It's easy to be cheap and simple and to breezily handwave when all you have to do is type on your keyboard. It's not easy out in the real world with real money.
Otherwise, why aren't you out there doing it? Why isn't anyone?
I've done part of it. I can grow money on trees, Why am I not doing it? I need a farm. I'll use my own real money too!
I can grow food on trees too. And this is not by composting them. I haven't tackled the algae issues. But one day I might take it on.
Clostridium acetobutylicum was grown in tank cultures for decades in order to produce acetone and butyl alcohol. The industry was eventually put out of business by the oil industry and it was because the world was awash in petroleum As petroleum becomes scarce the industry will eventually come back unless some other process is even cheaper.
When you hear of ethanol for motor fuel then remember this: The industry needs to brew a keg of beer at a retail price $2.50. This is easy to see! Beer is 5% ethanol. Its says so right on the can. A keg is 57 liters. 5% of 60 = 3 liters. 3 liters of ethanol is about the same energy as 2.5 liters of gasoline. If gas costs $1.00 per liter then that keg needs to be brewed and the ethanol concentrated to at least 95% and marketed at a price of $2.50 and that $2.50 must return a profit.
So when we hear how ethanol is going to save our bacon then we need to realize that 100% of the USA corn crop will supply liquid fuel for about 2 weeks. If we have the the technology to produce the ethanol at a price competitive with what we currently pay for gasoline then we should expect the price of beer to drop to about 1% of what it costs now!
The increased cosmic ray flux will undoubtably cause global cooling. The high energy rays and penetrate deep into the atmosphere where they create nucleation points which increase cloud over. The inreased cloud cover reflects more energy into space and the planet will cool.
This is likely the mechanizm behind the little ice age which occurred during the Maunder minimum between 1645 and 1715.
At this point solar cycle #24 is more than 2 years late. Solar cycle #25 was predicted to be very weak but #24 was predicted to be more or less normal. The predictions for #24 are proving to be in error.
Somewhere around here I have a letter of apology from the past president of Telus!
They started to shut off my phone service. You see - I had to build a time division reflectometer and shoot the line that I wanted my DSL service on. This is pretty easy to do. We went to Radio shack and bought about $20 worth of stuff and a 1.5 volt battery and hooked up a dual channel oscilloscope. About 15 minutes later we knew where the line taps were. So I called in Telus and asked them to remove the line taps and told them where they were.
What happened next? I was told it was going to cost me $1400!
I had no choice. I agreed to this.
So a tech came around. I have this on film! I set up a camera and I filmed him! He spent 1 hour. He had to unscrew 14 nuts and open a canister and snip a wire. So I figure Telus wanted to charge me $100 per nut!
After he did this the DSL fired up and ran perfectly!
A month later I got a call from one of Telus's supervisors. He asked me how it is that my DSL works! So I provided free consulting and told him if they snip such and such wires and get themselves a TDR then they can get their DSL services working!
Meanwhile I was in touch with their offices about that $1400 bill for 1 hour of work.
It was about 9 months later that I was in Brisbane. In that 9 month period of time even though Telus told me they would review the bill... they never did. I got a call from Calgary. The phones were being shut off! Telus had already disconnected one line in fact!
I called Telus from Brisbane and managed to get one of the executive assistants. I advised her she could save her company a lot of money. She had a choice. She could listen to me now and get my telephone line reconnected and get the bill reviewed and if she failed to do this then my next phone call was going to be to my lawyers in Calgary and we will get a court order and Telus will pay for it! Guess what - it worked. They reconnected the line. Meanwhile they did reduce the bill so I had to pay them something like $400 for them to fix the line so DSL would work!
Imagine! They want to offer a service they want to charge for and the customer has to show them how to do it and pay something like $400 for an hour's work on top of it! Insane!
That is just part of it.
A few years later I was billed more than $3000 in overcharges. They wouldn't answer their phones. I went through investor relations. IR does answer phones! I found their legal department. I wrote lawyer like nasty letters. I offered to sue them and pointed out that if I file - then we get discovery and in discovery they have to cough up the accounting and justify their billing. Maybe he might want to do this outside of a court action because if he doesn't then he will have to do it as part of a court action.
I got some results. They refunded about $3000.
On this matter I never ever received a correct billing statement from that company!
I just don't know where these misinformed opinions come from!
Furthermore we have at least two reactor designs already proven which can produce all the energy we need for the next 6,000 years without mining more uranium. If we talk only of electricity at current consumption rates we have enough uranium for 60,000 years. The reactors are the IFR designed at Argonne Labs and the Molten Salt reactor designed at Oak Ridge labs.
This does not take into account our thorium supplies. either of the above reactors will burn all the actinides.
They threw young kids in jail for decades. No apologies.
My cousin suggests the human race is splitting. I think she might be right. Clearly however there is a dark side and how civil servants can justify what they do sometimes causes me despair. I have never even been to the UK of course.
These stores will start to get the message when they find that enough people are willing to waste their time as they try to waste our time. Their vulnerability is they pay their staff usually by the hour and they pay rent.
We need to just keep refusing to pay for what we don't want in their bundles. The more time we waste the more the message gets through. Short answer: We don't want your garbage. Where do I recycle?
OpenBSD states in their PF doc that they can handle 50,000 entries in a table in few more lookups than 50. I don't know what the upper limit is however I know it is very high. The time for me to load 50,000 IP's into the PF table was less than a couple minutes. The time for me to build the list was only a few minutes. It did take a little thought to write the scripts. I've had to do it several times now but its automated enough for now.
Also we were being hit with over 20 spams per minute and this was loading the servers. After loading the block list the server load dropped to normal and the load was not really visible. So however the OpenBSD people did it - pf is Pretty damn good!
Usually the bot farms come in grazing and leave within a few days.
I'll probably automate this so that addresses will leak out periodically.
The problem I face is that there are a NUMBER of big ISP's which host these bots and the spam ends up coming from their mail servers. Some of our clients run through these mail servers. With 50,000 addresses to look through I have not been able to white list the servers I need to white list.
So I can never run this more than for a couple hours then I have to deactivate and reactivate to get the "real" mails through. This is not a problem on a port like 22 (SSH) but it is a problem on 25 (mail).
Again - as MANY have stated - turfing spoofed packets should be standard action on the part of ALL ISP's.
I _think_ the reason for "shaping" is to fsck up VoIP. Since the telcos want you to pay THEM for this service and not use something like Skype or someone else then if they can "shape" then they can delay certain packets and that screws up the competition. They like to get this into place before people understand how the technology really works and what they are up to. Eventually these dirty tricks may get changed or eliminated but in the mean time they make profit.
You block at the port level or the packet level. Then you block the machine doing the spewing. It would be nice however if when you do this you actually call the owner and solicit their cooperation. But you still block it per terms of service which you write into the contract.
Then we can't get most forms of attack because they are blocked at source.
Yes - we need to block at the upstream router. This is why the ISP who connects the bot to the net has to become proactive and stop burying their collective heads in the sand.
We all know who these ISP's are too. They tend to be the big boys.
The thing is that they can even write into their terms of service that the customer _agrees_ to a reasonable fee to correct zombie machines. Then they can make money on the "service" they provide.
OTOH... let me advise of how NOT to do things.
My lawyers in the past have had flocks of computers connected to the net. They did NOT have competent systems support personnel. They were charging me over $250 per hour. A competent consulting systems admin does not typically charge anywhere near that much.
Quite literally for a PITTANCE of what they charge their clients they could have technical backup and support. I shuddered to think my files and communications which were suppose to be confidential were sitting in those computers because I am certain that its not much different than putting them in an unlocked filing cabinate in the middle of a dark parking lot with a sign on the side that says in large bold florescent letters: Confidential, Please don't read!
People justify their sloppiness in many ways.
I stopped in a Pawn Shop one day and spotted a Quantum DLT7000. This was for $25 bux. So I bought it. Inside I found a tape. These tapes are worth close to $25 bux. I wondered: Why would ha pawn shop have a DLT7000? Most people don't even know what it is.
So I read the tape. The first file was a web site. The next files were the backup data off a windows NT system. That system was owned by an accountant and I got her name and phone number because it was on each of her clients' tax returns which were also on the tape. With little difficulty one could lift these files and drop then into the software she used to prepare the returns. BTW - that software was _also_ on the tape of course.
Note this however: At DTL7000 holds 70 GB of data. I copied everything onto a couple CDs. So the computer store in question sold her a DLT7000 which requires a SCSI interface and special backup software and so forth and cost about $4000 when she bought it. They could have sold her an optical drive for a few $100.
So we see: incompetence at the sales level. incompetence at the user level, incompetence at the disposal level. Tax returns sitting in a pawn shop.
Also when I called her up to ask if the tape drive had been stolen she gave me a hard time. Of course I know where she lives. She's one of my neighbors. Her address was in the tax returns as well. This explains why she happened to tote the drive down to the particular pawn shop which is within a small radius of where I live.
Arrghh!
I swear that when I need to do business with the "professionals" who "serve" the general public that I cringe.
All that is required is to pull the damn plug on these bots. Each of these machines has and IP address which it advertises every time it makes an attack. That's right folks: The return IP address is part of the header. You can't route packets without this information.
These feral packets _ALSO_ come into the ISP's routers. It is easy to identify them. Uninfected machines don't normally sit there and hammer away at port Blah. Some of the worst ports are 80 (html), 25 (mail) and 22 (SSH).
One really needs to only look at the ports that the botnet tries to exploit.
A simple solution is to pull the plug. A solution which is slightly more difficult is to block the ports the botnet is trying to attack on and then redirect any web access to a banner page advising the owner their machine is cracked and what to do about it... or a tech could phone the client.
_any_ ISP can do this. If they don't do it then they don't want to. As for consumer rights - crap! Its the ISP's which write the Terms of Service. They can put pretty much any terms they want providing said terms are considered reasonable. The public will probably not object. Spammers might however but then who cares if they can't find an uplink.
So the first place to start is at the ISP level.
Next: I've blocked botnets of more than 50,000 machines. I use OpenBSD on the webservers and on the firewalls. Its not that hard to do. Pf can easily handle this. If the server admins over at the "US Government Web Sites" can't handle this then IMHO they are incompetent. If reference, here is an example of how to block these bots in PF:
This is pretty easy for me anyways. I own about 5 CD's. I have never had a working CD player hooked up to my stereo. Now I know I will never install one.
I have also decided I do not like the Chrysler and GM bail out. As a Canadian I feel we are looking at decades of abuse by special interest groups with too much power. Accordingly I will _never_ own a GM or Chrysler product again as long as I live.
Now you see - pollies think they can manipulate people.
However if we the people get mad enough then maybe they will start to learn.
Now I can assure people there are MANY alternatives.
1) buy from the musicians. If they sign with a label, shun them. Tell your friends. Refuse to listen to any CD's produced by organized crime (RIAA? Is that organized crime? I know some artists think they are)
2) Don't drive a GM. Drive an Audi or VW (Diesel gets 60+ MPG). Drive a Toyota. Just say NO.
Criticize people who do buy these products. Tell them they must like HUGE tax payer subsidies and high oil prices.
What we need to do is put people back to work. I fail to see how propping up an industry which is as sick as our auto industry is going to keep people gainfully employed. Just consider the SUV mileage figures. While North America focused on the putting tons of steel on the road with pathetic mileage, Japan was bringing out hybrids. Note also that North America consumes about 1/4 of the world's oil. Yup. The world produces about 83 million Barrels of oil per day (BOPD) and North America consumes over 20 million BOPD. Its in the BP statistical review if anyone wants to look it up.
Funny, but strife inn the Auto Industry happened in 1973 as well. Back then, Chrysler needed a bail out. What did they learn?
When the oil embargo of the early 1970's hit, Japan was ready with high mileage cars. Detroit looked stupid.
Deja Vue
My point is that if people, and especially young people, want change - then they are going to have to find ways to make it happen. Young people in the 1960s forced change. It looks like history is going to have to repeat itself.
A good place to start is for people to buy ONLY from the original artists. They deserve the money anyways. Next if commercial downloading services aren't properly compensating the artists, then perhaps we need a grass roots way to compete with them. Its not reasonable for the artists to be expected for instance to set up servers. However I am confident there are MANY in the slashdot crowd who are up to speed in the are of server admin.
As I see it, the RIAA might think they won this battle. In doing so perhaps they lose the war.
This is old news. Its been known for a few years now that the solar conveyor belt has slowed. The question is how long solar activity will remain weak.
During the Maunder minimum it remained weak from about 1645 to 1710. Other minimums also occurred over a fairly long duration. During these minimums the earth tends to be quite cold. Read the wikipedia article on the maunder minimum and related minimums.
Thing is we may face many decades of reduced agricultural output at a time when we have many mouths to feed.
Its too early to tell yet, but cycle #24 is over 2 years late and cycle #25 is expected to be weak as well. So we could be looking at 22+ years of cold cold weather.
What this did was tie us to an obsolete architecture which probably should have been taken behind the barn and shot the moment it was born.
because of this we ended up trying to write programs which needed to be shoe horned into the hardware. The thing is if a guy has a computer on his desk and wants to run a new program then he doesn't want to go out and buy another computer just to run one new program (and then another and another). We ended up with clipped wings because of a short sighted marketing decision combined with the fact that the VAST majority of people had no idea how limited the design of that CPU was.
With a 32 bit linear address space we would have grown from the early PC into the present world far faster and far easier.
As a programmer I lost years of my life due to this. With MEGABYTES of memory I was still stuck with overlay linkers. Imagine! And this was in the 486 days as well!
I would estimate the costs of this botch to our economy to be in the billions.
We could have spent the wasted time at the lake or playing with the kids.
*nix could not succeed at the time primarily because of cost. Unix simply needed more hardware resources.
My 1st PC cost me $10,000 and I picked it up the day the Shuttle exploded so I kinda know when that was. As the teller in the bank handed me the certified cheque she asked if I had heard of the explosions.
Today that certified cheque would be over $20,000 and perhaps more than $25,000. This was for a high end XT clone that ran at 8 mHz. IBM's machines ran at 6 mHz as I recall.
A minimum 68000 based unix system back then was about $16,000.
It _wasn't_ the cost of the CPU. It was everything else - like bigger disk drives, more memory, and so forth.
the difference between the 8088 and 8086 is that one was 8 bit bus and the other 16 bit bus. BOTH had the same instruction set and BOTH used 32 bit addresses and they did it in the same way. Note the M68000 ALSO used a 32 bit address.
The thing is the M68000 was a linear address space with addresses counting from 0 to 2^32-1. The X8088 and X8086 _also_ had integers which could count from 0 to 2^32-1. However the intel chips overlapped 12 bits of the segment and offset registers. Why? So cows could fly? I dunno. It makes no sense to me.
This gave the intel chips a total address space of 2^20 and as Billy Goat said back then - who needs more than 640 KB?
IBM _could_ have used the 68000 CPU and produced a machine at about the same cost and this is illustrated by the fact that Xerox brought out a machine which did run a cut down version of unix (I forget the model - something like a B3T?) and it was 68000 based. Similarly Apple brought out the Mac but not running unix.
This is compounded by the fact that the VAST majority of people who bought these machines simply had no idea that the Intel X86 addressing was INSANE. It was only a few years later that we ended up with extended memory and expanded memory and special cards which tried to give us windows into the memory above 1 MB. Then the 386 and 486 addressed (pun intended) this issue but by then DOS and the applications it supported were so ingrained that they have dominated to the present day.
I was programming in x86 assembler (by necessity - not choice) at the time and the X86 instruction set sucks big time. The 68000 was far easier. No programmer worth his salt would choose X86.
The X86 still used 32 bits for the address but they overlapped the two 16 bit pieces so there were many ways to form the same address. It was INSANE!
IBM missed the boat, created a major competitor in the process and short themselves in the foot many times as a result. About all that saved IBM's PC bacon back then was that they had a lot of feet to shoot at.
IMHO when I read the article - its great. It shows how the rush to market can put a company out of business real quick.
BTW, I looked at the Lisa. I didn't buy it. I looked at a lot of the other computers in the list. I didn't buy them. Apple has not EVER sold me a computer. Funny. IBM has not EVER sold me a computer.
I have been running clones since 1986.
I'll predict that Microsoft's days are numbered as well. I think the number might be large however given their cash reserves. However I am hearing people tell me they are sick and tired of the shoddy windows code and the problem with malware. I think a lot of this problem stems from the X86 days and windows 3.11
The way I see it... the general population in many ways is like a school of fish. They tend to clump together for safety reasons. However, few have much in the way of any enduring investment and just like a school of fish they can all change direction rather quickly. If/when this happens then we may see the fortunes of a company like Microsoft turn sour about as fast as we saw the fortunes of GM and Chrysler turn sour.
If this happens then people will not go back. These paths tend to be traveled but once.
My wife was in a nursing home in a coma and the GP in question was too stupid and too lazy to call the neurosurgeon and inquire what the proper med levels were. She should have known. I did. Her own mother died of the same type of brain tumor.
There are many thick doctors out there. But where I live I have NEVER heard of a doctor having their license revoked. Sure - some diagnosis are difficult to make.
But I'm talking about adjusting the level of the steroids which in this case was Dexamethasone.
This is a pretty common steroid to be administered to patients with a brain tumor. Further more the dosage in her case was up to about 15 mg/day because of her small stature. To let her lapse into a coma at 8 mg/day is malpractice in my books.
I was the one telling the nurse - but this was a nursing home - not a hospital. She needed to be in an auxillary hospital and were she there perhaps it wouldn't have happened.
I was the one who told the neurosurgeon what was going on and he was shocked and called the nursing home immediately and changed the prescription - OVER THE PHONE.
Yes the doctor on call had his number. I gave it to her.
I could have pulled her before the College of Physicians and Surgeons but I knew they would do nothing. I wonder how many patients were similarly treated by that incompetent witch doctor.
The patent would apply to any markup language. This is totally obvious and there are many implementations which have been around for more than 25 years.
There are several errors here.
1) the patent should not have been granted because to do something like this is obvious.
2) the court must be totally incompetent.
3) the defense must be incompetent as well.
Any database driven web page is an infringement. It doesn't need to be XML. In fact most databases have this and Oracle is an example. PostgreSQL also has tools which do this.
Any templating software does this.
This illustrates just how bad the USA patent system is.
I hope it goes to appeal and that this gets straightened out. The thing is we software developers are under attack these days We will find that the 3rd world will eventually do all our software development. I know I would not go into software development if I were back in my university days. If a person does anything of any significance they can expect to be sued. No other profession that I know of is attacked as we software developers are being attacked.
You say they need to be quite an idjot to spend billions looking for something that doesn't exist? Well what about anthropogenic Global Warming? That doesn't exist or if it does its no where near the level where there is reason for the alarmism we have floating around now.
In due course the idea that CO2 at levels of 380 PPM is a problem will be discredited.
While there was a little warming over the last century its looking like were now cooling and this is probably due to the tardy arrival of Solar Cycle #24. #25 will probably be weak as well. This means we are likely slipping into a solar sun spot minimum and the consequences can be decades of cold weather.
Slashdot Mirror
Drwho - contact me. I might know how to organize funding. My email addy is published!
It's easy to be cheap and simple and to breezily handwave when all you have to do is type on your keyboard. It's not easy out in the real world with real money.
Otherwise, why aren't you out there doing it? Why isn't anyone?
I've done part of it. I can grow money on trees, Why am I not doing it? I need a farm. I'll use my own real money too!
I can grow food on trees too. And this is not by composting them. I haven't tackled the algae issues. But one day I might take it on.
Your thesis is not correct.
Clostridium acetobutylicum was grown in tank cultures for decades in order to produce acetone and butyl alcohol. The industry was eventually put out of business by the oil industry and it was because the world was awash in petroleum As petroleum becomes scarce the industry will eventually come back unless some other process is even cheaper.
When you hear of ethanol for motor fuel then remember this: The industry needs to brew a keg of beer at a retail price $2.50. This is easy to see! Beer is 5% ethanol. Its says so right on the can. A keg is 57 liters. 5% of 60 = 3 liters. 3 liters of ethanol is about the same energy as 2.5 liters of gasoline. If gas costs $1.00 per liter then that keg needs to be brewed and the ethanol concentrated to at least 95% and marketed at a price of $2.50 and that $2.50 must return a profit.
So when we hear how ethanol is going to save our bacon then we need to realize that 100% of the USA corn crop will supply liquid fuel for about 2 weeks. If we have the the technology to produce the ethanol at a price competitive with what we currently pay for gasoline then we should expect the price of beer to drop to about 1% of what it costs now!
Damn good point. I went to read TFA and left immediately!
The increased cosmic ray flux will undoubtably cause global cooling. The high energy rays and penetrate deep into the atmosphere where they create nucleation points which increase cloud over. The inreased cloud cover reflects more energy into space and the planet will cool.
This is likely the mechanizm behind the little ice age which occurred during the Maunder minimum between 1645 and 1715.
At this point solar cycle #24 is more than 2 years late. Solar cycle #25 was predicted to be very weak but #24 was predicted to be more or less normal. The predictions for #24 are proving to be in error.
A cooling trend can go on for decades.
Somewhere around here I have a letter of apology from the past president of Telus!
They started to shut off my phone service. You see - I had to build a time division reflectometer and shoot the line that I wanted my DSL service on. This is pretty easy to do. We went to Radio shack and bought about $20 worth of stuff and a 1.5 volt battery and hooked up a dual channel oscilloscope. About 15 minutes later we knew where the line taps were. So I called in Telus and asked them to remove the line taps and told them where they were.
What happened next? I was told it was going to cost me $1400!
I had no choice. I agreed to this.
So a tech came around. I have this on film! I set up a camera and I filmed him! He spent 1 hour. He had to unscrew 14 nuts and open a canister and snip a wire. So I figure Telus wanted to charge me $100 per nut!
After he did this the DSL fired up and ran perfectly!
A month later I got a call from one of Telus's supervisors. He asked me how it is that my DSL works! So I provided free consulting and told him if they snip such and such wires and get themselves a TDR then they can get their DSL services working!
Meanwhile I was in touch with their offices about that $1400 bill for 1 hour of work.
It was about 9 months later that I was in Brisbane. In that 9 month period of time even though Telus told me they would review the bill... they never did. I got a call from Calgary. The phones were being shut off! Telus had already disconnected one line in fact!
I called Telus from Brisbane and managed to get one of the executive assistants. I advised her she could save her company a lot of money. She had a choice. She could listen to me now and get my telephone line reconnected and get the bill reviewed and if she failed to do this then my next phone call was going to be to my lawyers in Calgary and we will get a court order and Telus will pay for it! Guess what - it worked. They reconnected the line. Meanwhile they did reduce the bill so I had to pay them something like $400 for them to fix the line so DSL would work!
Imagine! They want to offer a service they want to charge for and the customer has to show them how to do it and pay something like $400 for an hour's work on top of it! Insane!
That is just part of it.
A few years later I was billed more than $3000 in overcharges. They wouldn't answer their phones. I went through investor relations. IR does answer phones! I found their legal department. I wrote lawyer like nasty letters. I offered to sue them and pointed out that if I file - then we get discovery and in discovery they have to cough up the accounting and justify their billing. Maybe he might want to do this outside of a court action because if he doesn't then he will have to do it as part of a court action.
I got some results. They refunded about $3000.
On this matter I never ever received a correct billing statement from that company!
These days? I will not deal with that company.
It was a nightmare!
You are totally wrong.
We can mine U from granite if we need to.
I just don't know where these misinformed opinions come from!
Furthermore we have at least two reactor designs already proven which can produce all the energy we need for the next 6,000 years without mining more uranium. If we talk only of electricity at current consumption rates we have enough uranium for 60,000 years. The reactors are the IFR designed at Argonne Labs and the Molten Salt reactor designed at Oak Ridge labs.
This does not take into account our thorium supplies. either of the above reactors will burn all the actinides.
Anyone who things this is unjust should watch the movie: "In the name of the Father".
Look here: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0107207/
They threw young kids in jail for decades. No apologies.
My cousin suggests the human race is splitting. I think she might be right. Clearly however there is a dark side and how civil servants can justify what they do sometimes causes me despair. I have never even been to the UK of course.
These stores will start to get the message when they find that enough people are willing to waste their time as they try to waste our time. Their vulnerability is they pay their staff usually by the hour and they pay rent.
We need to just keep refusing to pay for what we don't want in their bundles. The more time we waste the more the message gets through. Short answer: We don't want your garbage. Where do I recycle?
OpenBSD states in their PF doc that they can handle 50,000 entries in a table in few more lookups than 50. I don't know what the upper limit is however I know it is very high. The time for me to load 50,000 IP's into the PF table was less than a couple minutes. The time for me to build the list was only a few minutes. It did take a little thought to write the scripts. I've had to do it several times now but its automated enough for now.
Also we were being hit with over 20 spams per minute and this was loading the servers. After loading the block list the server load dropped to normal and the load was not really visible. So however the OpenBSD people did it - pf is Pretty damn good!
Usually the bot farms come in grazing and leave within a few days.
I'll probably automate this so that addresses will leak out periodically.
The problem I face is that there are a NUMBER of big ISP's which host these bots and the spam ends up coming from their mail servers. Some of our clients run through these mail servers. With 50,000 addresses to look through I have not been able to white list the servers I need to white list.
So I can never run this more than for a couple hours then I have to deactivate and reactivate to get the "real" mails through. This is not a problem on a port like 22 (SSH) but it is a problem on 25 (mail).
Again - as MANY have stated - turfing spoofed packets should be standard action on the part of ALL ISP's.
I _think_ the reason for "shaping" is to fsck up VoIP. Since the telcos want you to pay THEM for this service and not use something like Skype or someone else then if they can "shape" then they can delay certain packets and that screws up the competition. They like to get this into place before people understand how the technology really works and what they are up to. Eventually these dirty tricks may get changed or eliminated but in the mean time they make profit.
You block at the port level or the packet level. Then you block the machine doing the spewing. It would be nice however if when you do this you actually call the owner and solicit their cooperation. But you still block it per terms of service which you write into the contract.
Then we can't get most forms of attack because they are blocked at source.
unless you can block it at the upstream router.
Yes - we need to block at the upstream router. This is why the ISP who connects the bot to the net has to become proactive and stop burying their collective heads in the sand.
We all know who these ISP's are too. They tend to be the big boys.
The thing is that they can even write into their terms of service that the customer _agrees_ to a reasonable fee to correct zombie machines. Then they can make money on the "service" they provide.
OTOH... let me advise of how NOT to do things.
My lawyers in the past have had flocks of computers connected to the net. They did NOT have competent systems support personnel. They were charging me over $250 per hour. A competent consulting systems admin does not typically charge anywhere near that much.
Quite literally for a PITTANCE of what they charge their clients they could have technical backup and support. I shuddered to think my files and communications which were suppose to be confidential were sitting in those computers because I am certain that its not much different than putting them in an unlocked filing cabinate in the middle of a dark parking lot with a sign on the side that says in large bold florescent letters: Confidential, Please don't read!
People justify their sloppiness in many ways.
I stopped in a Pawn Shop one day and spotted a Quantum DLT7000. This was for $25 bux. So I bought it. Inside I found a tape. These tapes are worth close to $25 bux. I wondered: Why would ha pawn shop have a DLT7000? Most people don't even know what it is.
So I read the tape. The first file was a web site. The next files were the backup data off a windows NT system. That system was owned by an accountant and I got her name and phone number because it was on each of her clients' tax returns which were also on the tape. With little difficulty one could lift these files and drop then into the software she used to prepare the returns. BTW - that software was _also_ on the tape of course.
Note this however: At DTL7000 holds 70 GB of data. I copied everything onto a couple CDs. So the computer store in question sold her a DLT7000 which requires a SCSI interface and special backup software and so forth and cost about $4000 when she bought it. They could have sold her an optical drive for a few $100.
So we see: incompetence at the sales level. incompetence at the user level, incompetence at the disposal level. Tax returns sitting in a pawn shop.
Also when I called her up to ask if the tape drive had been stolen she gave me a hard time. Of course I know where she lives. She's one of my neighbors. Her address was in the tax returns as well. This explains why she happened to tote the drive down to the particular pawn shop which is within a small radius of where I live.
Arrghh!
I swear that when I need to do business with the "professionals" who "serve" the general public that I cringe.
All that is required is to pull the damn plug on these bots. Each of these machines has and IP address which it advertises every time it makes an attack. That's right folks: The return IP address is part of the header. You can't route packets without this information.
These feral packets _ALSO_ come into the ISP's routers. It is easy to identify them. Uninfected machines don't normally sit there and hammer away at port Blah. Some of the worst ports are 80 (html), 25 (mail) and 22 (SSH).
One really needs to only look at the ports that the botnet tries to exploit.
A simple solution is to pull the plug. A solution which is slightly more difficult is to block the ports the botnet is trying to attack on and then redirect any web access to a banner page advising the owner their machine is cracked and what to do about it... or a tech could phone the client.
_any_ ISP can do this. If they don't do it then they don't want to. As for consumer rights - crap! Its the ISP's which write the Terms of Service. They can put pretty much any terms they want providing said terms are considered reasonable. The public will probably not object. Spammers might however but then who cares if they can't find an uplink.
So the first place to start is at the ISP level.
Next: I've blocked botnets of more than 50,000 machines. I use OpenBSD on the webservers and on the firewalls. Its not that hard to do. Pf can easily handle this. If the server admins over at the "US Government Web Sites" can't handle this then IMHO they are incompetent. If reference, here is an example of how to block these bots in PF:
pfctl -t spammers -T add 190.174.220.241
pfctl -t spammers -T add 67.10.200.220
pfctl -t spammers -T add 125.161.37.199
pfctl -t spammers -T add 71.218.209.198
pfctl -t spammers -T add 202.28.120.19
This is a shell script BTW. extracting the list of bots can be done by scanning the appropriate logs.
For what its worth, I'm boycotting them.
This is pretty easy for me anyways. I own about 5 CD's. I have never had a working CD player hooked up to my stereo. Now I know I will never install one.
I have also decided I do not like the Chrysler and GM bail out. As a Canadian I feel we are looking at decades of abuse by special interest groups with too much power. Accordingly I will _never_ own a GM or Chrysler product again as long as I live.
Now you see - pollies think they can manipulate people.
However if we the people get mad enough then maybe they will start to learn.
Now I can assure people there are MANY alternatives.
1) buy from the musicians. If they sign with a label, shun them. Tell your friends. Refuse to listen to any CD's produced by organized crime (RIAA? Is that organized crime? I know some artists think they are)
2) Don't drive a GM. Drive an Audi or VW (Diesel gets 60+ MPG). Drive a Toyota. Just say NO.
Criticize people who do buy these products. Tell them they must like HUGE tax payer subsidies and high oil prices.
What we need to do is put people back to work. I fail to see how propping up an industry which is as sick as our auto industry is going to keep people gainfully employed. Just consider the SUV mileage figures. While North America focused on the putting tons of steel on the road with pathetic mileage, Japan was bringing out hybrids. Note also that North America consumes about 1/4 of the world's oil. Yup. The world produces about 83 million Barrels of oil per day (BOPD) and North America consumes over 20 million BOPD. Its in the BP statistical review if anyone wants to look it up.
Funny, but strife inn the Auto Industry happened in 1973 as well. Back then, Chrysler needed a bail out. What did they learn?
When the oil embargo of the early 1970's hit, Japan was ready with high mileage cars. Detroit looked stupid.
Deja Vue
My point is that if people, and especially young people, want change - then they are going to have to find ways to make it happen. Young people in the 1960s forced change. It looks like history is going to have to repeat itself.
A good place to start is for people to buy ONLY from the original artists. They deserve the money anyways. Next if commercial downloading services aren't properly compensating the artists, then perhaps we need a grass roots way to compete with them. Its not reasonable for the artists to be expected for instance to set up servers. However I am confident there are MANY in the slashdot crowd who are up to speed in the are of server admin.
As I see it, the RIAA might think they won this battle. In doing so perhaps they lose the war.
This is old news. Its been known for a few years now that the solar conveyor belt has slowed. The question is how long solar activity will remain weak.
During the Maunder minimum it remained weak from about 1645 to 1710. Other minimums also occurred over a fairly long duration. During these minimums the earth tends to be quite cold. Read the wikipedia article on the maunder minimum and related minimums.
Thing is we may face many decades of reduced agricultural output at a time when we have many mouths to feed.
Its too early to tell yet, but cycle #24 is over 2 years late and cycle #25 is expected to be weak as well. So we could be looking at 22+ years of cold cold weather.
You sure hit the nail on the head!
What this did was tie us to an obsolete architecture which probably should have been taken behind the barn and shot the moment it was born.
because of this we ended up trying to write programs which needed to be shoe horned into the hardware. The thing is if a guy has a computer on his desk and wants to run a new program then he doesn't want to go out and buy another computer just to run one new program (and then another and another). We ended up with clipped wings because of a short sighted marketing decision combined with the fact that the VAST majority of people had no idea how limited the design of that CPU was.
With a 32 bit linear address space we would have grown from the early PC into the present world far faster and far easier.
As a programmer I lost years of my life due to this. With MEGABYTES of memory I was still stuck with overlay linkers. Imagine! And this was in the 486 days as well!
I would estimate the costs of this botch to our economy to be in the billions.
We could have spent the wasted time at the lake or playing with the kids.
*nix could not succeed at the time primarily because of cost. Unix simply needed more hardware resources.
My 1st PC cost me $10,000 and I picked it up the day the Shuttle exploded so I kinda know when that was. As the teller in the bank handed me the certified cheque she asked if I had heard of the explosions.
Today that certified cheque would be over $20,000 and perhaps more than $25,000. This was for a high end XT clone that ran at 8 mHz. IBM's machines ran at 6 mHz as I recall.
A minimum 68000 based unix system back then was about $16,000.
It _wasn't_ the cost of the CPU. It was everything else - like bigger disk drives, more memory, and so forth.
the difference between the 8088 and 8086 is that one was 8 bit bus and the other 16 bit bus. BOTH had the same instruction set and BOTH used 32 bit addresses and they did it in the same way. Note the M68000 ALSO used a 32 bit address.
The thing is the M68000 was a linear address space with addresses counting from 0 to 2^32-1. The X8088 and X8086 _also_ had integers which could count from 0 to 2^32-1. However the intel chips overlapped 12 bits of the segment and offset registers. Why? So cows could fly? I dunno. It makes no sense to me.
This gave the intel chips a total address space of 2^20 and as Billy Goat said back then - who needs more than 640 KB?
IBM _could_ have used the 68000 CPU and produced a machine at about the same cost and this is illustrated by the fact that Xerox brought out a machine which did run a cut down version of unix (I forget the model - something like a B3T?) and it was 68000 based. Similarly Apple brought out the Mac but not running unix.
This is compounded by the fact that the VAST majority of people who bought these machines simply had no idea that the Intel X86 addressing was INSANE. It was only a few years later that we ended up with extended memory and expanded memory and special cards which tried to give us windows into the memory above 1 MB. Then the 386 and 486 addressed (pun intended) this issue but by then DOS and the applications it supported were so ingrained that they have dominated to the present day.
I was programming in x86 assembler (by necessity - not choice) at the time and the X86 instruction set sucks big time. The 68000 was far easier. No programmer worth his salt would choose X86.
The X86 still used 32 bits for the address but they overlapped the two 16 bit pieces so there were many ways to form the same address. It was INSANE!
IBM missed the boat, created a major competitor in the process and short themselves in the foot many times as a result. About all that saved IBM's PC bacon back then was that they had a lot of feet to shoot at.
IMHO when I read the article - its great. It shows how the rush to market can put a company out of business real quick.
BTW, I looked at the Lisa. I didn't buy it. I looked at a lot of the other computers in the list. I didn't buy them. Apple has not EVER sold me a computer. Funny. IBM has not EVER sold me a computer.
I have been running clones since 1986.
I'll predict that Microsoft's days are numbered as well. I think the number might be large however given their cash reserves. However I am hearing people tell me they are sick and tired of the shoddy windows code and the problem with malware. I think a lot of this problem stems from the X86 days and windows 3.11
The way I see it... the general population in many ways is like a school of fish. They tend to clump together for safety reasons. However, few have much in the way of any enduring investment and just like a school of fish they can all change direction rather quickly. If/when this happens then we may see the fortunes of a company like Microsoft turn sour about as fast as we saw the fortunes of GM and Chrysler turn sour.
If this happens then people will not go back. These paths tend to be traveled but once.
If IBM had used a 32 bit processor then Microsoft would likely have failed.
Well - that is why I never worked for Microsoft. That was 1984.
You see my wife had a brain tumor and I live in Canada. We have universal health coverage.
I thought of emigrating. I would NEVER consider recommending to anyone that they move to the states.
My wife was in a nursing home in a coma and the GP in question was too stupid and too lazy to call the neurosurgeon and inquire what the proper med levels were. She should have known. I did. Her own mother died of the same type of brain tumor.
There are many thick doctors out there. But where I live I have NEVER heard of a doctor having their license revoked. Sure - some diagnosis are difficult to make.
But I'm talking about adjusting the level of the steroids which in this case was Dexamethasone.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dexamethasone
This is a pretty common steroid to be administered to patients with a brain tumor. Further more the dosage in her case was up to about 15 mg/day because of her small stature. To let her lapse into a coma at 8 mg/day is malpractice in my books.
I was the one telling the nurse - but this was a nursing home - not a hospital. She needed to be in an auxillary hospital and were she there perhaps it wouldn't have happened.
I was the one who told the neurosurgeon what was going on and he was shocked and called the nursing home immediately and changed the prescription - OVER THE PHONE.
Yes the doctor on call had his number. I gave it to her.
I could have pulled her before the College of Physicians and Surgeons but I knew they would do nothing. I wonder how many patients were similarly treated by that incompetent witch doctor.
This is just ridiculous.
The patent would apply to any markup language. This is totally obvious and there are many implementations which have been around for more than 25 years.
There are several errors here.
1) the patent should not have been granted because to do something like this is obvious.
2) the court must be totally incompetent.
3) the defense must be incompetent as well.
Any database driven web page is an infringement. It doesn't need to be XML. In fact most databases have this and Oracle is an example. PostgreSQL also has tools which do this.
Any templating software does this.
This illustrates just how bad the USA patent system is.
I hope it goes to appeal and that this gets straightened out. The thing is we software developers are under attack these days We will find that the 3rd world will eventually do all our software development. I know I would not go into software development if I were back in my university days. If a person does anything of any significance they can expect to be sued. No other profession that I know of is attacked as we software developers are being attacked.
You say they need to be quite an idjot to spend billions looking for something that doesn't exist? Well what about anthropogenic Global Warming? That doesn't exist or if it does its no where near the level where there is reason for the alarmism we have floating around now.
In due course the idea that CO2 at levels of 380 PPM is a problem will be discredited.
While there was a little warming over the last century its looking like were now cooling and this is probably due to the tardy arrival of Solar Cycle #24. #25 will probably be weak as well. This means we are likely slipping into a solar sun spot minimum and the consequences can be decades of cold weather.
twin 100 kW motors = 400 HP?
What an idjot.
This is actually about 268 HP.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horsepower
Its pretty bad when they can't even do the basics.