Socrates was banished for his views. I expect no less from our 'modern' society.
Lovely source of ambiguity, the English language. This could mean you expect to be banished for your views, or that you expect modern society to banish (or that they did banish) Socrates for his views (it merely you expect no less... no less than what? Socrates being banished for his views....)
Dr. Cerf, you're working towards a workable first cut at an Interplanetary Net for 2008. I understand that distances involved prevent the use of a TCP-like protocol, with store and forward being a more feasible approach.
What kind of routing and host naming challenges will exist in the IPN as you currently envision it and what sorts of approaches will be used to address these challenges?
Will packets themselves become intelligent self-routing containers? Will domain naming be heirarchical (and merely a superset of existing DNS to include extra-terrestrial TLDs)? Will it be feasible to dynamically update routing tables?
I don't have one of the rice-rockets or one of the various expensive eurosports coupes or sedans. Just a plain old Mustang with a 4.6 and a 5 speed (and only a mediocre rear end at 3.27) and no gotterdamerung ABS. But it's a hell of a lot of fun to drive hard and a bit of a challenge to handle winding down nice backwoods roads.
Sure, I could have a faster gearbox, an OEM supercharger, a lower ratio rear end, a dropped and tunable suspension, etc. (And I suppose I'd enjoy the 5.4L engine...)
But the fun of driving the car is in seeing what you can do with the hardware available. The skill of the driver isn't in having the most expensive hardware, its making the best use of the available hardware.
And having fun!
... the hack that clears the counter that tracks how many times you've done this.:)
Re:Is Intel doing the right thing?
on
Itanium Problems
·
· Score: 2
True, but if you're driving it with 120 Vac (assuming a 100% AC-DC conversion), your house is only experiencing about an 11 amp draw. Now, that won't blow your average 15 or 20 amp breaker, but plug many more things in, and it sure will. And that's a hell of a lot more than a normal PC will draw at present if I'm not mistaken (which, I admit, wouldn't be a first...).
Note he does mention that being Defense-funded, it did have to display some potential for some military usage. So I would agree that it wasn't developed "to survive a nuclear war" but it was likely funded because it could serve a military purpose (command and control capability enhancement).
Slashdot being what it is and having the diverse population that it does, I'm not about to gainsay your claim. However, you must admit that making a claim about a particular authority having made a particular statement and not providing any sort of reference (nor have I yet seen one, nor found one) does call things into question. And unverifiable (in terms of their actual content) personal conversations certainly aren't very useful to the rest of us.
But then, this is slashdot and just about anything said here could be entirely true, entirely made up, or anything in between.:)
Security of data relates to secure hosts and secure encrypted traffic and security of web services relates to secure hosts and authentication of users. Security of the network itself relates to the physical security of the hardware and transmission lines, the redundancy of the hardware, the adaptability of the software for routing and other network services, etc.
You suggest Vint Cerf dispelled the myth a number of times that the Internet was designed to withstand (in this case, gracefully degrade) under a nuclear attack. I'd be most interested to see a link to somewhere where this is quoted. Most textbooks relating to TCP/IP propagate this alleged myth and I'd be interested to see what exactly Vint said.
I was always under the impression that the decentralized nature of the original network was a design criteria which arose from the desire to withstand (or degrade gracefully more correctly stated) in the event of significant damage to the overall infrastructure. Are you suggesting this is not the case? If so, I'd _really_ like to see the sources you have used to arrive at this conclusion.
some kind of routing protocol would have to be devised that understood the topology of such a network (perhaps by using latitude and longitude as metrics for the routing,
That smacks of geolocation to me. People don't want others to know their incoming IP addresses, let alone their real coordinates!
Distributed routing could work, but I can see a lot of ways for such a decentralized approach to break down.
Don't invest in tomorrow's technology today at a premium, when you can get it tomorrow at a discount. That's why smart buyers invest in modular components. When your hardware gets outdated, pluck and chuck.
No! No! No!
Please DO invest today in the top-end graphics cards! Spend two to three hundred $ buying the best cards on the market! (Or more!)
You see, unlike the parent poster, I think this is a positively brilliant plan for each and every one of you in the high-end gaming crowd!
Look at the benefits: State of the art technology, frame rates so fast that subliminal advertising is practical, bitBLTs that could move your entire DNA encoding in one transfer, and colour depth that makes the games so close to real life you never have to leave your chaise-lounge and encounter the real world!
And as a nice bonus for those of us in the category of the less driven to best-of-the-best-damn-the-cost, there is this:
As all of the high end gamers drive the market up, some really decent hardware becomes really cost-effective and affordable for the rest of us!
So yes, Please Please Please DO buy the BEST and Most Expensive! Drive the market as hard as it can be driven! The mild and meek will quietly thank you and buy really nice (but obviously outdated) products for a bargain basement price!
... a copy of Expedient Hand Grenades from my local library. Guess that and the Poor Man's James Bond, stuff by Ho Chi Minh, Hitler, etc. should probably all be eschewed.
If you're borrowing something controversial enough to interest the government from your local LIBRARY, then you probably deserve to be in jail for stupidity. (Assuming you plan to do anything abhorrent).
So who will this law catch? Some innocent people with odd interests. Some guilty people who are pretty dumb. So it offers potential for false hits while essentially weeding the criminal groups to leave only the smarter/tougher criminals. Lovely.
(In this case, smart is defined as not signing out books on bomb making from the public library - order them at amazon.com or somewhere instead...)
Did you read my post? I said MDTs were easily crackable.
Most forces that have moved (not all, there are exceptions even yet) to laptops, palmtops, etc., and even some with MDTs, have implemented either application layer security or are using a digital encrypted radio system.
If you are more worried about the conduct of your police than you are about anyone's NCIC queries, etc. being publically accessible, then you've got a far larger problem than anything that crypto can solve.
Crypto makes police dispatch not trackable by bad guys (thus cutting the odds of a B&E team with a scanner booking out whenever cops get nearby) and it helps protect officers. It also protects YOUR data and that of other innocent people that get queried. And it even protects the guilty by not exposing the transactions relating to charges, file information, etc. from becoming public. If you don't think that's important, I think you're worrying too much about the wrong damn thing.
I think this is also maybe a national phobia in the US (I'm guessing you're a USAian). At least her in Canada, though I know the cops are human and do sometimes do some less than admirable things, I think by en large I don't fear my police force. I DO fear anytime someone happens to query my license plate having that information (registered owner, vehicle info) becoming freely available, or if I did happen to get charged with something.
Just to reassure you: Computers in the cars which allow cops to do text messaging but where the messaging is logged centrally - that scares the cops! So does the thought of people monitoring their on-time/off-time, etc. They're worried about witch hunts. So the fear of the technology goes both ways:)
First, if you accept that the only way to keep a secret is if two people know and one of them is dead and the other dead as well, then you've captured the root of the problem.
At some level, crypto can be cracked. The plan is that by the time someone can DL and crack the crypto, that the transactions have been processed, the sessions closed, etc. and no session hijack is possible.
And you talk about citizen transparency: Do your really want everyone with a radio knowing that the cops are responding to a domestic dispute at your place? Or that they book you for impaired. Or that they didn't actually find a disturbance, just found you naked doing the chicken dance with your boyfriend? That's the kind of "situational reporting" and data that goes into police transfers. Also things like them fetching your police records (criminal history). You'd really like everyone to have free access? What a terrible idea that would be.
You probably shoulnd't be concerned about the FSB finding out you were dancing naked on your lawn, but you might not want your neighbour LoudMouth Bill, the area gossip, finding out and telling everyone.
Also, it is quite difficult to detect penetrations of networks. This is a tough feat in wired networks and none too easy in wireless. Most intrusions by true professional crackers probably go undetected.
We could spend millions of dollars (tens of millions, hundreds of millions) on crypto and infosec and intrusion detection. And we'd be out those many millions and still someone with the will and backing could crack it. And the villains would apply their money to cracking other aspects of the system we can't afford to defend (we underpay our cops, for example).
Security is about balance - You try to arrange every part of your organization's infrastructure and personel base to be difficult to crack in proportion to the risk of a penetration and the likelihood of a penetration.
The Canadian RCMP spend enough money on security to make it difficult for anyone without serious inside knowledge and some heavy backing to crack the system. That's good enough for most situations, and they have special provisions in place for the few cases where this isn't enough.
I'd be more worried if every police data transaction was publicly transparent. Talk about a recipe for disaster....
I concur. However, there are places where getting an insider may be tough, and getting some hackers may not. If it only costs me $100K to hack a continent wide federal police network (not mentioning names, networks, or anything of the sort.... but I know such allegations have been made in the last few years), and this gives me the ability to hijack sessions, insert traffic, interfere with traffic, modify traffic, etc., this is a wide ranging and subtle capability. If I can do it in realtime, this is even better than having a man on the inside. It's having a COMPUTER on the inside. So it serves a slightly different purpose.
And the gov't spends a lot of time and money defending their infrastructure against penetration by the means you describe (with mixed results). They should apply the same diligence to their electronic networks.
Remember, the enemy always strikes against your weakest point. Once you spend time and money toughening up one avenue of attack, there will be a new weak point, a new line of attack, and someplace else that requires your attention. Such is the nature of security work - it requires continued vigilance and focus on a wide range of aspects - organizational, electronic, procedural, etc.
Egotism and arrogance aren't necesarily desireable corrolary features either!
Software Engineering is a much maligned, poorly-understood and often pretended-to discipline. But that doesn't mean that most "mere coders" don't perform engineering functions (note the definition of engineering involves applying thought and ingenuity to a problem).
And a lack of any sort of humility on behalf of "Software Engineers" isn't likely to help bridge the gap between conventional engineering disciplines and the very active world of software production.
Instead of displaying an annoying disdain for your fellow slashdotter (whom I may not agree with but I'm not going to trash for an ego boost), can't you make your point without the attitude?
If you believe that education only boils down to being able to find things, you've fallen prey to one of the Internet-generation fallacies.
Being able to find things is a key skill. Being able to harness technology is a key skill. Being able to operate when that technology is broken, when you don't trust the technology and need to verify its results, or when you need to get something done faster, these are all also important.
Also, having an arsenal of key commands/techniques/etc. ready at hand (ie in memory) isn't going to damage your productivity any. But the inability to recall things if you don't happen to have your search resources or your fancy-tech-gizmo solutions handy might just be a productivity impediment.
Disciplining the mind and memory and making them power tools (instead of lazy kiddie toys) is part of a more general process of making yourself a complete, capable, and valuable member of society and a good person to have handy in a work situation. Being less sharp isn't ever really an asset.
Why is it that the development of the human mind (something we know a lot about now and which has been demonstrated to have huge calculational and mnemonic capabilities) is considered somehow an archaic hobby? Is the mental effort involved really that painful?
Not to be politically incorrect, but the US has probably made some enemies who have a bit more backing (for example PRC, North Korea, organized crime, etc) and a lot more technical savvy. If you think that the only threats are from grass-eating starving cavemen too embroiled in their own local fights, then you're underrating the other players in the the game of global realpolitik.
Maybe most of these aren't directly terrorists (only supporting of same), but they certainly have intelligence aims and wouldn't mind causing the US economy some dislocations. Continuance of Foreign Policy or War by other means and all that jazz.
And organized crime might love to have access to a lot of wonderful law enforcement data, and lord knows they have the money to hire a few good (well, maybe not good but competent) hackers.
Now, I do agree that the US Gov't is taking advantage of the situation to clamp down on some other things - kinda like Canadian authorities using the invocation of the War Measures act at various times to deal with unrelated but annoying things like street-people, vagrants, etc.
But there IS a threat. Just because you're not getting kicked in the groin every day doesn't mean someone doesn't have it on their list of things to do.
Slashdot Mirror
One word: Ottawa.
Okay, that isn't terribly descriptive and it is damning a lot of reasonable expenditures. But it isn't so far off the mark as to be libelous.
Though I too would love to see the link in question!
Socrates was banished for his views. I expect no less from our 'modern' society.
Lovely source of ambiguity, the English language. This could mean you expect to be banished for your views, or that you expect modern society to banish (or that they did banish) Socrates for his views (it merely you expect no less... no less than what? Socrates being banished for his views....)
Dr. Cerf, you're working towards a workable first cut at an Interplanetary Net for 2008. I understand that distances involved prevent the use of a TCP-like protocol, with store and forward being a more feasible approach.
What kind of routing and host naming challenges will exist in the IPN as you currently envision it and what sorts of approaches will be used to address these challenges?
Will packets themselves become intelligent self-routing containers? Will domain naming be heirarchical (and merely a superset of existing DNS to include extra-terrestrial TLDs)? Will it be feasible to dynamically update routing tables?
But being a "yank," and no disrespect to the Europeans, I like this [link to viper] better. And yeah, it's got a real clutch. :-D
Yeah, the Viper's kinda nice. A clutch, some serious rubber on the road, some cubes under the hood, and a roaring powerhouse of an engine.
But having said all that, it *is* still a Dodge.....
I don't have one of the rice-rockets or one of the various expensive eurosports coupes or sedans. Just a plain old Mustang with a 4.6 and a 5 speed (and only a mediocre rear end at 3.27) and no gotterdamerung ABS. But it's a hell of a lot of fun to drive hard and a bit of a challenge to handle winding down nice backwoods roads.
Sure, I could have a faster gearbox, an OEM supercharger, a lower ratio rear end, a dropped and tunable suspension, etc. (And I suppose I'd enjoy the 5.4L engine...)
But the fun of driving the car is in seeing what you can do with the hardware available. The skill of the driver isn't in having the most expensive hardware, its making the best use of the available hardware.
And having fun!
... the hack that clears the counter that tracks how many times you've done this. :)
True, but if you're driving it with 120 Vac (assuming a 100% AC-DC conversion), your house is only experiencing about an 11 amp draw. Now, that won't blow your average 15 or 20 amp breaker, but plug many more things in, and it sure will. And that's a hell of a lot more than a normal PC will draw at present if I'm not mistaken (which, I admit, wouldn't be a first...).
Vint talking about the myth
Note he does mention that being Defense-funded, it did have to display some potential for some military usage. So I would agree that it wasn't developed "to survive a nuclear war" but it was likely funded because it could serve a military purpose (command and control capability enhancement).
Slashdot being what it is and having the diverse population that it does, I'm not about to gainsay your claim. However, you must admit that making a claim about a particular authority having made a particular statement and not providing any sort of reference (nor have I yet seen one, nor found one) does call things into question. And unverifiable (in terms of their actual content) personal conversations certainly aren't very useful to the rest of us.
:)
But then, this is slashdot and just about anything said here could be entirely true, entirely made up, or anything in between.
Thanks for the additional information.
Whereas I will admit to being lazy, I'd also like to point out that not one of the bits of text you reproduce above is attributable to Vint Cerf.
The side effects might even include a guest appearance on "Cops!" as "Male Corpse #2".
... one would want to check the box to make sure it wasn't an MS bonk-o-matic which might give a whole new meaning to "blue screen of death".
Security of data relates to secure hosts and secure encrypted traffic and security of web services relates to secure hosts and authentication of users. Security of the network itself relates to the physical security of the hardware and transmission lines, the redundancy of the hardware, the adaptability of the software for routing and other network services, etc.
You suggest Vint Cerf dispelled the myth a number of times that the Internet was designed to withstand (in this case, gracefully degrade) under a nuclear attack. I'd be most interested to see a link to somewhere where this is quoted. Most textbooks relating to TCP/IP propagate this alleged myth and I'd be interested to see what exactly Vint said.
I was always under the impression that the decentralized nature of the original network was a design criteria which arose from the desire to withstand (or degrade gracefully more correctly stated) in the event of significant damage to the overall infrastructure. Are you suggesting this is not the case? If so, I'd _really_ like to see the sources you have used to arrive at this conclusion.
some kind of routing protocol would have to be devised that understood the topology of such a network (perhaps by using latitude and longitude as metrics for the routing,
That smacks of geolocation to me. People don't want others to know their incoming IP addresses, let alone their real coordinates!
Distributed routing could work, but I can see a lot of ways for such a decentralized approach to break down.
Don't invest in tomorrow's technology today at a premium, when you can get it tomorrow at a discount. That's why smart buyers invest in modular components. When your hardware gets outdated, pluck and chuck.
No! No! No!
Please DO invest today in the top-end graphics cards! Spend two to three hundred $ buying the best cards on the market! (Or more!)
You see, unlike the parent poster, I think this is a positively brilliant plan for each and every one of you in the high-end gaming crowd!
Look at the benefits: State of the art technology, frame rates so fast that subliminal advertising is practical, bitBLTs that could move your entire DNA encoding in one transfer, and colour depth that makes the games so close to real life you never have to leave your chaise-lounge and encounter the real world!
And as a nice bonus for those of us in the category of the less driven to best-of-the-best-damn-the-cost, there is this:
As all of the high end gamers drive the market up, some really decent hardware becomes really cost-effective and affordable for the rest of us!
So yes, Please Please Please DO buy the BEST and Most Expensive! Drive the market as hard as it can be driven! The mild and meek will quietly thank you and buy really nice (but obviously outdated) products for a bargain basement price!
Ooops.... forgot to tag the whole post <SARCASM>
... a copy of Expedient Hand Grenades from my local library. Guess that and the Poor Man's James Bond, stuff by Ho Chi Minh, Hitler, etc. should probably all be eschewed.
If you're borrowing something controversial enough to interest the government from your local LIBRARY, then you probably deserve to be in jail for stupidity. (Assuming you plan to do anything abhorrent).
So who will this law catch? Some innocent people with odd interests. Some guilty people who are pretty dumb. So it offers potential for false hits while essentially weeding the criminal groups to leave only the smarter/tougher criminals. Lovely.
(In this case, smart is defined as not signing out books on bomb making from the public library - order them at amazon.com or somewhere instead...)
Did you read my post? I said MDTs were easily crackable.
:)
Most forces that have moved (not all, there are exceptions even yet) to laptops, palmtops, etc., and even some with MDTs, have implemented either application layer security or are using a digital encrypted radio system.
If you are more worried about the conduct of your police than you are about anyone's NCIC queries, etc. being publically accessible, then you've got a far larger problem than anything that crypto can solve.
Crypto makes police dispatch not trackable by bad guys (thus cutting the odds of a B&E team with a scanner booking out whenever cops get nearby) and it helps protect officers. It also protects YOUR data and that of other innocent people that get queried. And it even protects the guilty by not exposing the transactions relating to charges, file information, etc. from becoming public. If you don't think that's important, I think you're worrying too much about the wrong damn thing.
I think this is also maybe a national phobia in the US (I'm guessing you're a USAian). At least her in Canada, though I know the cops are human and do sometimes do some less than admirable things, I think by en large I don't fear my police force. I DO fear anytime someone happens to query my license plate having that information (registered owner, vehicle info) becoming freely available, or if I did happen to get charged with something.
Just to reassure you: Computers in the cars which allow cops to do text messaging but where the messaging is logged centrally - that scares the cops! So does the thought of people monitoring their on-time/off-time, etc. They're worried about witch hunts. So the fear of the technology goes both ways
Not at all.
First, if you accept that the only way to keep a secret is if two people know and one of them is dead and the other dead as well, then you've captured the root of the problem.
At some level, crypto can be cracked. The plan is that by the time someone can DL and crack the crypto, that the transactions have been processed, the sessions closed, etc. and no session hijack is possible.
And you talk about citizen transparency: Do your really want everyone with a radio knowing that the cops are responding to a domestic dispute at your place? Or that they book you for impaired. Or that they didn't actually find a disturbance, just found you naked doing the chicken dance with your boyfriend? That's the kind of "situational reporting" and data that goes into police transfers. Also things like them fetching your police records (criminal history). You'd really like everyone to have free access? What a terrible idea that would be.
You probably shoulnd't be concerned about the FSB finding out you were dancing naked on your lawn, but you might not want your neighbour LoudMouth Bill, the area gossip, finding out and telling everyone.
Also, it is quite difficult to detect penetrations of networks. This is a tough feat in wired networks and none too easy in wireless. Most intrusions by true professional crackers probably go undetected.
We could spend millions of dollars (tens of millions, hundreds of millions) on crypto and infosec and intrusion detection. And we'd be out those many millions and still someone with the will and backing could crack it. And the villains would apply their money to cracking other aspects of the system we can't afford to defend (we underpay our cops, for example).
Security is about balance - You try to arrange every part of your organization's infrastructure and personel base to be difficult to crack in proportion to the risk of a penetration and the likelihood of a penetration.
The Canadian RCMP spend enough money on security to make it difficult for anyone without serious inside knowledge and some heavy backing to crack the system. That's good enough for most situations, and they have special provisions in place for the few cases where this isn't enough.
I'd be more worried if every police data transaction was publicly transparent. Talk about a recipe for disaster....
I concur. However, there are places where getting an insider may be tough, and getting some hackers may not. If it only costs me $100K to hack a continent wide federal police network (not mentioning names, networks, or anything of the sort.... but I know such allegations have been made in the last few years), and this gives me the ability to hijack sessions, insert traffic, interfere with traffic, modify traffic, etc., this is a wide ranging and subtle capability. If I can do it in realtime, this is even better than having a man on the inside. It's having a COMPUTER on the inside. So it serves a slightly different purpose.
And the gov't spends a lot of time and money defending their infrastructure against penetration by the means you describe (with mixed results). They should apply the same diligence to their electronic networks.
Remember, the enemy always strikes against your weakest point. Once you spend time and money toughening up one avenue of attack, there will be a new weak point, a new line of attack, and someplace else that requires your attention. Such is the nature of security work - it requires continued vigilance and focus on a wide range of aspects - organizational, electronic, procedural, etc.
Did you read my comment? I do believe that the US is in fact engaged in some unfortunate self-inflicted curtailments of basic freedoms.
That said, the threat from the bad guys isn't a fantasy. To treat it as such is foolish in the extreme. The enemy are not all grass-chewing cavemen.
Egotism and arrogance aren't necesarily desireable corrolary features either!
Software Engineering is a much maligned, poorly-understood and often pretended-to discipline. But that doesn't mean that most "mere coders" don't perform engineering functions (note the definition of engineering involves applying thought and ingenuity to a problem).
And a lack of any sort of humility on behalf of "Software Engineers" isn't likely to help bridge the gap between conventional engineering disciplines and the very active world of software production.
Instead of displaying an annoying disdain for your fellow slashdotter (whom I may not agree with but I'm not going to trash for an ego boost), can't you make your point without the attitude?
If you believe that education only boils down to being able to find things, you've fallen prey to one of the Internet-generation fallacies.
Being able to find things is a key skill. Being able to harness technology is a key skill. Being able to operate when that technology is broken, when you don't trust the technology and need to verify its results, or when you need to get something done faster, these are all also important.
Also, having an arsenal of key commands/techniques/etc. ready at hand (ie in memory) isn't going to damage your productivity any. But the inability to recall things if you don't happen to have your search resources or your fancy-tech-gizmo solutions handy might just be a productivity impediment.
Disciplining the mind and memory and making them power tools (instead of lazy kiddie toys) is part of a more general process of making yourself a complete, capable, and valuable member of society and a good person to have handy in a work situation. Being less sharp isn't ever really an asset.
Why is it that the development of the human mind (something we know a lot about now and which has been demonstrated to have huge calculational and mnemonic capabilities) is considered somehow an archaic hobby? Is the mental effort involved really that painful?
Not to be politically incorrect, but the US has probably made some enemies who have a bit more backing (for example PRC, North Korea, organized crime, etc) and a lot more technical savvy. If you think that the only threats are from grass-eating starving cavemen too embroiled in their own local fights, then you're underrating the other players in the the game of global realpolitik.
Maybe most of these aren't directly terrorists (only supporting of same), but they certainly have intelligence aims and wouldn't mind causing the US economy some dislocations. Continuance of Foreign Policy or War by other means and all that jazz.
And organized crime might love to have access to a lot of wonderful law enforcement data, and lord knows they have the money to hire a few good (well, maybe not good but competent) hackers.
Now, I do agree that the US Gov't is taking advantage of the situation to clamp down on some other things - kinda like Canadian authorities using the invocation of the War Measures act at various times to deal with unrelated but annoying things like street-people, vagrants, etc.
But there IS a threat. Just because you're not getting kicked in the groin every day doesn't mean someone doesn't have it on their list of things to do.
Maybe we can feed the spammers' children.
Hopefully to something large and hungry.