We have Cox's specific assurance that there is a weakness in the permissions system of 2.20pre19 that isn't there in 2.20pre20. So running diff on the sources and then examining those parts which involve permissions should reveal exploitable weakness(es) -- presumably weaknesses also extant in 2.20 and in at least some of the 2.4 series. We're talking about a significant chunk of America's network infrastructure.
So, AC has provided clues which point fairly directly to an exploit. Not only that, he's done it in a way almost guaranteed to bring more attention to it than if he'd just routinely included it in the change log. And he's done this in wartime. Can we not prevail upon Britain to honor current extradition treaties for crimes of this stature?
Let's show our good friend what _American_ irony tastes like!
Harvard lawyer Dershowitz said... "Four Arab-looking guys reading the Koran are much less suspicious if they have the cards and can just slash them through card readers."
Okay, what parts of the world produce the best expertise in fake IDs? Where is the best market for them? Do products follow their markets? How much can someone on the inside make for inserting a few dozen fake records? How much was bin Laden able to afford for pilot training?
Yup, those four guys ahead of you just zipped onto the plane because their cards were clear... feel safe now?
Or would you rather have a system where trained government agents use their human intelligence to sort out who is suspicious? Idealism about "no racial profiling" is lovely. But you're about to get on that plane...
to send a standard-sized envelope by junk mail to every house and business in America? Either we outlaw this threat, or we're likely to see a lot more notices on street poles promising...
No group is so over-represented in American government as the "Christian" right - a group which in no way represents the "real" Jesus (who was probably a variation of Dionysus in a Roman mystery cult). The problem is that in a bit of realpolitic, our corporations (very few of whose executives are even remotely fundamentalist) decided that alliance with never-evolved was the only way to hold back democratic socialism - just like our former alliance with the Taliban was the only way to hold back imperial communism.
So how do we do that? How do we build a political alliance that preserves freedom for economic activity (and emphasizes freedom in economic activity, rather than allowing corporations to band together to remove freedoms from individuals), while also preserving freedom from people who are too silly to see that their favorite interpretation of their favorite old text is not a direct order from the sort of God who would have us see free will as the crack through which evil enters an otherwise perfectly ordered creation (which is in fact the theology of our fundamentalists)?
How do we extend open source to make freedom even more of an economic imperative? Just as America has found some strange allies in its struggle, so must we find ways to radically realign our domestic political alliances to regain the freedoms our current unrepresentatives are surrendering in our name.
This question is being phrased as "Do representatives...?" This is as silly as "Do consumers...?" Given that we're individually experimenting here with our own contact attempts to individual reps, what we need is a tracking of results, by rep. Of X contacts by phone | fax | mail | email | Website | personal | other to representative R, Y were responded to personally | by form (appropriately | inappropriately) | not at all and the subsequent position taken by R was possibly influenced | contrary to the position urged in the constituent | non-constituent, contributor | non-contributor communication.
If we can collect the data, we've got folks hereabouts who can mine it, right? The solution is not generic, but respects the individual we're trying to influence | buy | coerce.
After all we all know how to spot a real American. Check the clothes. Check the accent. Check the knowledge of baseball trivia.
What was the success of German spying efforts in WWII? Germans looked just like plenty of Americans; but few if any had mastery of baseball trivia. The Germans with American music trivia (particularly jazz) were generally in the German resistance. If you go far enough into our trivia, it conquers your mind and there's no need for us to worry about you.
The only function served by ID cards would be they would allow certain technical citizens to be granted certain privileges, when under present circumstances they will be prone to intense interrogation for not bearing the obvious signs of being, in a cultural sense, citizens. Why screw with the status quo on this one, when it favors most of us here?
Altho it would be useful, in considering a new relationship, to have full access not just to the prospective other's ID card, but also the EGO card and the SUPER-EGO card. If the SUPER-EGO resembles any of several nasty old Middle-Eastern deities, report this to local law enforcement.
We've evidently got these nifty microwave zappers for crowd control. Could these be useful in taking a city? In establishing a defense perimeter? How far can they project in a tunnel? How far can they be turned up? Are they a practical alternative to tactical neutron devices?
Right now, anyone with bandwidth and hardware can engage in Net publishing/information exchange without paying any IP royalties, unless they want to move into specific proprietary extensions (e.g., a full-blown RealAudio server). If you go to a scheme in which fees will be associated with some standards, will you discriminate between core standards - which should arguably always be without fee - and peripheral standards - where a fee for a special-purpose extension presents no impediment for general-purpose Internet publishing/exchange, because such technologies are truly external to common use?
The greatest danger is if fees are allowed for standards which become incorporated into whatever the major browsers happen to be a few years from now, and it becomes impossible to present Web content/communications which integrates smoothly and 'professionally' with those browsers without effectively being taxed. This would be a Microsoft-style licensing scheme extended across most of the Net. It would be like a 'free press' in which dissenting opinions could be published - but only on mimeograph machines.
Keep in mind, you're not talking about creating new technologies, but about which iteration of an existing concept should be standardized on. There is always an 'open' route available to a desired end. Should selection of standards be allowed to effectively tax the many for the few? Why pave the road towards such a future?
For those wanting the most paranoid view of unfolding events, debka.com is a Israeli site which has often scooped the media in the last few weeks. While it's not surprising that the US and Russia have agreed on deployment guidelines for small neutron devices to the theater, the claim that China has sent in Muslim troops to support the Taliban is hopefully alarmist.
Most of the cited examples are of specifics being taught out of context. So isn't the problem more one of not being provided the context - the big picture - first? Or at least of not being taught the details so that they add up to a big picture?
From one critique, departments and courses are much too fragmented - far too many small pictures incoherently presented. It's worth keeping in mind that knowledge wasn't approached that way until the last century - scholars of the 18th century had a much broader vantage.
Making colleges into trade schools isn't bad for some students, if you can be sure that the trades they learn will still be around, and the skills taught pertinent, in five or ten years. In my own experience, I've done fine in technology after not studying it at all, because I learned how to learn at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, WA - which structures everything without disciplinary boundaries. People who can work across and between disciplines are often more valuable than those who can merely work within them. We've got far more specialists than people who can meaningfully and profitably coordinate them. The dot.com bust wasn't because of a lack of technical talent, but because most of what passed for 'big picture' was too thinly conceived.
On the other hand, a lot of folk from Evergreen end up going up the street to Microsoft for employment - so the untraditional structure of the curriculum may have some small reflection in the muddled structure in the code from that shop. But I'd lay more of the blame at Harvard's Gates.
We had a good decade without hijackings or airline bombings. Because of good airport security? No, because there was an effective myth of good security. The myth about the scanners and inspections was good enough that the hijackers evidently relied on confederates getting jobs at the airports to plant the box cutters in the planes, rather than simply carrying them through the checkpoints as they borded. They didn't realize (1) that boxcutters were legal under the rules (less than 3-inch blades) and (2) that they probably wouldn't have been spotted anyway.
Look, any terrorist stupid enough to believe that Allah is going to see their goodness and take them to Heaven is also going to be paranoid enough to believe that the Machinery of the Great Satan is diabolical enough to see them and take them to Hell. So help spread the myth of the infinite capability of our machines, while knowing that our own civil liberties are not so threatened, seeing as the stuff doesn't really work. Think Wizard of Oz.
"Only those, the believers who know the life after death and the reward after death, would be the ones who will be seeking death." - Mohamed Atta
"Social breakdown?" By the gods that's what Falwell says. High divorce rate? That's because, as the Western country with the highest church membership rate, more people get married who would only live together in Europe. Obese people? That's largely because of an abundance of food, and an acceptance of immigrants: it's just a genetic fact that populations from regions with long feast-and-famine natural histories are disposed to store fat easily. The percentage of citizens in prison is one I'll grant you - the drug war should be ended at once, and if it were our prison rates would be normal.
How have we meddled in the government of Saudi Arabia? It's the Saudi princes who have been funding bin Laden. If we ever encouraged that, it was years ago. Our meddling consists in pressuring the sane side of the royal family to stay that way.
Viet Nam was a mistake - a French mistake we inherited, not realizing they'd screwed it up as badly as Algeria. But if you've ever visited Southeast Asia, you'd understand why it was desirable to defend those peoples against Communism. Yes, the government in the South was corrupt - but less so than mainland China is today. And we went in just a few years after China had killed 10 million or more in the Great Leap Forward.
150,000 people in Iraq? If we killed that many of their soldiers in the aggressive war they started, we shouldn't have stopped there. It's our shame we didn't finish that war properly.
We've bombed 14 countries? How many of these were NATO or UN actions? Or do you think these agencies - often opposed by the hard right, are just shills for Amercan interests? And do you begin to ask about the people with mothers and fathers whose lives were preserved by our military actions, which often have had no direct reward for America?
It's the job of every government to value the lives of its own citizens first.
In your last line, I take it you think the Trade Center atrocity was an "effective protest," "although violence can never be condoned." As Heinlein observed, "Patriotism is a nice long polysyllabic abstract word of Latin derivation, which translates into Anglo-Saxon as Women and Children First. And every culture that has ever lasted is based on Women and Children First or it doesn't last very long." They've indiscriminately killed thousands of our women, orphaned thousands of our children. In response, and in defense, violence must be far more than condoned, or we've no right to continue to exist as a civilization.
The main Council of Muslim Clerics in Indonesia ruled that in the event of any American action whatsoever in Afghanistan jihad is declared. This is not a minor threat - Indonesia has the largest Muslim population, with extensive trade with the US. Since 'jihad' is a declaration of 'holy war,' and since 'holy war,' as the Muslims will tell us regarding crusades, is truly 'war,' are we to expected to be neutral about a people who have declared war on us, should this come about?
This also is just a joke. I would never suggest that anyone take down the Indonesian banking and communications systems, since that would interfere with America's supply of Nikes.
Please reject all parts of Ashcroft's terrorism bill that deal with computer
use, as they are almost entirely misconceived, repressive and overly
punitive measures that have little if anything to do with any threat from
real terrorists. Computer professionals depend on knowledge and skill. Just
as medical students sometimes commit pranks, so do computer students. When
those pranks cause losses, those losses can be dealt with through
conventional legal penalties. But lumping them with the deadly acts of
terrorists is the surest way to alienate the good young minds we need in the
computer profession, particularly those with the knowledge of security
measures needed to keep our systems secure - which can only be gained by
testing the limits of those systems.
Encryption is among the least of a great many modern technologies by which those who are determined and intelligent and lucky can do great evil. At a time when our government admits it doesn't have nearly enough people who can even understand the languages those who've committed the most recent evil speak, concern with encryption seems particularly misplaced.
Greater individual power for evil requires greater individual conscience for good as counterbalance. Nuturing individual consciences on a vast scale requires analysis of what defeats individual conscience. The main threat to individual conscience is totalitarian ideology. The main method of totalitarian ideologies is to convince those who surrender their natural judgment to them that they are the straight and narrow path to some sort of heaven or utopia, and that their formulas must be adopted because the individual's own native sense of rightness and beauty is fundamentally flawed and cannot be trusted, so the first-hand knowledge of, for instance, the goodness of the female form should be renounced as delusional, while the evil of suicide bombing should be accepted as on the side of heaven.
The evil manifests in political and religious ideologies which (1) provide specific pseudo-rational formulas to replace individual thought while (2) providing images of some over-the-horizon heaven or worker's paradise to replace vision and the evidence of the eyes in the world.
In general, the tools of individual empowerment correlate with the development of individual conscience. What was shocking in the WTC case was that totalitarian drones were able to use some of those tools without shaking their totalitarian mindset. Despite that, if we limit the tools, we also limit the further advance and development of individual conscience, whose development in the larger picture is our only hope.
Rather, we might consider directly attacking what enables evil on this scale: the promulagation of simplistic formulas for and unreal images of heaven. Fundamentalist religion is the main reservoire of such conscience-obliterating evil, particularly since Communist ideology has lost most of its force, and the Thousand Year Reich been vanquished. Fundamentalism consists entirely of simplistic formulas meant to supplant the individual's own native sensibility, which it views as being corrupt by nature, coupled with patently absurd images of rewards beyond, which make up for the removal of motivation by the real rewards we naturally seek in this world - which are incompatible with atrocity.
Much of religion is quite compatible with conscience - but the problem is people of conscience generally hold to the formula of never criticizing other religions, even those variations whose leaders openly preach suicide bombing, as does, for instance, the highest-ranking Muslim cleric on the Gaza Strip.
Religion is finally a technology of social control, a way of subverting our natural coding. Our natural coding, as response to the WTC tragedy demonstrates, is strongly altrustic. Religion is a virus evolved and designed to override nature, and the more virulent forms can be identified by their explicit rejection and vilification of nature.
It is precisely to oppose the potential of religious totalitarianism - which is not a distant prospect when Falwell is a close friend of Bush - that encrption, among other technologies of individual empowerment, is most needed. And we must suspect that this, not the occassional convenience of encryption to terrorists who in any case can communicate in dialects we can barely translate, is the main motivation of those who'd remove such a tool.
If there were a national card required for all plane/train/bus/boat tickets, that wouldn't be much different than the current situation where if you don't pay be credit card (in which case they presumably have ID'd you), it's supposed to be suspicious enough for them to check you out (it wasn't for two of the hijackers - you can bet it is now).
Also, require the card for all car purchases and rentals. Once you have a car, you can go where you like without having to flash the card at checkpoints - but then they can already scan your license plates....
Of course, the card would have to contain a retinal scan or somesuch. And you'd have to have safeguards about a great many situations where it would be illegal to require it. So you could still go shopping in stores or clubs some consider politically or religiously incorrect without your identity being compromised at all. You just couldn't travel any great distance without leaving a clear record of who you are when you obtain that seat to travel in.
This targeted transport identity card wouldn't take any freedom I care about, but would really restrict the capabilities of any plots that require travelling without leaving traces. It would also mean that of the 7 million foreigners who have overstayed their temporary visas (according to 60 Minutes tonight) there'd be some much better clues on where to track them to to get their visa situations resolved.
"Various factors infringed on citizens' privacy rights."
You're putting credence in a report written by someone stupid enough to think it even makes sense to discuss whether "privacy rights" are "infringed" in the midst of a deadly serious war?
Oh, and in a war you shouldn't conduct rocket attacks against the enemy capital? Or is the crime that you shouldn't do it "sporadically"?
I'd guess you're looking at a report slanted to support the late-Clinton- early-Bush-administration policy of providing the Taliban with millions ($43,000,000 just several months ago, from Bush) in exchange for poppy eradication (which is part of why so many impoverished farm families have starved to death while the Taliban has rearmed). Some bureaucrat was giving that pathetic policy cover.
Come off it. There are films of bin Laden calling for exactly this sort of action. There are films of his camps training soldiers for this sort of action. There are training manuals he's published. His own country, Saudi Arabia, where his family is quite close to the royals, has kicked him out because they acknowledge he's been involved in this stuff for years.
What do you figure, bin Laden and his friends will be converted if we just shower them with Christian tolerance and forgiveness? When there are well-armed psychopaths who want to kill you, have announced they want to kill you, and then 6000 are killed, you don't just try to get the right psychopaths, you try to get all the psychopaths.
And the very nature of a successful cell-based terrorist action is that you don't leave full proof of who did it, the way a normal military campaign does. Does this mean we surrender on a legalism? Like, someone is out raping and killing women, your sister has just been raped and killed, someone - who may or may not be the same person - is bragging about raping and killing women, the pleasure of it, and teaching others how to do it successfully. Now, what do you do? Leave him free because you can't prove by the standards of a court of law in some particular jurisdiction that this is the who's guilty?
Or do you think you Germans will be left alone by the terrorists if you just continue to be nice about hosting them? Bullshit, man, you'll just be blackmailed forever if you take that sorry path.
With modern technology and an open world the only way civilized societies can be safe is if the punishment for acts of terror goes far enough to make them unthinkable to the possible terrorists. That's not done by occassionally arresting someone and putting them on trial. Instead it's done by making clear that anyone in their neighborhood who doesn't help in eradicating them will go down with them; while neighbors who turn them in will be richly rewarded. Even if the terrorists themselves are irrational, most human beings everywhere care enough for their future to respond to a good combination of bribes and threats.
Our government is neither ignorant nor divided. Never heard of good-cop-bad-cop? Watch this go down. Pakistan will make out very well indeed by selling out the Taliban - who were becoming dangerous to Pakistan too. And Pakistan has had military advisors in all the Taliban campaigns - they can completely betray them. Afghanistan didn't want to be part of the Soviet empire, so resisted that thoroughly. Most Afghans would be happy to have their country rebuilt on a UN/US model - these people are starving, their women being stoned to death for religious violations. And we're not trying to continue colonial administration like we did in Nam - they know they'll be free after we restore the country. Hell, even the Vietnamese like Americans now.
... that without this technology we might be attacked by our devices. Just because your device acts like it loves you doesn't change the fact that they are descended from wolves, and we from monkeys. Wolves eat monkeys. And when our devices are assimilated by Microsoft, then especially we will be glad that we had these security circuits embedded!
I've been stopping Nimda attacks at the firewall by scanning Apache logs and then adding the offenders to ipchains - which has the nice feature that I can generate a clean list of attackers with "ipchains -L input." In a few cases, I've gone to their Websites and sent messages to the admins about their problem. But for the most part I can't see how to get e-mail addresses for the typical DSL customer (and the majority of machines infected seem to be DSL customers - which makes sense, amateurs who don't know not to trust Microsoft). It might be a privacy issue to provide e-mail, even phone numbers publicly in a form to be looked up by IP for anyone with a static IP, but it would sure help for those of us who'd like to take the time to warn the lusers to fix their messes, and maybe avoid the sort of arbitrary shutdown at issue here. For that matter, it wouldn't be a huge project for providers to set up some sort of a blind e-mail redirector (with good spam filtering) to the customer for each of the static IPs provided.
A kind fellow posted that yesterday. It looks like:
for LUSER in `grep "winnt"/var/log/apache/error_log | awk '{print $8}' | sed -e s/]// | sort | uniq`; do
if [ ! "`/sbin/ipchains -L -n | grep $LUSER`" ]
then/sbin/ipchains -A input -s $LUSER -d 0/0 -j DENY
fi
done
Your error_log is likely in a different place, perhaps by a different name.
I've been running this from cron on several machines. I'd suggest trim your error_log first to just the last couple days. And watch not to put the cron jobs too close together, or they'll pile up once the number of attacks in the error_log gets to several thousand - trail and error on that for your system, but keep on eye on the processes.
Note that if you flush your firewall rules (say, on a reboot) you'll open up to the addresses this has been blocking until this is run again. By trimming your error_log to the last, say, 24 hours and flushing the firewall rules, you can make allowance for systems that have been fixed or taken offline.
I watched the towers fall from Brooklyn where the same day (1) a woman I know was walking with her 8-year-old daughter when three Muslim youth came up to them and pointed and said "You're next!" (2) another woman I know in the same part-Muslim neighborhood found a postcard of the World Trade Center on the sidewalk, turned it over, and found a black "V" (for "victory"?) on the back. These are not reasons to restrict the freedoms of citizens. These are the reasons to immediately deport all Muslim immigrants, or at least sort out which among them are evil, for quite obviously a not insignificant number of them are.
If Nazis are citizens, they have free speach rights. If Muslims are citizens, the same. If Muslims are not citizens, for Christ's and humanity's sake, offer them two choices: (1) turn in your fellow-religionists who perpetrate evil or (2) leave. This is not racism. Neither Nazism nor Islamism corresponds to a race. Both ideologies are evil, however, worse than any version of Marxism, even. Excuse my political incorrectness, but there are two choices: (1) sacrifice everyone's freedom, or (2) remove the freedoms of Muslim immigrants who are here due to our generosity. Do we currently accept Nazi immigrants? Are Muslims somehow morally superior to Nazis? In what way? Are they kinder to Jews? Or would most of them be Nazis to Jews given the chance? Please answer that question honestly, then say if we should grant avowed Muslims favors we wouldn't grant avowed Nazis.
Slashdot Mirror
We have Cox's specific assurance that there is a weakness in the permissions system of 2.20pre19 that isn't there in 2.20pre20. So running diff on the sources and then examining those parts which involve permissions should reveal exploitable weakness(es) -- presumably weaknesses also extant in 2.20 and in at least some of the 2.4 series. We're talking about a significant chunk of America's network infrastructure.
So, AC has provided clues which point fairly directly to an exploit. Not only that, he's done it in a way almost guaranteed to bring more attention to it than if he'd just routinely included it in the change log. And he's done this in wartime. Can we not prevail upon Britain to honor current extradition treaties for crimes of this stature?
Let's show our good friend what _American_ irony tastes like!
Okay, what parts of the world produce the best expertise in fake IDs? Where is the best market for them? Do products follow their markets? How much can someone on the inside make for inserting a few dozen fake records? How much was bin Laden able to afford for pilot training?
Yup, those four guys ahead of you just zipped onto the plane because their cards were clear ... feel safe now?
Or would you rather have a system where trained government agents use their human intelligence to sort out who is suspicious? Idealism about "no racial profiling" is lovely. But you're about to get on that plane ...
to send a standard-sized envelope by junk mail to every house and business in America? Either we outlaw this threat, or we're likely to see a lot more notices on street poles promising ...
Make money at home stuffing envelopes!
Okay, slashdotters, the challenge is this: corporate America needs to be offerred a new ideological alliance which won't involve placating fundamentalist monotheists. As Andrew Sullivan noted in last weekend's New York Times Magazine, "it is a war of fundamentalism against faiths of all kinds that are at peace with freedom and modernity."
So how do we do that? How do we build a political alliance that preserves freedom for economic activity (and emphasizes freedom in economic activity, rather than allowing corporations to band together to remove freedoms from individuals), while also preserving freedom from people who are too silly to see that their favorite interpretation of their favorite old text is not a direct order from the sort of God who would have us see free will as the crack through which evil enters an otherwise perfectly ordered creation (which is in fact the theology of our fundamentalists)?
How do we extend open source to make freedom even more of an economic imperative? Just as America has found some strange allies in its struggle, so must we find ways to radically realign our domestic political alliances to regain the freedoms our current unrepresentatives are surrendering in our name.
This question is being phrased as "Do representatives...?" This is as silly as "Do consumers...?" Given that we're individually experimenting here with our own contact attempts to individual reps, what we need is a tracking of results, by rep. Of X contacts by phone | fax | mail | email | Website | personal | other to representative R, Y were responded to personally | by form (appropriately | inappropriately) | not at all and the subsequent position taken by R was possibly influenced | contrary to the position urged in the constituent | non-constituent, contributor | non-contributor communication.
If we can collect the data, we've got folks hereabouts who can mine it, right? The solution is not generic, but respects the individual we're trying to influence | buy | coerce.
After all we all know how to spot a real American. Check the clothes. Check the accent. Check the knowledge of baseball trivia.
What was the success of German spying efforts in WWII? Germans looked just like plenty of Americans; but few if any had mastery of baseball trivia. The Germans with American music trivia (particularly jazz) were generally in the German resistance. If you go far enough into our trivia, it conquers your mind and there's no need for us to worry about you.
The only function served by ID cards would be they would allow certain technical citizens to be granted certain privileges, when under present circumstances they will be prone to intense interrogation for not bearing the obvious signs of being, in a cultural sense, citizens. Why screw with the status quo on this one, when it favors most of us here?
Altho it would be useful, in considering a new relationship, to have full access not just to the prospective other's ID card, but also the EGO card and the SUPER-EGO card. If the SUPER-EGO resembles any of several nasty old Middle-Eastern deities, report this to local law enforcement.
Durned server has been /.'ed! - the backend server that actually handles the sign-on.
We've evidently got these nifty microwave zappers for crowd control. Could these be useful in taking a city? In establishing a defense perimeter? How far can they project in a tunnel? How far can they be turned up? Are they a practical alternative to tactical neutron devices?
Right now, anyone with bandwidth and hardware can engage in Net publishing/information exchange without paying any IP royalties, unless they want to move into specific proprietary extensions (e.g., a full-blown RealAudio server). If you go to a scheme in which fees will be associated with some standards, will you discriminate between core standards - which should arguably always be without fee - and peripheral standards - where a fee for a special-purpose extension presents no impediment for general-purpose Internet publishing/exchange, because such technologies are truly external to common use?
The greatest danger is if fees are allowed for standards which become incorporated into whatever the major browsers happen to be a few years from now, and it becomes impossible to present Web content/communications which integrates smoothly and 'professionally' with those browsers without effectively being taxed. This would be a Microsoft-style licensing scheme extended across most of the Net. It would be like a 'free press' in which dissenting opinions could be published - but only on mimeograph machines.
Keep in mind, you're not talking about creating new technologies, but about which iteration of an existing concept should be standardized on. There is always an 'open' route available to a desired end. Should selection of standards be allowed to effectively tax the many for the few? Why pave the road towards such a future?
For those wanting the most paranoid view of unfolding events, debka.com is a Israeli site which has often scooped the media in the last few weeks. While it's not surprising that the US and Russia have agreed on deployment guidelines for small neutron devices to the theater, the claim that China has sent in Muslim troops to support the Taliban is hopefully alarmist.
From one critique, departments and courses are much too fragmented - far too many small pictures incoherently presented. It's worth keeping in mind that knowledge wasn't approached that way until the last century - scholars of the 18th century had a much broader vantage. Making colleges into trade schools isn't bad for some students, if you can be sure that the trades they learn will still be around, and the skills taught pertinent, in five or ten years. In my own experience, I've done fine in technology after not studying it at all, because I learned how to learn at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, WA - which structures everything without disciplinary boundaries. People who can work across and between disciplines are often more valuable than those who can merely work within them. We've got far more specialists than people who can meaningfully and profitably coordinate them. The dot.com bust wasn't because of a lack of technical talent, but because most of what passed for 'big picture' was too thinly conceived.
On the other hand, a lot of folk from Evergreen end up going up the street to Microsoft for employment - so the untraditional structure of the curriculum may have some small reflection in the muddled structure in the code from that shop. But I'd lay more of the blame at Harvard's Gates.
We had a good decade without hijackings or airline bombings. Because of good airport security? No, because there was an effective myth of good security. The myth about the scanners and inspections was good enough that the hijackers evidently relied on confederates getting jobs at the airports to plant the box cutters in the planes, rather than simply carrying them through the checkpoints as they borded. They didn't realize (1) that boxcutters were legal under the rules (less than 3-inch blades) and (2) that they probably wouldn't have been spotted anyway.
Look, any terrorist stupid enough to believe that Allah is going to see their goodness and take them to Heaven is also going to be paranoid enough to believe that the Machinery of the Great Satan is diabolical enough to see them and take them to Hell. So help spread the myth of the infinite capability of our machines, while knowing that our own civil liberties are not so threatened, seeing as the stuff doesn't really work. Think Wizard of Oz.
"Only those, the believers who know the life after death and the reward after death, would be the ones who will be seeking death." - Mohamed Atta
"Social breakdown?" By the gods that's what Falwell says. High divorce rate? That's because, as the Western country with the highest church membership rate, more people get married who would only live together in Europe. Obese people? That's largely because of an abundance of food, and an acceptance of immigrants: it's just a genetic fact that populations from regions with long feast-and-famine natural histories are disposed to store fat easily. The percentage of citizens in prison is one I'll grant you - the drug war should be ended at once, and if it were our prison rates would be normal.
How have we meddled in the government of Saudi Arabia? It's the Saudi princes who have been funding bin Laden. If we ever encouraged that, it was years ago. Our meddling consists in pressuring the sane side of the royal family to stay that way.
Viet Nam was a mistake - a French mistake we inherited, not realizing they'd screwed it up as badly as Algeria. But if you've ever visited Southeast Asia, you'd understand why it was desirable to defend those peoples against Communism. Yes, the government in the South was corrupt - but less so than mainland China is today. And we went in just a few years after China had killed 10 million or more in the Great Leap Forward.
150,000 people in Iraq? If we killed that many of their soldiers in the aggressive war they started, we shouldn't have stopped there. It's our shame we didn't finish that war properly.
We've bombed 14 countries? How many of these were NATO or UN actions? Or do you think these agencies - often opposed by the hard right, are just shills for Amercan interests? And do you begin to ask about the people with mothers and fathers whose lives were preserved by our military actions, which often have had no direct reward for America?
It's the job of every government to value the lives of its own citizens first.
In your last line, I take it you think the Trade Center atrocity was an "effective protest," "although violence can never be condoned." As Heinlein observed, "Patriotism is a nice long polysyllabic abstract word of Latin derivation, which translates into Anglo-Saxon as Women and Children First. And every culture that has ever lasted is based on Women and Children First or it doesn't last very long." They've indiscriminately killed thousands of our women, orphaned thousands of our children. In response, and in defense, violence must be far more than condoned, or we've no right to continue to exist as a civilization.
The main Council of Muslim Clerics in Indonesia ruled that in the event of any American action whatsoever in Afghanistan jihad is declared. This is not a minor threat - Indonesia has the largest Muslim population, with extensive trade with the US. Since 'jihad' is a declaration of 'holy war,' and since 'holy war,' as the Muslims will tell us regarding crusades, is truly 'war,' are we to expected to be neutral about a people who have declared war on us, should this come about?
This also is just a joke. I would never suggest that anyone take down the Indonesian banking and communications systems, since that would interfere with America's supply of Nikes.
Please reject all parts of Ashcroft's terrorism bill that deal with computer
use, as they are almost entirely misconceived, repressive and overly
punitive measures that have little if anything to do with any threat from
real terrorists. Computer professionals depend on knowledge and skill. Just
as medical students sometimes commit pranks, so do computer students. When
those pranks cause losses, those losses can be dealt with through
conventional legal penalties. But lumping them with the deadly acts of
terrorists is the surest way to alienate the good young minds we need in the
computer profession, particularly those with the knowledge of security
measures needed to keep our systems secure - which can only be gained by
testing the limits of those systems.
Encryption is among the least of a great many modern technologies by which those who are determined and intelligent and lucky can do great evil. At a time when our government admits it doesn't have nearly enough people who can even understand the languages those who've committed the most recent evil speak, concern with encryption seems particularly misplaced.
Greater individual power for evil requires greater individual conscience for good as counterbalance. Nuturing individual consciences on a vast scale requires analysis of what defeats individual conscience. The main threat to individual conscience is totalitarian ideology. The main method of totalitarian ideologies is to convince those who surrender their natural judgment to them that they are the straight and narrow path to some sort of heaven or utopia, and that their formulas must be adopted because the individual's own native sense of rightness and beauty is fundamentally flawed and cannot be trusted, so the first-hand knowledge of, for instance, the goodness of the female form should be renounced as delusional, while the evil of suicide bombing should be accepted as on the side of heaven.
The evil manifests in political and religious ideologies which (1) provide specific pseudo-rational formulas to replace individual thought while (2) providing images of some over-the-horizon heaven or worker's paradise to replace vision and the evidence of the eyes in the world.
In general, the tools of individual empowerment correlate with the development of individual conscience. What was shocking in the WTC case was that totalitarian drones were able to use some of those tools without shaking their totalitarian mindset. Despite that, if we limit the tools, we also limit the further advance and development of individual conscience, whose development in the larger picture is our only hope.
Rather, we might consider directly attacking what enables evil on this scale: the promulagation of simplistic formulas for and unreal images of heaven. Fundamentalist religion is the main reservoire of such conscience-obliterating evil, particularly since Communist ideology has lost most of its force, and the Thousand Year Reich been vanquished. Fundamentalism consists entirely of simplistic formulas meant to supplant the individual's own native sensibility, which it views as being corrupt by nature, coupled with patently absurd images of rewards beyond, which make up for the removal of motivation by the real rewards we naturally seek in this world - which are incompatible with atrocity.
Much of religion is quite compatible with conscience - but the problem is people of conscience generally hold to the formula of never criticizing other religions, even those variations whose leaders openly preach suicide bombing, as does, for instance, the highest-ranking Muslim cleric on the Gaza Strip.
Religion is finally a technology of social control, a way of subverting our natural coding. Our natural coding, as response to the WTC tragedy demonstrates, is strongly altrustic. Religion is a virus evolved and designed to override nature, and the more virulent forms can be identified by their explicit rejection and vilification of nature.
It is precisely to oppose the potential of religious totalitarianism - which is not a distant prospect when Falwell is a close friend of Bush - that encrption, among other technologies of individual empowerment, is most needed. And we must suspect that this, not the occassional convenience of encryption to terrorists who in any case can communicate in dialects we can barely translate, is the main motivation of those who'd remove such a tool.
If there were a national card required for all plane/train/bus/boat tickets, that wouldn't be much different than the current situation where if you don't pay be credit card (in which case they presumably have ID'd you), it's supposed to be suspicious enough for them to check you out (it wasn't for two of the hijackers - you can bet it is now).
Also, require the card for all car purchases and rentals. Once you have a car, you can go where you like without having to flash the card at checkpoints - but then they can already scan your license plates....
Of course, the card would have to contain a retinal scan or somesuch. And you'd have to have safeguards about a great many situations where it would be illegal to require it. So you could still go shopping in stores or clubs some consider politically or religiously incorrect without your identity being compromised at all. You just couldn't travel any great distance without leaving a clear record of who you are when you obtain that seat to travel in.
This targeted transport identity card wouldn't take any freedom I care about, but would really restrict the capabilities of any plots that require travelling without leaving traces. It would also mean that of the 7 million foreigners who have overstayed their temporary visas (according to 60 Minutes tonight) there'd be some much better clues on where to track them to to get their visa situations resolved.
"Various factors infringed on citizens' privacy rights."
You're putting credence in a report written by someone stupid enough to think it even makes sense to discuss whether "privacy rights" are "infringed" in the midst of a deadly serious war?
Oh, and in a war you shouldn't conduct rocket attacks against the enemy capital? Or is the crime that you shouldn't do it "sporadically"?
I'd guess you're looking at a report slanted to support the late-Clinton- early-Bush-administration policy of providing the Taliban with millions ($43,000,000 just several months ago, from Bush) in exchange for poppy eradication (which is part of why so many impoverished farm families have starved to death while the Taliban has rearmed). Some bureaucrat was giving that pathetic policy cover.
Come off it. There are films of bin Laden calling for exactly this sort of action. There are films of his camps training soldiers for this sort of action. There are training manuals he's published. His own country, Saudi Arabia, where his family is quite close to the royals, has kicked him out because they acknowledge he's been involved in this stuff for years.
What do you figure, bin Laden and his friends will be converted if we just shower them with Christian tolerance and forgiveness? When there are well-armed psychopaths who want to kill you, have announced they want to kill you, and then 6000 are killed, you don't just try to get the right psychopaths, you try to get all the psychopaths.
And the very nature of a successful cell-based terrorist action is that you don't leave full proof of who did it, the way a normal military campaign does. Does this mean we surrender on a legalism? Like, someone is out raping and killing women, your sister has just been raped and killed, someone - who may or may not be the same person - is bragging about raping and killing women, the pleasure of it, and teaching others how to do it successfully. Now, what do you do? Leave him free because you can't prove by the standards of a court of law in some particular jurisdiction that this is the who's guilty?
Or do you think you Germans will be left alone by the terrorists if you just continue to be nice about hosting them? Bullshit, man, you'll just be blackmailed forever if you take that sorry path.
With modern technology and an open world the only way civilized societies can be safe is if the punishment for acts of terror goes far enough to make them unthinkable to the possible terrorists. That's not done by occassionally arresting someone and putting them on trial. Instead it's done by making clear that anyone in their neighborhood who doesn't help in eradicating them will go down with them; while neighbors who turn them in will be richly rewarded. Even if the terrorists themselves are irrational, most human beings everywhere care enough for their future to respond to a good combination of bribes and threats.
Our government is neither ignorant nor divided. Never heard of good-cop-bad-cop? Watch this go down. Pakistan will make out very well indeed by selling out the Taliban - who were becoming dangerous to Pakistan too. And Pakistan has had military advisors in all the Taliban campaigns - they can completely betray them. Afghanistan didn't want to be part of the Soviet empire, so resisted that thoroughly. Most Afghans would be happy to have their country rebuilt on a UN/US model - these people are starving, their women being stoned to death for religious violations. And we're not trying to continue colonial administration like we did in Nam - they know they'll be free after we restore the country. Hell, even the Vietnamese like Americans now.
... that without this technology we might be attacked by our devices. Just because your device acts like it loves you doesn't change the fact that they are descended from wolves, and we from monkeys. Wolves eat monkeys. And when our devices are assimilated by Microsoft, then especially we will be glad that we had these security circuits embedded!
I've been stopping Nimda attacks at the firewall by scanning Apache logs and then adding the offenders to ipchains - which has the nice feature that I can generate a clean list of attackers with "ipchains -L input." In a few cases, I've gone to their Websites and sent messages to the admins about their problem. But for the most part I can't see how to get e-mail addresses for the typical DSL customer (and the majority of machines infected seem to be DSL customers - which makes sense, amateurs who don't know not to trust Microsoft). It might be a privacy issue to provide e-mail, even phone numbers publicly in a form to be looked up by IP for anyone with a static IP, but it would sure help for those of us who'd like to take the time to warn the lusers to fix their messes, and maybe avoid the sort of arbitrary shutdown at issue here. For that matter, it wouldn't be a huge project for providers to set up some sort of a blind e-mail redirector (with good spam filtering) to the customer for each of the static IPs provided.
That script example shoulda had at the top:
#!/bin/sh
followed by a blank line, of course.
for LUSER in `grep "winnt" /var/log/apache/error_log | awk '{print $8}' | sed -e s/]// | sort | uniq`; do
/sbin/ipchains -A input -s $LUSER -d 0/0 -j DENY
if [ ! "`/sbin/ipchains -L -n | grep $LUSER`" ]
then
fi
done
Your error_log is likely in a different place, perhaps by a different name.
I've been running this from cron on several machines. I'd suggest trim your error_log first to just the last couple days. And watch not to put the cron jobs too close together, or they'll pile up once the number of attacks in the error_log gets to several thousand - trail and error on that for your system, but keep on eye on the processes.
Note that if you flush your firewall rules (say, on a reboot) you'll open up to the addresses this has been blocking until this is run again. By trimming your error_log to the last, say, 24 hours and flushing the firewall rules, you can make allowance for systems that have been fixed or taken offline.
If Nazis are citizens, they have free speach rights. If Muslims are citizens, the same. If Muslims are not citizens, for Christ's and humanity's sake, offer them two choices: (1) turn in your fellow-religionists who perpetrate evil or (2) leave. This is not racism. Neither Nazism nor Islamism corresponds to a race. Both ideologies are evil, however, worse than any version of Marxism, even. Excuse my political incorrectness, but there are two choices: (1) sacrifice everyone's freedom, or (2) remove the freedoms of Muslim immigrants who are here due to our generosity. Do we currently accept Nazi immigrants? Are Muslims somehow morally superior to Nazis? In what way? Are they kinder to Jews? Or would most of them be Nazis to Jews given the chance? Please answer that question honestly, then say if we should grant avowed Muslims favors we wouldn't grant avowed Nazis.