Why would you think it would take the national guard, or any sort of serious force, or messing with routing tables?
All it would take two agents and a national security letter.
Most datacenters don't have that many people working in them at any given time. Well, there might be people, but staff is usually a half dozen or less security, 2 or 3 NOC techs, and some sales people if they even bothered to work from the office that day. Two agents say "cut power to all the gear in the meet-me room", and confirm everything went dark. Done. People argue less when confronted by people with guns, and put up less resistance when handcuffed and locked in a room. If they're feeling particularly ambitious (and horribly annoying IMHO), they could hit the main breakers on the equipment side of the battery room. No power to the routers, no data going over them.
Do a few major peerings, and the Internet is dead. A perfectly capable kill switch.
Something like this wouldn't be used for a SCADA problem. It's more of to isolate Internet resources.
In a war scenario, one of the first things an attacker would do is neutralize infrastructure. Power, communications, water, etc. Power is done at power plants. Only isolated pieces remain, like places with their own generators.
Communications is the point we're talking about here. Internet, land lines, cell phones, and sat phones down with the "kill switch". You'll still have some working, like PBXs within an organization, and some (but not all) sat phones. At very best, you'll have some sat phones talking to each other, but they aren't calling land lines or now disconnected cell phones.
Water is mostly killed with the power, or can be addressed later.
The only communications you'll end up with are HAM radios, and those with illegal transmitters switching to commercial AM/FM frequencies. Of those, it will only be the ones who have their own generators. They'll be a lot easier to triangulate without all the normal RF noise present.
Then you isolate consumable transportation. Civilians will starve without food supplies being brought in. Major roads, railroads, and sea ports with be blocked or severed.
The sad thing is, everything I described is in all of the war plans. It can also be accomplished by a small group of civilians with a good plan. It's simply proof that there has been no real threat to the United States... and to whoever may be reading this that says "Oh shit, he's a bad guy", I'm not. But if your bosses insist you interview me, feel free to stop by and say "hi". Bring soda and smokes, and we'll have a nice long chat. Don't mess up the front door, we'll open it for you.
Plenty of people know where all the international fiber endpoints are. I can think of a dozen buildings that if they were isolated, it would cripple Internet service in the US. They don't even have to shut down entire datacenters, only the power in the meet-me rooms. I think DHS can find 2 dozen agents in the US who would go to those buildings, shut down the rooms, and the Internet is gone.
As we've seen before, a problem with just one tier 1 provider can make Internet service crawl. Dropping a few major peering points would effectively shut the whole thing down. It's not even hard to find them, if you've been doing business with them. I've been to a few.
They could probably have it ready to shut down simultaneously with a 30 minute lead time to give enough time for the agents to drive to them. Internet and phones would be dead everywhere in the US, and severely interrupt international use. Any remaining links and private peerings would be saturated beyond use.
That's what I'm thinking.. Paying out $500k for images and whatever data they can collect is worth it to them. Hell, if that's the cost, it would be worth it for them to capture absolutely everything they can while driving. Why limit to images and wifi? They should make the street view cars broad spectrum receivers.
It all depends on where you live. Let me rephrase. If you live in a metro area, and you have taxi, bus, and/or train service, you will still find most people drive. The only real exceptions are the seriously overcrowded metro areas like Manhattan, where the parking spot for your car can be just as expensive as your tiny apartment.
In the greater metro area where I live, we have 3 bus systems (one per county), which all have interchange points. That includes an approx 50 mile x 50 mile area. If you're going out of area, Greyhound (bus) and Amtrak (train) are available. We also have two International airports, and two more in neighboring metro areas. That's not implying that we are any great wonder. Most metro areas have good transit systems in place.
You have to consider *all* the expenses with a car. It's not just fuel from Point A to Point B. I'll include some ballpark yearly numbers. You can obviously go higher or lower depending on your circumstances.
$4,700 - The vehicle itself ($30k car, 5 years payments @ 5% interest, -$8,000 trade-in value prorated across 5 years, probably calculated low)
$1,000 - yearly insurance
$1,935 - Fuel 15,000 miles @ 25mpg @ $3.225/gal (national average today)
$1,000 - insurance deductible when someone bashes into your car.
$150 - maintenance (oil change every 3k miles @ $20/ea )
$133 - maintenance (4 tires every 3 years, prorated)
$8,918 - year total
My metro area is 3 counties, each with their own bus systems. We'll go under the assumption that you need unlimited rides in all 3 counties. In reality, most people only regularly travel in one or two counties, so just paying normal fare for the occasional trip to the third is reasonable.
I'd say that you're much like most people. If most people would prefer to let something else drive in exchange for reduced costs, they'd all take cabs, buses and trains.
Judging by road traffic, that's not the case in most areas.
Well, we don't seem to have a lot of African warlords around here. ATF employees though, we have plenty. I keep calling asking to buy, but they always laugh and hang up. Should I be telling them I'm willing to spend up to 10 whole dollars?:)
At some point, the physical package will be shipped from Point A to Point B.
It's obvious that carriers like UPS and FedEx already track every detail of a package from pickup to delivery. You can get those details from their web site with the tracking number.
A private courier is more expensive, and adds the ability to track the package closer, especially if the feds are the sending party.
Even in the case of the Dread Pirate Roberts hiring a hitman, there is a real-world endpoint. They know who has the contract on their head, they'd only have to investigate why to find out who ordered it.
So even if TOR was perfectly anonymous (It's good, but...), and if bitcoins were anonymous (again, good, but...), it's still easy to catch one or both ends of the transaction.
Really? You have a multimillion dollar corporation in 2 boutique pet stores? Your reported annual revenue is less than $500k/yr. After expenses, you're a multi-thousand dollar enterprise.
Basically, he does humanitarian work to the locals, but is a large stake holder in the factories that are making the locals sick. Because he's "helping" them, he's the good guy. Because he's only a large stake holder in the factory, he's not the bad guy. He brings in more money from the factory than he puts out to help the locals.
Profit/Loss. If you bring in $100M, and you pay out $20M, and look like the good guy, you're doing it right, as it's still an $80M profit. Since you're dumping the $20M in to "help" the people, the locals won't complain.
If he had more loss than profit, he would simply cut ties to both sides. It's not worth it.
There's no room in business for humor. No good business person makes a decision without calculating their potential profit and loss (or risk/benefit, if you prefer those terms). If you don't understand it, I'd hazard to guess that you've never been involved in senior business decisions for a multimillion dollar company.
The alt audio I've tried had so much background noise I couldn't figure out what it was saying... Speech recognition would probably do better than me if it applied noise reduction filters first.
I'm thinking any which way it's a bad place to end up.
When aliens finally visit Earth and drop off a huge fleet of spare intergalactic spaceships, I'll make sure to ask for maps that avoid unsurvivable gravity wells.:)
I'm thinking more like crushed like a marshmallow in an infinite pressure pressure-cooker.
Or pummeled to death by other matter falling into the black hole.
Or die from the radiation.
Or die from being absorbed into a star falling into said black hole.
Or from the smell of shitting their pants in the space suit once they realize they're falling into a black hole.
Or just from lack of oxygen, dehydration, or starvation, as it's a pretty long trip from here to the nearest black hole. 1600 light years is a long trip, even at the speed of light.
That problem already exists. I've had quite a few devices that use the Prolific PL-2303 chip in it. Ok, we know it's a USB serial chip, and it's VID_067B&PID_2303. That doesn't really tell us anything about what's on the other side of it.
The Prolific site says that counterfeits exist., and I'm pretty sure I've run into a few. One was a programming cable for a Chinese made HAM radio. The Prolific supplied driver doesn't work with it, so I had to switch to another that I found in a group somewhere that did work. So now I have the wrong PL-2303 driver loaded up, which can interfere with other devices.
Even the legitimate PL-2303 chip devices can be troublesome. Which one is the device I think I'm using? What if I want 10 devices plugged in, and the application that goes with it scans and picks a random one? Then I'm still screwed. And ya, I've seen it happen.
Luckily for me, I only use them occasionally, so they stay unplugged until I'm ready to use them, and then I scan screw with uninstalling and installing different drivers until it works.
Forced expensive licensing for a de facto standard interface is dumb. It's even dumber where the interface has "universal" in the name. Like, it should just work anywhere, not just for organizations that paid for expensive licensing.
If I made a cool device right now, and I wanted to start selling them, thousands of dollars for licensing is probably way out of budget. I'd like to plug it in and have it identify as "JWSmythe USB Widget 14". If it costs me $5 to produce, and I sell at $10, the $5,000 "membership" fee won't be practical until I've sold over 5,000 units. Even then, it's just lowered my profit to $0. Ya, I know the $5k doesn't get me the VID/PID, so extend the number of no-profit units sold accordingly.
Since anything I'd make would probably be a low unit run, I'd never sell enough to pay for the VID/PID.
The ugly but practical way to do it is to just pick a VID/PID combination not being used, and hope the USB group doesn't notice me.
Disclaimer: I don't produce any hardware widgets, and I'm not hijacking unused VID/PID combinations. This was for illustration purposes only.
You also don't publicize your drone in press conferences and written up in detail for advancement of your educational status.
The best way to stay off the radar (figuratively) is to keep quiet about it. To keep off the radar (literally), stay out of controlled airspace.
I could (in theory) build a really kick ass drone. Trans-sonic jet powered, enough fuel to fly over 1,000 miles, HD cameras in every direction, and whatever else I wanted to put on board. If it didn't fly in controlled airspace, avoided metropolitan areas, and you didn't do anything dumb like arming it up with missiles and guns, no one would know or care about it.
Oh, and making it a pulsejet, and publicizing it online as a DIY cruise missile is a very very bad idea.
Have you checked the way most Americans behave these days? The majority of the citizens are armchair activists. The violence here would probably be less than after an unfavorable soccer game in Europe.
They should just give up and shut it down. It's what the Republicans (or at least 144 of them) want.
They shouldn't go for this partial shutdown except essential services. Shut it all down.
People in seek order in chaos. Call it an era, and let it go. We'll rebuild something better in it's place. Rebuilding will let us get rid of waste and inefficiency that has existed for an awful long time.
Then again, the current politicians wouldn't have a place in a new system. They aren't really willing to give up power, and perks through questionable dealings.
Historically, every civilization has come and gone. What we see today are just the ones that happen to still exist. In time, they will fall, and new ones will rise. It's just the way things work.
Just for giggles, I just went back to the site to respond to this post, so I can make sure I say exactly the way it "works"
I got straight through to the "View eligibility results" page, with a lovely green button "View Results". That implies there's something to see, right?
So clicking that takes me to a the "Eligibility results" page, with a lovely green button that says "View Eligibility Result". No, that's not an error, I'm on the second page that I have to click through to hopefully see results. Clicky.
Then I hang on a white page for about 30 seconds, and...
HTTP 400 Bad Request.
I think your goal of Thanksgiving is optimistic. I'm hoping for something before Jan 1 2015.
Slashdot Mirror
Why would you think it would take the national guard, or any sort of serious force, or messing with routing tables?
All it would take two agents and a national security letter.
Most datacenters don't have that many people working in them at any given time. Well, there might be people, but staff is usually a half dozen or less security, 2 or 3 NOC techs, and some sales people if they even bothered to work from the office that day. Two agents say "cut power to all the gear in the meet-me room", and confirm everything went dark. Done. People argue less when confronted by people with guns, and put up less resistance when handcuffed and locked in a room. If they're feeling particularly ambitious (and horribly annoying IMHO), they could hit the main breakers on the equipment side of the battery room. No power to the routers, no data going over them.
Do a few major peerings, and the Internet is dead. A perfectly capable kill switch.
Something like this wouldn't be used for a SCADA problem. It's more of to isolate Internet resources.
In a war scenario, one of the first things an attacker would do is neutralize infrastructure. Power, communications, water, etc. Power is done at power plants. Only isolated pieces remain, like places with their own generators.
Communications is the point we're talking about here. Internet, land lines, cell phones, and sat phones down with the "kill switch". You'll still have some working, like PBXs within an organization, and some (but not all) sat phones. At very best, you'll have some sat phones talking to each other, but they aren't calling land lines or now disconnected cell phones.
Water is mostly killed with the power, or can be addressed later.
The only communications you'll end up with are HAM radios, and those with illegal transmitters switching to commercial AM/FM frequencies. Of those, it will only be the ones who have their own generators. They'll be a lot easier to triangulate without all the normal RF noise present.
Then you isolate consumable transportation. Civilians will starve without food supplies being brought in. Major roads, railroads, and sea ports with be blocked or severed.
The sad thing is, everything I described is in all of the war plans. It can also be accomplished by a small group of civilians with a good plan. It's simply proof that there has been no real threat to the United States. .. and to whoever may be reading this that says "Oh shit, he's a bad guy", I'm not. But if your bosses insist you interview me, feel free to stop by and say "hi". Bring soda and smokes, and we'll have a nice long chat. Don't mess up the front door, we'll open it for you.
Yup, it's always been there.
Plenty of people know where all the international fiber endpoints are. I can think of a dozen buildings that if they were isolated, it would cripple Internet service in the US. They don't even have to shut down entire datacenters, only the power in the meet-me rooms. I think DHS can find 2 dozen agents in the US who would go to those buildings, shut down the rooms, and the Internet is gone.
As we've seen before, a problem with just one tier 1 provider can make Internet service crawl. Dropping a few major peering points would effectively shut the whole thing down. It's not even hard to find them, if you've been doing business with them. I've been to a few.
They could probably have it ready to shut down simultaneously with a 30 minute lead time to give enough time for the agents to drive to them. Internet and phones would be dead everywhere in the US, and severely interrupt international use. Any remaining links and private peerings would be saturated beyond use.
There are maps and lists readily available.
http://www.submarinecablemap.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_exchange_points#North_America
http://www.bgp4.as/internet-exchanges
http://www.datacentermap.com/ixps.html
That's what I'm thinking.. Paying out $500k for images and whatever data they can collect is worth it to them. Hell, if that's the cost, it would be worth it for them to capture absolutely everything they can while driving. Why limit to images and wifi? They should make the street view cars broad spectrum receivers.
Shush Goatse, you've been showing us your privacy hole for years. :)
It all depends on where you live. Let me rephrase. If you live in a metro area, and you have taxi, bus, and/or train service, you will still find most people drive. The only real exceptions are the seriously overcrowded metro areas like Manhattan, where the parking spot for your car can be just as expensive as your tiny apartment.
In the greater metro area where I live, we have 3 bus systems (one per county), which all have interchange points. That includes an approx 50 mile x 50 mile area. If you're going out of area, Greyhound (bus) and Amtrak (train) are available. We also have two International airports, and two more in neighboring metro areas. That's not implying that we are any great wonder. Most metro areas have good transit systems in place.
You have to consider *all* the expenses with a car. It's not just fuel from Point A to Point B. I'll include some ballpark yearly numbers. You can obviously go higher or lower depending on your circumstances.
My metro area is 3 counties, each with their own bus systems. We'll go under the assumption that you need unlimited rides in all 3 counties. In reality, most people only regularly travel in one or two counties, so just paying normal fare for the occasional trip to the third is reasonable.
I'd say that you're much like most people. If most people would prefer to let something else drive in exchange for reduced costs, they'd all take cabs, buses and trains.
Judging by road traffic, that's not the case in most areas.
Well, we don't seem to have a lot of African warlords around here. ATF employees though, we have plenty. I keep calling asking to buy, but they always laugh and hang up. Should I be telling them I'm willing to spend up to 10 whole dollars? :)
But I don't know any Bosnian war criminals. Where am I suppose to purchase gently used fully automatic weapons at rock bottom prices?
There is the glaring privacy hole.
At some point, the physical package will be shipped from Point A to Point B.
It's obvious that carriers like UPS and FedEx already track every detail of a package from pickup to delivery. You can get those details from their web site with the tracking number.
Shipping using USPS seemed "safer". It came out a few months ago that it isn't.
A private courier is more expensive, and adds the ability to track the package closer, especially if the feds are the sending party.
Even in the case of the Dread Pirate Roberts hiring a hitman, there is a real-world endpoint. They know who has the contract on their head, they'd only have to investigate why to find out who ordered it.
So even if TOR was perfectly anonymous (It's good, but...), and if bitcoins were anonymous (again, good, but...), it's still easy to catch one or both ends of the transaction.
"It's a trap!"
- Admiral Gial Ackbar
Ok, so he replied to the wrong message. That happens. :)
Really? You have a multimillion dollar corporation in 2 boutique pet stores? Your reported annual revenue is less than $500k/yr. After expenses, you're a multi-thousand dollar enterprise.
No, but he's trying to put the good PR spin on things.
How about this one to start.
http://www.latimes.com/news/la-na-gatesx07jan07,0,2533850.story#axzz2jXU69lfS
Basically, he does humanitarian work to the locals, but is a large stake holder in the factories that are making the locals sick. Because he's "helping" them, he's the good guy. Because he's only a large stake holder in the factory, he's not the bad guy. He brings in more money from the factory than he puts out to help the locals.
Profit/Loss. If you bring in $100M, and you pay out $20M, and look like the good guy, you're doing it right, as it's still an $80M profit. Since you're dumping the $20M in to "help" the people, the locals won't complain.
If he had more loss than profit, he would simply cut ties to both sides. It's not worth it.
Trust me, I have. The lowest profit company where I made company wide business decisions was $2M/yr. The highest, over $100M/yr.
There's no room in business for humor. No good business person makes a decision without calculating their potential profit and loss (or risk/benefit, if you prefer those terms). If you don't understand it, I'd hazard to guess that you've never been involved in senior business decisions for a multimillion dollar company.
It's a very obvious capitalistic endeavor.
Every person that dies is one less customer. You don't have to be Internet connected to be a Microsoft customer.
Facebook, on the other hand, requires Internet connectivity. Every person that doesn't have Internet service is an untapped customer.
I happen to like single player campaigns. No stupid kids playing spawn-shoot-suicide-repeat.
The alt audio I've tried had so much background noise I couldn't figure out what it was saying... Speech recognition would probably do better than me if it applied noise reduction filters first.
I'm thinking any which way it's a bad place to end up.
When aliens finally visit Earth and drop off a huge fleet of spare intergalactic spaceships, I'll make sure to ask for maps that avoid unsurvivable gravity wells. :)
I think we'll be ok for quite a while.
I'm thinking more like crushed like a marshmallow in an infinite pressure pressure-cooker.
Or pummeled to death by other matter falling into the black hole.
Or die from the radiation.
Or die from being absorbed into a star falling into said black hole.
Or from the smell of shitting their pants in the space suit once they realize they're falling into a black hole.
Or just from lack of oxygen, dehydration, or starvation, as it's a pretty long trip from here to the nearest black hole. 1600 light years is a long trip, even at the speed of light.
That problem already exists. I've had quite a few devices that use the Prolific PL-2303 chip in it. Ok, we know it's a USB serial chip, and it's VID_067B&PID_2303. That doesn't really tell us anything about what's on the other side of it.
The Prolific site says that counterfeits exist., and I'm pretty sure I've run into a few. One was a programming cable for a Chinese made HAM radio. The Prolific supplied driver doesn't work with it, so I had to switch to another that I found in a group somewhere that did work. So now I have the wrong PL-2303 driver loaded up, which can interfere with other devices.
Even the legitimate PL-2303 chip devices can be troublesome. Which one is the device I think I'm using? What if I want 10 devices plugged in, and the application that goes with it scans and picks a random one? Then I'm still screwed. And ya, I've seen it happen.
Luckily for me, I only use them occasionally, so they stay unplugged until I'm ready to use them, and then I scan screw with uninstalling and installing different drivers until it works.
Forced expensive licensing for a de facto standard interface is dumb. It's even dumber where the interface has "universal" in the name. Like, it should just work anywhere, not just for organizations that paid for expensive licensing.
If I made a cool device right now, and I wanted to start selling them, thousands of dollars for licensing is probably way out of budget. I'd like to plug it in and have it identify as "JWSmythe USB Widget 14". If it costs me $5 to produce, and I sell at $10, the $5,000 "membership" fee won't be practical until I've sold over 5,000 units. Even then, it's just lowered my profit to $0. Ya, I know the $5k doesn't get me the VID/PID, so extend the number of no-profit units sold accordingly.
Since anything I'd make would probably be a low unit run, I'd never sell enough to pay for the VID/PID.
The ugly but practical way to do it is to just pick a VID/PID combination not being used, and hope the USB group doesn't notice me.
Disclaimer: I don't produce any hardware widgets, and I'm not hijacking unused VID/PID combinations. This was for illustration purposes only.
You also don't publicize your drone in press conferences and written up in detail for advancement of your educational status.
The best way to stay off the radar (figuratively) is to keep quiet about it.
To keep off the radar (literally), stay out of controlled airspace.
I could (in theory) build a really kick ass drone. Trans-sonic jet powered, enough fuel to fly over 1,000 miles, HD cameras in every direction, and whatever else I wanted to put on board. If it didn't fly in controlled airspace, avoided metropolitan areas, and you didn't do anything dumb like arming it up with missiles and guns, no one would know or care about it.
Oh, and making it a pulsejet, and publicizing it online as a DIY cruise missile is a very very bad idea.
Have you checked the way most Americans behave these days? The majority of the citizens are armchair activists. The violence here would probably be less than after an unfavorable soccer game in Europe.
They should just give up and shut it down. It's what the Republicans (or at least 144 of them) want.
They shouldn't go for this partial shutdown except essential services. Shut it all down.
People in seek order in chaos. Call it an era, and let it go. We'll rebuild something better in it's place. Rebuilding will let us get rid of waste and inefficiency that has existed for an awful long time.
Then again, the current politicians wouldn't have a place in a new system. They aren't really willing to give up power, and perks through questionable dealings.
Historically, every civilization has come and gone. What we see today are just the ones that happen to still exist. In time, they will fall, and new ones will rise. It's just the way things work.
Just for giggles, I just went back to the site to respond to this post, so I can make sure I say exactly the way it "works"
I got straight through to the "View eligibility results" page, with a lovely green button "View Results". That implies there's something to see, right?
So clicking that takes me to a the "Eligibility results" page, with a lovely green button that says "View Eligibility Result". No, that's not an error, I'm on the second page that I have to click through to hopefully see results. Clicky.
Then I hang on a white page for about 30 seconds, and ...
HTTP 400 Bad Request.
I think your goal of Thanksgiving is optimistic. I'm hoping for something before Jan 1 2015.