"Black Boxes" are made to survive all kinds of unbelievable crashes, impacts, fires, explosions, etc.. Instead, these brainiacs are going to use something that breaks if it drops out of your pocket. Way to go, guys.
Jokes aside, most of the time when I tell someone "no", I am, in fact, helping them. If their problem is legitimate, if solving that problem is possible, and if the outcome of solving the problem is better than the outcome of not solving it, then I do.
It's not that I don't want to help people. It's that they're spinning their wheels with useless stuff. It's the guy who comes over and asks for help parsing a directory tree to sum up the size of each subdirectory, and when I tell him to simply parse the output of "du", he refuses - and later, when I take a look at his code out of curiosity, he's doing is recursion backwards, so he sits there and parses the directory structure a couple of orders of magnitude more often than he needs to. Helping him with his problem isn't really helping him, explaining how to go about his job in a better manner is the help that he really needs.
Then again, it can be the guy who tells me that something must be wrong with the disk or OS, because he gets errors about not being able to write to his file handles. After I waste a couple of days doing every sort of test imaginable to reproduce the error, I tell him to go back and debug his code - and it turns out that the error in question was being passed from who-knows-how far back in his code, but he never bothered to check result codes. Tracking down the bug in his program isn't helping him, beating him with a clue stick is what he needs.
"I'm sure you are good at what you do. The problem here is that, being on the business side, I should be coming to you with my business problem that has a technical solution, and you should help me find the right technical solution that will work based on your experience instead of forcing me to come up with ideas that are outside my expertise and then shooting them down."
The problem is that the PHB types seem to think that IT types can whip magic fairy dust out of their rectums, and implement immensely complex (and risky) strategies in a day or two.
I have no problem to helping people with technical problems... but when they come to me and say "I'd like to send out a few hundred thousand advertisements to people who didn't really sign up for them. How can I do that without getting us in any trouble?", then the answer is "You can't." When they come to me and say "Why can't you make our database server handle more load?", and I tell them "Because programmer Bob over there is issuing several thousand queries per second, when if he could pull his head out of his cavity and pass data around inside of his program, he could get away with three or four queries per second", they think that I can whip out a magic wand and make it all better.
You may not like having people say "no" to you, but a good IT guy is doing you a favor when he tells you know if you ask for something idiotic - just like you're doing HIM a favor when you tell him "no" if he suggests poor business ideas.
I was the second employee hired by my company, and now we're the major player in our industry. One of the co-owners has told me several times that he's very glad that I and a few other people told him "No, we're not going to do that, fire us if you want" early on. In hindsight, he's realized that we knew a lot more than he thought we did.
"Nine times out of ten, the people in the IT department want to play some kind of bullshit game - often lying about what can or cannot be done. I'm a reasonable man with reasonable expectations, but it seems that most people in IT cannot be bothered to try to find a solution because it is easier to say, "No.""
That's me. Users regularly come and ask for things which, on the surface, seem innocent enough - but having been at this game a lot longer than they have, I forsee the pitfalls which *will*, eventually, come to bite someone in the butt. I used to sit them down and explain why it wasn't a good idea, then listen to their thirty-seven "solutions" to the problem, and explain just how each of those solutions would be a problem as well, and waste an hour or two of my day.
Every once in a while, they do come up with a clever idea that I hadn't thought of, and I tell them "You bet. That's a great idea." But nine times out of ten, I just have to look them in the eye and say "I'm sorry, but I'm just not going to do that." Yeah... I guess I'm pretty jaded.
We used to be that way, where everyone had admin priveliges, and was expected to be responsible, and got a "talking to" if they weren't. But as the number of employees grew, that just became unfeasable. The day we took away everyone's admin rights (unless they legitimately needed them), our desktop support load was literally cut by a factor of ten.
The *most* pissy that people get is when you tell them that they lost their admin priveliges for doing various screwy things. They'll invent a hundred excuses why it wasn't really them (or really their fault), but magically, if you take away their rights, the problem stops...
Has always been the user who *thinks* he knows too much, and is out to prove it - usually causing problems, havoc, and destruction in so doing. You know, the kind of guy who gets pissed when you won't give them root/Administrator priveliges because he thinks he's a real big-shot. I've heard arguments as silly as "Well, I'm learning Linux on my own at home, so sooner or later, I'm going to know how to use it whether you give me root or not." Yeah, good for you.
It seems that every company I've worked for has had one. Maybe it's a small part of my personal castigation for the things I've done wrong. Who can say...
Homebrew machines are where you would expect it to work relatively well - at least that has been my experience with Windows Update and drivers. Where you run into trouble is with more proprietary hardware - on my Dell laptop, for instance, I have yet to find a driver update on Windows Update, despite the fact that Dell comes out with them periodically.
On laptops, I've run into a few cases where the laptop manufacturer (or mainboard manufacturer, later to be packed into a laptop) has taken a device, and changed the PCI ID by one number without changing ANYTHING in hardware, specifically so the "regular" driver for that piece of hardware wouldn't install without some hacking.
With a botnet of a few hundred thousand machines, brute-forcing the crypto application of your choice would immediately come to mind. Whether that would be one of the better uses of the botnet is questionable, but hey, if you have something that's really important to you to try to crack...
At that point, we still have to convert down to lower voltage, and probably wouldn't be able to do it any more efficiently than we already convert AC power... so where, exactly, is the huge advantage that would make it worth it?
Alrigty, show me where I can sign up to get 48V DC power delivered to a data center. Since my rack right now has over 2KW of 1U, mult-CPU hotness, that means that *one rack* will need 50 amps. There are 10 racks in a row, and at least 10 rows in that particular room (there are others), so this power company will have to be able to deliver 5,000 amps just for that one room. Think of the conductors you need... and wish for a pink unicorn, too.
Sure, I can put some solar panels up with a huge charge controller/regulator, and hook up a ton of submarine batteries, but I don't think that I'm going to find room on the roof for 240kw of solar panels... and rememer, that's just *one room* in the data center. Pink unicorns, man, pink unicorns. At best, you can move the AC->DC conversion and *some* of the regulation out of the air-conditioned room, but that's about all you're going to gain.
The idea of putting DC->DC converters close to a chip is interesting, but would still only take a tiny shaving off of the energy budget of a server.
I wasn't aware that operating systems really cared which voltage was powering the hardware...:-)
While individual systems may vary, I've noticed that the older the facility where I was working, the more likely they were to have DC power - since the facilities were "telco" before they were "telecom", and most telco stuff is DC. Even in newer datacenters, it's only the small outfits that haven't had DC, most of the larger ones have had DC available.
Even if you switch to 48V DC, you still have to convert 120 VAC to 48 V DC, then down to 12/5/3.3/1.x volts for motors and logic, so all you're doing is moving the conversion from a decentralized setup (a power supply in each computer) to a centralized one (a single large power supply). In the end, however, you still have to get from 120 down to around 1 volt for the CPU, and you're not going to suddenly make an order-of-magnitude change in the efficiency of that - or even near a doubling.
To keep it in perspective, though, there are vastly overshadowing losses which make the small differences in centralized/decentralized conversion efficiency moot. Your 120 VAC leg is probably coming from a 440 VAC lead coming into the building, and going through a very large transformer to get 120 VAC - and the 440 VAC that comes in is coming from a much higher voltage that was converted down at least once (and perhaps more) after being transmitted very long distances. The losses in all of that are much, much higher than the losses in conversion that you mention.
Sure, if you could generate and transmit a nice, smooth, regulated 48V DC from the power station to your computer, that would be great - but that's so unfeasable that you might as well wish for a pink unicorn while you're at it.
Just like that holographic storage that was going to replace hard drives "in 2-3 years"... almost a decade ago.
That's not to say that this *won't* happen, just that it's yet another "We're going to change the world in a few years!" idea, which should really be a "We'll wake you up if anything ever becomes of this." sort of message.
Re:Well, I guess that proved ME wrong...
on
Yahoo Pipes
·
· Score: 1
I am, but the person in question is doing well to be able to read email. I knew that they weren't talking about |-pipes, nor were they talking about t3 pipes, or anything else that I could come up with.
It turned out that they had some trouble accessing a web site, and someone else said "They're having trouble with their pipes."
Well, I guess that proved ME wrong...
on
Yahoo Pipes
·
· Score: 4, Funny
... about a week ago, one of my friends called me, and said "I have a tech question for you. What are pipes?"
I sat there for a few seconds, trying to figure out what in the world they were talking about, and finally answered "Round hollow things, like tubes."
So you can't make an unsafe car in Britain. Woo-hoo. Does that mean that Britons don't hit the local pub, get loaded, and run their car into something?
It's not a question of which OS has more security models, it's a question of what users *do* with those security models. Like one of my friends likes to say, "You can't fix stupid."
So, Linux can have fewer system calls, different permissions, different security models, and everything in the world... but that only matters if people *use* them. The first time Joe User discovers that he can't install XYZ screensaver because SELinux is preventing him, he'll turn it off. And the first time he can't do it as a non-priveliged user, he'll start running as root. From there, it doesn't really take any more to compromise Linux than it does Windows, just a flaw in Firefox, a media player, an email client, or just a plain and simple Trojan hidden inside whatever program you want to trick them into running.
Make the system more idiot-proof, and they'll make a better idiot. Never underestimate the power of an end-user to do something stupid.
Actually, it's a perfect mechanism. If each bot were to do traceroutes to discover paths, then work backwards looking for Ciscos (or any brand of router), then with a sufficiently disperse botnet, then even if bot #145,567 can't send any more traffic to a router, then perhaps bot #4,841,109 still can...
No, I haven't. It's a terribly money-grubbing city - in every single city newsletter, they mention finding new revenue streams. They have an astounding number of traffic cops who will write speeding tickets all day long - while ignoring all other crime, charge and triple the rates for building permits that most cities do. Cell phone reception sucks rocks with anything but Verizon, because they tax cell phone towers several times higher than other nearby cities. The list goes on and on.
You'd think that people would get fed up with it... but really, it's hard to find someone in this city that cares about anything other than their property values. C'est la vie.
Re:Ban all Microsoft Users from the Internet...
on
DNS Root Servers Attacked
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
It's nice to think that, but I don't *entirely* agree with it.
Microsoft is an easy target, given the insanely large user-base. However, if those users suddenly switched to Linux, it's doubtful that their practices would stop - they'd still install whichever distribution looked the best, installed 134 unneeded services and enabled them all by default, open unsafe attachments, and never update their computer.
In every operating system I've seen yet, security is an inconvenience. While you and I think that the tradeoff is worth it, we will always be outnumbered by people who think that it isn't. People who log in as "Administrator" would just as quickly read their email and browse porn sites as "root". Sad, but true.
It could, but it's more likely that it's either (a) a profit-driven scoundrel or (b) a bored young male somewhere in the world, testing something out. Cyber-crime isn't just for Nigerian kids in Internet cafes or bored young punks, organized crime from all over the world have moved quite heavily into the scene.
> Good insight, but why attack the root servers in the first place?
There are still people who see the Internet as being one of the roots of all evil, or as it being one large American/Western institution, and there are still people who just like to be jerks.
The first two haven't (so far) really had the right combination of resources to do something terribly bad to the Internet, and as time goes on, the last one has definitely faded away - but that's not to say that they're not out there.
We seem to agree that for any of the motives we've guessed at, there would have been other attacks which would have been more useful at achieving their goals. Still, even if it doesn't make sense, someone just did it - proving that there are still folks out there who are looking to throw a wrench in the works, and their motives don't really matter a whole lot to the people and businesses who suffer when there are problems with the Internet. It only takes a few jerks to inconvenience a whooooole lot of people...
It's also possible that the root servers were just a test target, that once they're ready, they'll go after their *real* target.
It doesn't matter, it's virtually guaranteed that the path between your resolver and the root name servers involves at least *one* Cisco router.
And in the unlikely event that it doesn't, it's just as likely that the path between you and where you want your traffic to go involves at least one Cisco router. Between the two, if someone were clever, capable, and dedicated, they could disrupt enough of the Internet to make it 99% unusable.
While it's not exactly an entirely effective attack - resolving caches will, for the most part, insulate end-users from the effects for anywhere from a few hours to a few days - it could be simply an experiment. If you suppose that this was perpetrated by someone who is intent on causing mayhem, they could have been testing how well their attack would work, in order to plan a much larger one which would bring down *all* of the root name servers, and for long enough to really make people feel the squeeze.
It's a dumb, brute-force type of approach. A much, MUCH more effective way would be to simply find an appropriate flaw in IOS to exploit...
They don't go into a lot of detail, but it's entirely possible that the bots in South Korea were, in fact, being controlled from somewhere else. I'd say that it's even *likely*.
Slashdot Mirror
"Black Boxes" are made to survive all kinds of unbelievable crashes, impacts, fires, explosions, etc.. Instead, these brainiacs are going to use something that breaks if it drops out of your pocket. Way to go, guys.
steve
I'm glad that someone else thought of that movie...
Give a man a fish, teach him to fish.... :-)
Jokes aside, most of the time when I tell someone "no", I am, in fact, helping them. If their problem is legitimate, if solving that problem is possible, and if the outcome of solving the problem is better than the outcome of not solving it, then I do.
It's not that I don't want to help people. It's that they're spinning their wheels with useless stuff. It's the guy who comes over and asks for help parsing a directory tree to sum up the size of each subdirectory, and when I tell him to simply parse the output of "du", he refuses - and later, when I take a look at his code out of curiosity, he's doing is recursion backwards, so he sits there and parses the directory structure a couple of orders of magnitude more often than he needs to. Helping him with his problem isn't really helping him, explaining how to go about his job in a better manner is the help that he really needs.
Then again, it can be the guy who tells me that something must be wrong with the disk or OS, because he gets errors about not being able to write to his file handles. After I waste a couple of days doing every sort of test imaginable to reproduce the error, I tell him to go back and debug his code - and it turns out that the error in question was being passed from who-knows-how far back in his code, but he never bothered to check result codes. Tracking down the bug in his program isn't helping him, beating him with a clue stick is what he needs.
"I'm sure you are good at what you do. The problem here is that, being on the business side, I should be coming to you with my business problem that has a technical solution, and you should help me find the right technical solution that will work based on your experience instead of forcing me to come up with ideas that are outside my expertise and then shooting them down."
The problem is that the PHB types seem to think that IT types can whip magic fairy dust out of their rectums, and implement immensely complex (and risky) strategies in a day or two.
I have no problem to helping people with technical problems... but when they come to me and say "I'd like to send out a few hundred thousand advertisements to people who didn't really sign up for them. How can I do that without getting us in any trouble?", then the answer is "You can't." When they come to me and say "Why can't you make our database server handle more load?", and I tell them "Because programmer Bob over there is issuing several thousand queries per second, when if he could pull his head out of his cavity and pass data around inside of his program, he could get away with three or four queries per second", they think that I can whip out a magic wand and make it all better.
You may not like having people say "no" to you, but a good IT guy is doing you a favor when he tells you know if you ask for something idiotic - just like you're doing HIM a favor when you tell him "no" if he suggests poor business ideas.
I was the second employee hired by my company, and now we're the major player in our industry. One of the co-owners has told me several times that he's very glad that I and a few other people told him "No, we're not going to do that, fire us if you want" early on. In hindsight, he's realized that we knew a lot more than he thought we did.
"Nine times out of ten, the people in the IT department want to play some kind of bullshit game - often lying about what can or cannot be done. I'm a reasonable man with reasonable expectations, but it seems that most people in IT cannot be bothered to try to find a solution because it is easier to say, "No.""
That's me. Users regularly come and ask for things which, on the surface, seem innocent enough - but having been at this game a lot longer than they have, I forsee the pitfalls which *will*, eventually, come to bite someone in the butt. I used to sit them down and explain why it wasn't a good idea, then listen to their thirty-seven "solutions" to the problem, and explain just how each of those solutions would be a problem as well, and waste an hour or two of my day.
Every once in a while, they do come up with a clever idea that I hadn't thought of, and I tell them "You bet. That's a great idea." But nine times out of ten, I just have to look them in the eye and say "I'm sorry, but I'm just not going to do that." Yeah... I guess I'm pretty jaded.
We used to be that way, where everyone had admin priveliges, and was expected to be responsible, and got a "talking to" if they weren't. But as the number of employees grew, that just became unfeasable. The day we took away everyone's admin rights (unless they legitimately needed them), our desktop support load was literally cut by a factor of ten.
The *most* pissy that people get is when you tell them that they lost their admin priveliges for doing various screwy things. They'll invent a hundred excuses why it wasn't really them (or really their fault), but magically, if you take away their rights, the problem stops...
Has always been the user who *thinks* he knows too much, and is out to prove it - usually causing problems, havoc, and destruction in so doing. You know, the kind of guy who gets pissed when you won't give them root/Administrator priveliges because he thinks he's a real big-shot. I've heard arguments as silly as "Well, I'm learning Linux on my own at home, so sooner or later, I'm going to know how to use it whether you give me root or not." Yeah, good for you.
It seems that every company I've worked for has had one. Maybe it's a small part of my personal castigation for the things I've done wrong. Who can say...
Homebrew machines are where you would expect it to work relatively well - at least that has been my experience with Windows Update and drivers. Where you run into trouble is with more proprietary hardware - on my Dell laptop, for instance, I have yet to find a driver update on Windows Update, despite the fact that Dell comes out with them periodically.
On laptops, I've run into a few cases where the laptop manufacturer (or mainboard manufacturer, later to be packed into a laptop) has taken a device, and changed the PCI ID by one number without changing ANYTHING in hardware, specifically so the "regular" driver for that piece of hardware wouldn't install without some hacking.
With a botnet of a few hundred thousand machines, brute-forcing the crypto application of your choice would immediately come to mind. Whether that would be one of the better uses of the botnet is questionable, but hey, if you have something that's really important to you to try to crack...
steve
At that point, we still have to convert down to lower voltage, and probably wouldn't be able to do it any more efficiently than we already convert AC power... so where, exactly, is the huge advantage that would make it worth it?
Alrigty, show me where I can sign up to get 48V DC power delivered to a data center. Since my rack right now has over 2KW of 1U, mult-CPU hotness, that means that *one rack* will need 50 amps. There are 10 racks in a row, and at least 10 rows in that particular room (there are others), so this power company will have to be able to deliver 5,000 amps just for that one room. Think of the conductors you need... and wish for a pink unicorn, too.
Sure, I can put some solar panels up with a huge charge controller/regulator, and hook up a ton of submarine batteries, but I don't think that I'm going to find room on the roof for 240kw of solar panels... and rememer, that's just *one room* in the data center. Pink unicorns, man, pink unicorns. At best, you can move the AC->DC conversion and *some* of the regulation out of the air-conditioned room, but that's about all you're going to gain.
The idea of putting DC->DC converters close to a chip is interesting, but would still only take a tiny shaving off of the energy budget of a server.
I wasn't aware that operating systems really cared which voltage was powering the hardware... :-)
While individual systems may vary, I've noticed that the older the facility where I was working, the more likely they were to have DC power - since the facilities were "telco" before they were "telecom", and most telco stuff is DC. Even in newer datacenters, it's only the small outfits that haven't had DC, most of the larger ones have had DC available.
Get a grip on reality.
Even if you switch to 48V DC, you still have to convert 120 VAC to 48 V DC, then down to 12/5/3.3/1.x volts for motors and logic, so all you're doing is moving the conversion from a decentralized setup (a power supply in each computer) to a centralized one (a single large power supply). In the end, however, you still have to get from 120 down to around 1 volt for the CPU, and you're not going to suddenly make an order-of-magnitude change in the efficiency of that - or even near a doubling.
To keep it in perspective, though, there are vastly overshadowing losses which make the small differences in centralized/decentralized conversion efficiency moot. Your 120 VAC leg is probably coming from a 440 VAC lead coming into the building, and going through a very large transformer to get 120 VAC - and the 440 VAC that comes in is coming from a much higher voltage that was converted down at least once (and perhaps more) after being transmitted very long distances. The losses in all of that are much, much higher than the losses in conversion that you mention.
Sure, if you could generate and transmit a nice, smooth, regulated 48V DC from the power station to your computer, that would be great - but that's so unfeasable that you might as well wish for a pink unicorn while you're at it.
Just like that holographic storage that was going to replace hard drives "in 2-3 years"... almost a decade ago.
That's not to say that this *won't* happen, just that it's yet another "We're going to change the world in a few years!" idea, which should really be a "We'll wake you up if anything ever becomes of this." sort of message.
I am, but the person in question is doing well to be able to read email. I knew that they weren't talking about |-pipes, nor were they talking about t3 pipes, or anything else that I could come up with.
It turned out that they had some trouble accessing a web site, and someone else said "They're having trouble with their pipes."
... about a week ago, one of my friends called me, and said "I have a tech question for you. What are pipes?"
I sat there for a few seconds, trying to figure out what in the world they were talking about, and finally answered "Round hollow things, like tubes."
So you can't make an unsafe car in Britain. Woo-hoo. Does that mean that Britons don't hit the local pub, get loaded, and run their car into something?
It's not a question of which OS has more security models, it's a question of what users *do* with those security models. Like one of my friends likes to say, "You can't fix stupid."
So, Linux can have fewer system calls, different permissions, different security models, and everything in the world... but that only matters if people *use* them. The first time Joe User discovers that he can't install XYZ screensaver because SELinux is preventing him, he'll turn it off. And the first time he can't do it as a non-priveliged user, he'll start running as root. From there, it doesn't really take any more to compromise Linux than it does Windows, just a flaw in Firefox, a media player, an email client, or just a plain and simple Trojan hidden inside whatever program you want to trick them into running.
Make the system more idiot-proof, and they'll make a better idiot. Never underestimate the power of an end-user to do something stupid.
Actually, it's a perfect mechanism. If each bot were to do traceroutes to discover paths, then work backwards looking for Ciscos (or any brand of router), then with a sufficiently disperse botnet, then even if bot #145,567 can't send any more traffic to a router, then perhaps bot #4,841,109 still can...
steve
No, I haven't. It's a terribly money-grubbing city - in every single city newsletter, they mention finding new revenue streams. They have an astounding number of traffic cops who will write speeding tickets all day long - while ignoring all other crime, charge and triple the rates for building permits that most cities do. Cell phone reception sucks rocks with anything but Verizon, because they tax cell phone towers several times higher than other nearby cities. The list goes on and on.
You'd think that people would get fed up with it... but really, it's hard to find someone in this city that cares about anything other than their property values. C'est la vie.
It's nice to think that, but I don't *entirely* agree with it.
Microsoft is an easy target, given the insanely large user-base. However, if those users suddenly switched to Linux, it's doubtful that their practices would stop - they'd still install whichever distribution looked the best, installed 134 unneeded services and enabled them all by default, open unsafe attachments, and never update their computer.
In every operating system I've seen yet, security is an inconvenience. While you and I think that the tradeoff is worth it, we will always be outnumbered by people who think that it isn't. People who log in as "Administrator" would just as quickly read their email and browse porn sites as "root". Sad, but true.
It could, but it's more likely that it's either (a) a profit-driven scoundrel or (b) a bored young male somewhere in the world, testing something out. Cyber-crime isn't just for Nigerian kids in Internet cafes or bored young punks, organized crime from all over the world have moved quite heavily into the scene.
> Good insight, but why attack the root servers in the first place?
There are still people who see the Internet as being one of the roots of all evil, or as it being one large American/Western institution, and there are still people who just like to be jerks.
The first two haven't (so far) really had the right combination of resources to do something terribly bad to the Internet, and as time goes on, the last one has definitely faded away - but that's not to say that they're not out there.
We seem to agree that for any of the motives we've guessed at, there would have been other attacks which would have been more useful at achieving their goals. Still, even if it doesn't make sense, someone just did it - proving that there are still folks out there who are looking to throw a wrench in the works, and their motives don't really matter a whole lot to the people and businesses who suffer when there are problems with the Internet. It only takes a few jerks to inconvenience a whooooole lot of people...
It's also possible that the root servers were just a test target, that once they're ready, they'll go after their *real* target.
steve
It doesn't matter, it's virtually guaranteed that the path between your resolver and the root name servers involves at least *one* Cisco router.
And in the unlikely event that it doesn't, it's just as likely that the path between you and where you want your traffic to go involves at least one Cisco router. Between the two, if someone were clever, capable, and dedicated, they could disrupt enough of the Internet to make it 99% unusable.
While it's not exactly an entirely effective attack - resolving caches will, for the most part, insulate end-users from the effects for anywhere from a few hours to a few days - it could be simply an experiment. If you suppose that this was perpetrated by someone who is intent on causing mayhem, they could have been testing how well their attack would work, in order to plan a much larger one which would bring down *all* of the root name servers, and for long enough to really make people feel the squeeze.
It's a dumb, brute-force type of approach. A much, MUCH more effective way would be to simply find an appropriate flaw in IOS to exploit...
steve
They don't go into a lot of detail, but it's entirely possible that the bots in South Korea were, in fact, being controlled from somewhere else. I'd say that it's even *likely*.