If it weren't for some users flooding the network with massive filesharing packets, this would all be a non-issue. Actually, for most users it still is since most users are not affected at all by bandwidth strangling.
As much as I appreciate the bad analogy (you rule the field, my friend) "massive filesharing" is a drop in the bucket compared to malware.
I'd pay extra for a malware-free link. And the ISPs could provide such a link using the same hardware they currently misuse to prevent people from running servers (NNTP serving's been blocked for decades, and now SMTP and HTTP are being blocked, and next will be IMAP, then SSH because you can tunnel other protocols over it.) Just look at the traffic patterns, malware stands out like a freakin' sore thumb if you have even slightly competent network operators. But they are all too greedy and incompetent, which would normally cause them to lose the battle of the marketplace... except that only works in a free and far marketplace.
Seriously, if the US government was performing its duty of regulating interstate commerce, instead of getting embroiled in stupid foreign military adventuring and the like, we'd all have unrestricted traffic for a fraction of the current cost.
Large ISPs typically provide an opt-out on their sponsored links page that immediately opts you out of the DNS redirection, but I've noticed that some smaller ISPs and CLECs have opt-out links that don't actually appear to do anything. I don't have a good solution for employees using these ISPs, and our employees are getting frustrated because the problem is becoming more prevalent and we can't fix it for them. I've tried calling a few of these smaller ISPs for help, but it's been like talking to a wall.
That's not limited to small ISPs. Verizon FiOS, for example:
"Oh, sure, we will let you opt out - just click on the link that shows your router" BROKEN LINK Hmmm, guess I will click on a similar router... THEY ARE ALL BAD LINKS Gee, I guess I will click on the "change OS settings" link then... BAD LINK
Somebody's going to point out that you can Google and find where helpful geeks have posted the instructions to opt-out without Verizon's assistance. But that's not the point, really, is it? Verizon had working opt-out links exactly long enough to get a favorable review in Consumer Reports, and then it all mysteriously broke. I cannot explain this coincidence, personally, you will have to come to your own conclusions.
Goats emit previously unsequestered carbon, that is, carbon that was extracted from the atmosphere by plants. They add nothing to the total amount of carbon in the running system.
Lawnmowers emit previously sequestered carbon, that is, carbon that was locked into the bowels of the earth aeons ago, which created the conditions necessary for mammalian life forms to exist.
So, 2 facts only are needed to understand the whole shebang:
1) Plants do not take carbon from the ground (they get it from the air) and
2) All but the very richest humans die as soon as all the carbon in the ground is put back into the air.
All this noise about "saving the earth" and "global warming" is just noise. The real issue is just a simple variant of don't shit where you eat, easily phrased as don't fart in the bathysphere.
Weird; did you rename netcat? When Hobbit wrote it, the command was nc... I've never heard of someone renaming the executable image before.
The following is from a Red Hat Enterprise 5 machine with all current patches:
[medievalist@corelord ~]$ echo -e "HEAD / HTTP/1.1\nHost: slashdot.org\n\n" | nc slashdot.org 80 | grep ^X X-Powered-By: Slash 2.005001 X-Bender: The laws of science be a harsh mistress. X-Varnish: 1312575435 1312574226
This is from a very large HP-UX 11i machine:
medievalist@pwcontrol ~ $ echo -e "HEAD / HTTP/1.1\nHost: slashdot.org\n\n" | nc slashdot.org 80 | grep ^X X-Powered-By: Slash 2.005001 X-Fry: Why use my own legs like an idiot when I can use a Chickenwalker? X-Varnish: 1312578111 1312577486
This is from an ancient Sun box:
# echo -e "HEAD / HTTP/1.1\nHost: slashdot.org\n\n" | nc slashdot.org 80 | grep ^X X-Powered-By: Slash 2.005001 X-Fry: Make up some feelings and tell her you have them. X-Varnish: 1312582112 1312580734
I'm glad that that has become the issue with USB runs now. For several years, the combination of commonly available host controllers with undocumented behaviour, cables with higher than expected internal resistance, poor connector alloys, and devices that didn't report correct power requirements conspired to defeat standards-compliant topologies at much less than 5m.
Testify, brother!
Things have really improved, though - I have two 48 foot USB cable runs in my house that work fine. They use a couple of those fancy-schmancy USB-powered USB repeater cables in series with a normal one. 3x16=48
1. Amateur cable. These are done just any old way as long as the colors match at both ends. The pairs don't even have to be twisted for it to work over very short distances (2 to 6 feet) at 1GB.
2. Professional Cable. All the pinouts done properly according to whichever standard you are working with, by someone who knows what he is doing.
3. Factory cables. Here is the dirty secret. Some of these are done by robots and some are just professional cables. There is no way for you to tell which is which.
4. Cables you've actually tested for quality and throughput. These are the only kind that can be trusted, and the only kind that experts use, regardless of who made them.
If you can't afford a real tester, a couple of computers running linux with gigabit NICs can be made to serve.
A good cable tester (say, a Fluke for example) is extremely expensive, but not as expensive as the man-hours involved in re-wiring an enterprise network because "maybe I think it might be worn out".
Seriously, get a good tester, and it will tell you exactly which wires you need to replace. People on slashdot are just guessing, they have no freaking idea if your wires are any good (apparently you don't know either, but a tester will fix that problem for you).
The building was the research wing of a nationally known foundation. I'm not going to name them because I actually like the organization and admire their work. HOWEVER.....
When they bought the ventilation system for the researcher's fume hoods it was spec'd stainless steel with a draining gradient to prevent pooling of condensation. What was actually built was a sort-of-level duct system made from the same galvanized steel components as the HVAC system.
To save money on duct hangers, they stacked the fume ducts with the HVAC ducts, HVAC on the bottom. The guy in the basement was researching plant DNA, and for complicated reasons he used to boil skunk cabbage in fuming nitric acid from time to time. When he did this in the summer, the airconditioning in the HVAC ducts cooled the whole duct stack and the mercaptan-laden acid condensed into puddles on the more-or-less level bottoms of the fume ducts. Eventually, near the end of one hot summer, the acid ate through both layers of steel and toxic fumes from dozens of research experiments in six stories of lab building were comingled with the building atmosphere. The HVAC system was on a duty cycle and the fume exhaust system was on constant fan, and things got real ugly real fast; people vomiting and being sent to the hospital, itchy, burning eyes, the whole nine yards.
To fix the problem, the entire building HVAC was ripped out, stem to stern, over the course of a month or so. This left me (on the fifth floor) with no AC for the central computing system (a DEC mini that blew quite a bit of heat). With no external wall (since the new library wing got built over it) I had to chop a hole with a hatchet into the wall leading into the main hallway and install a household window air conditioner in order to get the payroll and other critical jobs run. This put the hallway at 107 degrees Fahrenheit and humidity like the amazon rainforest, and the computer room in the high 80s to low 90s depending on how often people sneaked in to cool off. It also necessitated turning all the lights and conveniences off because the AC unit overloaded the available electrical circuits.
You'd think that was bad enough. But actually it was OK once we got used to it; I ran extension cords and 20mA loops out to the roof and set a couple VT100s up there so my cow-orkers and I could work on the roof in the (relatively) cool breeze in t-shirts. We had smokes and tall drinks with umbrellas in them, it was OK as long as it wasn't raining. It was worse by far for the scientists who had to continue working in stuffy, unventilated labs and offices (did I mention that nobody stopped working for any of this?).
But the months dragged on, and the HVAC reconstruction did as well. Other crises came and went and various stumbling blocks were overcome, but in the middle of a freezing Philadelphia winter we had no heat but that generated by our trusty DEC mini! Since the building circuits were (still) inadequate, electric heat was reserved for offices and labs without heat-generating computer systems. I personally cannot type with gloves on, I had to periodically escape to the heated wings or rub my stiff fingers over the PDP's exhaust fans so I could keep coding. This was while re-writing the database software for a 12-million-object live database... you could see your breath in the computer room.
Nearly a year passed before the last wall was sealed up and the HVAC/fume systems were pronounced sound. During the course of the demolition, several walls that I had drilled and sleeved for cables were taken down, and when they were mortared back up the mason for some reason carefully separated each wire bundle into separate ethernet and 20maLoop cables, laid one down every foot or so into the mortar bed, and laid block over them. When you entered the wiring closet, the wires were growing out of the wall like bright blue and grey grass, over about a ten-square-foot area. It was dumbfounding. I discovered this when communications starting failing everywhere... the li
Assuming ssh is usable. My ISP gave me a router that despite letting me set various port forwarding, refuses to honor them, so remote access to any of the machines just does not seem to work the way I would like. I do have ssh on my network machines, but they are keys, password, whitelist protected on uncommon port while only supporting version 2 connections.
Most likely you aren't programming it right, because it has a retarded programming interface. For example, you might have to open firewall holes for forwarded ports, even though it's excruciatingly obvious that you want to let in anything for which you've set up forwarding rules.
ISP routers are the cheapest crap imaginable. If you have Verizon, they'll likely give you a Westell specially built to be extra-crappy (or worse yet an Actiontec). You can usually make them do what you want with hundreds of hours of trial and error, but you may as well throw away the manual and don't bother calling tech support. Write down the configuration that works, when you find it, because the box will reach it's MTBF about the same time you find the insanely baroque combination of options that will make it do what you need.
Of course, if you have Comcast they probably won't even give you a router - they'll just plug the Internet right into your soon-to-be-worm-hosting-machine. And if you have any problems, the first thing their tech support will tell you is to turn off your firewall.
If you allow SSH access from the wide internet and you allow passwords, you are probably still vulnerable.
Really, just use SSH with private/public keys and you'll be okay.
Aren't private/public keys just long passwords?
No, but in this instance they are functionally equivalent.
A 64 character or better password that only you know, that's not in any dictionary, would serve you just as well as the most complex key scheme... either way, you're not going to get cracked by guessing engines.
But keys are geekier, it gives you an excuse to carry data storage outside your head. If you'd rather use your head just pick extremely complex passwords, you Luddite rebel you.
Although I admit that Firefox and NoScript are handy for popups, no tool that you can install on your system will beat engaged parenting.
Indeed, I find that teaching the children to use firefox, noscript, and adblock is a good way to introduce the concepts of censoring, pre-emptive blocking, self-filtering, etc. You can show them how to take control of their own environment so they won't grow up to be the kind of people who demand censorship.
I would detect all the worms and other malware that are clogging up the pipes, and redirect all those customers' traffic to a special web page that gives them nothing but links to antivirus information and vendors. After they fix their problems, I'd let them back on the general net, where they'd use a tiny portion of the bandwidth they were using whilst infected.
I'd make damn sure the telephone support staff were thoroughly briefed and ready to deal with the flood of angry phone calls. They will need some scripts for dealing with difficult people and at least one class on how the detection and redirection will work. The phone reps should make the customers happy that you've helped them avoid federal prosecution for child porn etc. spread through malware.
This public service message brought to you by the Campus Crusade for Cthulu. Cthulu has a plan for this world you can be a part of it as a hors d'oeuvre
One of the early arguments made by DARPA folks to politicians, in order to secure continued federal funding for packet switched network development, was the ability of the network to route around failed or destroyed nodes. They made this argument in the context of the cold war, of nuclear war.
That's not how I remember it, but I was not privy to the conversations of politicians, I was writing code and hooking up boxes.
Last time I checked you could destroy the Internet with two nukes; one in Herndon and one in San Jose. All the surviving major hubs will overflow memory and everything starts breaking up and reforming in horrible cascading waves. That was years ago, though; by now it might take ten nukes... but a nuclear war would involve hundreds of bombs. Anything less would be a terrorist incident, not a nuclear war.
You moron, he was making a funny comment about skynet, not talking about REALLY Making the internet withstand a nuclear attack. Who cares if there is any internet after a nuclear attack, the world will be torn to small pieces anyways, we will have to rewire a small asteroid, at least we wont be shut down by a faulty router in europe!
Your polite and informative comment made me change my mind, my political party, and my underpants!
You are the most persuasive and intelligent person imaginable; your mastery of capitalization and punctuation makes my knees go weak with envy!
I have the same name as a convicted serial killer and rapist. But this has been much less of a problem since Texas executed the bastard.
My advice to you: change your middle name and make a point of using it on all your written correspondence. Make sure the first letter of your new middle name is the same as the old, so that your college records etc. will still match up.
Google first to make sure your new full name has no similar problems. It's better to have your name get billions of conflicting hits than few or none; if it has no hits, and tomorrow someone of that name commits a heinous crime, you're back at square one.
HR drones will type whatever name is boldface at the top of the resume. MORTON GIGER THROCKGRISTLE III is what you want, not M. G. Throckgristle.
They need to replace it with a network that is designed to survive a nuclear attack. Oh wait, hang on....
Wish I had mod points today. Parent should already be SCORE:5 Funny. Apparently not enough Slashdotters know the history/evolution of the net.
If you're referring to the myth that the Internet was "designed to withstand nuclear attack", perhaps Slashdotters know more than you think.
The Internet was designed to allow distributed control, and to withstand telephone company malice and incompetence. This was a much more useful goal than withstanding nuclear attack.
Ionizing radiation is what's damaging to the human body. It hits electrons and strips them off their host atoms.
I don't think you can prove that's the only effect that radiant energy can have on the human body.
And, quite frankly, if there were significant harmful effects from EM waves, we'd know it by now. They've been broadcast for 80 years.
Very good point. Any harmful effect would have to be very subtle, or very unevenly distributed, in order to escape detection. Either way, very very unlikely to pose a significant public health risk, particularly when compared with something like automobile exhaust.
Nobis, cum semel occidit brevis lux, nox est perpetua una dormienda
Only in silence the word, only in darkness the light, only in dying life, bright the hawk's flight on the empty sky. --Ursula Kroeber le Guin, Creation of Ea
It means that or hints that brain chemistry has biochemical effects on us and our offspring via genetics. Animal husbandry would tell us this if we listened, but we need to see it in humans to fully 'get it'... I don't want to say that this is more evidence for the support of eugenics, but... well, it seems likely.
No, that's a logical error. You are saying that there's a process by which a population of organisms changes the characters of individual organisms over time in response to environment, and therefore members of that population should subvert that process by taking control over it and replacing the existing environmental feedback mechanisms with human planning.
There's no good reason for that, other than hubris or o'erweening pride ("I am so smart, I am god!") and at least one good reason not to - the process by definition works, so fucking with it intentionally could destabilize the dynamic equilibrium that characterizes feedback loops.
"It exists, and therefore I can make it better" is not reasonable or logical. There needs to be a more complex and nuanced argument if you're going to try to argue in favor of eugenics. The argument you're going to have to defeat is "it exists, and therefore is a system flexible and reliable enough to function without human management, so leave it alone and spend efforts elsewhere".
Slashdot Mirror
As much as I appreciate the bad analogy (you rule the field, my friend) "massive filesharing" is a drop in the bucket compared to malware.
I'd pay extra for a malware-free link. And the ISPs could provide such a link using the same hardware they currently misuse to prevent people from running servers (NNTP serving's been blocked for decades, and now SMTP and HTTP are being blocked, and next will be IMAP, then SSH because you can tunnel other protocols over it.) Just look at the traffic patterns, malware stands out like a freakin' sore thumb if you have even slightly competent network operators. But they are all too greedy and incompetent, which would normally cause them to lose the battle of the marketplace... except that only works in a free and far marketplace.
Seriously, if the US government was performing its duty of regulating interstate commerce, instead of getting embroiled in stupid foreign military adventuring and the like, we'd all have unrestricted traffic for a fraction of the current cost.
Or the "byzantine generals" problem perhaps?
I don't think it's something you're going to be able to solve effectively if you eliminate human judgment from your policies.
That's not limited to small ISPs. Verizon FiOS, for example:
"Oh, sure, we will let you opt out - just click on the link that shows your router"
BROKEN LINK
Hmmm, guess I will click on a similar router...
THEY ARE ALL BAD LINKS
Gee, I guess I will click on the "change OS settings" link then...
BAD LINK
Somebody's going to point out that you can Google and find where helpful geeks have posted the instructions to opt-out without Verizon's assistance. But that's not the point, really, is it? Verizon had working opt-out links exactly long enough to get a favorable review in Consumer Reports, and then it all mysteriously broke. I cannot explain this coincidence, personally, you will have to come to your own conclusions.
Goats emit previously unsequestered carbon, that is, carbon that was extracted from the atmosphere by plants. They add nothing to the total amount of carbon in the running system.
Lawnmowers emit previously sequestered carbon, that is, carbon that was locked into the bowels of the earth aeons ago, which created the conditions necessary for mammalian life forms to exist.
So, 2 facts only are needed to understand the whole shebang:
1) Plants do not take carbon from the ground (they get it from the air) and
2) All but the very richest humans die as soon as all the carbon in the ground is put back into the air.
All this noise about "saving the earth" and "global warming" is just noise. The real issue is just a simple variant of don't shit where you eat, easily phrased as don't fart in the bathysphere.
echo -e "HEAD / HTTP/1.1\nHost: slashdot.org\n\n" | nc slashdot.org 80 | grep ^X
bash: nc: command not found
Weird; did you rename netcat? When Hobbit wrote it, the command was nc... I've never heard of someone renaming the executable image before.
The following is from a Red Hat Enterprise 5 machine with all current patches:
[medievalist@corelord ~]$ echo -e "HEAD / HTTP/1.1\nHost: slashdot.org\n\n" | nc slashdot.org 80 | grep ^X
X-Powered-By: Slash 2.005001
X-Bender: The laws of science be a harsh mistress.
X-Varnish: 1312575435 1312574226
This is from a very large HP-UX 11i machine:
medievalist@pwcontrol ~ $ echo -e "HEAD / HTTP/1.1\nHost: slashdot.org\n\n" | nc slashdot.org 80 | grep ^X
X-Powered-By: Slash 2.005001
X-Fry: Why use my own legs like an idiot when I can use a Chickenwalker?
X-Varnish: 1312578111 1312577486
This is from an ancient Sun box:
# echo -e "HEAD / HTTP/1.1\nHost: slashdot.org\n\n" | nc slashdot.org 80 | grep ^X
X-Powered-By: Slash 2.005001
X-Fry: Make up some feelings and tell her you have them.
X-Varnish: 1312582112 1312580734
The X-Hermes ones seem to be rare.
Testify, brother!
Things have really improved, though - I have two 48 foot USB cable runs in my house that work fine. They use a couple of those fancy-schmancy USB-powered USB repeater cables in series with a normal one. 3x16=48
4. Cables you've actually tested for quality and throughput. These are the only kind that can be trusted, and the only kind that experts use, regardless of who made them.
If you can't afford a real tester, a couple of computers running linux with gigabit NICs can be made to serve.
You're right; thanks! I'll return the favor:
echo -e "HEAD / HTTP/1.1\nHost: slashdot.org\n\n" | nc slashdot.org 80 | grep ^X
X-Powered-By: Slash 2.005001 ;)
X-Hermes: Without my body, I'm a nobody.
X-Varnish: 247810914 247810236
A good cable tester (say, a Fluke for example) is extremely expensive, but not as expensive as the man-hours involved in re-wiring an enterprise network because "maybe I think it might be worn out".
Seriously, get a good tester, and it will tell you exactly which wires you need to replace. People on slashdot are just guessing, they have no freaking idea if your wires are any good (apparently you don't know either, but a tester will fix that problem for you).
He drove the price of a basic laptop down to $100 just like he said he would.
What was it Ghandi said? First they mock you, then they fight you, then you win?
The building was the research wing of a nationally known foundation. I'm not going to name them because I actually like the organization and admire their work. HOWEVER.....
When they bought the ventilation system for the researcher's fume hoods it was spec'd stainless steel with a draining gradient to prevent pooling of condensation. What was actually built was a sort-of-level duct system made from the same galvanized steel components as the HVAC system.
To save money on duct hangers, they stacked the fume ducts with the HVAC ducts, HVAC on the bottom. The guy in the basement was researching plant DNA, and for complicated reasons he used to boil skunk cabbage in fuming nitric acid from time to time. When he did this in the summer, the airconditioning in the HVAC ducts cooled the whole duct stack and the mercaptan-laden acid condensed into puddles on the more-or-less level bottoms of the fume ducts. Eventually, near the end of one hot summer, the acid ate through both layers of steel and toxic fumes from dozens of research experiments in six stories of lab building were comingled with the building atmosphere. The HVAC system was on a duty cycle and the fume exhaust system was on constant fan, and things got real ugly real fast; people vomiting and being sent to the hospital, itchy, burning eyes, the whole nine yards.
To fix the problem, the entire building HVAC was ripped out, stem to stern, over the course of a month or so. This left me (on the fifth floor) with no AC for the central computing system (a DEC mini that blew quite a bit of heat). With no external wall (since the new library wing got built over it) I had to chop a hole with a hatchet into the wall leading into the main hallway and install a household window air conditioner in order to get the payroll and other critical jobs run. This put the hallway at 107 degrees Fahrenheit and humidity like the amazon rainforest, and the computer room in the high 80s to low 90s depending on how often people sneaked in to cool off. It also necessitated turning all the lights and conveniences off because the AC unit overloaded the available electrical circuits.
You'd think that was bad enough. But actually it was OK once we got used to it; I ran extension cords and 20mA loops out to the roof and set a couple VT100s up there so my cow-orkers and I could work on the roof in the (relatively) cool breeze in t-shirts. We had smokes and tall drinks with umbrellas in them, it was OK as long as it wasn't raining. It was worse by far for the scientists who had to continue working in stuffy, unventilated labs and offices (did I mention that nobody stopped working for any of this?).
But the months dragged on, and the HVAC reconstruction did as well. Other crises came and went and various stumbling blocks were overcome, but in the middle of a freezing Philadelphia winter we had no heat but that generated by our trusty DEC mini! Since the building circuits were (still) inadequate, electric heat was reserved for offices and labs without heat-generating computer systems. I personally cannot type with gloves on, I had to periodically escape to the heated wings or rub my stiff fingers over the PDP's exhaust fans so I could keep coding. This was while re-writing the database software for a 12-million-object live database... you could see your breath in the computer room.
Nearly a year passed before the last wall was sealed up and the HVAC/fume systems were pronounced sound. During the course of the demolition, several walls that I had drilled and sleeved for cables were taken down, and when they were mortared back up the mason for some reason carefully separated each wire bundle into separate ethernet and 20maLoop cables, laid one down every foot or so into the mortar bed, and laid block over them. When you entered the wiring closet, the wires were growing out of the wall like bright blue and grey grass, over about a ten-square-foot area. It was dumbfounding. I discovered this when communications starting failing everywhere... the li
Assuming ssh is usable. My ISP gave me a router that despite letting me set various port forwarding, refuses to honor them, so remote access to any of the machines just does not seem to work the way I would like. I do have ssh on my network machines, but they are keys, password, whitelist protected on uncommon port while only supporting version 2 connections.
Most likely you aren't programming it right, because it has a retarded programming interface. For example, you might have to open firewall holes for forwarded ports, even though it's excruciatingly obvious that you want to let in anything for which you've set up forwarding rules.
ISP routers are the cheapest crap imaginable. If you have Verizon, they'll likely give you a Westell specially built to be extra-crappy (or worse yet an Actiontec). You can usually make them do what you want with hundreds of hours of trial and error, but you may as well throw away the manual and don't bother calling tech support. Write down the configuration that works, when you find it, because the box will reach it's MTBF about the same time you find the insanely baroque combination of options that will make it do what you need.
Of course, if you have Comcast they probably won't even give you a router - they'll just plug the Internet right into your soon-to-be-worm-hosting-machine. And if you have any problems, the first thing their tech support will tell you is to turn off your firewall.
If you allow SSH access from the wide internet and you allow passwords, you are probably still vulnerable.
Really, just use SSH with private/public keys and you'll be okay.
Aren't private/public keys just long passwords?
No, but in this instance they are functionally equivalent.
A 64 character or better password that only you know, that's not in any dictionary, would serve you just as well as the most complex key scheme... either way, you're not going to get cracked by guessing engines.
But keys are geekier, it gives you an excuse to carry data storage outside your head. If you'd rather use your head just pick extremely complex passwords, you Luddite rebel you.
Wouldn't it be substantially easier to just set a really strong SSH password and use key-based auth if you need to configure your router remotely?
You're interrupting the flow of this conversation.
You may need to down a few pints before posting in this topic. Or at least this particular thread.
Although I admit that Firefox and NoScript are handy for popups, no tool that you can install on your system will beat engaged parenting.
Indeed, I find that teaching the children to use firefox, noscript, and adblock is a good way to introduce the concepts of censoring, pre-emptive blocking, self-filtering, etc. You can show them how to take control of their own environment so they won't grow up to be the kind of people who demand censorship.
Sounds like you've got the right idea to me.
WTF are people dragging anchors around for?
They are doing it to piss you off and wreck your Internets. It has nothing to do with a ten thousand year old industry that feeds millions.
And why to we even allow fisherman to drag crap along the sea bottom?
Dammit, Aqua-TSA should be monitoring every meter of sea-bottom! Stupid Obama is soft on terror!
Don't take it personally, I'm just goofing on you.
I would detect all the worms and other malware that are clogging up the pipes, and redirect all those customers' traffic to a special web page that gives them nothing but links to antivirus information and vendors. After they fix their problems, I'd let them back on the general net, where they'd use a tiny portion of the bandwidth they were using whilst infected.
I'd make damn sure the telephone support staff were thoroughly briefed and ready to deal with the flood of angry phone calls. They will need some scripts for dealing with difficult people and at least one class on how the detection and redirection will work. The phone reps should make the customers happy that you've helped them avoid federal prosecution for child porn etc. spread through malware.
That's what I'd do.
In drowned R'lyeh dead Cthulu lies dreaming...
DON'T WAKE HIM UP...
This public service message brought to you by the Campus Crusade for Cthulu.
Cthulu has a plan for this world
you can be a part of it
as a hors d'oeuvre
The main evolutionary trait of human beings is technology,
I thought it was hubris.
Eh, to-may-to, to-mah-to...
One of the early arguments made by DARPA folks to politicians, in order to secure continued federal funding for packet switched network development, was the ability of the network to route around failed or destroyed nodes. They made this argument in the context of the cold war, of nuclear war.
That's not how I remember it, but I was not privy to the conversations of politicians, I was writing code and hooking up boxes.
Last time I checked you could destroy the Internet with two nukes; one in Herndon and one in San Jose. All the surviving major hubs will overflow memory and everything starts breaking up and reforming in horrible cascading waves. That was years ago, though; by now it might take ten nukes... but a nuclear war would involve hundreds of bombs. Anything less would be a terrorist incident, not a nuclear war.
You moron, he was making a funny comment about skynet, not talking about REALLY Making the internet withstand a nuclear attack. Who cares if there is any internet after a nuclear attack, the world will be torn to small pieces anyways, we will have to rewire a small asteroid, at least we wont be shut down by a faulty router in europe!
Your polite and informative comment made me change my mind, my political party, and my underpants!
You are the most persuasive and intelligent person imaginable; your mastery of capitalization and punctuation makes my knees go weak with envy!
I wish I was smart like you, and not a moron!
I have the same name as a convicted serial killer and rapist. But this has been much less of a problem since Texas executed the bastard.
My advice to you: change your middle name and make a point of using it on all your written correspondence. Make sure the first letter of your new middle name is the same as the old, so that your college records etc. will still match up.
Google first to make sure your new full name has no similar problems. It's better to have your name get billions of conflicting hits than few or none; if it has no hits, and tomorrow someone of that name commits a heinous crime, you're back at square one.
HR drones will type whatever name is boldface at the top of the resume. MORTON GIGER THROCKGRISTLE III is what you want, not M. G. Throckgristle.
They need to replace it with a network that is designed to survive a nuclear attack. Oh wait, hang on....
Wish I had mod points today. Parent should already be SCORE:5 Funny. Apparently not enough Slashdotters know the history/evolution of the net.
If you're referring to the myth that the Internet was "designed to withstand nuclear attack", perhaps Slashdotters know more than you think.
The Internet was designed to allow distributed control, and to withstand telephone company malice and incompetence. This was a much more useful goal than withstanding nuclear attack.
Ionizing radiation is what's damaging to the human body. It hits electrons and strips them off their host atoms.
I don't think you can prove that's the only effect that radiant energy can have on the human body.
And, quite frankly, if there were significant harmful effects from EM waves, we'd know it by now. They've been broadcast for 80 years.
Very good point. Any harmful effect would have to be very subtle, or very unevenly distributed, in order to escape detection. Either way, very very unlikely to pose a significant public health risk, particularly when compared with something like automobile exhaust.
Only in silence the word,
only in darkness the light,
only in dying life,
bright the hawk's flight on the empty sky.
--Ursula Kroeber le Guin, Creation of Ea
It means that or hints that brain chemistry has biochemical effects on us and our offspring via genetics. Animal husbandry would tell us this if we listened, but we need to see it in humans to fully 'get it'... I don't want to say that this is more evidence for the support of eugenics, but... well, it seems likely.
No, that's a logical error. You are saying that there's a process by which a population of organisms changes the characters of individual organisms over time in response to environment, and therefore members of that population should subvert that process by taking control over it and replacing the existing environmental feedback mechanisms with human planning.
There's no good reason for that, other than hubris or o'erweening pride ("I am so smart, I am god!") and at least one good reason not to - the process by definition works, so fucking with it intentionally could destabilize the dynamic equilibrium that characterizes feedback loops.
"It exists, and therefore I can make it better" is not reasonable or logical. There needs to be a more complex and nuanced argument if you're going to try to argue in favor of eugenics. The argument you're going to have to defeat is "it exists, and therefore is a system flexible and reliable enough to function without human management, so leave it alone and spend efforts elsewhere".