No, you'd pay your sleezy robocaller to genuinely try and sell your competitor's products. Sales would be met either from stock specifically acquired in bulk for the purpose (and probably netting a small profit into the bargin), or by putting the order through to the competitor directly, like by entering the callee's details into the competitor's website as they are being taken. The latter would be even better, since it would be even harder to claim innocence when the cops can go rooting through the competitor's sales system and find the order, invoice and despatch note in there.
Also, "start"??? I think the correct phrase at this point would be "Patents are supposed to encourage innovation and we're now in a world where they have already stifled innovation."
Or isn't Mr. Bezos keeping up with events in the courthouses of the Eastern District of Texas?
That seems awfully conservative to me. Since there is next to no incentive for a Black Hat to reveal any 0-day they are currently exploiting - bug bounty programmes being perhaps the one exception - then there is the possibility that any given exploit that is discovered might have already been found and be in the process of being exploited as an unknown 0-day by someone else. Taken to the extreme, and that could mean that every published and exploitable bug has been utilised a 0-day at some point, even when the person officially credited with discovery has used a responsible disclosure approach and a vendor patch has been available before the details are maed public.
I'd be very surprised if the number of 0-day exploits in active use, whether by criminals, scammers or government agencies, around the entire world at any given time was in single figures, and the figure even peaking into the three figure range doesn't seem like it's too unrealistic, either.
According to the live feed it's still being troubleshooted as at 94,000ft, so still no progress. Presumably there are other heaters on the suit that can keep him warm enough during the descent, so the only issue I could see would be if the lack of helmet heating might cause the helmet visor to mist up during descent. There is no talk about aborting the jump at all on the feed, so I'd guess it's not a critical issue.
I rather think that plate tectonics and vulcanism would put paid to any monument left on Earth for up to a couple of billion years. The moon or one of the other balls of rock might be a better option from a geological perspective, but would still be vulnerable to a suitably large meteor strike in the vicinity. A small object like a satellite floating around in space is probably going to have the best chance of survival, but the flipside is that it simply isn't very likely to be found unless it can be discriminated from all of the other lumps of ice, rock and dead satellites spinning around the sun.
Realistically, the only way I can see for us to leave a message for an alien race in the distant future is to get our asses off this rock and colonize as many other star systems as possible in the hope that something will still be around when they arrive, ideally that will include distant descendants. Quite simply, we don't currently have the technology to build something that can plausibly survive those kinds of timescales and also be significant enough to guarantee even a miniscule chance of being found.
Give Randall some credit, this must have taken ages to put together, and is all the more impressive once you realise that it's more or less all draw to the scale. The real mindfsck is when you read the comment from the girl on the far left and work out that, despite all of that apparently vast area to explore, the whole thing represents is only about five miles from one side to the other. I just didn't expect it [the drawing] to be so small!
Yeah, the GoogleMaps version really sucks for some reason. Try this one instead.
Note that is privately hosted, and since a Slashdotting is likely to turn his suspicions about hosting costs into reality you might want to consider a donation, or at least a like to help him with the Facebook "Like" for the image linked from the page.
Fiddly, but on the right track for getting the most out of the 12 PCs. *NIX is your friend here - what you want is what X.org refers to as a "multiseat" system - your only limit is how many discrete graphics cards you can cram into your PC(s). Here's a walkthough of setting one up with six seats. If you can get them, you could also hook up some VT102 or similar dumb terminals to the same box and maybe rig up some UPSs so you can have power available when it's needed as opposed to when it's available.
If he can't get hold of typewriters in a country sandwiched between India and Burma, then he's not looking hard enough or just plain hasn't looked. There must be thousands of the things lying around that left over from the latter days of the British Empire, probably the most pedantic bunch of "fill it in in triplicate" record-keeping bureaucrats that the world has seen. Sure, some of them probably need some work, but you have a ready supply of about 500 kids who could muck in there, and maybe learn a thing or two about basic engineering in the process.
Typewriters are definitely the way to go for the initial lessons. Manual ones for starters, then maybe electronic ones if they are available for the next stage - just make sure that any ribbons that are needed are cloth so that they can be re-inked though.
Some more thoughts for the next stage - moving them onto actual "computers". You might want to looking into re-purpose one or more of the 12 PCs as a *NIX box using your favourite distro (via LiveCD if need be), then running some dumb terminals off it. With an RS-232 port board and a bunch of Wyse terminals you could easily run a whole classroom from a single decently specified server box, or even some more modern terminals that have Ethernet. Dumb terminals are still quite common in India and other countries I've been too in the region, so I'd imagine they wouldn't be too hard or expensive to obtain across the border in Bangladesh. Ask around too - maybe a local company that has upgraded to PCs might have some in a store room they'd be willing to donate for some favourable press... Alternatively, if you can get hold of some extra graphics adapters, monitors and keyboards, you could take a look at this tutorial that walks you through building a six-headed Linux box - one server, six keyboards & monitors and (more importantly) concurrent users. That's all going to need some power, but a heck of a lot less than an equivalent number of stand-alone PCs.
I think you missed the part of the story about these being legacy IPs. They were assigned to the DWP directly by IANA, before there were any RIRs, LIRs or even CIDR allocations, under an agreement that effectively does mean that the DWP owns, in the very literal sense, the IP space assigned. At best, there is a kind of gentleman's agreement that the DWP would comply with RIPE's policies, but there isn't really any legally binding reason for them to do so as there is no contract in place between DWP and RIPE. Also, for RIPE at least, there has been a size allocation policy on assignments in place for over 10 years, and I'm pretty sure that APNIC has had a similar policy in place for about as long.
That doesn't change the fact that we are all but out of assignable IPv4 space in the ARIN, RIPE and APNIC regions, and there are plenty of companies that are going to need more IPv4 space to grow before any migration to dual-stack or native IPv6 can happen. True, it's partly their own fault for not starting to look at IPv6 sooner, but you also have to lay some of the blame at the still quite lamentable IPv6 support from the middle to lower tiers of the hardware market upon which many of the IPv6 holdouts rely to be able to operate on the margins they have. Reclaiming unrouted IP space, even huge swathes of it like the DWP's/8, for conventional re-assignment isn't worth doing, "rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic" is right; it would only buy you a few months at best.
In case you haven't noticed, we're also in the middle of a global recession; forcing such small, low-margin companies to dual-stack, necessitating expense and reassignment of staff resources likely to be needed elsewhere, is likely to drive many of them into bankruptcy, deepening and prolonging the recession. What is needed are some incentives in the form of a carrot (time to dual-stack, available IPv4 space if absolutely required) and a stick (having to pay for the loan of IPs), and maybe a bit of helping hand from government in the form of cheap loans to pay for it from all of those banks that the taxpayer's now own.
You jest, but that was my first thought too. I suspect that we'll see a sharp uptick in 419s written in Spanish over the next few months now that there are some niceofficialmediareports from third parties to lend some credence to the scam.
Plenty of people have noticed this before now, IANA has published a table showing all the/8 allocations pretty much since they were formed. Anything flagged as "LEGACY" was assigned before the current RIR/LIR assignment process was implemented. Someone even complied a table showing which parts of the legacy IP assignments were not routed some years back, which must have included the DWP's/8 as well unless they were actually advertising it at the time that the table was compiled.
The only thing that makes this slightly newsworthy is this about a cash strapped sovereign government sitting on a sizable pool of "spare" IPv4 space that has suddenly become a much more valuable commodity following the recent announcement that RIPE is now down to its final/8 and IPv4 allocations within Europe and those parts of Asia that fall under RIPE's remit are now heavily restricted. You can probably expect a similar story about the dozens (see the table above) of underused/8s that are held by US corporations and government agencies, the DoD especially, when ARIN's IPv4 approaches exhaustion as well.
Quite. These IP addresses legitimately belong to the UK Government, and therefore by implication to the UK taxpayer. The snag is that they belong to the wrong department of the UK Government to actually do much good and given the usual incompetence of government transferring them to where they might be useful isn't likely to happen in time. If UK.gov can get its thumb out of its ass and come to some kind of arrangement with RIPE to let them it do it (this kind of thing is not currently permitted under RIPE's T&Cs), these IPs could actually make some money for the Exchequer.
There are going to be plenty of IPv6 hold-outs in the UK who are pretty much fscked now that RIPE is assigning IPs from its last/8 and therefore won't be able to get any more IPv4 addresses to grow their businesses. If the DWP's/8 were to be loaned out to those companies for a suitably stiff "administration fee" that would give those businesses more time to migrate to IPv6 while potentially generating a considerable amount of revenue for the UK government in the process. Better yet, make the fee monthly and increase it as time goes by; that way you'd be motivating the companies concerned to hasten their move to IPv6 so they could return the loan IPv4 block back to UK.gov ready for assignment to the next sucker who held off deploying IPv6 too long.
That second link to Musicmetric (incorrectly labelled Musicmatch) for the download of the raw data should actually go here since it's a little hard to find the link on the Musicmetric website. So much for posting comments into the Firehose to help the editors edit, huh?;)
Sure, but that would require either DPI of port #53 traffic or forced redirection of DNS traffic to the ISP's servers to matter. In my experience there are not too many airport/hotel portals, wireless hotspots or repressive governments that are doing that (yet).
SSH clients that support tunneling are available for Android and, as far as SSH servers are concerned, port #53 is just another port you might want to bind it to.:)
Who needs Iodine? Anyone with access to an an SSH server could bind it to port 53, then just establish SSH tunnels to it to do all sorts of stuff, not least of which are avoiding all sorts of data charges and local content filtering. Hypothetically speaking, of course...;)
I know surfing the web using Internet Explorer can be a bit of an adventure, but even so, I think that's probably the first time I've seen it referred to as a "game".
According to the article that $426 was made in less than one day (the first), and since you'll hopefully be getting donations seven days a week that makes it equivalent to an income just shy of $3,000 per week. Assuming that you can crank out equally successful games at a rate that out paces the inevitable waning interest in your previous works, while you are not certainly going to be making a fortune and will need to self fund all the benefits that an employer might provide as part of a package, it's still not a bad wage.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, I can see the headline now: "Anne Thwacks Whacked with Anthrax!"
No, you'd pay your sleezy robocaller to genuinely try and sell your competitor's products. Sales would be met either from stock specifically acquired in bulk for the purpose (and probably netting a small profit into the bargin), or by putting the order through to the competitor directly, like by entering the callee's details into the competitor's website as they are being taken. The latter would be even better, since it would be even harder to claim innocence when the cops can go rooting through the competitor's sales system and find the order, invoice and despatch note in there.
Also, "start"??? I think the correct phrase at this point would be "Patents are supposed to encourage innovation and we're now in a world where they have already stifled innovation."
Or isn't Mr. Bezos keeping up with events in the courthouses of the Eastern District of Texas?
That seems awfully conservative to me. Since there is next to no incentive for a Black Hat to reveal any 0-day they are currently exploiting - bug bounty programmes being perhaps the one exception - then there is the possibility that any given exploit that is discovered might have already been found and be in the process of being exploited as an unknown 0-day by someone else. Taken to the extreme, and that could mean that every published and exploitable bug has been utilised a 0-day at some point, even when the person officially credited with discovery has used a responsible disclosure approach and a vendor patch has been available before the details are maed public.
I'd be very surprised if the number of 0-day exploits in active use, whether by criminals, scammers or government agencies, around the entire world at any given time was in single figures, and the figure even peaking into the three figure range doesn't seem like it's too unrealistic, either.
According to the live feed it's still being troubleshooted as at 94,000ft, so still no progress. Presumably there are other heaters on the suit that can keep him warm enough during the descent, so the only issue I could see would be if the lack of helmet heating might cause the helmet visor to mist up during descent. There is no talk about aborting the jump at all on the feed, so I'd guess it's not a critical issue.
Now, now. The correct way to appease a Grammar Nazi is to give them a big hug, then softly say "There, Their, They're..."
By counting the number of times terms like "OMG" and "LOL" appear per sentence?
I rather think that plate tectonics and vulcanism would put paid to any monument left on Earth for up to a couple of billion years. The moon or one of the other balls of rock might be a better option from a geological perspective, but would still be vulnerable to a suitably large meteor strike in the vicinity. A small object like a satellite floating around in space is probably going to have the best chance of survival, but the flipside is that it simply isn't very likely to be found unless it can be discriminated from all of the other lumps of ice, rock and dead satellites spinning around the sun.
Realistically, the only way I can see for us to leave a message for an alien race in the distant future is to get our asses off this rock and colonize as many other star systems as possible in the hope that something will still be around when they arrive, ideally that will include distant descendants. Quite simply, we don't currently have the technology to build something that can plausibly survive those kinds of timescales and also be significant enough to guarantee even a miniscule chance of being found.
No, the ultimate impressive achievement would be to grow the new ear in the middle of the forehead. That way it would be the final front-ear.
Soooo... Glass half empty kind of guy, huh?
Give Randall some credit, this must have taken ages to put together, and is all the more impressive once you realise that it's more or less all draw to the scale. The real mindfsck is when you read the comment from the girl on the far left and work out that, despite all of that apparently vast area to explore, the whole thing represents is only about five miles from one side to the other. I just didn't expect it [the drawing] to be so small!
Yeah, the GoogleMaps version really sucks for some reason. Try this one instead.
Note that is privately hosted, and since a Slashdotting is likely to turn his suspicions about hosting costs into reality you might want to consider a donation, or at least a like to help him with the Facebook "Like" for the image linked from the page.
Fiddly, but on the right track for getting the most out of the 12 PCs. *NIX is your friend here - what you want is what X.org refers to as a "multiseat" system - your only limit is how many discrete graphics cards you can cram into your PC(s). Here's a walkthough of setting one up with six seats. If you can get them, you could also hook up some VT102 or similar dumb terminals to the same box and maybe rig up some UPSs so you can have power available when it's needed as opposed to when it's available.
If he can't get hold of typewriters in a country sandwiched between India and Burma, then he's not looking hard enough or just plain hasn't looked. There must be thousands of the things lying around that left over from the latter days of the British Empire, probably the most pedantic bunch of "fill it in in triplicate" record-keeping bureaucrats that the world has seen. Sure, some of them probably need some work, but you have a ready supply of about 500 kids who could muck in there, and maybe learn a thing or two about basic engineering in the process.
Typewriters are definitely the way to go for the initial lessons. Manual ones for starters, then maybe electronic ones if they are available for the next stage - just make sure that any ribbons that are needed are cloth so that they can be re-inked though.
Some more thoughts for the next stage - moving them onto actual "computers". You might want to looking into re-purpose one or more of the 12 PCs as a *NIX box using your favourite distro (via LiveCD if need be), then running some dumb terminals off it. With an RS-232 port board and a bunch of Wyse terminals you could easily run a whole classroom from a single decently specified server box, or even some more modern terminals that have Ethernet. Dumb terminals are still quite common in India and other countries I've been too in the region, so I'd imagine they wouldn't be too hard or expensive to obtain across the border in Bangladesh. Ask around too - maybe a local company that has upgraded to PCs might have some in a store room they'd be willing to donate for some favourable press... Alternatively, if you can get hold of some extra graphics adapters, monitors and keyboards, you could take a look at this tutorial that walks you through building a six-headed Linux box - one server, six keyboards & monitors and (more importantly) concurrent users. That's all going to need some power, but a heck of a lot less than an equivalent number of stand-alone PCs.
I think you missed the part of the story about these being legacy IPs. They were assigned to the DWP directly by IANA, before there were any RIRs, LIRs or even CIDR allocations, under an agreement that effectively does mean that the DWP owns, in the very literal sense, the IP space assigned. At best, there is a kind of gentleman's agreement that the DWP would comply with RIPE's policies, but there isn't really any legally binding reason for them to do so as there is no contract in place between DWP and RIPE. Also, for RIPE at least, there has been a size allocation policy on assignments in place for over 10 years, and I'm pretty sure that APNIC has had a similar policy in place for about as long.
/8, for conventional re-assignment isn't worth doing, "rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic" is right; it would only buy you a few months at best.
That doesn't change the fact that we are all but out of assignable IPv4 space in the ARIN, RIPE and APNIC regions, and there are plenty of companies that are going to need more IPv4 space to grow before any migration to dual-stack or native IPv6 can happen. True, it's partly their own fault for not starting to look at IPv6 sooner, but you also have to lay some of the blame at the still quite lamentable IPv6 support from the middle to lower tiers of the hardware market upon which many of the IPv6 holdouts rely to be able to operate on the margins they have. Reclaiming unrouted IP space, even huge swathes of it like the DWP's
In case you haven't noticed, we're also in the middle of a global recession; forcing such small, low-margin companies to dual-stack, necessitating expense and reassignment of staff resources likely to be needed elsewhere, is likely to drive many of them into bankruptcy, deepening and prolonging the recession. What is needed are some incentives in the form of a carrot (time to dual-stack, available IPv4 space if absolutely required) and a stick (having to pay for the loan of IPs), and maybe a bit of helping hand from government in the form of cheap loans to pay for it from all of those banks that the taxpayer's now own.
You jest, but that was my first thought too. I suspect that we'll see a sharp uptick in 419s written in Spanish over the next few months now that there are some nice official media reports from third parties to lend some credence to the scam.
Plenty of people have noticed this before now, IANA has published a table showing all the /8 allocations pretty much since they were formed. Anything flagged as "LEGACY" was assigned before the current RIR/LIR assignment process was implemented. Someone even complied a table showing which parts of the legacy IP assignments were not routed some years back, which must have included the DWP's /8 as well unless they were actually advertising it at the time that the table was compiled.
/8 and IPv4 allocations within Europe and those parts of Asia that fall under RIPE's remit are now heavily restricted. You can probably expect a similar story about the dozens (see the table above) of underused /8s that are held by US corporations and government agencies, the DoD especially, when ARIN's IPv4 approaches exhaustion as well.
The only thing that makes this slightly newsworthy is this about a cash strapped sovereign government sitting on a sizable pool of "spare" IPv4 space that has suddenly become a much more valuable commodity following the recent announcement that RIPE is now down to its final
Quite. These IP addresses legitimately belong to the UK Government, and therefore by implication to the UK taxpayer. The snag is that they belong to the wrong department of the UK Government to actually do much good and given the usual incompetence of government transferring them to where they might be useful isn't likely to happen in time. If UK.gov can get its thumb out of its ass and come to some kind of arrangement with RIPE to let them it do it (this kind of thing is not currently permitted under RIPE's T&Cs), these IPs could actually make some money for the Exchequer.
/8 and therefore won't be able to get any more IPv4 addresses to grow their businesses. If the DWP's /8 were to be loaned out to those companies for a suitably stiff "administration fee" that would give those businesses more time to migrate to IPv6 while potentially generating a considerable amount of revenue for the UK government in the process. Better yet, make the fee monthly and increase it as time goes by; that way you'd be motivating the companies concerned to hasten their move to IPv6 so they could return the loan IPv4 block back to UK.gov ready for assignment to the next sucker who held off deploying IPv6 too long.
There are going to be plenty of IPv6 hold-outs in the UK who are pretty much fscked now that RIPE is assigning IPs from its last
That second link to Musicmetric (incorrectly labelled Musicmatch) for the download of the raw data should actually go here since it's a little hard to find the link on the Musicmetric website. So much for posting comments into the Firehose to help the editors edit, huh? ;)
Sure, but that would require either DPI of port #53 traffic or forced redirection of DNS traffic to the ISP's servers to matter. In my experience there are not too many airport/hotel portals, wireless hotspots or repressive governments that are doing that (yet).
SSH clients that support tunneling are available for Android and, as far as SSH servers are concerned, port #53 is just another port you might want to bind it to. :)
Who needs Iodine? Anyone with access to an an SSH server could bind it to port 53, then just establish SSH tunnels to it to do all sorts of stuff, not least of which are avoiding all sorts of data charges and local content filtering. Hypothetically speaking, of course... ;)
I know surfing the web using Internet Explorer can be a bit of an adventure, but even so, I think that's probably the first time I've seen it referred to as a "game".
According to the article that $426 was made in less than one day (the first), and since you'll hopefully be getting donations seven days a week that makes it equivalent to an income just shy of $3,000 per week. Assuming that you can crank out equally successful games at a rate that out paces the inevitable waning interest in your previous works, while you are not certainly going to be making a fortune and will need to self fund all the benefits that an employer might provide as part of a package, it's still not a bad wage.
tl;dr