" . . . take a look at how great the democrats have done in areas like detroit (falling apart more every day) or seattle (crime skyrocketing), southern california (rampant unemployment), new york (do i even need to say anything here). With out fail, blue leadership has been killing all our major cities."
Detroit is the result of being dependent on one industry that is changing, not "the democrats". Seattle does not have skyrocketing crime. Southern California's "rampant unemployment" is no different than many other parts of the country, such as Florida, where I live. No, you don't need to say anything about New York; its a vibrant, successful city, one of the great cities of the World. "All our major cities" do not have uniformly Democratic leadership, nor are they failing.
"The Linux community, along with Google's new Android mobile platform, offer even less in terms of minimum standards and quality control, resulting in software that is often free but usually unfinished and typically inaccessible to anyone outside of dedicated tinkerers and hobbyists. While examples of fine open source client software exists, there is no available market driving this kind of development financially."
From "http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/":
"SETI@home is a scientific experiment that uses Internet-connected
computers in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). You
can participate by running a free program that downloads and analyzes
radio telescope data. "
"The SETI@home program is a special kind of screensaver. Like other
screensavers it starts up when you leave your computer unattended, and
it shuts down as soon as you return to work. What it does in the interim
is unique. While you are getting coffee, or having lunch or sleeping,
your computer will be helping the Search for Extraterrestrial
Intelligence by analyzing data specially captured by the world's largest
radio telescope. "
"The client/screensaver is available for download only from this web page
- we do not support SETI@home software obtained elsewhere. This software
will upload and download data only from our data server here at Berkeley.
The data server doesn't download any executable code to your computer.
All in all, the screensaver is much safer than the browser you're running
right now!"
There are currently over four million registered users of seti@home. Over
half a million of these users are "active"; they have returned at least one
result within the last four weeks.
THE VULNERABILITIES
The seti@home clients use the HTTP protocol to download new workunits, user
information and to register new users. The implementation leaves two
security vulnerabilities:
1) All information is send in plaintext across the network. This
information includes the processor type and the operating system of the
machine seti@home is running on.
2) There is a bufferoverflow in the server responds handler. Sending an
overly large string followed by a newline ('\n') character to the client
will trigger this overflow. This has been tested with various versions of
the client. All versions are presumed to have this flaw in some form.
3) A similar buffer overflow seems to affect the main seti@home server at
shserver2.ssl.berkeley.edu. It closes the connection after receiving a
too large string of bytes followed by a '\n'.
THE TECHNIQUE
1) Sniffing the information exposed by the seti@home client is trivial and
very usefull to a malicious person planning an attack on a network. A
passive scan of machines on a network can be made using any packetsniffer
to grab the information from the network.
2) All tested clients have similar buffer overflows, which allowed
setting eip to an arbitrairy value which can lead to arbitrairy code
execution. An attacker would have to reroute the connection the client
tries to make to the seti@home webserver to a machine he or she controls.
This can be done using various widely available spoofing tools. Seti@home
also has the ability to use a HTTP-proxy, an attacker could also use the
machine the PROXY runs on as a base for this attack. Routers can also be
used as a base for this attack.
More like, not worked. The first step to making a political point is to show up. And calling this a "digital demonstrations" doesn't make it any less a DDOS.
Luckily, both these points are addressed in the article. The one you read before posting . ..
For the second point, see the article; its too long to post here. For the first point, you ask how a guess can be made without precise data. With precise data, its not a guess; that's the definition of a guess. As for how he did it:
He estimated the maximum number of logical operations the Universe has performed by calculating its total energy with Einstein's E = mc2. The energy of any physical system determines how fast it can switch from one quantum state to another - how fast it can compute.
I was browsing nVidia's forum over @ Fools, and there was a link to Reactor Critical. Here's what they have to say about NV25.
Long-awaited NV25 based adapters. This graphics processor that have similar capabilities compared with XGPU is a lot more powerful than GeForce3 Ti500. Since it is manufactured using 0.13 microns technology, it has a lot of chances to be clocked at the very high levels. The GPU comes in January/February 2002, while professional boards should be available in the second quarter.
ELSA is going to launch two boards based on NV25GL processor, both supports two LCD monitors, though, we do not know whether there are two integrated TMDS transmitters or only one and the second is external.
NV25 that works on 275 MHz. 128 MB DDR SDRAM @ 250 MHz.
NV25 that works on 300 MHz. 128 MB DDR SDRAM @ 330 MHz.
So, this is what a high-end NV25 part *might* look like...
* Rumoured 6 Pixel pipelines
* Core freq: 300 MHz.
* Memory: 660 MHz. (eff) ~ 10.5 GB/sec BW, assuming they stay with 128-bit data paths.
* Supports TwinView
* Supports (finally) Hardware iDCT
* More powerful T&L unit, to include a second Vertex Shader
* Can't find the link, but there's a rumour stating that we can expect Voodoo5 5500-esque Anti-Aliasing feature. The presumption is that the NV25 will bring a Rotated-Grid AA implementation to the table.
*.13u Manufacturing process
It really does sound like a pretty amazing chip. I would be willing to bet we'll be hearing a lot more in the way of rumours as the New Year approaches.
So it has:
* 74MHz ARM7 Cirrus processor
* Runs a tiny version of Debian Linux
* 4MB of DRAM
* 512KB of flash memory
* CS8900 based 10MB ethernet interface but it only does:
* Catalog the digital music files on your computer system.
* Communicate with the Digital Audio Player.
As he said: That's it. And you don't have options to play with those two either. It is truly as if SonicBlue had a meeting and said, "What is the absolute, minimal amount of work we can do to make this piece of software work?". It then appears that they took that list of minimums and cut it in half. It is barebones, to say the least.
It would have been easy to add some decent bells and whistles. I think they really missed the boat with this one.
CNN.COM has this article on China's space program planning to send a man to the moon.
Actually, they're quite cagey about the Moon thing.
Sun Laiyan, vice director of the China National Space Administration, declined to give any details of the moon exploration plan other than that it was part of China's space industry plans.
Of course, they dead set against "militarizing outer space". Oh yeah, such peaceful people; naturally they're against that. For us, anyway.
. . . many people think record companies are just plain bad. Why is that? . . . Perhaps it's because of the way record companies make their money: they make it from our heroes, the musical artists.
All notions of musical parasitism aside, record companies perform the critical functions that allow artists to reach the masses.
No, musical parasitism not aside, technology has made the Big Five as relevant as buggy whip manufacturers.. Perhaps its their illicit oligopoly that offends the customers. Or just the use of that monopoly-like position to crush as much opposition as possible.
When you first sit down to play Metal Gear Solid 2, you assume the role of Snake for the opening sequence. But soon the tables turn--Snake disappears and you take control of Raiden. It's a twist that even the most die-hard Metal Gear fans surely won't be expecting.
Oh, right. Except its all over the Internet. Like movie trailers that give it all away.
"You see this callus on my finger?" Kojima asks. "Well, that's from me using so many highlighters to go through all the bugs. I use up at least two highlighter pens a day."
For those of you interested in Darwin Awards, here is the X-Prize site. Here is Robert A. Braeunig's page on how to do it, orbital mechanics and the like. Space.com usually carries the X-prize news. For those of you wondering about the difference between an Ariane and a Proteus, here is the glossary
Most of the Western nations have mutual extradition, and other law enforcement, treaties. Suddenly, the nation with the most intolerant attitude sets the "standard" for all of us. Something has to give.
Tiemann, who was head of the open-source programming tool company Cygnus before Red Hat acquired it, warned that moving to a proprietary model is no miracle cure. A faltering open-source company shouldn't expect instant revenue by closing the source code in the next edition--an approach Cygnus tried but abandoned.
Hey, if you have almost no business model, and your whole business plan fits on half a sheet of paper, it turns out that neither open source, nor closed source is a magic pill of salvation. Who'da guessed that. Darn, this entrepreneur thing is hard
No, I'm not a social introvert. My cow-orkers were picked by HR. Yeah, right, there's a good filter for close, personal friendship. I pick my friends, and the overlap has thus far been slim, although anything might happen.
November 19, 2001
Companies Compete to Provide Saudi Internet Veil
By JENNIFER 8. LEE
Saudi men chat and browse a censored Internet in a hotel in Riyadh. Other Muslim nations, including Pakistan and the United Arab Emirates, are considering adding software filters on domestic Web use, and Western companies are eager to provide them.
Nearly a dozen software companies, most of them American, are competing for a contract to help Saudi Arabia block access to Web sites the Saudi government deems inappropriate for that nation's half- million Internet users.
For the companies, the Saudi account would be important not only for the direct revenue -- which analysts say could be worth several million dollars -- but also for its value as a flagship that could help win similar contracts from other governments.
Pornographic sites, the biggest Internet business in other countries, make up the overwhelming majority of the sites blocked in Saudi Arabia, distantly followed by sites that may be sensitive for political or religious reasons.
To critics of the sale of content filters, software company executives say that they are only providing politically neutral tools. "Once we sell them the product, we can't enforce how they use it," said Matthew Holt, a sales executive for Secure Computing (news/quote ), of San Jose, Calif., that currently provides Internet-filtering software to the Saudi government under a contract that expires in 2003.
Secure Computing hopes to renew that contract but has competition from at least 10 other companies from the United States, Britain, Germany and the Netherlands.
"This would be a terrific deal to win -- an important deal to win," said Geoff Haggart, a vice president at Websense (news/quote ), a San Diego company that has begun a software trial with the Saudi government and is considered a top contender for its contact.
Websense's current clients include more than half of the Fortune 500 companies, the United States Army and Saudi Aramco, the large Saudi oil company. Other software that Saudi Arabia has considered includes products from Surf Control, a London company; N2H2, of Seattle; and Symantec, a Cupertino, Calif., company.
Within the Islamic world, religious sensitivities and security-conscious regimes can combine to create a technophobic atmosphere. Governments in Muslim nations, among them Pakistan and the United Arab Emirates, have made overtures to Internet filtering companies. But no Muslim nation has been as active a user of the software as has Saudi Arabia. By royal decree, virtually all public Internet traffic to and from Saudi Arabia has been funneled through a single control center outside Riyadh since the Internet was introduced in the kingdom nearly three years ago.
If the Riyadh center blocks a site, a warning screen pops up warning the user, in English and Arabic, "Access to the requested URL is not allowed!"
"The Internet is a frightening place to some people," said Mr. Holt, who oversees sales operations in the Middle East for Secure Computing. "The government feels the need to intervene."
In Saudi Arabia, the government spent two years designing a centralized control system before gingerly opening the spigot to the Internet in February 1999. At the time, the government selected Secure Computing's SmartFilter software from four competing products from the United States, in part because the company offered a discount. The company and Saudi officials declined to disclose the contract terms.
SmartFilter came with ready-made categories like pornography and gambling and was customized to include specific sites the Saudis perceived as defaming Islam or the royal family.
With the Secure Computing contract set to expire in little more than a year, rivals are actively courting Saudi technology officials. The companies are promoting their expanded Arabic-language capabilities. They are selling their ease of customization for sites considered anti-Islam or anti-royal family. They are donating engineers to support trials, while steeply discounting their list prices. One German company even offered the service for free, according to an executive involved in the competition.
Corporate customers and the United States Army generally use filtering software to prevent their users from viewing pornography, gambling or otherwise frittering away time on the job. But Saudi Arabia is one of the countries with the most centralized control of Internet content of various types, according to a report by the advocacy group Reporters Without Borders.
Another country highlighted in the report is China, whose government blocks various foreign media and human rights Web sites by using domestic software. The United States government recently introduced a plan to establish a computer network to help Chinese residents circumvent their government's fire wall. But so far, Washington has not taken similar steps in Saudi Arabia, which brooks little political dissent but is one of the United States' closest allies among Middle Eastern Muslim nations.
"We have a really serious problem in terms of the American free speech idea," said Jack Balkin, a professor at the Yale Law School who studies the politics of Internet filtering. "But it is very American to make money. Between anticensorship and the desire to make money, the desire to make money will win out."
Saudi security agencies identify the political Web sites that are considered for inclusion on the blacklist. Among the banned sites are the Committee for the Defense of Human Rights in the Arabian Peninsula (www.cdrhap.com) and the Movement for Islamic Reform in Arabia (www.islah.org). Even some less politically charged sites, including ones that recount the history of Saudi Arabia, are blocked.
In response to Internet filtering, many Saudis either dial up foreign Internet service providers, use Web sites that protect the user's identity or engage in a cat-and-mouse game with Web sites that frequently change their addresses to elude filters. (For such sites, like the one operated by Islah.org, would-be visitors send e-mail to a fixed address and receive the new Web address.)
It is because filtering for an entire country is a logistically tricky task that the Saudi government is looking for new software. "It's not that we are unhappy with the product, we're just looking for a better solution," said Eyas S. al-Hajery, who plays a major role in the selection process and has evaluated various software filters.
The competition is up in the air, said Dr. Hajery, who directs the Information Security Center at King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology, the institution that serves as Saudi Arabia's Internet control valve. "We are very open to try other choices," he said.
The marketing pitches pour in weekly through e-mails, phone calls and in-person presentations. But the decision will have less to do with marketing than customer service after the sale, Dr. Hajery said.
Customer service is important because Saudi Arabia's filtering effort is so large in scope and so highly customized. The Saudi Internet staff says it tries to be reasonable within the guidelines, and it provides Web forms for users to request additions or removals from the blacklists.
Dr. Hajery says his staff of a dozen employees receives more than 500 suggestions a day from the public to block sites that the authorities have missed. The requests are reviewed by the staff and about half of them are ultimately added to the blacklist -- up to 7,000 URL's monthly. Many of the sites forbidden on religious grounds are gleaned through this process, since the staff members are primarily focused on ferreting out pornography sites, Dr. Hajery said. The center also receives more than 100 requests a day to remove specific sites from the blacklist -- many because they have been wrongfully characterized by the SmartFilter software, he said.
Secure Computing disputes this, saying that all of its sites are reviewed by people after being screened by the software.
Some sites become incidental victims to the government's broad snare. In August 2000, the Saudi government decided to block access to all Yahoo (news/quote ) online clubs because many clubs were popular for pornography. After the move elicited protest from people who use various Yahoo clubs to communicate about everything from engineering to cooking, the center began selectively unblocking nonpornographic Yahoo sites at users' requests.
Many Saudis support the government's ban on pornography. But sites banned for political reasons incite protests. A 28-year- old claims assistant at Royal and SunAlliance Insurance, who is a member of the Shiite minority in Saudi Arabia, where the majority of Muslims are Sunni, said in an e- mail interview that a Web site containing basic information about his village near the town of Qatif had been blocked.
He compared Internet filtering to the Saudi national emblem, two crossed swords below a date palm.
"You can look straight and eat from that palm tree as much as you want," he said, "but if you ever try to look to your right or left side, there'll be a sword waiting to chop off your head."
And every damn one of 'em isn't available anywhere around here. It never fails; whatever MB I pick out as the best isn't available.
1Alpha7
Advice to the Not Listening
on
Good to Great
·
· Score: 1
Many companies make the mistake of putting their master plan together, and then finding the right people to execute the plan. Hiring bright people is pointless if you've already done the thinking for them.
More advice the PHBs of the World will never be able to see. Maybe such analytical advice will fall on the fertile soil of the next generation.
Slashdot Mirror
" . . . take a look at how great the democrats have done in areas like detroit (falling apart more every day) or seattle (crime skyrocketing), southern california (rampant unemployment), new york (do i even need to say anything here). With out fail, blue leadership has been killing all our major cities."
Detroit is the result of being dependent on one industry that is changing, not "the democrats". Seattle does not have skyrocketing crime. Southern California's "rampant unemployment" is no different than many other parts of the country, such as Florida, where I live. No, you don't need to say anything about New York; its a vibrant, successful city, one of the great cities of the World. "All our major cities" do not have uniformly Democratic leadership, nor are they failing.
For larger voltages and amperages than 120v, 15 amp, a GFI breaker is used.
We designed one in the 50s. Did some serious research on the idea. When I was a kid in the 60s, it was still taken seriously.
"The Linux community, along with Google's new Android mobile platform, offer even less in terms of minimum standards and quality control, resulting in software that is often free but usually unfinished and typically inaccessible to anyone outside of dedicated tinkerers and hobbyists. While examples of fine open source client software exists, there is no available market driving this kind of development financially."
Lost in space? Does he use the same stuff I do?
Most computer skilled people prefer those same browsers. Its what I've got open at this moment, FF and Chrome.
Its not just the college graduates. We have the same problem with high school graduates for blue collar jobs.
Soul: Immortal spiritual being
Confirmed information leaking:
This issue affects all clients.
Confirmed remote exploitable:
setiathome-3.03.i386-pc-linux-gnu-gnulibc2.1
setiathome-3.03.i686-pc-linux-gnu-gnulibc2.1
setiathome-3.03.i386-pc-linux-gnulibc1-static
setiathome-3.03.i686-pc-linux-gnulibc1-static
setiathome-3.03.i386-winnt-cmdline.exe
i386-unknown-freebsd2.2.8 (Special thanks to Niels Heinen)
SETI@home.exe (v3.07 Screensaver)
Confirmed DoS-able using buffer overflow:
The main seti@home server at shserver2.ssl.berkeley.edu
Presumed vulnerable to buffer overflow:
All other clients.
PATCHED VERSION
Are available
BACKGROUND INFORMATION
From "http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/" :
"SETI@home is a scientific experiment that uses Internet-connected computers in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). You can participate by running a free program that downloads and analyzes radio telescope data. "
"The SETI@home program is a special kind of screensaver. Like other screensavers it starts up when you leave your computer unattended, and it shuts down as soon as you return to work. What it does in the interim is unique. While you are getting coffee, or having lunch or sleeping, your computer will be helping the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence by analyzing data specially captured by the world's largest radio telescope. "
"The client/screensaver is available for download only from this web page - we do not support SETI@home software obtained elsewhere. This software will upload and download data only from our data server here at Berkeley. The data server doesn't download any executable code to your computer. All in all, the screensaver is much safer than the browser you're running right now!"
There are currently over four million registered users of seti@home. Over half a million of these users are "active"; they have returned at least one result within the last four weeks.
THE VULNERABILITIES
The seti@home clients use the HTTP protocol to download new workunits, user information and to register new users. The implementation leaves two security vulnerabilities:
1) All information is send in plaintext across the network. This information includes the processor type and the operating system of the machine seti@home is running on.
2) There is a bufferoverflow in the server responds handler. Sending an overly large string followed by a newline ('\n') character to the client will trigger this overflow. This has been tested with various versions of the client. All versions are presumed to have this flaw in some form.
3) A similar buffer overflow seems to affect the main seti@home server at shserver2.ssl.berkeley.edu. It closes the connection after receiving a too large string of bytes followed by a '\n'.
THE TECHNIQUE
1) Sniffing the information exposed by the seti@home client is trivial and very usefull to a malicious person planning an attack on a network. A passive scan of machines on a network can be made using any packetsniffer to grab the information from the network.
2) All tested clients have similar buffer overflows, which allowed setting eip to an arbitrairy value which can lead to arbitrairy code execution. An attacker would have to reroute the connection the client tries to make to the seti@home webserver to a machine he or she controls. This can be done using various widely available spoofing tools. Seti@home also has the ability to use a HTTP-proxy, an attacker could also use the machine the PROXY runs on as a base for this attack. Routers can also be used as a base for this attack.
3) Exploitation of the bug in the server
"none have proven to be perfect"
More like, not worked. The first step to making a political point is to show up. And calling this a "digital demonstrations" doesn't make it any less a DDOS.
1 Alpha 7
Luckily, both these points are addressed in the article. The one you read before posting . . .
For the second point, see the article; its too long to post here. For the first point, you ask how a guess can be made without precise data. With precise data, its not a guess; that's the definition of a guess. As for how he did it:
He estimated the maximum number of logical operations the Universe has performed by calculating its total energy with Einstein's E = mc2. The energy of any physical system determines how fast it can switch from one quantum state to another - how fast it can compute.
In case you miss it 3/4 down the page:
NV25 Information
I was browsing nVidia's forum over @ Fools, and there was a link to Reactor Critical. Here's what they have to say about NV25.
Long-awaited NV25 based adapters. This graphics processor that have similar capabilities compared with XGPU is a lot more powerful than GeForce3 Ti500. Since it is manufactured using 0.13 microns technology, it has a lot of chances to be clocked at the very high levels. The GPU comes in January/February 2002, while professional boards should be available in the second quarter.
ELSA is going to launch two boards based on NV25GL processor, both supports two LCD monitors, though, we do not know whether there are two integrated TMDS transmitters or only one and the second is external.
NV25 that works on 275 MHz. 128 MB DDR SDRAM @ 250 MHz.
NV25 that works on 300 MHz. 128 MB DDR SDRAM @ 330 MHz.
So, this is what a high-end NV25 part *might* look like...
* Rumoured 6 Pixel pipelines .13u Manufacturing process
* Core freq: 300 MHz.
* Memory: 660 MHz. (eff) ~ 10.5 GB/sec BW, assuming they stay with 128-bit data paths.
* Supports TwinView
* Supports (finally) Hardware iDCT
* More powerful T&L unit, to include a second Vertex Shader
* Can't find the link, but there's a rumour stating that we can expect Voodoo5 5500-esque Anti-Aliasing feature. The presumption is that the NV25 will bring a Rotated-Grid AA implementation to the table.
*
It really does sound like a pretty amazing chip. I would be willing to bet we'll be hearing a lot more in the way of rumours as the New Year approaches.
I think that the good people at CERN would disagree with that statement.
You're thinking of Tim's development of the Web. The Interent and the Web are not synonymous.
1Alpha7
So it has:
* 74MHz ARM7 Cirrus processor
* Runs a tiny version of Debian Linux
* 4MB of DRAM
* 512KB of flash memory
* CS8900 based 10MB ethernet interface
but it only does:
* Catalog the digital music files on your computer system.
* Communicate with the Digital Audio Player.
As he said:
That's it. And you don't have options to play with those two either. It is truly as if SonicBlue had a meeting and said, "What is the absolute, minimal amount of work we can do to make this piece of software work?". It then appears that they took that list of minimums and cut it in half. It is barebones, to say the least.
It would have been easy to add some decent bells and whistles. I think they really missed the boat with this one.
1Alpha7
CNN.COM has this article on China's space program planning to send a man to the moon.
Actually, they're quite cagey about the Moon thing.
Sun Laiyan, vice director of the China National Space Administration, declined to give any details of the moon exploration plan other than that it was part of China's space industry plans.
Of course, they dead set against "militarizing outer space". Oh yeah, such peaceful people; naturally they're against that. For us, anyway.
1Alpha7
. . . many people think record companies are just plain bad. Why is that? . . . Perhaps it's because of the way record companies make their money: they make it from our heroes, the musical artists.
All notions of musical parasitism aside, record companies perform the critical functions that allow artists to reach the masses.
No, musical parasitism not aside, technology has made the Big Five as relevant as buggy whip manufacturers.. Perhaps its their illicit oligopoly that offends the customers. Or just the use of that monopoly-like position to crush as much opposition as possible.
1Alpha7
When you first sit down to play Metal Gear Solid 2, you assume the role of Snake for the opening sequence. But soon the tables turn--Snake disappears and you take control of Raiden. It's a twist that even the most die-hard Metal Gear fans surely won't be expecting.
Oh, right. Except its all over the Internet. Like movie trailers that give it all away.
1Alpha7
"You see this callus on my finger?" Kojima asks. "Well, that's from me using so many highlighters to go through all the bugs. I use up at least two highlighter pens a day."
Now that's thorough software development.
1Alpha7
For those of you interested in Darwin Awards, here is the X-Prize site. Here is Robert A. Braeunig's page on how to do it, orbital mechanics and the like. Space.com usually carries the X-prize news. For those of you wondering about the difference between an Ariane and a Proteus, here is the glossary
1Alpha7
Most of the Western nations have mutual extradition, and other law enforcement, treaties. Suddenly, the nation with the most intolerant attitude sets the "standard" for all of us. Something has to give.
1Alpha7
NSI is the worst registrar out there. Here is a list of registrars, any one of which is better than NSI. Personally, I use Bulk Register.
1ALpha7
Tiemann, who was head of the open-source programming tool company Cygnus before Red Hat acquired it, warned that moving to a proprietary model is no miracle cure. A faltering open-source company shouldn't expect instant revenue by closing the source code in the next edition--an approach Cygnus tried but abandoned.
Hey, if you have almost no business model, and your whole business plan fits on half a sheet of paper, it turns out that neither open source, nor closed source is a magic pill of salvation. Who'da guessed that. Darn, this entrepreneur thing is hard
1Alpha7
No, I'm not a social introvert. My cow-orkers were picked by HR. Yeah, right, there's a good filter for close, personal friendship. I pick my friends, and the overlap has thus far been slim, although anything might happen.
1Alpha7
God, I hate that registration crap.
November 19, 2001
Companies Compete to Provide Saudi Internet Veil
By JENNIFER 8. LEE
Saudi men chat and browse a censored Internet in a hotel in Riyadh. Other Muslim nations, including Pakistan and the United Arab Emirates, are considering adding software filters on domestic Web use, and Western companies are eager to provide them.
Nearly a dozen software companies, most of them American, are competing for a contract to help Saudi Arabia block access to Web sites the Saudi government deems inappropriate for that nation's half- million Internet users.
For the companies, the Saudi account would be important not only for the direct revenue -- which analysts say could be worth several million dollars -- but also for its value as a flagship that could help win similar contracts from other governments.
Pornographic sites, the biggest Internet business in other countries, make up the overwhelming majority of the sites blocked in Saudi Arabia, distantly followed by sites that may be sensitive for political or religious reasons.
To critics of the sale of content filters, software company executives say that they are only providing politically neutral tools. "Once we sell them the product, we can't enforce how they use it," said Matthew Holt, a sales executive for Secure Computing (news/quote ), of San Jose, Calif., that currently provides Internet-filtering software to the Saudi government under a contract that expires in 2003.Secure Computing hopes to renew that contract but has competition from at least 10 other companies from the United States, Britain, Germany and the Netherlands.
"This would be a terrific deal to win -- an important deal to win," said Geoff Haggart, a vice president at Websense (news/quote ), a San Diego company that has begun a software trial with the Saudi government and is considered a top contender for its contact.
Websense's current clients include more than half of the Fortune 500 companies, the United States Army and Saudi Aramco, the large Saudi oil company. Other software that Saudi Arabia has considered includes products from Surf Control, a London company; N2H2, of Seattle; and Symantec, a Cupertino, Calif., company.
Within the Islamic world, religious sensitivities and security-conscious regimes can combine to create a technophobic atmosphere. Governments in Muslim nations, among them Pakistan and the United Arab Emirates, have made overtures to Internet filtering companies. But no Muslim nation has been as active a user of the software as has Saudi Arabia. By royal decree, virtually all public Internet traffic to and from Saudi Arabia has been funneled through a single control center outside Riyadh since the Internet was introduced in the kingdom nearly three years ago.
If the Riyadh center blocks a site, a warning screen pops up warning the user, in English and Arabic, "Access to the requested URL is not allowed!"
"The Internet is a frightening place to some people," said Mr. Holt, who oversees sales operations in the Middle East for Secure Computing. "The government feels the need to intervene."
In Saudi Arabia, the government spent two years designing a centralized control system before gingerly opening the spigot to the Internet in February 1999. At the time, the government selected Secure Computing's SmartFilter software from four competing products from the United States, in part because the company offered a discount. The company and Saudi officials declined to disclose the contract terms.
SmartFilter came with ready-made categories like pornography and gambling and was customized to include specific sites the Saudis perceived as defaming Islam or the royal family.
With the Secure Computing contract set to expire in little more than a year, rivals are actively courting Saudi technology officials. The companies are promoting their expanded Arabic-language capabilities. They are selling their ease of customization for sites considered anti-Islam or anti-royal family. They are donating engineers to support trials, while steeply discounting their list prices. One German company even offered the service for free, according to an executive involved in the competition.
Corporate customers and the United States Army generally use filtering software to prevent their users from viewing pornography, gambling or otherwise frittering away time on the job. But Saudi Arabia is one of the countries with the most centralized control of Internet content of various types, according to a report by the advocacy group Reporters Without Borders.
Another country highlighted in the report is China, whose government blocks various foreign media and human rights Web sites by using domestic software. The United States government recently introduced a plan to establish a computer network to help Chinese residents circumvent their government's fire wall. But so far, Washington has not taken similar steps in Saudi Arabia, which brooks little political dissent but is one of the United States' closest allies among Middle Eastern Muslim nations.
"We have a really serious problem in terms of the American free speech idea," said Jack Balkin, a professor at the Yale Law School who studies the politics of Internet filtering. "But it is very American to make money. Between anticensorship and the desire to make money, the desire to make money will win out."
Saudi security agencies identify the political Web sites that are considered for inclusion on the blacklist. Among the banned sites are the Committee for the Defense of Human Rights in the Arabian Peninsula (www.cdrhap.com) and the Movement for Islamic Reform in Arabia (www.islah.org). Even some less politically charged sites, including ones that recount the history of Saudi Arabia, are blocked.
In response to Internet filtering, many Saudis either dial up foreign Internet service providers, use Web sites that protect the user's identity or engage in a cat-and-mouse game with Web sites that frequently change their addresses to elude filters. (For such sites, like the one operated by Islah.org, would-be visitors send e-mail to a fixed address and receive the new Web address.)
It is because filtering for an entire country is a logistically tricky task that the Saudi government is looking for new software. "It's not that we are unhappy with the product, we're just looking for a better solution," said Eyas S. al-Hajery, who plays a major role in the selection process and has evaluated various software filters.
The competition is up in the air, said Dr. Hajery, who directs the Information Security Center at King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology, the institution that serves as Saudi Arabia's Internet control valve. "We are very open to try other choices," he said.
The marketing pitches pour in weekly through e-mails, phone calls and in-person presentations. But the decision will have less to do with marketing than customer service after the sale, Dr. Hajery said.
Customer service is important because Saudi Arabia's filtering effort is so large in scope and so highly customized. The Saudi Internet staff says it tries to be reasonable within the guidelines, and it provides Web forms for users to request additions or removals from the blacklists.
Dr. Hajery says his staff of a dozen employees receives more than 500 suggestions a day from the public to block sites that the authorities have missed. The requests are reviewed by the staff and about half of them are ultimately added to the blacklist -- up to 7,000 URL's monthly. Many of the sites forbidden on religious grounds are gleaned through this process, since the staff members are primarily focused on ferreting out pornography sites, Dr. Hajery said. The center also receives more than 100 requests a day to remove specific sites from the blacklist -- many because they have been wrongfully characterized by the SmartFilter software, he said.
Secure Computing disputes this, saying that all of its sites are reviewed by people after being screened by the software.
Some sites become incidental victims to the government's broad snare. In August 2000, the Saudi government decided to block access to all Yahoo (news/quote ) online clubs because many clubs were popular for pornography. After the move elicited protest from people who use various Yahoo clubs to communicate about everything from engineering to cooking, the center began selectively unblocking nonpornographic Yahoo sites at users' requests.
Many Saudis support the government's ban on pornography. But sites banned for political reasons incite protests. A 28-year- old claims assistant at Royal and SunAlliance Insurance, who is a member of the Shiite minority in Saudi Arabia, where the majority of Muslims are Sunni, said in an e- mail interview that a Web site containing basic information about his village near the town of Qatif had been blocked.
He compared Internet filtering to the Saudi national emblem, two crossed swords below a date palm.
"You can look straight and eat from that palm tree as much as you want," he said, "but if you ever try to look to your right or left side, there'll be a sword waiting to chop off your head."
And every damn one of 'em isn't available anywhere around here. It never fails; whatever MB I pick out as the best isn't available.
1Alpha7
Many companies make the mistake of putting their master plan together, and then finding the right people to execute the plan. Hiring bright people is pointless if you've already done the thinking for them.
More advice the PHBs of the World will never be able to see. Maybe such analytical advice will fall on the fertile soil of the next generation.
1Alpha7