Just because they're connected with the government and has special privileges doesn't mean that they're not allowed to deal with private corporations. The fact that the USPS is currently in a seven year partnership with Federal Express (a corporation) apparently doesn't seem to matter to you.
How would you feel if the USPS were to team up with the Mafia? Which are a better analogy with Microsoft than Federal Express.
The post office is not really part of the government, but rather a business run to support an important country function.
Governments frequently set up organisations to do things which are eseential for their territory (and it's economy) to operate effectivly. Even if they superficially appear to be businesses the rules they operate under may be different. e.g. not having to maximise profit for shareholders, exemptions from planning laws, etc.
Maybe we need to add "separation of corporation and state" to our "separation of church and state" in the constitution?
Depends on the definition of "religion". Considering that many political organisations require at least the same level of faith as any "religion". With the line between "political" and "religious" having been blurred throughout history. Also OS advocates, of all kinds, are described using the same kind of terms as are used to describe religious (or political) positions.
I'd like to have see chips that incorporate the CPU, RAM and something equivalent to the North+South bridge. Motherboards should be designed to take 1-32 of these plugged into some godawfulfast bus. CPU and RAM should be one in the same and scale together. RAM co-located w/ the CPU would be much, much faster.
Most of this (apart from the RAM with the CPU) sounds like a Sequent Symetry. There's also the Vax cluster. Where processors (with RAM) and storage controllers connect to a 16 (IIRC) way star interconnect. Both of these are over a decade old technology. So something similar which fits in a box one person can pick up is probably overdue.
The primary disadvantage of clustering is the network bottleneck. You lose out because even 100mbps is only a small fraction of what the pci bus of even low end pentium systems are able to handle. At LEAST go with gigabit ethernet so you can push over 100 megs per second between processors. This will greatly increase the usefulness of an integrated cluster by decreasing the one primary disadvantage
Depends on the application in question. There are many parallel processing tasks which do not need massive communication between processors. Effectivly each processor simply gets on with it's task on it's own.
If your going to spend the time and money building and marketing systems like this, they could have done a better job. They suck mobos in a big case and eth linked them togeather.
But for some reason chose a midi tower, rather than a 4U rackmount.
Or perhaps Cloud 9 were having problems anyway and found it easier to put the blame on an a fictitious DoS than actually admit they've gone bust due to their own bad management.
Dosn't need to be fictitious. Consider airlines blaming all their troubles on September the 11th. Even though some of them had been in trouble for years.
Perhaps we are putting our resources out to the wrong people? Who are we actually mad at? What we should be doing is stopping people from creating the tools that these "script kiddies" are using.
Starting a "war on hacker tools" is as futile as a "war on drugs/terrorism/etc".
Take that away and those lame unknowledged kids will be helpless.
Except that it's impossible. You'd be trying to in effect "uninvent" these tools, which has actually been tried (with firearms in Japan).
The majority of DDOS attacks could be tracked if only more ISP's would put outbound packet filtering on.
Or rather compromised machines used to launch them identified. Especially if dynamic IP assignment was also minimised.
I am not a transit ISP, so there is never a reason for me to send a packet with a source IP address that doesn't belong to one of our assigned address blocks. There is no way for that packet to get back to me.
It is possible for someone to be doing this for legitimate reasons(some kind of load balancing or redundant connections), just highly unlikely.
Taking this to an absurdly inappopriate analogy: If some pranksters fire bombed an old age home killing all inside, is the solution to call for old age homes to be built with fireproof walls and armed guards out front? Where does the responsibility of the criminal end and the responsibility of the victim begin?
If this happened you'd have both people investigating how to cach the arsonists and people investigating how to make buildings which didn't burn so well, didn't produce so much toxic smoke, more effective warning and evacuation systems, etc.
This is not a black and white issue. A DoS attack is both illegal and imoral, as what you are doing hurts a large group of people. Exposing bad security in e-book files will help people in the long run.
It can be a very grey area. e.g. the equivalent of someone smuggling a weapon onto an airliner to deomonstrate that the security arangments arn't fully effective.
as far as I can tell there is no legitimate use for a tool designed specifically for DoS attacks
Testing that something intended to prevent such attacks working is a perfectly legitimate use. In the same way that it's perfectly legitimate to test an armoured vehicle by shooting at it. (Or if it's being sold to the government of Georgia firing anti tank weapons at it.)
Guns are bad. Nuclear weapons are bad. Let's remove them both from the military. Studying how these things are built and used is not a worthwhile endevor. Since we don't believe in attacking someone for no reason, we don't need any weapons. We also don't need to study how offensive weapons might be used against us. Therefore there is no reason for their existance. Let's just pass a WMCA (Weapons Millenium Contraband Act) law and outlaw anyone even thinking about how weapons work or how reinforcements might be vulnerable to weapons.
Whilst I think this was intended as satire, there is a historical parallel. Japan actually banned firearms, because their use made a nonsense of their highly trained swordsman. Effectivly their whole way of doing war and the industry supporting it would have been obsolete. This worked until the US navy turned up and enguaged in "gunboat diplomacy". Having realised that they had made a mistake the Japanese actually learned from it (and decided to pay a return visit on the US Pacific fleet some time later.)
With all the designs available to us today, as engineers, we should be able to employ traffic shaping devices to limit the amount of load any given site can generate on the net.
However the way a Distributed denial of service attack works is that the stuff comes from programs installed on machines without the users knowlage. Unless the attacks have some kind of identifiable signature how do you identify them? Traffic shapping approachs are more applicable with something like spamming.
Because we have ended up with a situation where the law is actually different for analogue and digital recordings. Something which major publishing and distribution companies appear to have worked hard to create.
This may be "funny," but I've said that such maneuvering may be in the future for software / internet firms in the future. There's no big manufacturing plants to build and the money is right for them to "lease" a small island for 99 years and just plant themselves on it. And how hard would it be to recruit personnel to work on gorgeous Caribbean islands?
You mean like this nice large island in the Caribbean known as Cuba...
Grow your company to the right size in a protected nation (see USA), then when that country starts to turn on you, pack up and head for your own mini country!
Exactly where does this mini country get the sort of military hardware it may need to be sure of maintaining its independance?
It's only a matter of time until MS becomes based in the Cayman Islands
What do they then do if they annoy the US government? Whilst they are US based the only thing they have to fear is the DOJ, move outside the US and they then have to face the DOD. (And the militry of any other country they might annoy.)
That is because the people/organizations you mention are willing to go to extreme mesures to push their view. They'll spend all their free time passing out fliers. They're willing to start protest rallys, picket lines, and riots. Some of them are even willing to murder for their ideas.
Some of them have even worked out ways of using public money to pay for their lobbying activities.
Normal people just want to live their lives. Normal people worry about what will happen to their familes if they are arrested or anger an opposing faction.
Normal people also have lives and jobs. Which generally do not allow they to enguage in full time lobbying (or to pay for full time proxies, which is the way big business does it.)
Why does it seem that governments always come to be dominated by special interests, e.g., big business, religious zealots, etc., at the expense of the people at large?
Because such organisations are better able to find time (and money) to influence politicans. Especially if they claim to represent either a "majority" or politically correct "minority". (The really clever ones "bootstrap" their own "minority" cause...) How you create a political system where regular people can raise issues with politicans whilst eliminating organised corporate lobbying is a very non trivial issue.
Australia has a written constitution, but unlike the US constitution it says very little about human rights, and the limits of government legislation.
Not that it makes much difference in practice. Since the US federal government has had plenty of practice in finding and exploiting loopholes. A written constitution is only as good as a populace prepared to defend it.
Cheer up. It could be worse. What would happen if the Government lied to us?
How would you tell if they were? If you already have laws against "obsenity", "hate speach", etc it dosn't take must to extend their definition to help hide government corruption. Most people are far less cynical about their governments than would be prudent (if anything can be learned from history.)
When will the conservatives in Australia learn that just because you might want your kids seeing something, doesn't mean you have the right to stop everyone in the country from seeing it?
THe simple answer is never since very often the "children might see it" is simply an excuse.
t's obvious that the reason they are keeping the blacklist secret is because they are afraid of public scrutiny and backlash against it. No doubt, like virtually all censorware, they have censored many sites that clearly oughtn't be censored.
THough the more interesting question is how many of these are actual "mistakes" and how many are because the adgenda of the censors isn't quite what they want people to think it is.
In addition to "porn" on the blacklist, they'll probably put all non-mormon religious sites, and anything that has to do with dancing, tea, coffee, Pepsi, or the "devil" alcohol. Note also that R rated movies (or even PG-13) are considered "porn" by many of the people in Utah.
I recall seeing a documentry about at attempt to presecute a video store for supplying porn somewhere in Utah. The case effectivly collapsed when the defence carried out some research into PPV cable usage in the same area. Effectivly they managed to prove the addage that those who advocate censorship are often hypocritical.
Slashdot Mirror
Just because they're connected with the government and has special privileges doesn't mean that they're not allowed to deal with private corporations. The fact that the USPS is currently in a seven year partnership with Federal Express (a corporation) apparently doesn't seem to matter to you.
How would you feel if the USPS were to team up with the Mafia? Which are a better analogy with Microsoft than Federal Express.
The post office is not really part of the government, but rather a business run to support an important country function.
Governments frequently set up organisations to do things which are eseential for their territory (and it's economy) to operate effectivly. Even if they superficially appear to be businesses the rules they operate under may be different. e.g. not having to maximise profit for shareholders, exemptions from planning laws, etc.
Maybe we need to add "separation of corporation and state" to our "separation of church and state" in the constitution?
Depends on the definition of "religion". Considering that many political organisations require at least the same level of faith as any "religion". With the line between "political" and "religious" having been blurred throughout history. Also OS advocates, of all kinds, are described using the same kind of terms as are used to describe religious (or political) positions.
I'd like to have see chips that incorporate the CPU, RAM and something equivalent to the North+South bridge. Motherboards should be designed to take 1-32 of these plugged into some godawfulfast bus. CPU and RAM should be one in the same and scale together. RAM co-located w/ the CPU would be much, much faster.
Most of this (apart from the RAM with the CPU) sounds like a Sequent Symetry. There's also the Vax cluster. Where processors (with RAM) and storage controllers connect to a 16 (IIRC) way star interconnect.
Both of these are over a decade old technology. So something similar which fits in a box one person can pick up is probably overdue.
The primary disadvantage of clustering is the network bottleneck. You lose out because even 100mbps is only a small fraction of what the pci bus of even low end pentium systems are able to handle. At LEAST go with gigabit ethernet so you can push over 100 megs per second between processors. This will greatly increase the usefulness of an integrated cluster by decreasing the one primary disadvantage
Depends on the application in question. There are many parallel processing tasks which do not need massive communication between processors. Effectivly each processor simply gets on with it's task on it's own.
If your going to spend the time and money building and marketing systems like this, they could have done a better job. They suck mobos in a big case and eth linked them togeather.
But for some reason chose a midi tower, rather than a 4U rackmount.
Or perhaps Cloud 9 were having problems anyway and found it easier to put the blame on an a fictitious DoS than actually admit they've gone bust due to their own bad management.
Dosn't need to be fictitious. Consider airlines blaming all their troubles on September the 11th. Even though some of them had been in trouble for years.
Perhaps we are putting our resources out to the wrong people? Who are we actually mad at? What we should be doing is stopping people from creating the tools that these "script kiddies" are using.
Starting a "war on hacker tools" is as futile as a "war on drugs/terrorism/etc".
Take that away and those lame unknowledged kids will be helpless.
Except that it's impossible. You'd be trying to in effect "uninvent" these tools, which has actually been tried (with firearms in Japan).
The majority of DDOS attacks could be tracked if only more ISP's would put outbound packet filtering on.
Or rather compromised machines used to launch them identified. Especially if dynamic IP assignment was also minimised.
I am not a transit ISP, so there is never a reason for me to send a packet with a source IP address that doesn't belong to one of our assigned address blocks. There is no way for that packet to get back to me.
It is possible for someone to be doing this for legitimate reasons(some kind of load balancing or redundant connections), just highly unlikely.
Taking this to an absurdly inappopriate analogy: If some pranksters fire bombed an old age home killing all inside, is the solution to call for old age homes to be built with fireproof walls and armed guards out front? Where does the responsibility of the criminal end and the responsibility of the victim begin?
If this happened you'd have both people investigating how to cach the arsonists and people investigating how to make buildings which didn't burn so well, didn't produce so much toxic smoke, more effective warning and evacuation systems, etc.
This is not a black and white issue. A DoS attack is both illegal and imoral, as what you are doing hurts a large group of people. Exposing bad security in e-book files will help people in the long run.
It can be a very grey area. e.g. the equivalent of someone smuggling a weapon onto an airliner to deomonstrate that the security arangments arn't fully effective.
as far as I can tell there is no legitimate use for a tool designed specifically for DoS attacks
Testing that something intended to prevent such attacks working is a perfectly legitimate use. In the same way that it's perfectly legitimate to test an armoured vehicle by shooting at it. (Or if it's being sold to the government of Georgia firing anti tank weapons at it.)
Guns are bad. Nuclear weapons are bad. Let's remove them both from the military. Studying how these things are built and used is not a worthwhile endevor. Since we don't believe in attacking someone for no reason, we don't need any weapons. We also don't need to study how offensive weapons might be used against us. Therefore there is no reason for their existance. Let's just pass a WMCA (Weapons Millenium Contraband Act) law and outlaw anyone even thinking about how weapons work or how reinforcements might be vulnerable to weapons.
Whilst I think this was intended as satire, there is a historical parallel. Japan actually banned firearms, because their use made a nonsense of their highly trained swordsman. Effectivly their whole way of doing war and the industry supporting it would have been obsolete. This worked until the US navy turned up and enguaged in "gunboat diplomacy". Having realised that they had made a mistake the Japanese actually learned from it (and decided to pay a return visit on the US Pacific fleet some time later.)
With all the designs available to us today, as engineers, we should be able to employ traffic shaping devices to limit the amount of load any given site can generate on the net.
However the way a Distributed denial of service attack works is that the stuff comes from programs installed on machines without the users knowlage. Unless the attacks have some kind of identifiable signature how do you identify them?
Traffic shapping approachs are more applicable with something like spamming.
A skript kiddy is pretty safe, as are spammers
Depends, if a spammer is trying to sell a real product they should be perfectly possible to track down.
why is it OK to tape a show and not to divX it?
Because we have ended up with a situation where the law is actually different for analogue and digital recordings. Something which major publishing and distribution companies appear to have worked hard to create.
Didn't you see the Family Guy episode when the Griffins found out that their property was not of the USA?
Since at least 2 of the US states arn't strictly legitimatly part of the US there are a whole bunch of people who this could be the case for.
Unless this software company has their own army.
They'd also need air and sea defence.
Other countries can pretty much do what they want to them.
Especially the USA...
This may be "funny," but I've said that such maneuvering may be in the future for software / internet firms in the future. There's no big manufacturing plants to build and the money is right for them to "lease" a small island for 99 years and just plant themselves on it. And how hard would it be to recruit personnel to work on gorgeous Caribbean islands?
You mean like this nice large island in the Caribbean known as Cuba...
Grow your company to the right size in a protected nation (see USA), then when that country starts to turn on you, pack up and head for your own mini country!
Exactly where does this mini country get the sort of military hardware it may need to be sure of maintaining its independance?
It's only a matter of time until MS becomes based in the Cayman Islands
What do they then do if they annoy the US government? Whilst they are US based the only thing they have to fear is the DOJ, move outside the US and they then have to face the DOD. (And the militry of any other country they might annoy.)
That is because the people/organizations you mention are willing to go to extreme mesures to push their view. They'll spend all their free time passing out fliers. They're willing to start protest rallys, picket lines, and riots. Some of them are even willing to murder for their ideas.
Some of them have even worked out ways of using public money to pay for their lobbying activities.
Normal people just want to live their lives. Normal people worry about what will happen to their familes if they are arrested or anger an opposing faction.
Normal people also have lives and jobs. Which generally do not allow they to enguage in full time lobbying (or to pay for full time proxies, which is the way big business does it.)
Why does it seem that governments always come to be dominated by special interests, e.g., big business, religious zealots, etc., at the expense of the people at large?
Because such organisations are better able to find time (and money) to influence politicans. Especially if they claim to represent either a "majority" or politically correct "minority". (The really clever ones "bootstrap" their own "minority" cause...)
How you create a political system where regular people can raise issues with politicans whilst eliminating organised corporate lobbying is a very non trivial issue.
Australia has a written constitution, but unlike the US constitution it says very little about human rights, and the limits of government legislation.
Not that it makes much difference in practice. Since the US federal government has had plenty of practice in finding and exploiting loopholes.
A written constitution is only as good as a populace prepared to defend it.
Cheer up. It could be worse. What would happen if the Government lied to us?
How would you tell if they were? If you already have laws against "obsenity", "hate speach", etc it dosn't take must to extend their definition to help hide government corruption. Most people are far less cynical about their governments than would be prudent (if anything can be learned from history.)
When will the conservatives in Australia learn that just because you might want your kids seeing something, doesn't mean you have the right to stop everyone in the country from seeing it?
THe simple answer is never since very often the "children might see it" is simply an excuse.
t's obvious that the reason they are keeping the blacklist secret is because they are afraid of public scrutiny and backlash against it. No doubt, like virtually all censorware, they have censored many sites that clearly oughtn't be censored.
THough the more interesting question is how many of these are actual "mistakes" and how many are because the adgenda of the censors isn't quite what they want people to think it is.
In addition to "porn" on the blacklist, they'll probably put all non-mormon religious sites, and anything that has to do with dancing, tea, coffee, Pepsi, or the "devil" alcohol. Note also that R rated movies (or even PG-13) are considered "porn" by many of the people in Utah.
I recall seeing a documentry about at attempt to presecute a video store for supplying porn somewhere in Utah. The case effectivly collapsed when the defence carried out some research into PPV cable usage in the same area.
Effectivly they managed to prove the addage that those who advocate censorship are often hypocritical.