The problem here is that SEVEN carriers carry almost all traffic in the US. Most smaller cities are only served by four or less.
If you live in Portland, you have three choices in peering. All of them are large corporations. If those three decide to block your traffic, you have no recourse other than to leave the state, or invest $100 billion in creating a new backbone, and then arrange peering agreements with all of these companies AND provide direct connectivity to the content you want published.
The problem isn't necessarily Fox News, because they have a substantial demographic, but rather, for smaller groups. Sure, it is nice to think about blocking the KKK or something similar, but what about other somewhat fringe groups like radical libertarians. The first amendment says the government cannot prevent their speech, but what if three major backbone companies decide to restrict it? They are effectively wiped away. There is no "soap box" if you are compelled to stay inside your "virtual" house by corporate owners.
The government stepped in (rightly) when the 19th centry mega-corporations began to dictate local laws with their wholly-owned corporate shantytowns, where employees were required to live.
But in a digital era, when more jobs are going online and most communication is online, a corporation restricting speech is just as dangerous as the government doing it, because the corporation is the de-facto government of the internet, by the nature of their control over its traffic...
Unless there is some rule that says otherwise.
I regard net neutrality akin to the first amendment or the anit-monopoly laws in "meat space". They are simply that important.
Socially, America is in the 90th percentile of "right" leaning countries.
There are plenty of issues where it falls "extreme right" in the midst of few peers, such as Somalia, Saudi Arabia, Iran, etc.
There are other issues where the US is "center" by the rest of the world's standards (not just talking Europe). There are virtually NO issues where the US falls left of center by a global standard.
This guys was forging documents from his circuit agreements and things. You can't call Verizon to ask about someone else's account. You have to rely on the documentation the colo gives you.
I would bet that at least one of those 300 customers had asked for proof of current accounts and things like that and was provided such (fradulently) by the colo owner.
It's too bad they had to be pulled in. It seems to me that the FBI could have made an effort to clone the systems and at least return some of it.
The CPU/RAM/Motherboard of the systems in question is NOT of value to the investigation, other than for leverage and fear and financial detriment.
The companies who had their systems taken would probably have not balked at all if the servers had been returned in a week, without drives. I'd wager they may even pay the costs of having the drives forensically duplicated so they could get their stuff back online. That is much cheaper than the business loss that was a result.
Of course, everyone should do backups, etc. It just seems rather strong-arm to take that much equipment, including power strips, cabinets, rack mounting gear, third party documentation and the like.
It is old news, yes. But tell that to the 300 OTHER businesses who had their equipment siezed, 100 of which subsequently went out of business, likely at least partially as a result of this FBI action.
Seizing the power strips and cabinets and even the books full of system documentation from OTHER COMPANIES not involved in the fraud, other than to be physically located near the suspected fraud.
I will be royally pissed if this idiot turd makes the banks change their rules to wait for 2 weeks after the posting of a check.
Understand? There's two options.
1) Post checks rather quickly, assuming that most are good, and letting you take a bit of the risk
2) Hold on to all checks for 2-4 weeks before releasing the funds, royally screwing people like landlords, or any other business or individual who collects checks and then needs to use those checks to pay other expenses.
Your idea is terrible. You can't have you cake and eat it too.
The problem is that they had expectations from the old "Stargate" fans. the bad guys would be unspeakably evil and have minions of bald dark skinned servants and giant gold head dresses and names like "Aphophis". And the hero is ALWAYS captured by the bad guy half way through the episode and it ALWAYS looks hopeless, but they are ALWAYS rescued in the last 3 minutes through some absurdly improbably confluence of events with absolutely no casualties.
This is what they expected, and didn't get, therefore this show is "emo and too dramatic". It's "too dark".
I agree, its the only show I still watch on regular TV. Now I can cancel my cable and save $50/mo. Sweet.
I'm not sure if you've ever experienced being forcibly removed from your own life for a period of months, but I know a few people who have and those real people make these characters on the show seem downright stoic.
To me it seems pretty realistic, though people who have never suffered much in their life might find it a bit corny to witness exactly how much that upsets people.
LOL. "Adult" has nothign to do with sex. Steamy sex scenes in a scifi drama screams "teenage boys, come watch!!!".
The concepts of intractable moral dillemmas is what makes good fiction. The decision between two evils is powerful.
SG-1, Star Trek, etc gets out of this by always finding "magical third answer that saves everyone with no casualties" but that's so trite as to be almost funny sometimes.
Having some character flaws is valuable to a good story.
He's a colonel you turd, and the whole POINT of the show is looking at the mistakes people make when put in a tough situation.
The drivel in most SciFi is the fact that everyone always responds by formula, rather than acting as flawed people that humans essentially are. The faulty assumption is that some high technology automatically improves the people behind it too.
Do you think people find "Apocalypse Now" hackneyed and fake because they often fucked up in the face of difficult situations? Or do people watch it and say "wow, people are messed up sometimes." and understand its a great story with messed up characters?
Sheesh. I'm so tired of the clinical "he's a general, therefor he is always perfect" and "he's an evil doer, so whatever he does is insanely evil" style of sterilized scifi. It's just painful to watch.
SGU was the antithesis of SG-1. SG-1 was scifi kitch, almost to the max. Aliens pretending to be gods, everyone has big grandious sounding Latin names, regardless of what planet they are from.
SGU was a subdued psychological sci-fi.
Personally, I ALMOST didn't watch SGU at all because SG-1 and SGA were terrible. But I really like SGU.
Never been much of a fan of the cardboard "fire moon from hell" sets and "all teh super-villains wear gigantic gold headdress and have uuber transparent names like 'Anubis' and parade around speaking like some Marvel comic bad guy"
"haha! Now I have the power of the [insert ancient race here], with which my minions will crush your puny planet. But first, I must imprision the same four people in my lava-filled prison planet and chain you up with fake looking vines and give you three hours to escape. Ha Ha! Bow before me."
After the tenth episode of that, I was just about done, and then they introduced uhm "Merlin". Yeah, srsly?
While I disagree with the US and French movements in the direction of freedom, I do feel compelled to point out a factual error, and/or ask for clarification.
France GDP per capita is only 75% of the US. While it has climbed somewhat since the 1960s when it was only 60% of the US per capita, I'm not quite sure what you mean by "higher cut of GDP".
That wouldn't be because they cover the elderly, who account for a massive majority of the required care, would it?
Medicare is far more efficient, on a "per capita expenditures vs services paid" and "overhead introduced to the system" basis than most private health care.
Actually, there was. They were called "Jim Crow" laws, and they allowed separation of races in public spaces and provided punishments for those who refused to comply.
Rosa Parks was arrested and served time in jail for refusing to stand up for a white man. The law mandated that she obey the driver regarding the segregation of the seating on the bus.
Quote:
Jim Crow laws in various states required the segregation of races in such common areas as restaurants and theaters. The "separate but equal" standard established by the Supreme Court in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) lent high judicial support to segregation.
A Montgomery, Alabama, ordinance compelled black residents to take seats apart from whites on municipal buses. At the time, the "separate but equal" standard applied, but the actual separation practiced by the Montgomery City Lines was hardly equal.
It was most certainly a "city ordinance" and therefore a law in 1955.
[Heads up, Yes, I know ARP does not cross subnets on a properly configured network. You dont have to tell me that.]
[snip]
Wouldn't it cause considerably more damage to logically coordinate your zombies to do a distributed ARP poisoning attack, and route high-bandwith traffic through the target network block(s) instead?
LOL. ARP traffic does not cross subnets. It has nothing to do with being properly configured. It's a layer two protocol. Routers do not forward layer 2. Correctly configured or not, it doesn't happen.
What you're describing (ARP poisoning) would require you to have zombies on the SAME layer 2 broadcast domain as a VERY poorly configured backbone switch. I'd wager that's not going to happen. These networks are very tightly controlled.
I instruct the zombie drones along those routes to start spamming out ARP packets. These ARP packets confuse the shit out of the rest of the subnet's automatically generated routing tables, which then causes at least some portion of the normal traffic that these subnets are transporting to get re-routed along the path I specify.
ARP doesn't impact routing tables in a carrier network (nor, really, in any network). It's possible to redirect the traffic of one host to a different location on the same layer 2 network through ARP poisoning, but carrier backbone networks virtually all use port security to prevent malicious arp. Even if they don't, the backbone networks do not have a substantial broadcast domain. Two routers connected to each other via an inter-city FDDI or somesuch. You don't just "find zombies" on that broadcast domain. The only two nodes are the two ends of the fiber in secure data centers. Even if you could impact the layer 2 delivery of packets in a carrier network, you would ALSO have to redirect it to a multi-homed network device, since a router is simply going to pass it right back to the proper interface referenced in the routing table.
EG-- Think of what would happen if you used ComCast's various local networks (the neighborhood branch networks that the cable modems are attached to),
Nothing would happen. A cable modem is supposed to be a layer 3 device and regardless, its layer 2 network ID is manually programmed into the distribution switch during activation. But even if you could attack the endpoints and redirect a few homes worth of packets to a different upstream IP... uhm. where the hell is the traffic going to go? You would have to rewrite the routing table on the router, which has NOTHING to do with ARP.
Now, there are flaws in OSPF and BGP routing protocols which MIGHT enabled someone to rewrite the tables (various vendors are working on standards upgrades right now to address these). But you have to have direct access to a backbone-level peering arrangement to make this happen. See: China's "accidental" routing of massive bits of traffic for a few hours this summer.
This would DDoS the entire [snip... blah blah blah...] AND your nodes wouldn't be generating fingerprints all over some remote server's access logs.... [snip blah blah]
Simply spoofing the return address in the IP header is often adequate in a DDoS. Most carrier networks don't enforce egress IP filtering (despite it being best practice) due to complex routing issues, especially from server-class and business clients. Simple, and a plus is that you can use the spoofed addresses to generate false traffic at another location consisting of responses from the first target. Additionally, in some networks it can be useful to use the device's own IP as a return address. Especially with protocols like "echo" (which shouldn't be on the Internet, let alone turned on but still is sometimes), which can generate a DoS without the other D, very quickly.
Because I have absolutely no idea what you jut said.
Tor is not a transparent proxy, it uses multiple levels of encryption. One would have to compromise the entire onion stream (all three servers) in order to have real insight into the data packets, without massive, global core network control and amazingly sophisticated traffic analysis attacks against multiple country's infrastructure.
Considering that tor exit node operators often find an enormous amount of illegal material going through tor, yet I've never heard of prosecutions for tor-based network activity, I have to presume that, while they may have some limited insight into the network and might be able to reconstruct some traffic from the network stream, they cannot eavesdrop on the data willy-nilly.
They can't arrest all drug users, they can't arrest all downloaders of child pornography, they can't arrest all hackers, they can't arrest all drunk drivers.
But it doesn't stop them from trying and those who DO get arrested (one might call them the "low hanging fruit") have their lives fucked pretty hard.
Those that don't think they're pretty smart, but really, often, they're not really that smart, but are just lucky that someone else was even dumber than they were, and/or had more bad luck.
That's a dangerous game to play "They can't arrest all of us", especially in a country that values "law and order politics" as much as the US does.
It's just that they don't have the overpriced monopoly land-line business to subsidize the initial cost of the wireless infrastructure as AT&T and Verizon did.
This totally explains why cellphones are even cheaper in countries that have no appreciable landline infrastructure.... right? right?
Slashdot Mirror
The problem here is that SEVEN carriers carry almost all traffic in the US. Most smaller cities are only served by four or less.
If you live in Portland, you have three choices in peering. All of them are large corporations. If those three decide to block your traffic, you have no recourse other than to leave the state, or invest $100 billion in creating a new backbone, and then arrange peering agreements with all of these companies AND provide direct connectivity to the content you want published.
The problem isn't necessarily Fox News, because they have a substantial demographic, but rather, for smaller groups. Sure, it is nice to think about blocking the KKK or something similar, but what about other somewhat fringe groups like radical libertarians. The first amendment says the government cannot prevent their speech, but what if three major backbone companies decide to restrict it? They are effectively wiped away. There is no "soap box" if you are compelled to stay inside your "virtual" house by corporate owners.
The government stepped in (rightly) when the 19th centry mega-corporations began to dictate local laws with their wholly-owned corporate shantytowns, where employees were required to live.
But in a digital era, when more jobs are going online and most communication is online, a corporation restricting speech is just as dangerous as the government doing it, because the corporation is the de-facto government of the internet, by the nature of their control over its traffic...
Unless there is some rule that says otherwise.
I regard net neutrality akin to the first amendment or the anit-monopoly laws in "meat space". They are simply that important.
Go buy a twinkie and tell me if the government stops you.
In fact, go eat some dirt. Did someone stop you?
so... what exactly are you saying?
Socially, America is in the 90th percentile of "right" leaning countries.
There are plenty of issues where it falls "extreme right" in the midst of few peers, such as Somalia, Saudi Arabia, Iran, etc.
There are other issues where the US is "center" by the rest of the world's standards (not just talking Europe). There are virtually NO issues where the US falls left of center by a global standard.
Just sayin...
Well, this is understood, but how do you do that?
This guys was forging documents from his circuit agreements and things. You can't call Verizon to ask about someone else's account. You have to rely on the documentation the colo gives you.
I would bet that at least one of those 300 customers had asked for proof of current accounts and things like that and was provided such (fradulently) by the colo owner.
It's too bad they had to be pulled in. It seems to me that the FBI could have made an effort to clone the systems and at least return some of it.
The CPU/RAM/Motherboard of the systems in question is NOT of value to the investigation, other than for leverage and fear and financial detriment.
The companies who had their systems taken would probably have not balked at all if the servers had been returned in a week, without drives. I'd wager they may even pay the costs of having the drives forensically duplicated so they could get their stuff back online. That is much cheaper than the business loss that was a result.
Of course, everyone should do backups, etc. It just seems rather strong-arm to take that much equipment, including power strips, cabinets, rack mounting gear, third party documentation and the like.
It is old news, yes. But tell that to the 300 OTHER businesses who had their equipment siezed, 100 of which subsequently went out of business, likely at least partially as a result of this FBI action.
Seizing the power strips and cabinets and even the books full of system documentation from OTHER COMPANIES not involved in the fraud, other than to be physically located near the suspected fraud.
That's the news, if you ask me.
Yeah, good reason to use only "insured" services like PayPal or government/bank cheques for online transactions.
I will be royally pissed if this idiot turd makes the banks change their rules to wait for 2 weeks after the posting of a check.
Understand? There's two options.
1) Post checks rather quickly, assuming that most are good, and letting you take a bit of the risk
2) Hold on to all checks for 2-4 weeks before releasing the funds, royally screwing people like landlords, or any other business or individual who collects checks and then needs to use those checks to pay other expenses.
Your idea is terrible. You can't have you cake and eat it too.
The problem is that they had expectations from the old "Stargate" fans. the bad guys would be unspeakably evil and have minions of bald dark skinned servants and giant gold head dresses and names like "Aphophis". And the hero is ALWAYS captured by the bad guy half way through the episode and it ALWAYS looks hopeless, but they are ALWAYS rescued in the last 3 minutes through some absurdly improbably confluence of events with absolutely no casualties.
This is what they expected, and didn't get, therefore this show is "emo and too dramatic". It's "too dark".
I agree, its the only show I still watch on regular TV. Now I can cancel my cable and save $50/mo. Sweet.
I'm curious which characters you find "whiny"?
I'm not sure if you've ever experienced being forcibly removed from your own life for a period of months, but I know a few people who have and those real people make these characters on the show seem downright stoic.
To me it seems pretty realistic, though people who have never suffered much in their life might find it a bit corny to witness exactly how much that upsets people.
LOL. "Adult" has nothign to do with sex. Steamy sex scenes in a scifi drama screams "teenage boys, come watch!!!".
The concepts of intractable moral dillemmas is what makes good fiction. The decision between two evils is powerful.
SG-1, Star Trek, etc gets out of this by always finding "magical third answer that saves everyone with no casualties" but that's so trite as to be almost funny sometimes.
Having some character flaws is valuable to a good story.
Well, if you look at what is replacing SGU in the lineup, I might have to agree this time.
Yet another "ghost hunter" show and increased "WWE" coverage.
SRSLY?
He's a colonel you turd, and the whole POINT of the show is looking at the mistakes people make when put in a tough situation.
The drivel in most SciFi is the fact that everyone always responds by formula, rather than acting as flawed people that humans essentially are. The faulty assumption is that some high technology automatically improves the people behind it too.
Do you think people find "Apocalypse Now" hackneyed and fake because they often fucked up in the face of difficult situations? Or do people watch it and say "wow, people are messed up sometimes." and understand its a great story with messed up characters?
Sheesh. I'm so tired of the clinical "he's a general, therefor he is always perfect" and "he's an evil doer, so whatever he does is insanely evil" style of sterilized scifi. It's just painful to watch.
and I'm a huge Stargate fan
See, there is the problem.
SGU was the antithesis of SG-1. SG-1 was scifi kitch, almost to the max. Aliens pretending to be gods, everyone has big grandious sounding Latin names, regardless of what planet they are from.
SGU was a subdued psychological sci-fi.
Personally, I ALMOST didn't watch SGU at all because SG-1 and SGA were terrible. But I really like SGU.
Never been much of a fan of the cardboard "fire moon from hell" sets and "all teh super-villains wear gigantic gold headdress and have uuber transparent names like 'Anubis' and parade around speaking like some Marvel comic bad guy"
"haha! Now I have the power of the [insert ancient race here], with which my minions will crush your puny planet. But first, I must imprision the same four people in my lava-filled prison planet and chain you up with fake looking vines and give you three hours to escape. Ha Ha! Bow before me."
After the tenth episode of that, I was just about done, and then they introduced uhm "Merlin". Yeah, srsly?
At least SGU has some class.
While I disagree with the US and French movements in the direction of freedom, I do feel compelled to point out a factual error, and/or ask for clarification.
France GDP per capita is only 75% of the US. While it has climbed somewhat since the 1960s when it was only 60% of the US per capita, I'm not quite sure what you mean by "higher cut of GDP".
That wouldn't be because they cover the elderly, who account for a massive majority of the required care, would it?
Medicare is far more efficient, on a "per capita expenditures vs services paid" and "overhead introduced to the system" basis than most private health care.
I'm not the GP, but uhm. I'd like to point out something here.
Everybody dies. I know your mom forgot to tell you, but it's a fact.
And very very few people die catastrophically and instantly so that they require no health care whatsoever.
So, "going through life without having anything ever happen to them".
No, that's actually, undeniably, impossible.
Blood or not, Microsoft does not allow third parties to audit their kernel or core system stacks. It just doesn't happen.
Dude, that article is about the
Microsoft's Operating system security guide
The guide... is a big document. The NSA/DoD security hardening guide is quite well known and frequently used by system administrators.
Try again?
mmmm vagina-babble
That made me LOL.
Actually, there was. They were called "Jim Crow" laws, and they allowed separation of races in public spaces and provided punishments for those who refused to comply.
Rosa Parks was arrested and served time in jail for refusing to stand up for a white man. The law mandated that she obey the driver regarding the segregation of the seating on the bus.
Quote:
Jim Crow laws in various states required the segregation of races in such common areas as restaurants and theaters. The "separate but equal" standard established by the Supreme Court in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) lent high judicial support to segregation.
A Montgomery, Alabama, ordinance compelled black residents to take seats apart from whites on municipal buses. At the time, the "separate but equal" standard applied, but the actual separation practiced by the Montgomery City Lines was hardly equal.
It was most certainly a "city ordinance" and therefore a law in 1955.
[Heads up, Yes, I know ARP does not cross subnets on a properly configured network. You dont have to tell me that.]
[snip]
Wouldn't it cause considerably more damage to logically coordinate your zombies to do a distributed ARP poisoning attack, and route high-bandwith traffic through the target network block(s) instead?
LOL. ARP traffic does not cross subnets. It has nothing to do with being properly configured. It's a layer two protocol. Routers do not forward layer 2. Correctly configured or not, it doesn't happen.
What you're describing (ARP poisoning) would require you to have zombies on the SAME layer 2 broadcast domain as a VERY poorly configured backbone switch. I'd wager that's not going to happen. These networks are very tightly controlled.
I instruct the zombie drones along those routes to start spamming out ARP packets. These ARP packets confuse the shit out of the rest of the subnet's automatically generated routing tables, which then causes at least some portion of the normal traffic that these subnets are transporting to get re-routed along the path I specify.
ARP doesn't impact routing tables in a carrier network (nor, really, in any network). It's possible to redirect the traffic of one host to a different location on the same layer 2 network through ARP poisoning, but carrier backbone networks virtually all use port security to prevent malicious arp. Even if they don't, the backbone networks do not have a substantial broadcast domain. Two routers connected to each other via an inter-city FDDI or somesuch. You don't just "find zombies" on that broadcast domain. The only two nodes are the two ends of the fiber in secure data centers. Even if you could impact the layer 2 delivery of packets in a carrier network, you would ALSO have to redirect it to a multi-homed network device, since a router is simply going to pass it right back to the proper interface referenced in the routing table.
EG-- Think of what would happen if you used ComCast's various local networks (the neighborhood branch networks that the cable modems are attached to),
Nothing would happen. A cable modem is supposed to be a layer 3 device and regardless, its layer 2 network ID is manually programmed into the distribution switch during activation. But even if you could attack the endpoints and redirect a few homes worth of packets to a different upstream IP... uhm. where the hell is the traffic going to go? You would have to rewrite the routing table on the router, which has NOTHING to do with ARP.
Now, there are flaws in OSPF and BGP routing protocols which MIGHT enabled someone to rewrite the tables (various vendors are working on standards upgrades right now to address these). But you have to have direct access to a backbone-level peering arrangement to make this happen. See: China's "accidental" routing of massive bits of traffic for a few hours this summer.
This would DDoS the entire [snip... blah blah blah...] AND your nodes wouldn't be generating fingerprints all over some remote server's access logs.... [snip blah blah]
Simply spoofing the return address in the IP header is often adequate in a DDoS. Most carrier networks don't enforce egress IP filtering (despite it being best practice) due to complex routing issues, especially from server-class and business clients. Simple, and a plus is that you can use the spoofed addresses to generate false traffic at another location consisting of responses from the first target. Additionally, in some networks it can be useful to use the device's own IP as a return address. Especially with protocols like "echo" (which shouldn't be on the Internet, let alone turned on but still is sometimes), which can generate a DoS without the other D, very quickly.
Is that a sentence? Or three?
Because I have absolutely no idea what you jut said.
Tor is not a transparent proxy, it uses multiple levels of encryption. One would have to compromise the entire onion stream (all three servers) in order to have real insight into the data packets, without massive, global core network control and amazingly sophisticated traffic analysis attacks against multiple country's infrastructure.
Considering that tor exit node operators often find an enormous amount of illegal material going through tor, yet I've never heard of prosecutions for tor-based network activity, I have to presume that, while they may have some limited insight into the network and might be able to reconstruct some traffic from the network stream, they cannot eavesdrop on the data willy-nilly.
The simple answer is "they don't have to"
They can't arrest all drug users, they can't arrest all downloaders of child pornography, they can't arrest all hackers, they can't arrest all drunk drivers.
But it doesn't stop them from trying and those who DO get arrested (one might call them the "low hanging fruit") have their lives fucked pretty hard.
Those that don't think they're pretty smart, but really, often, they're not really that smart, but are just lucky that someone else was even dumber than they were, and/or had more bad luck.
That's a dangerous game to play "They can't arrest all of us", especially in a country that values "law and order politics" as much as the US does.
It's just that they don't have the overpriced monopoly land-line business to subsidize the initial cost of the wireless infrastructure as AT&T and Verizon did.
This totally explains why cellphones are even cheaper in countries that have no appreciable landline infrastructure.... right? right?
Oh, wait... :-)