I've been using them in my Computer Eng. Problem Solving class for 3 years.
Here's a vid where freshmen measure a drop (accounting for air resistance) using a wiimote. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tPCBfyQP4eE I'd say they make a great instrument as long as you quantify your error.
If done right, the game or whatever just serves as an engagement and recruiting tool. The important bit is then using the platform to introduce problem solving and programming learning opportunities and then relating that back to the non-gaming IT world.
In my case, I teach the first course in Computer Engineering, and I use the Wii Controller as the data source. Check out http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tPCBfyQP4eE to see a lab where students use the wii remote in a foam football to measure the distance it fell in real time in an 8+ meter drop.
This draws on their physics, math, and learning how to structure solutions to a problem nicely.
Basically, 9 years ago we showed some remarkably embarassing features in Xerox multifunction printer/copiers/faxes. Including SNMP access to plaintext passwords!
I wonder how many of these "features" are still there.
I am a computer scientist and faculty member at a Research 1 university.
As a few have said, IT IS THE CULTURE! I blame it on Anti-intellectual sentiment, pitiful teaching of math and science, and the fact that we don't have a big exploration goal.
I am not going to delve into anti-intellectual issue right now, but I would ask: What is the ratio of good scientists to evil scientists in movies?
In general, I have to say that we do a poor job in teaching math and science at all levels. There are many scapegoats here, but it's hard to imagine getting many good science teachers into schools without more pay and better environment. In the Universities, we have been importing scientists in many areas. As a culture, this is short sighted as it is unlikely to motivate US students into science. How are we to expect students in the University to be lured into science and math when they cannot relate to their professors and vice versa. Difficulties in communication and subtle racial/ethnic biases make it difficult for US students to see themselves as future professors. Students need role models.
The moon landings paid for themselves many times over in young scientists and engineers. We need some national goals that gives students a sense of purpose and appreciation. Why should I bust my hump for science when better paying, easier jobs exist? I could probably double my income in the private sector and work less, but I would lose my opportunity to work with fresh young students and help them see the beauties of learning new things.
More NSF grants will not solve the problem. Maybe if they are tied to developing domestic students into faculty--that could have a long term effect. The new Mars and moon efforts are good ideas, but the current administration doesn't have the credibility/vision of Kennedy to inspire America.
As you can tell, this is near and dear to my heart. I hope that we can do something with real effects. I do little things everyday, but I want to do more!
The Fireworks Foundation (http://www.fireworksfoundation.org/) the Pyrotechnics Guild International (http://www.pgi.org/) are fighting this overstep by the CPSC. I am a proud card-carrying member of the PGI and in this case the CPSC is overstepping its bounds in several ways. If they succeed in winning against chemical suppliers, the entire fireworks hobby is endangered. The legal fireworks hobby is an amazing phenomenon that is completely legal with annoying but manageable federal permits.
If you care about this issue, visit the fireworks foundation and donate to the defense of fireworks chemical suppliers for the hobbiest.
Alien weapon systems
on
Space Lichens
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Didn't you see the amount of rock shooting off into space after the Death Star blew up Alderaan? Let's not forget all of the test shots they would have done before that.
Also, we can't forget that it could have been on pieces of the ringworld from Halo.
Spaf and I dissected it back in 98: http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=353697
The interesting thing about land is that it resulted from two different interpretations of the RFC. One said send X in this state and another said Y. Hence, lots of unrelated protocol stacks had the vulnerability while others didn't.
I used to read Jules Verne stuff that I had read as a kid on my palm pilot. Of course, this is old enough to be on PG. Very cool. One of the readers can auto scroll. Adjust the timing and just look at the same line.
Anyone out there hack The DISH network PVR's? I've got the cheaper of the two with one receiver, but it is still awesome. I'd love to add a 100G drive, but haven't seen anything about doing it.
For him to be canned over this report (which is excellent by the way), is awful. Other heavy hitters in infosec also collaborated on this report e.g. Schneier, Becky Bace, and Charles Pfleeger.
It's not so much that @stake doesn't have the right to fire him, but rather that it's a pity that they can't stand up to the truth. Not that corporations are known for their honor anyway. I would not trust a @stake with my business at this point-what's next? MS buying them into using their clearly superior security products?!
This is outlandishly ignorant and foolishly confident of the legislature. What makes them think that outlawing this knowledge will somehow change things? All this does is make it harder for the good guys.
My guess is that this is a security measure to better protect material that may be useful for making a dirty bomb. I also like the satellite theory, though.
You need to reduce as early as possible as fast as possible. Choose the minimum resolution/bit depth/frames you can live with. Find a compression device (i.e. mpeg2/4) that can handle n cameras realtime and drop res/bits/frames to your specs. These will be expensive, but you can probably make up for it by reducing your storage and network requirements. Funnel n cameras into the devices using analog cabling, then spit the resulting digital stream out a network to m archiving stations with lots of high bandwidth storage to use as buffer. Of course, you'll need spares for each of these devices.
Hire your tape monkeys to run tapes and/or get a disk silo. I suspect you could get away with much less storage than you think by compressing early.
Even better would be motion detection on the compression or camera side so that only the cameras that are sensing movement would be working.
As for your network, you'll need to partition it to meet your bandwidth requirements.
Good luck!
I've heard this idea before including from my advisor. The idea is that releasing exploits to the public is creating an environment where it's too easy to hack machines.
Unfortunately, it's simply untrue that there aren't positive reasons for releasing exploits.
I can think of several: testing of machines (risky, but useful), understanding of vulnerability (CERT advisories are pretty much useless for this.), research.
The most important of these (IMHO) is the understanding of the vulnerabilities. In the past, we didn't even talk about vulnerabilities in the open and we have the abhorrent state of affairs we have today. Security isn't even taught in computer science and engineering curricula and when it is, it's treated as a separate set of classes. When I started working in infosec, I had no idea how the exploits worked and what the real coding vulnerabilities were. Without release of exploits, I probably still wouldn't.
Build a database in whatever you find useful and then write a simple script to generate a file for input into the AT&T graphviz package. (see http://www.research.att.com/sw/tools/graphviz/ )
Once you have generated the raw graph(s), you can use the graphviz tools to fine tune them into presentable looking displays.
Graphviz doesn't have lots of network icons, but it's ok, make up your own and document them.
Yep, HP does ship an IDS, but AFAIK it is not on Linux yet. It's called IDS/9000 and it is NOT a network intrusion detection system. I've seen a briefing on it and as a network security researcher I'd say it is the most advanced IDS out there. It looks for very general patterns that indicate attacks--not specific signatures that may indicate an attack.
This could be a sign that IDS/9000 may be coming for Linux though. And it would definitely be worth more than $3000 for IDS/9000 on a large multi-user server.
I do know a fair bit about this.
Random _INCREMENTS_ are worthless you just need
enough packets sent to cover the maximum increment. I believe random increments is what many
Unices and NT use but they probably
use the same next sequence number counter
for all connections.
The way linux does it is to use a random start point per 4 tuple and change it every 5 minutes.
It then adds a time-based increment to
this. It should be very difficult to
blind spoof as you wouldn't be able
to guess the starting point for some other
4tuple. (ipsrc, ipdest, tcpsrcport,tcpdstport)
You're right I hadn't read this
article, but it didn't release anything I
didn't already know about the situation.
BTW, I happen to be a 5th year phd student
in network security and I've done a fair
amount of work in vulnerability analysis.
To those who think this is just about
preventing spoofing at borders,
no it's not. That still won't stop attacks
from inside networks.
Ok, we have the usual batch of dumbass guesses on/. Most are wrong or only partially right.
If you can eavesdrop on a TCP session, you can hijack it regardless of the randomness of the TCP ISN. This is because you SEE the ISN in the SYNACK returned by the server. This is a fundamental flaw in TCP and is left to upper level protocols to prevent. (like ssh) Telnet, ftp, etc. don't.
It doesn't matter because this isn't really what the advisory is about!
The real problems with guessable ISN's is when you can do something to a server like a probe to sample the sequence numbers and then make good guesses as to what the next one will be. Then you can do BLIND spoofing where you don't have to eavesdrop. The worst use of this is to exploit.rhosts and hosts.equiv type trust relationships. Basically, if you can blind spoof, and the packets can get to the end box that trusts a given IP address, you can execute commands on that box. This is a big deal. Also, if you can blind spoof, you can easily reset the connections being served by the server by sending TCP RSTs. This is a low bandwidth DoS that is quite devastating.
The deal here is that everyone thought that they had "good enough" randomness for ISN's, but it looks like many implementations don't. The problem seems to be that the poor implementations are widespread.
He published it in a format that was available to students on school property. I see no functional difference between this and a paper pamphlet.
Please enlightment me.
Would you support a student who, during school hours stood just off school property and shouted obscenities about the principle?
You are splitting hairs
-josh
I would actually support the student. The principal has no authority over the kid for what he or she does outside of school.
Over and over, we see people talk about programming and how to improve the coding that's being done. One thing that the current system emphasizes is that code that just works is OK. i.e. given ok input, we get good output
One problem I see is that we don't penalize people when they write something that takes bad output and produces unexpected results. i.e. how many of your programs can handle random input without crashing or worse? Got fixed length buffers? Ever think about what happens if the file your code depends on is suddenly changed by someone else?
This is why systems crash. This is why security is so poor in software.
The teaching system rewards code that works but doesn't try to penalize code that has extra unintended features.
You think the lawyer's haven't already thought of that?
Besides, that means they'd have to store bazillions of those damn contracts. Overhead that would eventually cost more than the cuecats themselves.
Slashdot Mirror
and now Slashdot.
Seriously, love this reboot series. Worth the buffering every time!
I've been using them in my Computer Eng. Problem Solving class for 3 years.
Here's a vid where freshmen measure a drop (accounting for air resistance) using a wiimote.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tPCBfyQP4eE
I'd say they make a great instrument as long as you quantify your error.
If done right, the game or whatever just serves as an engagement and recruiting tool. The important bit is then using the platform to introduce problem solving and programming learning opportunities and then relating that back to the non-gaming IT world.
In my case, I teach the first course in Computer Engineering, and I use the Wii Controller as the data source. Check out http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tPCBfyQP4eE to see a lab where students use the wii remote in a foam football to measure the distance it fell in real time in an 8+ meter drop.
This draws on their physics, math, and learning how to structure solutions to a problem nicely.
http://csrc.nist.gov/nissc/2000/proceedings/papers/034.pdf
Basically, 9 years ago we showed some remarkably embarassing features in Xerox multifunction printer/copiers/faxes. Including SNMP access to plaintext passwords!
I wonder how many of these "features" are still there.
Shameless self promotion:s /034.pdf
http://csrc.nist.gov/nissc/2000/proceedings/paper
Penetration Analysis of a XEROX Docucenter DC 230ST:. Assessing the Security of a Multi-purpose Office Machine.
Basically, there were many physical and network vulnerabilities that were of concern without even getting to a remote code execution problem.
Enjoy!
I am a computer scientist and faculty member at a Research 1 university.
As a few have said, IT IS THE CULTURE! I blame it on Anti-intellectual sentiment, pitiful teaching of math and science, and the fact that we don't have a big exploration goal.
I am not going to delve into anti-intellectual issue right now, but I would ask: What is the ratio of good scientists to evil scientists in movies?
In general, I have to say that we do a poor job in teaching math and science at all levels. There are many scapegoats here, but it's hard to imagine getting many good science teachers into schools without more pay and better environment. In the Universities, we have been importing scientists in many areas. As a culture, this is short sighted as it is unlikely to motivate US students into science. How are we to expect students in the University to be lured into science and math when they cannot relate to their professors and vice versa. Difficulties in communication and subtle racial/ethnic biases make it difficult for US students to see themselves as future professors. Students need role models.
The moon landings paid for themselves many times over in young scientists and engineers. We need some national goals that gives students a sense of purpose and appreciation. Why should I bust my hump for science when better paying, easier jobs exist? I could probably double my income in the private sector and work less, but I would lose my opportunity to work with fresh young students and help them see the beauties of learning new things.
More NSF grants will not solve the problem. Maybe if they are tied to developing domestic students into faculty--that could have a long term effect. The new Mars and moon efforts are good ideas, but the current administration doesn't have the credibility/vision of Kennedy to inspire America.
As you can tell, this is near and dear to my heart. I hope that we can do something with real effects. I do little things everyday, but I want to do more!
and made it fax out what it found everynight. See: Penetration Analysis of a XEROX Docucenter DC 230ST:"
The Fireworks Foundation (http://www.fireworksfoundation.org/) the Pyrotechnics Guild International (http://www.pgi.org/) are fighting this overstep by the CPSC. I am a proud card-carrying member of the PGI and in this case the CPSC is overstepping its bounds in several ways. If they succeed in winning against chemical suppliers, the entire fireworks hobby is endangered. The legal fireworks hobby is an amazing phenomenon that is completely legal with annoying but manageable federal permits.
If you care about this issue, visit the fireworks foundation and donate to the defense of fireworks chemical suppliers for the hobbiest.
Didn't you see the amount of rock shooting off into space after the Death Star blew up Alderaan? Let's not forget all of the test shots they would have done before that.
Also, we can't forget that it could have been on pieces of the ringworld from Halo.
Spaf and I dissected it back in 98: http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=353697
The interesting thing about land is that it resulted from two different interpretations of the RFC. One said send X in this state and another said Y. Hence, lots of unrelated protocol stacks had the vulnerability while others didn't.
I used to read Jules Verne stuff that I had read as a kid on my palm pilot. Of course, this is old enough to be on PG. Very cool. One of the readers can auto scroll. Adjust the timing and just look at the same line.
Anyone out there hack The DISH network PVR's? I've got the cheaper of the two with one receiver, but it is still awesome. I'd love to add a 100G drive, but haven't seen anything about doing it.
For him to be canned over this report (which is excellent by the way), is awful. Other heavy hitters in infosec also collaborated on this report e.g. Schneier, Becky Bace, and Charles Pfleeger.
It's not so much that @stake doesn't have the right to fire him, but rather that it's a pity that they can't stand up to the truth. Not that corporations are known for their honor anyway. I would not trust a @stake with my business at this point-what's next? MS buying them into using their clearly superior security products?!
This is outlandishly ignorant and foolishly confident of the legislature. What makes them think that outlawing this knowledge will somehow change things? All this does is make it harder for the good guys.
My guess is that this is a security measure to better protect material that may be useful for making a dirty bomb. I also like the satellite theory, though.
Wow, what karma whore. You're making more shit up than a battalion of marines with dysentary.
You need to reduce as early as possible as fast as possible. Choose the minimum resolution/bit depth/frames you can live with. Find a compression device (i.e. mpeg2/4) that can handle n cameras realtime and drop res/bits/frames to your specs. These will be expensive, but you can probably make up for it by reducing your storage and network requirements. Funnel n cameras into the devices using analog cabling, then spit the resulting digital stream out a network to m archiving stations with lots of high bandwidth storage to use as buffer. Of course, you'll need spares for each of these devices.
Hire your tape monkeys to run tapes and/or get a disk silo. I suspect you could get away with much less storage than you think by compressing early.
Even better would be motion detection on the compression or camera side so that only the cameras that are sensing movement would be working.
As for your network, you'll need to partition it to meet your bandwidth requirements.
Good luck!
I've heard this idea before including from my advisor. The idea is that releasing exploits to the public is creating an environment where it's too easy to hack machines.
Unfortunately, it's simply untrue that there aren't positive reasons for releasing exploits.
I can think of several: testing of machines (risky, but useful), understanding of vulnerability (CERT advisories are pretty much useless for this.), research.
The most important of these (IMHO) is the understanding of the vulnerabilities. In the past, we didn't even talk about vulnerabilities in the open and we have the abhorrent state of affairs we have today. Security isn't even taught in computer science and engineering curricula and when it is, it's treated as a separate set of classes. When I started working in infosec, I had no idea how the exploits worked and what the real coding vulnerabilities were. Without release of exploits, I probably still wouldn't.
Build a database in whatever you find useful and then write a simple script to generate a file for input into the AT&T graphviz package. (see http://www.research.att.com/sw/tools/graphviz/ )
Once you have generated the raw graph(s), you can use the graphviz tools to fine tune them into presentable looking displays.
Graphviz doesn't have lots of network icons, but it's ok, make up your own and document them.
Yep, HP does ship an IDS, but AFAIK it is not on Linux yet. It's called IDS/9000 and it is NOT a network intrusion detection system. I've seen a briefing on it and as a network security researcher I'd say it is the most advanced IDS out there. It looks for very general patterns that indicate attacks--not specific signatures that may indicate an attack.
This could be a sign that IDS/9000 may be coming for Linux though. And it would definitely be worth more than $3000 for IDS/9000 on a large multi-user server.
The way linux does it is to use a random start point per 4 tuple and change it every 5 minutes. It then adds a time-based increment to this. It should be very difficult to blind spoof as you wouldn't be able to guess the starting point for some other 4tuple. (ipsrc, ipdest, tcpsrcport,tcpdstport)
You're right I hadn't read this article, but it didn't release anything I didn't already know about the situation.
BTW, I happen to be a 5th year phd student in network security and I've done a fair amount of work in vulnerability analysis. To those who think this is just about preventing spoofing at borders, no it's not. That still won't stop attacks from inside networks.
Ok, we have the usual batch of dumbass guesses on /. Most are wrong or only partially right.
If you can eavesdrop on a TCP session, you can hijack it regardless of the randomness of the TCP ISN. This is because you SEE the ISN in the SYNACK returned by the server. This is a fundamental flaw in TCP and is left to upper level protocols to prevent. (like ssh) Telnet, ftp, etc. don't. It doesn't matter because this isn't really what the advisory is about!
The real problems with guessable ISN's is when you can do something to a server like a probe to sample the sequence numbers and then make good guesses as to what the next one will be. Then you can do BLIND spoofing where you don't have to eavesdrop. The worst use of this is to exploit .rhosts and hosts.equiv type trust relationships. Basically, if you can blind spoof, and the packets can get to the end box that trusts a given IP address, you can execute commands on that box. This is a big deal. Also, if you can blind spoof, you can easily reset the connections being served by the server by sending TCP RSTs. This is a low bandwidth DoS that is quite devastating.
The deal here is that everyone thought that they had "good enough" randomness for ISN's, but it looks like many implementations don't. The problem seems to be that the poor implementations are widespread.
Would you support a student who, during school hours stood just off school property and shouted obscenities about the principle? You are splitting hairs -josh
I would actually support the student. The principal has no authority over the kid for what he or she does outside of school.
Over and over, we see people talk about programming and how to improve the coding that's being done. One thing that the current system emphasizes is that code that just works is OK. i.e. given ok input, we get good output
One problem I see is that we don't penalize people when they write something that takes bad output and produces unexpected results. i.e. how many of your programs can handle random input without crashing or worse? Got fixed length buffers? Ever think about what happens if the file your code depends on is suddenly changed by someone else?
This is why systems crash. This is why security is so poor in software.
The teaching system rewards code that works but doesn't try to penalize code that has extra unintended features.
You think the lawyer's haven't already thought of that?
Besides, that means they'd have to store bazillions of those damn contracts. Overhead that would eventually cost more than the cuecats themselves.
BTW, thanks for the polite reply, 5h1tf@ce.