No, violating the third and fourth articles of the Bill of Rights would be so outlandish that even if that is the intention currently, it would die a quick (but excruciatingly painful) death in the current political environment. No, the Air Force cannot be that stupid, they have no intention of installing these on US civilian computers.
As Spock says (ahem), when you eliminate the impossible, whatever left, however improbable, must be the truth. They need a large network of computers, right? Getting Zombies in China is kinda taken already, so what are some alternatives? How many computers, do you suppose, are used by ALL US government agencies, BOTH local and federal?
It seems to me that the US Military may enlist all branches of the *civilian* government and mandate they all install the bot. This is relatively cheap, easy, reliable. Obviously, some portions of the civilian government infrastructure would have to be excluded to ensure that if the botnet was exploited by others, the compromise would not be too great. From a practical, bureaucratic perspective, weighing legal, ethical, and fiscal considerations, that is far and away the best approach.
I realize this is heresy for some, but the mesh network was designed and makes sense for a *national* network. Meshing internationally keeps costs down, but it is a really bad idea from a security point of view.
Why not have point to points with certain nations/regions of the world? Connection with these nations continue on the condition that they only route traffic to the US that originates on their national network. There are ways around any architecture, of course, the point is to give you an enforcement mechanism.
Drastic measures, considerable re architecture, etc, needs to be put on the table. Allowing this carte blanche espionage is just absurd. I believe the US still has enough weight to throw around to force something like this through, and it could pick up some key allies in the effort, too.
That ideal of yours is all well and good, but you are also recognizing above that their choices effect you. This is due to the social fabric we live in. What choices can a person make that don't have effects on society? If you drive to work, someone needs to pay for that road that wouldn't be necessary if you weren't driving.
The struggle between Authoritarianism versus Libertarianism stem from these issues, but the simplistic thinking expressed by the extreme views of either side are not satisfactory. Just as a society can't justly dictate how a person should live their life (e.g. don't do drugs), that does not make the opposite extreme the only other option. In other words, it is not also not just for society to allow people to do whatever they want. We know this as a general truth (murder, etc), yet when it comes to some particulars such as health care, it finds expression despite such glaring flaws.
I am positing that on some issues, a compromise must be struck. Universal health care, yes, but free choice also.
Who makes that judgment? Is it the EMT responding on the scene? Is the the ambulance driver? Does the doctor decide when you are on the operating table?
You are going to ask people whose profession is to help fix people and save lives to determine who is worthy of being saved, and who isn't? This is the horribly unethical problem that is the notion of being "uninsured" in the first place. You want to compound that with subjective life style judgments?
So, a gay person with AIDS is treated by a fundamentalist doctor who believes sexuality is a lifestyle choice, and thus, AIDS treatment costs are an unnecessary burden on the tax payer. This is truly the extreme of what the US already has in place with HMOs who are constantly crunching numbers, as opposed to doing everything in their power to help people get better.
Sure, what you say is a wonderful idea. Freedom of choice, my body, and all that. But this thing is called society for a reason. If you really want to destroy yourself, do it outside the realm of society. But of course, these junkies don't hold such noble notions of personal responsibility, so you can't expect them (nor society) to act in accord with such notions.
The problem with plastic bags is not the oil they use in their production -- it is the composition of the bag that makes it impossible to break down. There is a litany of information on this subject. The great garbage patches in the Pacific are largely plastic, and no matter how much plastic may get broken into tiny pieces over time, every core component will not break down in any meaningful way. We are talking on the order of hundreds of thousands or millions of years before Earth figures out a way to break this crap down.
All this has me thinking about collateral damage. War, by definition, has collateral damage. What will we see here? Will it be several underwater cables being cut at the same time, shutting down businesses and people in entire countries? Will it be mass assaults such that the machine of innocents are pwned? Could the systematic and government driven exploitation of the open nature of the internet lead to the closing of virtual borders?
I don't doubt this is the right thing to do strategically: you exploit opportunities at war, but it seems that the collateral damage is inevitable, which begs the question: what will the internet look like after prolonged, intensified, government warfare?
It is the same old story, retold generation after generation. I wonder how much of this cycle is a part of natural life, and how much of it comes from ignorance? After all, you'd think people would clue in that when they were young they heard the same kinds of things they are now telling a new generation of young folks. This at least seems to be a tangible way to lesser the effects of such nonsense; because the young won't so strongly revile older generations without their antecedents being so intolerable to the change their own seeds have sown.
While change may be harder to accept the older you get, is it possible that this concept too is being challenged? It is one thing to be a farmer or an industrial worker all your life -- surely being intolerant of change is almost inevitable here. Yet, in such a dynamic economy, with jobs changing constantly, and information accessibility just beginning to reach extraordinary heights -- is it possible that tolerance of change will be ingrained in the coming generation? Imagine the kind of changes that would likely mean for society as a whole!
Infrastructure is failing in various parts of our civil society, while we also have droughts throughout the country that will continue to persist if not worsen. Oregon experiences its share of both of these important issues.
I'm curious if you have considered a national water infrastructure? It would certainly be difficult, expensive, and time consuming. Is long term planning no longer viable in our modern political climate? Like so many other issues such as national debt, corporate greed, and the environment: is short-term expediency too powerful a force to overcome? Is it even conceivable in the modern political landscape for audacious projects to occur, such as the interstate system for water?
>Yes, but it's a good thing. The technology changes to fast, and often each attack is in the style of the person doing it.
I don't think what we are saying is mutually exclusive. You can achieve your goals without having one group with the Marines and the other with the Air Force. Operationally, such a distinction makes sense, but not on a strategic level. In this sense, there needs to be a unified command that recognizes the theater properly.
>When I did security work, I never ran into anyone with that in their title that was worth a damn. >I wonder if you're the exception.
He he he. When you talk about security holes in our current systems, now you've got me on the floor! Seriously, that is funny.:D
It is unfortunate that the General did not talk about his vision for the future, as several questions prompted. Does the Cyber Command have a concrete understanding, and long term projections, of cyber wafare in the future? For example, could this result in the creation of a new branch of the military, in a similar way as the Army Air Corps spawned the Air Force? In order to instill confidence in our operations, it is important that we convey an appropriate vision for the future. The disparity, for example, revealed in one response about distinct cyber groups across the different branches of the military is counter-intuitive, to say the least! This reveals an operational, as opposed to a strategic role of IT in the military. While that may be correct today, ought we not be working towards a paradigm shift in the future?
On the issue of internet law, while a politically understandable response, it would have been good to have read a more realistic grappling with these incredibly difficult problems. It is a fairly routine conception to refer to the internet as the wild west, and this is a significant reality in terms of effectively addressing defense. In particular, this contradiction is revealing:
"It's a complex issue, but [the] bottom line is that we won't need new laws to be able to fly and fight in cyberspace." [....] "Those who commit unlawful acts would certainly face potential criminal liability for war crimes."
Effective warfare exploits opportunity, and the lawlessness of the internet has been exploited ad nausea by criminals and nations the world over. While it is not the role of the military to devise such laws, surely we can see the strategic importance that it is in our best interest to encourage the establishment of such laws? This should be pretty obvious: in the same way that a military power is want to fight insurgents/guerrillas, the US Cyber Command shouldn't tacitly accept a theater that strongly disadvantages what should otherwise be a significant position of power.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Brian Basgen Information Security Officer
In mid-February Tipping Point (maker of an IPS) released new filters on FTP Put and Get commands due to this rise in exploits. Always nice to see the IPS on the leading edge, and it again provides a point of emphasis that the IPS is absolutely essential for an enterprise.
Saying "you get what you pay for" is objectively true, but it ignores the point of the article....;)
No matter how much the DoD would like domestic chips, no matter how much they shell out, it just isn't going to happen. This shift in the market has been going on for decades, there is no way in hell you can stop it. More importantly, any efforts against it necessarily require political protectionism, which is as politically dead as buggy whips. Meanwhile, computer crime has skyrocketed in the last 5 years, and it has become extremely big business. Big enough that this kind of thing, embedding chips with spy ware, is starting to actually make sense.
I think most people recognize that the dependence of the US military on technology is problematic. At some point this will become a major vulnerability point for the US military in war. You don't have to go sci-fi and consider an EMP weapon; look no further than embedded chips, brought to you by the Russian mafia for the low-low price of a few tens of millions.
The bottom line is that you can't compete via protectionism, and if you can't compete in the market, the conventional wisdom is that you are sure to loose on the battlefield.
It is really simple. Your PC upgrade should correlate to console upgrades. No game designers today will seriously out pace the fixed characteristics of consoles. If you look at the "next generation" of consoles and build your system to out pace them (which is easy and cheap to do) -- you won't be disappointed for the next three years.
On the other hand, if you upgrade your PC 6 months or a year before the next gen consoles are released, guess what happens? Within a year all game developers are building towards the new spec, and you are left in the dust. The consoles are, no one can doubt, a driving force of the game development industry, but that doesn't mean the PC is ever going to be out of the picture.
An ancillary of unemployment is a pool of unused labor. This enables companies to suppress wages while choosing the best candidates. Any tendency in the market that destroys this unemployment gap is extremely problematic to companies like Microsoft. Why?
One has to consider that the budget of a large corporation such as Microsoft is largely constituted in payroll. Even a temporary market condition such as what we saw in the late 1990s with no labor surplus causes wages to shoot up. Reducing wages, once a labor surplus returns to the market, is of course a tall order, and hence layoffs, dead-wood, and so on.
Thus, the ideal market condition for all large companies is to ensure that unemployment is a permanent fixture of the market. In this sense economists talk about 5% unemployment being "normal", and of course while the method of counting unemployment is dubious ethically, it generally serves the appropriate purposes economically.
All this leads to the driving need to bring in additional labor, and continually expand the unemployment sector. The great thing about H1-B is that they represent, for all intents and purpose (for this limited period in history, any way) a virtually unlimited supply of labor. Thus, Microsoft and many other corporations will do everything they possibly can to get as many workers from H1-B as possible, and then some.
As any worker in this society, geeks can only have strength in numbers; united, under a common voice, and when needed, a common programme of action. Geeks cannot win their political rights without this. The IT industry is already organised, to not organise ourselves is to be powerless into their hands.
The only serious way to cause political change, is through unity, and there exists no better way of establishing unity between us, than forming into a union that specifically represents ourselves in the issues and problems we face every day.
As any worker in his society, geeks can only have strength in numbers; united, under a common voice, and when needed, a common programme of action. Geeks cannot win their political rights without this. The IT industry is already organised, to not organise ourselves is to be powerless into their hands. The only serious way to cause political change, is through unity, and there exists no better way of establishing unity between us, than forming into a union that specifically represents ourselves in the issues and problems we face every day.
Slashdot Mirror
No, violating the third and fourth articles of the Bill of Rights would be so outlandish that even if that is the intention currently, it would die a quick (but excruciatingly painful) death in the current political environment. No, the Air Force cannot be that stupid, they have no intention of installing these on US civilian computers.
As Spock says (ahem), when you eliminate the impossible, whatever left, however improbable, must be the truth. They need a large network of computers, right? Getting Zombies in China is kinda taken already, so what are some alternatives? How many computers, do you suppose, are used by ALL US government agencies, BOTH local and federal?
It seems to me that the US Military may enlist all branches of the *civilian* government and mandate they all install the bot. This is relatively cheap, easy, reliable. Obviously, some portions of the civilian government infrastructure would have to be excluded to ensure that if the botnet was exploited by others, the compromise would not be too great. From a practical, bureaucratic perspective, weighing legal, ethical, and fiscal considerations, that is far and away the best approach.
I realize this is heresy for some, but the mesh network was designed and makes sense for a *national* network. Meshing internationally keeps costs down, but it is a really bad idea from a security point of view.
Why not have point to points with certain nations/regions of the world? Connection with these nations continue on the condition that they only route traffic to the US that originates on their national network. There are ways around any architecture, of course, the point is to give you an enforcement mechanism.
Drastic measures, considerable re architecture, etc, needs to be put on the table. Allowing this carte blanche espionage is just absurd. I believe the US still has enough weight to throw around to force something like this through, and it could pick up some key allies in the effort, too.
That ideal of yours is all well and good, but you are also recognizing above that their choices effect you. This is due to the social fabric we live in. What choices can a person make that don't have effects on society? If you drive to work, someone needs to pay for that road that wouldn't be necessary if you weren't driving.
The struggle between Authoritarianism versus Libertarianism stem from these issues, but the simplistic thinking expressed by the extreme views of either side are not satisfactory. Just as a society can't justly dictate how a person should live their life (e.g. don't do drugs), that does not make the opposite extreme the only other option. In other words, it is not also not just for society to allow people to do whatever they want. We know this as a general truth (murder, etc), yet when it comes to some particulars such as health care, it finds expression despite such glaring flaws.
I am positing that on some issues, a compromise must be struck. Universal health care, yes, but free choice also.
Who makes that judgment? Is it the EMT responding on the scene? Is the the ambulance driver? Does the doctor decide when you are on the operating table?
You are going to ask people whose profession is to help fix people and save lives to determine who is worthy of being saved, and who isn't? This is the horribly unethical problem that is the notion of being "uninsured" in the first place. You want to compound that with subjective life style judgments?
So, a gay person with AIDS is treated by a fundamentalist doctor who believes sexuality is a lifestyle choice, and thus, AIDS treatment costs are an unnecessary burden on the tax payer. This is truly the extreme of what the US already has in place with HMOs who are constantly crunching numbers, as opposed to doing everything in their power to help people get better.
Sure, what you say is a wonderful idea. Freedom of choice, my body, and all that. But this thing is called society for a reason. If you really want to destroy yourself, do it outside the realm of society. But of course, these junkies don't hold such noble notions of personal responsibility, so you can't expect them (nor society) to act in accord with such notions.
The problem with plastic bags is not the oil they use in their production -- it is the composition of the bag that makes it impossible to break down. There is a litany of information on this subject. The great garbage patches in the Pacific are largely plastic, and no matter how much plastic may get broken into tiny pieces over time, every core component will not break down in any meaningful way. We are talking on the order of hundreds of thousands or millions of years before Earth figures out a way to break this crap down.
All this has me thinking about collateral damage. War, by definition, has collateral damage. What will we see here? Will it be several underwater cables being cut at the same time, shutting down businesses and people in entire countries? Will it be mass assaults such that the machine of innocents are pwned? Could the systematic and government driven exploitation of the open nature of the internet lead to the closing of virtual borders?
I don't doubt this is the right thing to do strategically: you exploit opportunities at war, but it seems that the collateral damage is inevitable, which begs the question: what will the internet look like after prolonged, intensified, government warfare?
It is the same old story, retold generation after generation. I wonder how much of this cycle is a part of natural life, and how much of it comes from ignorance? After all, you'd think people would clue in that when they were young they heard the same kinds of things they are now telling a new generation of young folks. This at least seems to be a tangible way to lesser the effects of such nonsense; because the young won't so strongly revile older generations without their antecedents being so intolerable to the change their own seeds have sown.
While change may be harder to accept the older you get, is it possible that this concept too is being challenged? It is one thing to be a farmer or an industrial worker all your life -- surely being intolerant of change is almost inevitable here. Yet, in such a dynamic economy, with jobs changing constantly, and information accessibility just beginning to reach extraordinary heights -- is it possible that tolerance of change will be ingrained in the coming generation? Imagine the kind of changes that would likely mean for society as a whole!
Infrastructure is failing in various parts of our civil society, while we also have droughts throughout the country that will continue to persist if not worsen. Oregon experiences its share of both of these important issues.
I'm curious if you have considered a national water infrastructure? It would certainly be difficult, expensive, and time consuming. Is long term planning no longer viable in our modern political climate? Like so many other issues such as national debt, corporate greed, and the environment: is short-term expediency too powerful a force to overcome? Is it even conceivable in the modern political landscape for audacious projects to occur, such as the interstate system for water?
Your argument is dubious. Mercenaries do not equate to an effective military in any way, shape, or form. On the contrary.
>Yes, but it's a good thing. The technology changes to fast, and often each attack is in the style of the person doing it.
:D
I don't think what we are saying is mutually exclusive. You can achieve your goals without having one group with the Marines and the other with the Air Force. Operationally, such a distinction makes sense, but not on a strategic level. In this sense, there needs to be a unified command that recognizes the theater properly.
>When I did security work, I never ran into anyone with that in their title that was worth a damn.
>I wonder if you're the exception.
He he he. When you talk about security holes in our current systems, now you've got me on the floor! Seriously, that is funny.
It is unfortunate that the General did not talk about his vision for the future, as several questions prompted.
Does the Cyber Command have a concrete understanding, and long term projections, of cyber wafare in the future?
For example, could this result in the creation of a new branch of the military, in a similar way as the Army Air
Corps spawned the Air Force? In order to instill confidence in our operations, it is important that we convey an
appropriate vision for the future. The disparity, for example, revealed in one response about distinct cyber
groups across the different branches of the military is counter-intuitive, to say the least! This reveals an operational, as opposed to a strategic role of IT in the military. While that may be correct today, ought we not be working towards a paradigm shift in the future?
On the issue of internet law, while a politically understandable response, it would have been good to have read a
more realistic grappling with these incredibly difficult problems. It is a fairly routine conception to refer to
the internet as the wild west, and this is a significant reality in terms of effectively addressing defense. In
particular, this contradiction is revealing:
"It's a complex issue, but [the] bottom line is that we won't need new laws to be able to fly and fight in
cyberspace." [....] "Those who commit unlawful acts would certainly face potential criminal liability for war
crimes."
Effective warfare exploits opportunity, and the lawlessness of the internet has been exploited ad nausea by
criminals and nations the world over. While it is not the role of the military to devise such laws, surely we can
see the strategic importance that it is in our best interest to encourage the establishment of such laws? This should be pretty
obvious: in the same way that a military power is want to fight insurgents/guerrillas, the US Cyber Command
shouldn't tacitly accept a theater that strongly disadvantages what should otherwise be a significant position of
power.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Brian Basgen
Information Security Officer
In mid-February Tipping Point (maker of an IPS) released new filters on FTP Put and Get commands due to this rise in exploits. Always nice to see the IPS on the leading edge, and it again provides a point of emphasis that the IPS is absolutely essential for an enterprise.
Saying "you get what you pay for" is objectively true, but it ignores the point of the article....
No matter how much the DoD would like domestic chips, no matter how much they shell out, it just isn't going to happen. This shift in the market has been going on for decades, there is no way in hell you can stop it. More importantly, any efforts against it necessarily require political protectionism, which is as politically dead as buggy whips. Meanwhile, computer crime has skyrocketed in the last 5 years, and it has become extremely big business. Big enough that this kind of thing, embedding chips with spy ware, is starting to actually make sense.
I think most people recognize that the dependence of the US military on technology is problematic. At some point this will become a major vulnerability point for the US military in war. You don't have to go sci-fi and consider an EMP weapon; look no further than embedded chips, brought to you by the Russian mafia for the low-low price of a few tens of millions.
The bottom line is that you can't compete via protectionism, and if you can't compete in the market, the conventional wisdom is that you are sure to loose on the battlefield.
It is really simple. Your PC upgrade should correlate to console upgrades. No game designers today will seriously out pace the fixed characteristics of consoles. If you look at the "next generation" of consoles and build your system to out pace them (which is easy and cheap to do) -- you won't be disappointed for the next three years.
On the other hand, if you upgrade your PC 6 months or a year before the next gen consoles are released, guess what happens? Within a year all game developers are building towards the new spec, and you are left in the dust. The consoles are, no one can doubt, a driving force of the game development industry, but that doesn't mean the PC is ever going to be out of the picture.
An ancillary of unemployment is a pool of unused labor. This enables companies to suppress wages while choosing the best candidates. Any tendency in the market that destroys this unemployment gap is extremely problematic to companies like Microsoft. Why?
One has to consider that the budget of a large corporation such as Microsoft is largely constituted in payroll. Even a temporary market condition such as what we saw in the late 1990s with no labor surplus causes wages to shoot up. Reducing wages, once a labor surplus returns to the market, is of course a tall order, and hence layoffs, dead-wood, and so on.
Thus, the ideal market condition for all large companies is to ensure that unemployment is a permanent fixture of the market. In this sense economists talk about 5% unemployment being "normal", and of course while the method of counting unemployment is dubious ethically, it generally serves the appropriate purposes economically.
All this leads to the driving need to bring in additional labor, and continually expand the unemployment sector. The great thing about H1-B is that they represent, for all intents and purpose (for this limited period in history, any way) a virtually unlimited supply of labor. Thus, Microsoft and many other corporations will do everything they possibly can to get as many workers from H1-B as possible, and then some.
As any worker in this society, geeks can only have strength in numbers; united, under a common voice, and when needed, a common programme of action. Geeks cannot win their political rights without this. The IT industry is already organised, to not organise ourselves is to be powerless into their hands.
The only serious way to cause political change, is through unity, and there exists no better way of establishing unity between us, than forming into a union that specifically represents ourselves in the issues and problems we face every day.
As any worker in his society, geeks can only have strength in numbers; united, under a common voice, and when needed, a common programme of action. Geeks cannot win their political rights without this. The IT industry is already organised, to not organise ourselves is to be powerless into their hands. The only serious way to cause political change, is through unity, and there exists no better way of establishing unity between us, than forming into a union that specifically represents ourselves in the issues and problems we face every day.