Yep. When I was a kid nobody* had a computer. Then for a while people had computers but little or no connectivity. Then everybody had a computer and fast connectivity.
During the sneakernet era you had computing ability, but if they wanted your data they'd have to get a warrant or ransack your office illegally.
If keeping things away from the NSA is that important, go all 1980s on your selves. It really wasn't such a bad time for most of us. Swapping floppies in person was actually kind of fun. There were no government agents at swap meets.... that I know of, LOL.
*The term "nobody" means no ordinary middle class household or small business. Yes, I know NASA and big companies had computers when I was a kid. "Nobody" is being used in the loose, colloquial sense here. The standard disclaimer about not inferring the ridiculous also applies. This includes casting a loose net over the definition of computer so as to include devices such as the abacus, or employees with "computer" as their job title and mocking me for implying that I'm older than written history. The standard disclaimer also applies to the text of the standard disclaimer.
I would think that rejecting lots of waste heat into San Francisco Bay would require an Environmental Impact Report, as well as approval from the Coastal Commission and probably other government checks. IANALaywer or expert on these things; but just follow the news on things like the remodels of piers in San Francisco and other things that touch the water. If Google somehow manages to be "special" on something like that, well... EVIL!
Oh wow, real close. Closer than I thought they'd come. I don't think steel buildings will meet occupancy requirements in most areas, but wow. Oh... so.... close. Flying under the radar doesn't count. Getting it past the government is the hard part.
Amazon isn't the "everything store" until you can buy a house there. In the early 20th century you could buy a house from Sears. Of course I'm sure there were plenty of details left for the purchaser.
Anyway, Amazon is the closest thing to a 21st Century Sears. People comment on Amazon listings and discuss them just like people used to salivate over stuff in a Sears catalog.
You left out the part where the car goes a million miles per hour, runs on electricity from a rechargeable battery, and costs $100. Unfortunately, it fits in the palm of your hand.
It's probably safer than watching TV. You don't get diabetes, obesity and coronary artery disease from cycling. If cycling gets you off the couch, do it. Hiking gets me off the couch. I don't worry about stumbling over a rock or yep... getting hit by a mountain biker. I worry about my mid-section getting flabby. Statistically, it's far more likely to kill me.
I used to cycle. I didn't mind the 25 mph city streets, as long as they were wide enough to avoid car door openings. I hated faster roads. Braddock and Ox road area of Fairfax County, VA was the worst. I road on Braddock, and a driver yelled at me. I road on the sidewalk next to Ox, and a guy mowing his lawn yelled at me for riding where only pedestrians are supposed to be. Technically he was right, but my life was more important to me than your stupid law. I was not about to take my life into my hands and ride on the side of Ox road there. I see a lot more road riders in California where I live now, but I really don't want to join them. I could see myself cruising the El Camino and the little Main Streets on the Peninsula though. El Camino is 35 mph but the traffic is so bad it goes slower a lot. That's about the fastest road I'd ever want to be on. San Francisco? It's a madhouse. Fuggedaboutit. I'll see you on a mountain side, walking to get fresh air and exercise.
I see the rise of FaceBook and mobile, roughly around 2007 as a real shark-jumping. This transformed the web into a much more consumer oriented, dumbed down experience. The intelligent stuff is still out there, but new users aren't drawn into it. Even if they would be inclined to Slashdot, they're corrupted and distracted by all the finger-painting pinch-zoom twerking.
People were still building their own web pages in the 90s, still experimenting. It was the fertile ground from which many green herbs were growing... ultimately to be choked off by weeds. Perhaps the rise of MySpace is indicative of that phase. In general, the transition from "you've got to know a little HTML to put up a page" to "just type your life story into our site" is the latest step into oblivion.
Of course everybody has their own take on this, and there have been several stages. The opening of the Internet to AOL users in the mid-90s is the original September moment.
Sorry, I know Slashdot loves to bash MS; but I didn't see the bundling of IE having much impact on the quality of the Web.
Without looking at the survey, it's hard to say; but I don't think they asked people to list a career or even chose from a set. I think they simply asked people if they thought that career was interesting. Given that, 24% is rather low. With all the action and drama that you see in the media surrounding this stuff, you'd think most people would think the real wold of security is interesting. That doesn't necessarily mean they want to be in the field. It just means they think it's interesting. The propagandists need to try harder. If they really hit it right, maybe they can convince us that the local locksmith is some kind of superhero.
There is no annual inspection in California either. Just smog check based on the age of the car. I'm not sure if smog occurs every year for anybody. You just get a notification for it when the registration renewal comes in. It's a small price to pay for not looking like Beijing when inversions occur.
. This is one of the big changes when you come from back East. In Virginia, I had two stickers on the windshield, one for inspection and another for tax. We also had emissions inspection every other year. In California you just have the registration sticker on your plate and smog.
There are multiple lotteries drawing every week; but there is only one asteroid lottery. More importantly, people witness numerous life-changing lottery payouts every month. Nobody in historical times has ever witnessed a civilization altering asteroid event.
So. Simply looking at the odds isn't enough. The experimental results are that voluntary participation in the lottery produces a handful of millionaires every month, while mandatory participation in the asteroid lottery produces a few rumored deaths and a handful of confirmed injuries in 5000 years.
Every field seems to have this issue to one degree or another. There are "music made easy" books, languages made easy, everything under the Sun "for dummies". It seems like it's particularly strong with programming. Maybe this is because programming is relatively new. Music and language are ancient. They're ancient enough for people to realize that for some people they will always be hard. Certainly a good teacher helps; but you have to have some innate ability.
Programming is too young for us to figure out how far teachers can take the typical student. I suspect it's similar to how far they can take the typical math, music, or language student. That's just my pet theory though. Until we reach consensus, I welcome your efforts to make programming easy, with a huge dose of skepticism.
How about this for some morality: Killing people, except in defense of self or someone else, is wrong (and worshiping a different invisible guy or the same invisible guy differently isn't a very good reason). Torturing people is wrong. Raping people is wrong. Hurting people, except in defense of self or someone else, is wrong. Stealing (however done) is wrong, but less wrong than hurting, raping, torturing, or murdering. Groups that break those rules are bad, groups that don't are at worst harmless.
That's a good start. You should come up with a few more. To make sure we don't forget them, have them carved on stone tablets and...
Yeah, I knee-jerked on the first line. OTOH, students came together in protest against the Vietnam war. Yeah, a bit dated and depending on your PoV that can be seen as conflict rather than cooperation. It was on a national scale though. In more recent memory, the Reform Party under Ross Perot managed to ignite a national spirit. It's a pity he went insane.
I don't know if I would characterize Katrina as "the country not giving a shit". To me it looked more like leadership failure at all levels during the initial crisis. In the months that followed, the cooperative spirit seemed to re-emerge.
How about "Set up a global int l and set it to 0, and a global int O and set it to 1
This reminds me of, "have a config file... and read in environment variables... in a library, not your main() function.". I've seen that first hand. Damn I hated that, since I tend to prefer config files over environment when practical. I just sort of forgot about the environment, not having used it for a long time. So I'm like, "Why doesn't this work on the other machine????" and somebody who knew about it is like, "the library configures itself with getenv() when you first call in to a certain function". Fuuuuuu...
Along a similar line, abort() without logging in a library, due to errors that are just frequent enough. Why does the production server just stop sometimes? This one is easily checked by grepping the code; but still.
Then of course there's the "fall in love with things that are difficult to debug", such as fork(), setjmp/longjmp, threads, or other unusual flow control features used in unusual ways. See, "call/cc considered harmful". Good thing that at least C doesn't have that.
Perhaps maybe somebody has made a list of things like this to check.
You can track down function calls that are likely to cause problems with grep. So. To really make maintenance a chore, variable names that mean something to you (but not anybody else) is an excellent choice.
Part of the lore at one place was the guy whose variable names were all variations on butt: assvar, butt, bum, butt, arse, anus, etc; perhaps with some context on the end of the name, a phrase or just "variable" e.g. int assmunchingvariable;
I don't know if they ever got around to re-writing that. I'm pretty sure they didn't maintain it.
And yet whenever there is a flood, what do you see? Pretty much the entire able-bodied town filling sand bags and building makeshift levies. Oh, that's just the mid-West you say. Well, when a few spot fires started in San Francisco after the 1989 quake, what did you see? Ordinary joes helping the firefighters position hoses. No fluke. Bucket brigades are as American as apple pie.
There's a dicotomy here. Americans fighting eachother is quite a show. Competition is celebrated, but cooperation in the face of a common foe or danger is too.
I had to dig a bit below level 5; but it looks like some other people are really on to your problem. It looks like maybe the router is just telling you something wrong, and slowing things down. A KISS router config might be all you need.
You're such a genius. You were the one who suggested "plonk". Since Slashdot doesn't have an actual killfile, Foe is the closest thing. I don't see a pill on your post. Just the red dot. You're in a very exclusive club--the 2nd Foe in 10 years. It's kind of sad, really. We've been on here about the same ammount of time, based on userid number. I looked over some of your other posts. You've got some 5s, very nice posts; but you also have a lot of these back-n-forth pissing contests with other users. I try not to get into them too often; but sometimes I screw up like I have with you. The red dot is just there to remind me that you're one of those types. Of course, I'd be willing to remove it if you turn out to be somebody who can, you know... admit that you aren't God's gift to the Internet who is always right, always has it nailed down, and can just insult people and expect to get respect.
Once again, it's not real "hate" or highschool stuff. Just a way of flagging. I sincerely hope that we can come to some kind of mutual respect and understanding as human beings who see things differently and aren't perfect... but if we can't, then the little red ball is there to let me know it's not worth bothering.
It happens even when we're not logged in to the game and reboot the router to get a new IP address.
How large a subnet is this? I suppose it's possible they could be DoS'ing an entire subnet if it's not too large. If so, the ISP is stupid not to care about it. Many perfectly innocent users would be randomly assigned IPs in that block, and simply think the ISP sucked. Oh and please don't take this the wrong way. I don't know your level of skill with networks; but the "new IPs" don't start with 10. or 192.168 do they?
I'm not a gamer either, but i suspect most games are controlled by server connections with no p2p connectivity.
If I were building the kind of games you see depicted on Big Bang Theory, the gameplay would be through the server; but the chit-chat with the headphones would be p2p. There's no point routing all that chit-chat through the server. I guess you could play the game without the headphones; but it would be difficult to coordinate attacks with your partners.
When I thought about this a bit more, it occurred to me that the person being DoS'd should contact the game company. Now it gets interesting.
The game company has two aspects of its reputation to defend. 1. It doesn't want players being DoS'd. 2. It doesn't want to LART players based on spurious accusations.
That means it would have to make sure the suspect is guilty. They could have the user switch IP several times, and only display the new IP to the suspect. If displaying the new IP to the suspect resulted in the DoS being redirected, but displaying the new IP to other users didn't, then that seems like a smoking gun to me.
Now we get into the whole cost/benefit analysis for the game company to do something like that. It's probably easier just to log complaints against users, and pull the plug on people after N complaints. If say, 8 users from different walks of life have complained that X is DoS'ing them because he got pissed off, then there's a pretty good chance X is guilty. The best thing about this approach is that it works for all kinds of bad behavior, not just DoS'ing. You're going to have to handle complaints about users anyway, so there you have my answer for now:
Complain to the game company, but not until you've checked to make sure that something else isn't compromising your system..
We seem to have attracted the attention of some less than savory types in online gaming
Followed by:
And how do they find us with a new MAC address and IP within minutes?
This is pretty obvious. The game is telling them. Not much of a gamer myself; but I'm willing to wager you can see the IP address from which a particular user is logged on. Maybe the game will let you cloak that. If it won't they can always find you again...
Slashdot Mirror
Yep. When I was a kid nobody* had a computer. Then for a while people had computers but little or no connectivity. Then everybody had a computer and fast connectivity.
During the sneakernet era you had computing ability, but if they wanted your data they'd have to get a warrant or ransack your office illegally.
If keeping things away from the NSA is that important, go all 1980s on your selves. It really wasn't such a bad time for most of us. Swapping floppies in person was actually kind of fun. There were no government agents at swap meets.... that I know of, LOL.
*The term "nobody" means no ordinary middle class household or small business. Yes, I know NASA and big companies had computers when I was a kid. "Nobody" is being used in the loose, colloquial sense here. The standard disclaimer about not inferring the ridiculous also applies. This includes casting a loose net over the definition of computer so as to include devices such as the abacus, or employees with "computer" as their job title and mocking me for implying that I'm older than written history. The standard disclaimer also applies to the text of the standard disclaimer.
I would think that rejecting lots of waste heat into San Francisco Bay would require an Environmental Impact Report, as well as approval from the Coastal Commission and probably other government checks. IANALaywer or expert on these things; but just follow the news on things like the remodels of piers in San Francisco and other things that touch the water. If Google somehow manages to be "special" on something like that, well... EVIL!
Time for a contest
Oh wow, real close. Closer than I thought they'd come. I don't think steel buildings will meet occupancy requirements in most areas, but wow. Oh... so.... close. Flying under the radar doesn't count. Getting it past the government is the hard part.
Amazon isn't the "everything store" until you can buy a house there. In the early 20th century you could buy a house from Sears. Of course I'm sure there were plenty of details left for the purchaser.
Anyway, Amazon is the closest thing to a 21st Century Sears. People comment on Amazon listings and discuss them just like people used to salivate over stuff in a Sears catalog.
You left out the part where the car goes a million miles per hour, runs on electricity from a rechargeable battery, and costs $100. Unfortunately, it fits in the palm of your hand.
I road
Before anybody else mentions it, I sea that now. Dam spell chick doesn't catch homophones.
It's probably safer than watching TV. You don't get diabetes, obesity and coronary artery disease from cycling. If cycling gets you off the couch, do it. Hiking gets me off the couch. I don't worry about stumbling over a rock or yep... getting hit by a mountain biker. I worry about my mid-section getting flabby. Statistically, it's far more likely to kill me.
I used to cycle. I didn't mind the 25 mph city streets, as long as they were wide enough to avoid car door openings. I hated faster roads. Braddock and Ox road area of Fairfax County, VA was the worst. I road on Braddock, and a driver yelled at me. I road on the sidewalk next to Ox, and a guy mowing his lawn yelled at me for riding where only pedestrians are supposed to be. Technically he was right, but my life was more important to me than your stupid law. I was not about to take my life into my hands and ride on the side of Ox road there. I see a lot more road riders in California where I live now, but I really don't want to join them. I could see myself cruising the El Camino and the little Main Streets on the Peninsula though. El Camino is 35 mph but the traffic is so bad it goes slower a lot. That's about the fastest road I'd ever want to be on. San Francisco? It's a madhouse. Fuggedaboutit. I'll see you on a mountain side, walking to get fresh air and exercise.
I see the rise of FaceBook and mobile, roughly around 2007 as a real shark-jumping. This transformed the web into a much more consumer oriented, dumbed down experience. The intelligent stuff is still out there, but new users aren't drawn into it. Even if they would be inclined to Slashdot, they're corrupted and distracted by all the finger-painting pinch-zoom twerking.
People were still building their own web pages in the 90s, still experimenting. It was the fertile ground from which many green herbs were growing... ultimately to be choked off by weeds. Perhaps the rise of MySpace is indicative of that phase. In general, the transition from "you've got to know a little HTML to put up a page" to "just type your life story into our site" is the latest step into oblivion.
Of course everybody has their own take on this, and there have been several stages. The opening of the Internet to AOL users in the mid-90s is the original September moment.
Sorry, I know Slashdot loves to bash MS; but I didn't see the bundling of IE having much impact on the quality of the Web.
I want to use it for a computer monitor (How many IDEs can you fit in 4k?).
Great for the IDE but you know
web pages
will look
like this
on it.
Without looking at the survey, it's hard to say; but I don't think they asked people to list a career or even chose from a set. I think they simply asked people if they thought that career was interesting. Given that, 24% is rather low. With all the action and drama that you see in the media surrounding this stuff, you'd think most people would think the real wold of security is interesting. That doesn't necessarily mean they want to be in the field. It just means they think it's interesting. The propagandists need to try harder. If they really hit it right, maybe they can convince us that the local locksmith is some kind of superhero.
When I saw this I literally LOL'd. You don't have to be a rocket scientist to know this ain't brain surgery.
There is no annual inspection in California either. Just smog check based on the age of the car. I'm not sure if smog occurs every year for anybody. You just get a notification for it when the registration renewal comes in. It's a small price to pay for not looking like Beijing when inversions occur.
. This is one of the big changes when you come from back East. In Virginia, I had two stickers on the windshield, one for inspection and another for tax. We also had emissions inspection every other year. In California you just have the registration sticker on your plate and smog.
Before I even consider this, I'd like to have a rigorous definition of free will... although I'm not really sure what it is that makes me want that.
There are multiple lotteries drawing every week; but there is only one asteroid lottery. More importantly, people witness numerous life-changing lottery payouts every month. Nobody in historical times has ever witnessed a civilization altering asteroid event.
So. Simply looking at the odds isn't enough. The experimental results are that voluntary participation in the lottery produces a handful of millionaires every month, while mandatory participation in the asteroid lottery produces a few rumored deaths and a handful of confirmed injuries in 5000 years.
Every field seems to have this issue to one degree or another. There are "music made easy" books, languages made easy, everything under the Sun "for dummies". It seems like it's particularly strong with programming. Maybe this is because programming is relatively new. Music and language are ancient. They're ancient enough for people to realize that for some people they will always be hard. Certainly a good teacher helps; but you have to have some innate ability.
Programming is too young for us to figure out how far teachers can take the typical student. I suspect it's similar to how far they can take the typical math, music, or language student. That's just my pet theory though. Until we reach consensus, I welcome your efforts to make programming easy, with a huge dose of skepticism.
How about this for some morality: Killing people, except in defense of self or someone else, is wrong (and worshiping a different invisible guy or the same invisible guy differently isn't a very good reason). Torturing people is wrong. Raping people is wrong. Hurting people, except in defense of self or someone else, is wrong. Stealing (however done) is wrong, but less wrong than hurting, raping, torturing, or murdering. Groups that break those rules are bad, groups that don't are at worst harmless.
That's a good start. You should come up with a few more. To make sure we don't forget them, have them carved on stone tablets and...
Yeah, I knee-jerked on the first line. OTOH, students came together in protest against the Vietnam war. Yeah, a bit dated and depending on your PoV that can be seen as conflict rather than cooperation. It was on a national scale though. In more recent memory, the Reform Party under Ross Perot managed to ignite a national spirit. It's a pity he went insane.
I don't know if I would characterize Katrina as "the country not giving a shit". To me it looked more like leadership failure at all levels during the initial crisis. In the months that followed, the cooperative spirit seemed to re-emerge.
How about "Set up a global int l and set it to 0, and a global int O and set it to 1
This reminds me of, "have a config file... and read in environment variables... in a library, not your main() function.". I've seen that first hand. Damn I hated that, since I tend to prefer config files over environment when practical. I just sort of forgot about the environment, not having used it for a long time. So I'm like, "Why doesn't this work on the other machine????" and somebody who knew about it is like, "the library configures itself with getenv() when you first call in to a certain function". Fuuuuuu...
Along a similar line, abort() without logging in a library, due to errors that are just frequent enough. Why does the production server just stop sometimes? This one is easily checked by grepping the code; but still.
Then of course there's the "fall in love with things that are difficult to debug", such as fork(), setjmp/longjmp, threads, or other unusual flow control features used in unusual ways. See, "call/cc considered harmful". Good thing that at least C doesn't have that.
Perhaps maybe somebody has made a list of things like this to check.
You can track down function calls that are likely to cause problems with grep. So. To really make maintenance a chore, variable names that mean something to you (but not anybody else) is an excellent choice.
Part of the lore at one place was the guy whose variable names were all variations on butt: assvar, butt, bum, butt, arse, anus, etc; perhaps with some context on the end of the name, a phrase or just "variable" e.g. int assmunchingvariable;
I don't know if they ever got around to re-writing that. I'm pretty sure they didn't maintain it.
Working together is un-American
And yet whenever there is a flood, what do you see? Pretty much the entire able-bodied town filling sand bags and building makeshift levies. Oh, that's just the mid-West you say. Well, when a few spot fires started in San Francisco after the 1989 quake, what did you see? Ordinary joes helping the firefighters position hoses. No fluke. Bucket brigades are as American as apple pie.
There's a dicotomy here. Americans fighting eachother is quite a show. Competition is celebrated, but cooperation in the face of a common foe or danger is too.
I had to dig a bit below level 5; but it looks like some other people are really on to your problem. It looks like maybe the router is just telling you something wrong, and slowing things down. A KISS router config might be all you need.
You're such an idiot.
You're such a genius. You were the one who suggested "plonk". Since Slashdot doesn't have an actual killfile, Foe is the closest thing. I don't see a pill on your post. Just the red dot. You're in a very exclusive club--the 2nd Foe in 10 years. It's kind of sad, really. We've been on here about the same ammount of time, based on userid number. I looked over some of your other posts. You've got some 5s, very nice posts; but you also have a lot of these back-n-forth pissing contests with other users. I try not to get into them too often; but sometimes I screw up like I have with you. The red dot is just there to remind me that you're one of those types. Of course, I'd be willing to remove it if you turn out to be somebody who can, you know... admit that you aren't God's gift to the Internet who is always right, always has it nailed down, and can just insult people and expect to get respect.
Once again, it's not real "hate" or highschool stuff. Just a way of flagging. I sincerely hope that we can come to some kind of mutual respect and understanding as human beings who see things differently and aren't perfect... but if we can't, then the little red ball is there to let me know it's not worth bothering.
It happens even when we're not logged in to the game and reboot the router to get a new IP address.
How large a subnet is this? I suppose it's possible they could be DoS'ing an entire subnet if it's not too large. If so, the ISP is stupid not to care about it. Many perfectly innocent users would be randomly assigned IPs in that block, and simply think the ISP sucked. Oh and please don't take this the wrong way. I don't know your level of skill with networks; but the "new IPs" don't start with 10. or 192.168 do they?
I'm not a gamer either, but i suspect most games are controlled by server connections with no p2p connectivity.
If I were building the kind of games you see depicted on Big Bang Theory, the gameplay would be through the server; but the chit-chat with the headphones would be p2p. There's no point routing all that chit-chat through the server. I guess you could play the game without the headphones; but it would be difficult to coordinate attacks with your partners.
When I thought about this a bit more, it occurred to me that the person being DoS'd should contact the game company. Now it gets interesting.
The game company has two aspects of its reputation to defend. 1. It doesn't want players being DoS'd. 2. It doesn't want to LART players based on spurious accusations.
That means it would have to make sure the suspect is guilty. They could have the user switch IP several times, and only display the new IP to the suspect. If displaying the new IP to the suspect resulted in the DoS being redirected, but displaying the new IP to other users didn't, then that seems like a smoking gun to me.
Now we get into the whole cost/benefit analysis for the game company to do something like that. It's probably easier just to log complaints against users, and pull the plug on people after N complaints. If say, 8 users from different walks of life have complained that X is DoS'ing them because he got pissed off, then there's a pretty good chance X is guilty. The best thing about this approach is that it works for all kinds of bad behavior, not just DoS'ing. You're going to have to handle complaints about users anyway, so there you have my answer for now:
Complain to the game company, but not until you've checked to make sure that something else isn't compromising your system..
We seem to have attracted the attention of some less than savory types in online gaming
Followed by:
And how do they find us with a new MAC address and IP within minutes?
This is pretty obvious. The game is telling them. Not much of a gamer myself; but I'm willing to wager you can see the IP address from which a particular user is logged on. Maybe the game will let you cloak that. If it won't they can always find you again...