, we'd have to cross HALF A GALAXY to get to 50 billion of them.
Old system - the duly appointed authorities had to SUSPECT you of a crime... and get sufficient evidence to convince a disinterested 3rd party (a judge) that there was a need for a warrant.
New system - skim through the LEGITIMATE transactions of EVERYONE hoping to find something criminal or actionable or... just something you want to read about someone. Stalking ex's. Harassing people who do not respect you enough. Getting some info on that cutie you saw at the grocery store.
In one proof-of-concept demo, a photo that was taken via a cell phone camera, was automatically synced to a Mesh that pushed the pictures out to a Facebook photo album.
It was certainly impressive to see data -- in this case a cell phone camera picture -- almost instantly synced across multiple devices and saved to a web service immediately after it was created.
Prepare yourself for the flood of home-made porn (BAD home-made porn) that is "synced across multiple devices".
And for the first people fired for "uploading" their porn collection to their workstations at their jobs.
This project is going to discover that the GUARDS have contact with prisoners that go on to commit crimes.
Prisoner-A and Prisoner-B commit a terrorist act of child pornography and BOTH of those prisoners will have had contact with Guard-C in Prison-D. Therefore, every other prisoner who had contact with Guard-C is a potential terrorist child pornographer.
Really. That's all that you're going to find from this. This is a waste of money.
Actually, they are for "the little guy" and they do create "petty monopolies".
They were designed to create an environment where an inventor could create something and market it for a set number of years with our government providing protection from competition. In exchange for that, the invention would be free to be copied when the patent expired.
Now, patents are used to BLOCK development. Because you can get a broad patent on ANYTHING, just about EVERYTHING is being patented.
So Company-A is working on a new invention. Company-B hears about the work and rushes out to get a patent on a broad "process" that covers (but does not specify) the invention that Company-A is working on.
Now Company-A owes money to Company-B for an invention that Company-B never produced.
Fuck that. Just have the patent office require a WORKING, PHYSICAL model of the invention PRIOR to accepting the patent application. That's how is used to be.
Of course, this would kill all the software "patents" and "practices" patents and so forth. Which I think is a good thing(tm).
You have to put alot of work into making an exploit, do you choose to put that work into something that gives you 90% or 5% returns.
You're using the wrong terminology. There is no "95%" return.
Rather, it is an issue of putting in effort X and choosing to bypass return Y (millions of machines) in order to fight every other cracker out there for a chance at return 20Y.
Now, you can say that every single cracker in the world does that... yeah, right. or You can say that cracking a Mac is more difficult than cracking a Windows box. In which case Mac security is better than Windows security.
A zombie army of a million Macs is just as efficient (and valuable) as a zombie army of a million Windows boxes.
Nonetheless, outside of these two cases, it seems like Microsoft is being targeting because, well, they're Microsoft. They have a huge market share and a really good update management system, so they're a big target for something like this. That coupled with their history of vulnerabilities, and it's easy to understand why they were picked over, say, Apple.
Nope. If that were correct, then Apple would see 5% (or so) of the "virus" development out there.
There are millions of Macs out there. If cracking them was that easy, they'd be cracked. There's just too much money there even if the Windows market is almost 20x larger.
Slashdot Mirror
Yep, that's the logical way to do it.
The problem is that this is an illogical response. What are they going to actually do with this patriotic attack system? DDoS a zombie? A few zombies? A hundred zombies?
At some point, the battle becomes worse than the attack. The attacker has thousands (hundreds of thousands? a million?) zombies. What use is "attacking" them like this?
No, you did not understand. The headers from the spam showed that it came from their server. MessageLabs' servers. Those were the servers connecting to my server and sending the spam to me.
I had to break out the headers to specifically show them that. I had to do that because they seemed incapable of reading the headers themselves.
MessageLabs sucks.
I had a problem with spam from one of their clients and they kept claiming that even though it came from one of their servers, it was not "from" them so they could not do anything about it.
Their tech support people really knew nothing of SMTP. Even when I mailed the headers to them, they still couldn't understand it. I had to spell it out for them.
Any legitimate "email provider" must have some way to handle complaints about their customers sending spam. MessageLabs did not.
So ... your mythical Windows user bought the cheapest box he could find ... and then wants to spend MORE money ... at WalMart ... on applications?
When he could just download the app at home.
Hey, me too!
...
And I have to agree that since the advent of LiveCD's (and modern packaging systems) the entire process has gotten so easy that there is no excuse to NOT repair a Linux installation.
Linux is designed so that if you can boot the box, you can (99.999% of the time) fix the problem. Whether you boot with floppy, CD, DVD or USB
Recently I was bitten by the Ubuntu libc bug in beta. No problem! Boot the LiveCD, grab the package, follow some simple instructions and you're back up and working.
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=722886
Skip to the last page. There's a LOT of discussion of that.
But since the patent office will now take "patents" on "a system for ..." that pretty much means that anyone can patent anything and then wait for someone to actually invent the device.
... and then claim that a new battery system infringes upon my useless patent. As long as I'm willing to "license" my patent for less than an actual court case would cost, I'll make money.
I can patent a perpetual motion machine
And I'll hinder REAL innovation and progress.
That's the goal with that company. They aren't improving anything. They're abusing the patent system (with the patent system's willing support) to drain profits from real inventors.
LVM is NOT the same as RAID5.
LVM makes it easy to move space around on the disks, but it does NOTHING to prevent data loss from failed disks.
Put LVM on top of a RAID 1 or RAID 5 subsystem. Then you can add / replace disks and grow the volumes to use the new space.
The current torrent clients do not RANDOMLY pick an address. They check latency and hops.
Sure, it's easy to get HUGE IMPROVEMENTS when you choose to compare yourself against something that no one does anyway.
I'll wait to see what their app does when compared to the current methodology of the clients. I'd guess that it would be WORSE than simply measuring the latency and hops. Which is already done and done rather more efficiently than their method of querying 3rd party servers.
They are looking at the PHYSICAL location of the machines.
... that means NOTHING with regard to hops and latency between us.
As far as I am aware, most bittorrent clients already search for the machines with the fewest hops and lowest latency. Translation: machines on the same NETWORK as them.
Because if I am on Comcast at home and you have DSL through ATT at home and our homes are within 500' of each other
Microsoft doesn't care if they ever become prosperous enough to afford Microsoft software.
It's the "barrier to entry" that concerns Microsoft. If the kids are given a laptop, then it is just up to them to learn to program with the FOSS tools for the FOSS environment that they've been given. The "barrier to entry" has been, effectively, removed. And NOT in Microsoft's favour.
Microsoft wants to keep the "barrier to entry" just high enough so that Microsoft platforms look most appealing to anyone who manages to cross that barrier.
And "empowering" the next generation through educating them about the technology.
Turns out it's just about getting toys to kids.
Our previous colonies could look forward to resupplies within a couple of years (at the most). A colony in another solar system
And THAT is even considering that you're on an Earth-clone planet. If you're on a space station (the way I believe it would work) then you're in even greater danger of dying out before help gets there.No, it is very easy to understand when you understand the DISTANCES involved.Why? You are stating their starting time as if it were a fact.
IF species X started at location Y, Z years ago.
And IF species X traveled A lightyears every B years.
THEN species X would be at location C by date D.
Assuming no problems were encountered.
That species X is NOT at location C
And his theory is SO flawed that if we don't expand, that means that there IS a "Great Filter".
And if we die out and are replaced by intelligent dolphins, they they won't expand because of the "Great Filter" except that THEIR "Great Filter" will be completely different than ours. And so on and so forth.
Which kind of negates the "Great" aspect of the "Great Filter". Because there is not a SINGLE "filter" that would apply to both cases.
Suppose we find trilobite skeletons on Mars ... and the next day an alien ship enters our system. In his work, those two are contradictory events. They cannot happen in the same universe. But there are all kinds of ways they COULD happen.
...
... develop that area ... and then move out from that fringe in X years. So you would have a new fringe area every X years. And X would (given human life spans) be a few thousand years. Just long enough to get the colony's population up to where it could build a space program of its own.
So his theory is flawed.
Now, whether a million years is significant or not
It is not in the entire history of Life.
It is VERY significant in the history of any single species.
You assume that such civilization would instantly launch a ship to each and every star and that none of those ships would have problems in the million year long flight. Although many ships would have to cross our galactic core.
Rather, a civilization would colonize the area around it
So if we find trilobites on Mars ... Mankind is doomed.
... beyond stupid.
Because the trilobites couldn't find a way to get to the sweet Earth oceans before Mars dried up on them. And, therefore, there is a "Great Filter" that prevents us from colonizing the galaxy.
WTF ?!?
The "Great Filter" is DISTANCE. It takes a LONG TIME and a LOT OF ENERGY to travel from one solar system to the next. Extrapolating our demise from the failure of a bunch of imaginary trilobites' space program is
The galaxy is HUGE. Even if there are 100 billion stars in it, we'd have to cross HALF A GALAXY to get to 50 billion of them.
With electronic sensors in them.
Sweat and grime will destroy them faster than they can make them.
Old system - the duly appointed authorities had to SUSPECT you of a crime ... and get sufficient evidence to convince a disinterested 3rd party (a judge) that there was a need for a warrant.
... just something you want to read about someone. Stalking ex's. Harassing people who do not respect you enough. Getting some info on that cutie you saw at the grocery store.
New system - skim through the LEGITIMATE transactions of EVERYONE hoping to find something criminal or actionable or
Fuck that.
And for the first people fired for "uploading" their porn collection to their workstations at their jobs.
This project is going to discover that the GUARDS have contact with prisoners that go on to commit crimes.
Prisoner-A and Prisoner-B commit a terrorist act of child pornography and BOTH of those prisoners will have had contact with Guard-C in Prison-D. Therefore, every other prisoner who had contact with Guard-C is a potential terrorist child pornographer.
Really. That's all that you're going to find from this. This is a waste of money.
From TFRFP:Emphasis added.
Actually, they are for "the little guy" and they do create "petty monopolies".
They were designed to create an environment where an inventor could create something and market it for a set number of years with our government providing protection from competition. In exchange for that, the invention would be free to be copied when the patent expired.
Now, patents are used to BLOCK development. Because you can get a broad patent on ANYTHING, just about EVERYTHING is being patented.
So Company-A is working on a new invention. Company-B hears about the work and rushes out to get a patent on a broad "process" that covers (but does not specify) the invention that Company-A is working on.
Now Company-A owes money to Company-B for an invention that Company-B never produced.
Fuck that. Just have the patent office require a WORKING, PHYSICAL model of the invention PRIOR to accepting the patent application. That's how is used to be.
Of course, this would kill all the software "patents" and "practices" patents and so forth. Which I think is a good thing(tm).
I patented the means of patenting "quality patents".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wild_Kingdom
You don't even need to go back to the 50's. And it was a GREAT show.
Rather, it is an issue of putting in effort X and choosing to bypass return Y (millions of machines) in order to fight every other cracker out there for a chance at return 20Y.
Now, you can say that every single cracker in the world does that
or
You can say that cracking a Mac is more difficult than cracking a Windows box. In which case Mac security is better than Windows security.
A zombie army of a million Macs is just as efficient (and valuable) as a zombie army of a million Windows boxes.
And if what you say now is correct, then there's no reason why the research team could not have included Mac updates and Ubuntu updates.
I do not see them picking Windows because it is Windows.
There are millions of Macs out there. If cracking them was that easy, they'd be cracked. There's just too much money there even if the Windows market is almost 20x larger.