A decade or so ago, you could do this.. more or less. Your "low-level" format and all that - nowadays, there is logic on the drive unit itself you have to deal with.... there are more levels of abstraction... so even the lowest-level access I can think of off-hand from a normal modern OS won't actually come anywhere near controlling the drive itself. You'd need to actually mess with drive firmware to do that.... I think.
And yeah - check out Steve Gibson... Spinrite did stuff like that - not sure how valid that is with current media though (the principles probably still apply, but even he may be dealing with some level of abstraction now)
Oh -and marketing generally had no access to said room, nor was there much shoulder watching - but agan - small-scale noc, where the NOC guys were often also the chief engineers on occasion.
I've seen some small-scale NOCs that made effective use of large screens.... (LCD, not projector). The staff had personal space/desks - complete with family photos, and the shared screens were there for whatever the NOC staff there at the time felt them best used for at any given moment. If nothing was going on, that might be watching funny youtube videos, but generally it would be wahtever aspect of the current incident was important to the group as a whole.
Those crashes are explained simply because the problem at hand is out of context. Driving is habit... you train yourself to react. Reacting to a stuck accelerator, or similar situation, is not something you are trained to react to - so you have to think, and analyze the situation, while in panic mode. It may take you a vital second or two to realize that your car is misbehaving, and another second to decide what to do about it.
"If time slows down for things moving things, time does not flow at all for photons. And from photons perspective, time flows normally, however, there is no space, they get where they were going in the same moment they were created."
- Photons are always moving at C.. so we could say time does not flow for a photon. From a photon's perspective, time wouldn't flow normally - I would surmize that a photon itself, in as much as photons can be considered things that exists, time doesn't exist.
. That said - photons don't think as far as we know, so they have no sense of time anyway.
That's where all the other cool stuff science is trying to understand comes in, all the cool particles we are looking for, and all the far out math comes into play. There's obviously more stuff going on that we're going to have to observe and infer and keep plugging away at.
If you treat time as a 4th dimension tangential to the other 3, it does seem like we are being more or less pushed at a constant velocity through it, unless we start tearing around the other 3, or to be more accurate, dealing with huge amounts of energy. Toss in all that stuff about the universe expanding, and that stuff about gravity being an emergent property rather than a fundamental force due to entropy laws...... it gets really fun to muse about.
In some aspects it acts exactly like a spatial dimension - you can perform direct transformations (ie: lorentz transformation) - just like like you can using two coordinate systems in the 3rd dimension.
The experience we have, our observation of reality, seems to be going in one direction in time. The phenomenon that lets us be "us" is also all wrapped up in whatever that is.
So whether there is such a thing as going "backwards in time" - we aren't likely to see it.... by our own nature.
Hmm... so maybe when we see, like, a photon suddenly decay into a positron and electron, which then annihilate each other and turn back into a photon - maybe that was just a little weirdness and the positron was just the same electron but going backwards in time? (Which would still be going forwards in time, from our point of view, with properties reversed)
"Time is not a "thing" you can study, just like "space" is not a thing you can study. Space is a place for the universe to exist. It's the distance between things - molecules, galaxies. Time is simply something for the universe to exist in."
No, actually - space and time *ARE* the universe --- part and parcel. The universe doesn't exist within spacetime - it IS spacetime.
Happens between me and a close friend all the time. We'll often solve complex systems issues with identical troubleshooting procedures without even completing sentences.....we think the same way.
People can predict what other people are going to say because what is being said generally has context, meaning, and a limited number of likely ways to express itself.
Further, your brain is already listening and expecting certain words to come next...... possibly more than one scenario. You will remember the one that actually happens, and forget the rest.
Time is not "sideways" to the 3 dimensions of space? Why not? I mean it's probably an overgeneralization, there's more to it than that, but the analogy works very well to describe a lot of observations.... the closer you get to the speed of light, the slower you move through time.
Perception of time and the physics of time are two very different things - made more complex because we are part of the universe we are trying to observe.
Not discrediting the physicist at all - but the analogies and abstractions used to explain this to a reporter really don't add anything or mean much to anyone, other than to make people think of wild ideas that really have nothing to do with the idea itself.
ARe you refererring you your speakers buzzing just before your GSM phone rings? That's due to RF interference from a signal burst from your phone acknowledging that it's there to the cellular site before deciding to start ringing.
On your traditional landline, there would be no such give-away - the old mechanical phone rings as soon as soon as the ring signal hits it - it's powered by that signal. New phones might interpret it and rng then.
But... I have a limited number of friends I talk to on the phone (what with the internet and all that nowadays) - we live int he same timezone and tend to follow similar patterns - it's not THAT wierd that after work, after dinner, at 5:05pm, my friend and I decided to catch up at the same time once out of the hundreds of times we've had similar calls. Doesn't make us psychic.
(I'm not denying there may be more to the universe than hard science knows - psychic powers and all that would be super cool... but so far, I don't see any evidence to the fact,despite wishful thinking)
The phone thing: We think about an astounding number of things in parallel during the day... I can certainly attest to the feeling of just having thought about someone the moment before the phone rings.... only sometimes.
But you know what? It's far more likely that this is what happens:
1) The phone rings 2) Your brain instantly goes into some kind of massive, dedicated, subconscious parallel search mode to try to predict who might be calling... all within a fraction of a second 3) You answer the phone. 4) Your brain gets the timing slightly mixed up (all this having happened within a second or so) and you are left with the feeling that you were just thinking about that person before they called.
Science explains that perfectly, and easily: At any given time, some portion of people are waking up with some weird feeling that doom has come over someone in their family.
THen, one time out of a million or so, it actually happens that the person they call to talk about this with, ro check up on, DID have something mildly or severely bad happen, and they start thinking htey are psychic.
All the others, where nothing happened, just forget that it ever happened in the first place. So, given the number of people affected by 9/11, it's no wonder *someone* out there woke up feeling something was wrong, turned on the TV, and then saw a catastrophe happen on TV that they felt was relevant enough to them, and therefore, they must have just experienced omse weird psychic phenomenon.
Cognitive bias - you remember those dreams you have where they seem to correlate to daytime events, and forget the rest, and assume there is some relationship.
I agree - very slippery slope - but it seems very logical in this case - I'm wrestling with how I feel about that.
The domains were suspended, not taken away - presumably a legitimate owner can get the domain back with no problem (it is a requirement that your registration information be legitimate, and the owner exists. Had the domains had proper registered owners, that information would have been public and the owners could have been hit legally, directly.
I'm sure they do/will - but you fight each attack with the tools necessary.
If taking a few domains offline temporarily totally crippled a massive botnet, that's great, as much as the possible future slippery-slope or abuse of power by using DNS for abuse-enforcement bothers me........ we don't want court-orders against DNS providers to become the way to shut sites down globaly all the time.
IT does, however, in the case of these viruses and whatnot, seem like a very logical choice, and places the core DNS infrastructure in a unique position to mitigate a huge amount of damage, fast.
Godaddy already had the root password, presumably from when you set the VPS up.
- We have no way of knowing that they store these in cleartext that I can see, unless I missed something.
The abnormal (not wrong, just not what most people do) setup with the honeypot allowed their security scanner to think it had logged into your box successfully using a brute-force method.
They then found they could not *actively* log in with the password on file, because they were hitting a honeypot, not the real SSH port.
They followed up with an email to what they thought was an infected box.
So - glad they are changing policy - but even more glad they are at least pro-active about it. For every securiyt-conscious admin such as indicated here, there are tons and tons of VPS out there without even minimal security practices.
Basically, it looks like a process mismatch between the expectations of godaddy and the guy managing the server..... nothing that you can't work out, and you get what you pay for.
Sure. But it's still not the same level of security, or randomness, as a true random number generator... that's what the math/crypto guys are all about.
A cheap, on-silicon way, using current fabrication methods of building reliable random number generators into microprocessors is a good sell.... so figuring out how to use components that we already know how to mass produce and turn them into cryptographically useful RNGs is significant.
I mean, the facts in the article are facts, but it's an opinion piece.
MySQL claimed they could copyright a "protocol" and that it was covered under the GPL. That seem sketchy to me, given the GPL is a license designed to cover source code. You could apply it to books.... but that would just mean large parts of the GPL were out of scope in the context of books. (Your text would still be protected... but rules about distributing object could would have no relevance, I imagine.)
As to requiring contributors to assign rights to the project owner - that's a common practice of many projects, and has nothing to do with the GPL itself, and everything to do with ownership of a project. The FSF requires this as well. You are, of course, free to fork and do what you want on your own.. but if you wanted code in their official releases, you had to assign them the rights to it as well - this let them dual-license it as they saw fit. I can't say I wouldn't do the same with my own projects, if it came down to it.
This really doesn't change the GPL much in any way I can see... the GPL has mostly been misunderstood, and will continue to be misunderstood, by many, forever.
Again... self-signed makes it useless in practice - the ISP could just have gear in place to permanently man-in-the-middle every connection. Or rather, the government would force them to put it there, and forbid them from talking about it.
It would prevent casual eavesdropping if the session was already initialized, keys were memorized to see if they changed later, and people actually understood the technology - but, outside technical and crypto circles, people just click "yes".
Remember the furor about how Firefox 3 handled self-signed certs differently - everyone acted like it was BAD?
A blackhat can drop a MITM gizmo in any wifi area, say a hotel, that generates a certificate that has the name of the hotel in it.... and middle every connection - and you watch, probably 90% of users will say "Oh.... weird, lemme read this, huh, must be some hotel hting, i'll just click okay" and on they go........
I agree, we should all use encryption more - but it takes more discipline and better tools.
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A decade or so ago, you could do this.. more or less. Your "low-level" format and all that - nowadays, there is logic on the drive unit itself you have to deal with.... there are more levels of abstraction... so even the lowest-level access I can think of off-hand from a normal modern OS won't actually come anywhere near controlling the drive itself. You'd need to actually mess with drive firmware to do that.... I think.
And yeah - check out Steve Gibson... Spinrite did stuff like that - not sure how valid that is with current media though (the principles probably still apply, but even he may be dealing with some level of abstraction now)
Oh -and marketing generally had no access to said room, nor was there much shoulder watching - but agan - small-scale noc, where the NOC guys were often also the chief engineers on occasion.
I've seen some small-scale NOCs that made effective use of large screens.... (LCD, not projector). The staff had personal space/desks - complete with family photos, and the shared screens were there for whatever the NOC staff there at the time felt them best used for at any given moment. If nothing was going on, that might be watching funny youtube videos, but generally it would be wahtever aspect of the current incident was important to the group as a whole.
Kudos!
Those crashes are explained simply because the problem at hand is out of context. Driving is habit... you train yourself to react. Reacting to a stuck accelerator, or similar situation, is not something you are trained to react to - so you have to think, and analyze the situation, while in panic mode. It may take you a vital second or two to realize that your car is misbehaving, and another second to decide what to do about it.
"If time slows down for things moving things, time does not flow at all for photons. And from photons perspective, time flows normally, however, there is no space, they get where they were going in the same moment they were created."
- Photons are always moving at C.. so we could say time does not flow for a photon. From a photon's perspective, time wouldn't flow normally - I would surmize that a photon itself, in as much as photons can be considered things that exists, time doesn't exist.
. That said - photons don't think as far as we know, so they have no sense of time anyway.
That's where all the other cool stuff science is trying to understand comes in, all the cool particles we are looking for, and all the far out math comes into play. There's obviously more stuff going on that we're going to have to observe and infer and keep plugging away at.
If you treat time as a 4th dimension tangential to the other 3, it does seem like we are being more or less pushed at a constant velocity through it, unless we start tearing around the other 3, or to be more accurate, dealing with huge amounts of energy. Toss in all that stuff about the universe expanding, and that stuff about gravity being an emergent property rather than a fundamental force due to entropy laws...... it gets really fun to muse about.
In some aspects it acts exactly like a spatial dimension - you can perform direct transformations (ie: lorentz transformation) - just like like you can using two coordinate systems in the 3rd dimension.
The experience we have, our observation of reality, seems to be going in one direction in time. The phenomenon that lets us be "us" is also all wrapped up in whatever that is.
So whether there is such a thing as going "backwards in time" - we aren't likely to see it.... by our own nature.
Hmm... so maybe when we see, like, a photon suddenly decay into a positron and electron, which then annihilate each other and turn back into a photon - maybe that was just a little weirdness and the positron was just the same electron but going backwards in time? (Which would still be going forwards in time, from our point of view, with properties reversed)
"Time is not a "thing" you can study, just like "space" is not a thing you can study. Space is a place for the universe to exist. It's the distance between things - molecules, galaxies. Time is simply something for the universe to exist in."
No, actually - space and time *ARE* the universe --- part and parcel. The universe doesn't exist within spacetime - it IS spacetime.
Happens between me and a close friend all the time. We'll often solve complex systems issues with identical troubleshooting procedures without even completing sentences.... .we think the same way.
People can predict what other people are going to say because what is being said generally has context, meaning, and a limited number of likely ways to express itself.
Further, your brain is already listening and expecting certain words to come next...... possibly more than one scenario. You will remember the one that actually happens, and forget the rest.
Time is not "sideways" to the 3 dimensions of space? Why not? I mean it's probably an overgeneralization, there's more to it than that, but the analogy works very well to describe a lot of observations.... the closer you get to the speed of light, the slower you move through time.
Perception of time and the physics of time are two very different things - made more complex because we are part of the universe we are trying to observe.
Not discrediting the physicist at all - but the analogies and abstractions used to explain this to a reporter really don't add anything or mean much to anyone, other than to make people think of wild ideas that really have nothing to do with the idea itself.
Fluff piece, in other words.
ARe you refererring you your speakers buzzing just before your GSM phone rings? That's due to RF interference from a signal burst from your phone acknowledging that it's there to the cellular site before deciding to start ringing.
On your traditional landline, there would be no such give-away - the old mechanical phone rings as soon as soon as the ring signal hits it - it's powered by that signal. New phones might interpret it and rng then.
I've done that...
But... I have a limited number of friends I talk to on the phone (what with the internet and all that nowadays) - we live int he same timezone and tend to follow similar patterns - it's not THAT wierd that after work, after dinner, at 5:05pm, my friend and I decided to catch up at the same time once out of the hundreds of times we've had similar calls. Doesn't make us psychic.
(I'm not denying there may be more to the universe than hard science knows - psychic powers and all that would be super cool... but so far, I don't see any evidence to the fact,despite wishful thinking)
The phone thing: We think about an astounding number of things in parallel during the day... I can certainly attest to the feeling of just having thought about someone the moment before the phone rings.... only sometimes.
But you know what? It's far more likely that this is what happens:
1) The phone rings
2) Your brain instantly goes into some kind of massive, dedicated, subconscious parallel search mode to try to predict who might be calling... all within a fraction of a second
3) You answer the phone.
4) Your brain gets the timing slightly mixed up (all this having happened within a second or so) and you are left with the feeling that you were just thinking about that person before they called.
Science explains that perfectly, and easily: At any given time, some portion of people are waking up with some weird feeling that doom has come over someone in their family.
THen, one time out of a million or so, it actually happens that the person they call to talk about this with, ro check up on, DID have something mildly or severely bad happen, and they start thinking htey are psychic.
All the others, where nothing happened, just forget that it ever happened in the first place.
So, given the number of people affected by 9/11, it's no wonder *someone* out there woke up feeling something was wrong, turned on the TV, and then saw a catastrophe happen on TV that they felt was relevant enough to them, and therefore, they must have just experienced omse weird psychic phenomenon.
Cognitive bias - you remember those dreams you have where they seem to correlate to daytime events, and forget the rest, and assume there is some relationship.
I agree - very slippery slope - but it seems very logical in this case - I'm wrestling with how I feel about that.
The domains were suspended, not taken away - presumably a legitimate owner can get the domain back with no problem (it is a requirement that your registration information be legitimate, and the owner exists. Had the domains had proper registered owners, that information would have been public and the owners could have been hit legally, directly.
I'm sure they do/will - but you fight each attack with the tools necessary.
If taking a few domains offline temporarily totally crippled a massive botnet, that's great, as much as the possible future slippery-slope or abuse of power by using DNS for abuse-enforcement bothers me........ we don't want court-orders against DNS providers to become the way to shut sites down globaly all the time.
IT does, however, in the case of these viruses and whatnot, seem like a very logical choice, and places the core DNS infrastructure in a unique position to mitigate a huge amount of damage, fast.
Godaddy already had the root password, presumably from when you set the VPS up.
- We have no way of knowing that they store these in cleartext that I can see, unless I missed something.
The abnormal (not wrong, just not what most people do) setup with the honeypot allowed their security scanner to think it had logged into your box successfully using a brute-force method.
They then found they could not *actively* log in with the password on file, because they were hitting a honeypot, not the real SSH port.
They followed up with an email to what they thought was an infected box.
So - glad they are changing policy - but even more glad they are at least pro-active about it. For every securiyt-conscious admin such as indicated here, there are tons and tons of VPS out there without even minimal security practices.
Basically, it looks like a process mismatch between the expectations of godaddy and the guy managing the server..... nothing that you can't work out, and you get what you pay for.
Good. Great news.
Could be because the device that needs to generate the random number isn't a PC.
Sure. But it's still not the same level of security, or randomness, as a true random number generator... that's what the math/crypto guys are all about.
A cheap, on-silicon way, using current fabrication methods of building reliable random number generators into microprocessors is a good sell.... so figuring out how to use components that we already know how to mass produce and turn them into cryptographically useful RNGs is significant.
I mean, the facts in the article are facts, but it's an opinion piece.
MySQL claimed they could copyright a "protocol" and that it was covered under the GPL. That seem sketchy to me, given the GPL is a license designed to cover source code. You could apply it to books.... but that would just mean large parts of the GPL were out of scope in the context of books. (Your text would still be protected... but rules about distributing object could would have no relevance, I imagine.)
As to requiring contributors to assign rights to the project owner - that's a common practice of many projects, and has nothing to do with the GPL itself, and everything to do with ownership of a project. The FSF requires this as well. You are, of course, free to fork and do what you want on your own.. but if you wanted code in their official releases, you had to assign them the rights to it as well - this let them dual-license it as they saw fit. I can't say I wouldn't do the same with my own projects, if it came down to it.
This really doesn't change the GPL much in any way I can see... the GPL has mostly been misunderstood, and will continue to be misunderstood, by many, forever.
Again... self-signed makes it useless in practice - the ISP could just have gear in place to permanently man-in-the-middle every connection. Or rather, the government would force them to put it there, and forbid them from talking about it.
It would prevent casual eavesdropping if the session was already initialized, keys were memorized to see if they changed later, and people actually understood the technology - but, outside technical and crypto circles, people just click "yes".
Remember the furor about how Firefox 3 handled self-signed certs differently - everyone acted like it was BAD?
A blackhat can drop a MITM gizmo in any wifi area, say a hotel, that generates a certificate that has the name of the hotel in it.... and middle every connection - and you watch, probably 90% of users will say "Oh.... weird, lemme read this, huh, must be some hotel hting, i'll just click okay" and on they go........
I agree, we should all use encryption more - but it takes more discipline and better tools.