"...the FBI has spent the last two years developing a new surveillance architecture that would concentrate Internet traffic in several key locations where all packets, not just e-mail, could be wiretapped."
Excuse me, but isn't one of the main goals of the Internet routing infrastructure precisely the prevention of this type of centralized control? It seems like this proposal would introduce much greater risk by increasing the Net's reliance on a smaller number of points of failure. The FBI can't have its way on this without destroying the Internet as we know it...
At the university I attend, I had noticed severe slowdowns with our network all this morning, and our IS staff sent out an email saying that they were working on the problem. What they didn't mention is that the reason net performance has ground to a halt is that there are multiple infected machines RUN BY IS on the internal LAN. In other words, the people who should know better are the ones running the unpatched IIS boxes! You'd think they would have learned after Code Red....
The fact the old code red is turned off tells me that they might be linked to the same person(s) or something
I think it's more likely that because CR2 spreads so much faster than CR1 it has basically wiped out its ancestor. IIRC, version 2 can infect machines already infected with version 1, so due to the faster propogation rate, CR1 should quickly become rare indeed. That seems to be the case at least in my Apache logs...for the first several hours after CR2 began to hit me, the two versions were interspersed, but CR1 soon dropped off to a trickle.
The funniest part in the story was when the Gator.com executive was quoted as saying the Gator is "easily removable via the Add/Remove Programs dialogue". When I downloaded several programs containing Gator, it didn't install immediately. Instead, it would just sit invisble in the background and wait like an hour. If you tried to delete its installer in this time period it would be locked by the OS. THe only way to delete it before it installed on those programs (which I am POSITIVE did not give the option to install without Gator) was to kill the program and then delete the file. Anyone else see this delay tactic? I think it is meant to make Gator just "show up" on the computer later to prevent the user from just immediately deleting it without "trying" it.
The only reason this is more devestating to the net than the Bind exploit was is because MS has a higher installed base. If RedHat had the same installed base, the effects would have probably been much worse.
I agree that you have a point, but I don't think it's just the size of the installed base. Most Redhat users probably have a greater understanding of the need to keep their system patched...and Linux doesn't hide all the details of the system from the user in the way that Windows does. It's quite possible that many home Win2k users don't even know that they are running IIS at all, much less that they need to keep informed about exploits and patches for such.
Linux tends to encourage its users to learn more about the workings of their system, in my opinion. Windows tends to encourage people to think of their computer as an "appliance" that they don't have to worry about.
How many hosts will the new strain scan, and does it re-seed its RNG? The reason I ask is that I've noticed that many of the infected hosts that are within my same subnet have scanned my machine upwards of 5-6 times today...
Is each host just limited to a finite number of IPs that it will scan repeatedly, or will it continue to scan the entire Internet if not stopped?
August 1: CNN tells that virus warnings like this are like "crying wolf"
August 4: New, more virulent, variant of Code Red explodes onto the scene (judging from my Apache logs) and begins to bring parts of the @home network down...
The way I see it, we are all reaping the foul harvest MS has sown. I can't even imagine the amount of bandwidth being wasted on these stupid worms. I don't use MS server products, but because of this their crappiness is STILL affecting me...and us all.
Short of someone writing an illegal patch-worm, this could be seriously difficult to stop. There are just too many IIS installations that are run by people who either don't know what they are doing or worse don't even know what IIS or a web server is. That's the problem with these "idiot-proof" GUI webservers...they can be run by idiots.
We need to see MS get some serious bad press for this, or it won't end. It's getting out of control (judging by the fact that my home Apache server is being hit with this new strain every 5 seconds...literally), and I think it's time MS killed the monster they created and got a little more proactive about finding and notifying the people who are running these unpatched installs...
I agree, although I am still getting some hits from the old variant... Possibly the two variants are actually competing for infectable machines. If so, that would be very interesting in a twisted sort of way...
Darwinistic competition of computer code in the real world...
I remember having the idea like 6 or 7 years ago that we should just firewall AOL and its kin off from the "real" Internet to solve all the problems. This would keep all the people that the marketers are looking for in one place and stop the spread of the commercialization cancer at its source. The people who WANT that type of content could just use AOL or whatever and be happy, and the rest of us would be able to find useful information online again (ala pre-Netscape/IE/etc).
I know this idea sounds elitist, but I really think it has merit. It isn't so much about saying that we are "better" than the AOLers as much it is about segmenting the networks to deliver different experiences to different audiences instead of just letting the marketing-driven commercializtion to spread over the entire Net. Maybe this wouldn't be a problem if the segmentation of the TLD's had actually been enforced...
I'm in a fairly serious Counter-Strike Clan (www.tarclan.com) and I can tell you that the cheating problem has been a continual plague on the concept of league play in CS. For a little while recently, Punkbuster seemed to be working for at least keeping down the numbers of cheaters in league matches, but recently it has become obvious that a great number of cheats were not being detected by PB. Whether this is being done through hacks of PB, or simply because new cheat programs have become available that PB does not yet recogize is unclear, but certain leagues have become virtually unplayable as a result. In my clan we know and can accept that there is really no way for us to catch all the cheaters...so basically we now just scrim and match clans that we know and trust as noncheaters and don't let the children on the publics bother us. It's a lot more fun for everybody if you can trust the opposing team enough that you can just play the game and have fun without worrying about who is cheating blah blah blah. The clans we play have built reputations as being good as well as trustworthy, and aren't willing to risk that over a match. So, although the public server game for CS may be pretty dead for the moment, there is still good fair play to be had if you dig deeper into the CS community.
Actually, Half-life does track people by a "WON ID number" that cooresponds to the serial number for the Half-Life CD. Server admins can ban players by WON ID number, hopefully defeating dynamic IPs, name changes, etc. However, I'm positive that the numbers can be easily faked and as Counter-Strike/TFC/et all are some of the most hacked games out there, the strategy appears to have failed for the most part. Probably it requires too much effort on the part of the admins.
I thought the part about the DMCA was particularly interesting. Whether you agree with this guy or not about the property rights metaphor, I think it's quite true that any criticism of laws like the DMCA should be based on an analysis of who is losing rights and who is gaining under the new law. I know I agree with the second interpretation he puts forth, ie that copyright owners lose at least some control of their works by publishing them for the public. This just makes sense to me logically; granting someone control of other people's use of products smacks of authoritarianism to me. But I do agree that making law in this realm is simply a matter of deciding where we, as a society, decide to draw the lines.
You might care a bit more when people start sniffing the passwords to your online brokerage accounts and credit card numbers you are typing into online forms...
If Moore's Law is to continue, liquid cooled computers are probably an inevitability. After all, in order to stuff more transistors into the chips you have to make the wires smaller which increases resistance and thus heat output. Sooner or later, our air cooling systems just won't cut it anymore...
What is the big deal with the NSA and paranoia? The whole point of open source is that it is impossible for them to slip backdoors or anything like that into the kernel. I highly doubt that even the NSA would be able to get something like that past the Linux community.
While you may not find full-text for _every_ journal article online, the Internet can, in fact, be quite useful for tracking down relevant journal citations to look up when you do go to the library. I remember spending hours at the library looking through massive bibliographic indexes in order to find articles on more obscure topics when I was in high school. Now it is easy for me to just do a little pre-research on the Web to help me find out information such as the names of leading experts in a particular field that (really) saves me hours of work when I actually do walk down to the library. The Web can be an invaluable resource for serious research if you know what you are doing and use it in combination with traditional research tools.
That said, I agree that it sometimes isn't really necessary for students to have such a fat pipe. But remember that a primary purpose of universities is to expose students to the kinds of technologies that they will encounter in the "real world". It makes sense for colleges to stay ahead of the technological curve.
Maybe I'm missing something here, but why have we not yet implemented seamless, transparent crypto at some low level of TCP/IP? That way, even if people can spoof TCP headers and such, they won't be able to decode the payload of the intercepted packets. There is no reason why all the Windoze users out there who have never heard of crypto should not be protected by it just because they don't use PGP. Is there any reason why we cannot build crypto into the protocols used for ALL internet traffic (not just credit cards, etc)? Processing power is cheap, so I doubt that the excuse that it will slow net communications holds much water now.
All true, but the problem is that many home users do not understand that what they are doing is exposing files to the Internet. How many @home users do you really think could tell you that the windows SMB service should _never_ be bound to a routable protocol in an unfirewalled environment. They simply turn it on to share with the maybe one other computer they have in their house, without knowledge of the security implications of what they are doing.
In a loose sense of the word, MS is right that the GPL "destroys" intellectual property. The relevant question is whether or not this is a bad thing (I'm inclined to think it is not!)
I've made the same observation - once, in the early 90's, I actually let a diskette go through the washing machine in my jean's pocket and it STILL worked perfectly as soon as I had let it dry out completely. I still have that one and it still works well, unlike virtually all of the diskettes I have purchased in the last couple years. Nowadays, I reformat all my floppies before saving anything important to them just to scan for bad sectors. If any are detected, then I just toss the disk since I know it will go soon and take my data with it. That is MY definition of a bad disk - one that is even slightly damaged.
While I completely agree with most of your points, I have to take issue with the statement that women would be physiologically better suited to a Mars mission. One of the major health risks associated with long term space travel is loss of bone density (eventually leading to osteoporosis). Women are more susceptible to osteoporosis on Earth because they have less bone mass to lose. Same thing applies here.
I made up my nickname in the sixth grade (I am a junior in college now) whem I discovered all "real"-word names taken on the Internet. Several years later I discovered that the word also represents a Kingdom of viruses, the memetic viruses. You can do a Google search that will turn up several links proving this. Apparently even words I make up had already been thought of in the 19th century!
Slashdot Mirror
According to the article:
"...the FBI has spent the last two years developing a new surveillance architecture that would concentrate Internet traffic in several key locations where all packets, not just e-mail, could be wiretapped."
Excuse me, but isn't one of the main goals of the Internet routing infrastructure precisely the prevention of this type of centralized control? It seems like this proposal would introduce much greater risk by increasing the Net's reliance on a smaller number of points of failure. The FBI can't have its way on this without destroying the Internet as we know it...
At the university I attend, I had noticed severe slowdowns with our network all this morning, and our IS staff sent out an email saying that they were working on the problem. What they didn't mention is that the reason net performance has ground to a halt is that there are multiple infected machines RUN BY IS on the internal LAN. In other words, the people who should know better are the ones running the unpatched IIS boxes! You'd think they would have learned after Code Red....
I think it's more likely that because CR2 spreads so much faster than CR1 it has basically wiped out its ancestor. IIRC, version 2 can infect machines already infected with version 1, so due to the faster propogation rate, CR1 should quickly become rare indeed. That seems to be the case at least in my Apache logs...for the first several hours after CR2 began to hit me, the two versions were interspersed, but CR1 soon dropped off to a trickle.
The funniest part in the story was when the Gator.com executive was quoted as saying the Gator is "easily removable via the Add/Remove Programs dialogue". When I downloaded several programs containing Gator, it didn't install immediately. Instead, it would just sit invisble in the background and wait like an hour. If you tried to delete its installer in this time period it would be locked by the OS. THe only way to delete it before it installed on those programs (which I am POSITIVE did not give the option to install without Gator) was to kill the program and then delete the file. Anyone else see this delay tactic? I think it is meant to make Gator just "show up" on the computer later to prevent the user from just immediately deleting it without "trying" it.
I agree that you have a point, but I don't think it's just the size of the installed base. Most Redhat users probably have a greater understanding of the need to keep their system patched...and Linux doesn't hide all the details of the system from the user in the way that Windows does. It's quite possible that many home Win2k users don't even know that they are running IIS at all, much less that they need to keep informed about exploits and patches for such.
Linux tends to encourage its users to learn more about the workings of their system, in my opinion. Windows tends to encourage people to think of their computer as an "appliance" that they don't have to worry about.
How many hosts will the new strain scan, and does it re-seed its RNG? The reason I ask is that I've noticed that many of the infected hosts that are within my same subnet have scanned my machine upwards of 5-6 times today...
Is each host just limited to a finite number of IPs that it will scan repeatedly, or will it continue to scan the entire Internet if not stopped?
(http://www.cnn.com/2001/TECH/internet/08/01/viru
August 1: CNN tells that virus warnings like this are like "crying wolf"
August 4: New, more virulent, variant of Code Red explodes onto the scene (judging from my Apache logs) and begins to bring parts of the @home network down...
The way I see it, we are all reaping the foul harvest MS has sown. I can't even imagine the amount of bandwidth being wasted on these stupid worms. I don't use MS server products, but because of this their crappiness is STILL affecting me...and us all.
Short of someone writing an illegal patch-worm, this could be seriously difficult to stop. There are just too many IIS installations that are run by people who either don't know what they are doing or worse don't even know what IIS or a web server is. That's the problem with these "idiot-proof" GUI webservers...they can be run by idiots.
We need to see MS get some serious bad press for this, or it won't end. It's getting out of control (judging by the fact that my home Apache server is being hit with this new strain every 5 seconds...literally), and I think it's time MS killed the monster they created and got a little more proactive about finding and notifying the people who are running these unpatched installs...
I agree, although I am still getting some hits from the old variant... Possibly the two variants are actually competing for infectable machines. If so, that would be very interesting in a twisted sort of way...
Darwinistic competition of computer code in the real world...
I remember having the idea like 6 or 7 years ago that we should just firewall AOL and its kin off from the "real" Internet to solve all the problems. This would keep all the people that the marketers are looking for in one place and stop the spread of the commercialization cancer at its source. The people who WANT that type of content could just use AOL or whatever and be happy, and the rest of us would be able to find useful information online again (ala pre-Netscape/IE/etc). I know this idea sounds elitist, but I really think it has merit. It isn't so much about saying that we are "better" than the AOLers as much it is about segmenting the networks to deliver different experiences to different audiences instead of just letting the marketing-driven commercializtion to spread over the entire Net. Maybe this wouldn't be a problem if the segmentation of the TLD's had actually been enforced...
This is one programming book that has stood the test of time... Bjarne Strousrup.
I'm in a fairly serious Counter-Strike Clan (www.tarclan.com) and I can tell you that the cheating problem has been a continual plague on the concept of league play in CS. For a little while recently, Punkbuster seemed to be working for at least keeping down the numbers of cheaters in league matches, but recently it has become obvious that a great number of cheats were not being detected by PB. Whether this is being done through hacks of PB, or simply because new cheat programs have become available that PB does not yet recogize is unclear, but certain leagues have become virtually unplayable as a result. In my clan we know and can accept that there is really no way for us to catch all the cheaters...so basically we now just scrim and match clans that we know and trust as noncheaters and don't let the children on the publics bother us. It's a lot more fun for everybody if you can trust the opposing team enough that you can just play the game and have fun without worrying about who is cheating blah blah blah. The clans we play have built reputations as being good as well as trustworthy, and aren't willing to risk that over a match. So, although the public server game for CS may be pretty dead for the moment, there is still good fair play to be had if you dig deeper into the CS community.
Actually, Half-life does track people by a "WON ID number" that cooresponds to the serial number for the Half-Life CD. Server admins can ban players by WON ID number, hopefully defeating dynamic IPs, name changes, etc. However, I'm positive that the numbers can be easily faked and as Counter-Strike/TFC/et all are some of the most hacked games out there, the strategy appears to have failed for the most part. Probably it requires too much effort on the part of the admins.
I thought the part about the DMCA was particularly interesting. Whether you agree with this guy or not about the property rights metaphor, I think it's quite true that any criticism of laws like the DMCA should be based on an analysis of who is losing rights and who is gaining under the new law. I know I agree with the second interpretation he puts forth, ie that copyright owners lose at least some control of their works by publishing them for the public. This just makes sense to me logically; granting someone control of other people's use of products smacks of authoritarianism to me. But I do agree that making law in this realm is simply a matter of deciding where we, as a society, decide to draw the lines.
You might care a bit more when people start sniffing the passwords to your online brokerage accounts and credit card numbers you are typing into online forms...
If Moore's Law is to continue, liquid cooled computers are probably an inevitability. After all, in order to stuff more transistors into the chips you have to make the wires smaller which increases resistance and thus heat output. Sooner or later, our air cooling systems just won't cut it anymore...
What is the big deal with the NSA and paranoia? The whole point of open source is that it is impossible for them to slip backdoors or anything like that into the kernel. I highly doubt that even the NSA would be able to get something like that past the Linux community.
While you may not find full-text for _every_ journal article online, the Internet can, in fact, be quite useful for tracking down relevant journal citations to look up when you do go to the library. I remember spending hours at the library looking through massive bibliographic indexes in order to find articles on more obscure topics when I was in high school. Now it is easy for me to just do a little pre-research on the Web to help me find out information such as the names of leading experts in a particular field that (really) saves me hours of work when I actually do walk down to the library. The Web can be an invaluable resource for serious research if you know what you are doing and use it in combination with traditional research tools. That said, I agree that it sometimes isn't really necessary for students to have such a fat pipe. But remember that a primary purpose of universities is to expose students to the kinds of technologies that they will encounter in the "real world". It makes sense for colleges to stay ahead of the technological curve.
Maybe I'm missing something here, but why have we not yet implemented seamless, transparent crypto at some low level of TCP/IP? That way, even if people can spoof TCP headers and such, they won't be able to decode the payload of the intercepted packets. There is no reason why all the Windoze users out there who have never heard of crypto should not be protected by it just because they don't use PGP. Is there any reason why we cannot build crypto into the protocols used for ALL internet traffic (not just credit cards, etc)? Processing power is cheap, so I doubt that the excuse that it will slow net communications holds much water now.
All true, but the problem is that many home users do not understand that what they are doing is exposing files to the Internet. How many @home users do you really think could tell you that the windows SMB service should _never_ be bound to a routable protocol in an unfirewalled environment. They simply turn it on to share with the maybe one other computer they have in their house, without knowledge of the security implications of what they are doing.
In a loose sense of the word, MS is right that the GPL "destroys" intellectual property. The relevant question is whether or not this is a bad thing (I'm inclined to think it is not!)
Here's my guess: 2001-03-17 21:25:31 Had to add this line to make it past the lameness filter.
I've made the same observation - once, in the early 90's, I actually let a diskette go through the washing machine in my jean's pocket and it STILL worked perfectly as soon as I had let it dry out completely. I still have that one and it still works well, unlike virtually all of the diskettes I have purchased in the last couple years. Nowadays, I reformat all my floppies before saving anything important to them just to scan for bad sectors. If any are detected, then I just toss the disk since I know it will go soon and take my data with it. That is MY definition of a bad disk - one that is even slightly damaged.
While I completely agree with most of your points, I have to take issue with the statement that women would be physiologically better suited to a Mars mission. One of the major health risks associated with long term space travel is loss of bone density (eventually leading to osteoporosis). Women are more susceptible to osteoporosis on Earth because they have less bone mass to lose. Same thing applies here.
I made up my nickname in the sixth grade (I am a junior in college now) whem I discovered all "real"-word names taken on the Internet. Several years later I discovered that the word also represents a Kingdom of viruses, the memetic viruses. You can do a Google search that will turn up several links proving this. Apparently even words I make up had already been thought of in the 19th century!