boxen/bok'sn/ pl.n. [very common; by analogy with VAXen] Fanciful plural of box often encountered in the phrase `Unix boxen', used to describe commodity {Unix} hardware. The connotation is that any two Unix boxen are interchangeable.
Lets go back a few thousand years, and an earthquake happens. What are you going to think it is? They have no idea that there are shifting plates underneath them which is causing it, they just feel the ground rumble.
What if something like that were to happen, and the local cavemen people gather round, and decide that maybe the earthquake was a message that they have not done something right, or that they are being punished in some way. They then somehow decide what shouldn't be done to cause one of them again, and religion starts. As time goes by, and no other quakes happen, the people feel that they have been doing the right thing, and they trust more in their beliefs.
I myself am agnostic. What I believe is that I cannot be 100% certain if there is or is not a god. I am not going to look at a book that was written a couple thousand years ago, and hold it as truth. Most religions that I know of are based upon books that were written in a much different day and age. I would imagine things like solar eclipses, earthquakes, northern lights, and so on, would be very strange things to see if I didn't have science to explain it to me.
And my on-topic section.. I feel that this cloning buisness could be a good thing, BUT, I can also see that if it is not organized and open 100%, then we could start seeing mutants. I would really hate to live in world where we have a second class of humans, the mutants, and they will be seen as freaks of nature, etc. So, all in all, I support it, but I have many doubts that human nature can do it in a sane and civilized way. I guess it doens't matter much, as there will always be someone who is rich enough, and can fund something like this under wraps.
Well in this day and age, I wouldn't spend over a grand on a tube tv, you can get a nice rear projection wide screen tv for about 2500 bucks. The ones I saw at best buy were pretty nice looking.. Of course the panasonic plasma display is great too, only about 200 bucks a month, if I didn't have a car payment id be all over it.
Would the main slashdot page be just http://slashdot, or http://home.slashdot, or http://main.slashdot, etc..
I thought these new TLD's are pretty neat, but when you get what the other poster had up there, 4 domains that point to the Carnegie Museum of Art, it seems to me that they didn't organize this well.
You could then type out: "http://art.museum" and get a listing of all the museums of art online. And similarly, you could type out "http://maritime.museum" and get a listing of all those. It seems to me that it would be a lot easier to find museums that way online. I guess some museums have multiple sections, you could just list them under multiple domains I guess..
Well anyway, its pretty cool i guess, but I seems its going to end up how our domains are now. Wasn't.com supposed to be commercial buisness's only, I think I had heard that from someplace.
Yea, I remember a while back, probably 5 years ago, where I sat down, and viewed the source of a few easy pages, and taught myself HTML. I think that having the ability to look at straight HTML is great, I really dont like the idea of depending on frontpage or something to do this for me.
I recently tried to make a page that would kinda auto resize everything for whatever resolution you came up in, using tables and such. What a pain in the ass.. I used photoshop to make some basic items, cut them up into seperate pieces, and tried to get them to work with tables, and I would always have one or two parts that wouldn't line up correctly, so I just gave up.
It almost seems like now im going to be forced to use some sort of program now to do all this, as my HTML skills are fairly basic at best. Ive tried using homesite, but I fought with it a lot trying to do what I wanted. Anyone by chance know of a good program to make web pages these days? Especially one that doens't mutilate code like frontpage does (im only mentioning frontpage because I think it is probably the worst offender of how it treats your code).
I haven't touched CSS much at all, I like what it does, so i'll probably have to sit down and learn it one day... It it something that can be coded by hand usually, or is there alot involved with CSS that you really need to have a program generate the code?
I had DSL before I had a cable modem. With DSL, when something wasn't working, I would have 2 companies that would tell me its the other ones fault, my ISP, and the Telephone company. They never talked between themselves, they would just keep on blaming one or the other about why my dsl wasn't working.
With cable, I have one company to bitch at, as they control the lines and the service.
Good/Bad? Hard to say, I like my cable modem much better though =)
I think a better suggestion would be this, when they send out the questions to whoever, just have something that says if they are going to call by phone they have to give advance notice. They could then properly tape and transcribe the call.
That is no excuse.. I mean, I am 100% ready to record any call that comes to me, trace it to the source, and have my men on them before I hang u.. oh nevermind..
If he did get a call just out of the blue, from someone that seems to be so busy, he really had no choice but to write as he talked. To tell you the truth, I hadn't really heard of this person before this article came up, and I found it fairly informing, but all the 3rd party references was a bit annoying.
Ah well, the stories will still come, not really a big deal.
Yea, when I read the topic, I expected that whoever was talking to him recorded the conversation, and then after that, wrote down what he said word for word.
When I read the first line, "Bruce noted that characters he portrays are pretty fun to start with" it almost sounded like he was talking himself, but in 3rd person.. seems kinda lazy not to do it the correct way..
Your machine on the network (192.168.0.2) sends a request out to get to www.yahoo.com.
The packets go to your router using a random port number from your machine (lets pick port 888). The router then takes those packets, replaces my ip address with the routers ip address.
The router will also build a table of this. From the info above, it will take my ip address, 192.168.0.2, and link it to port 888.
Alright, so with that done, this is what happens next. The router then sends those packets to www.yahoo.com. Yahoo.com will then send what it needs to back, to the router ip address. The router will know that the packets that it just recieved were a reply from the original packets sent out.
The router will then replace the section in the packet that is the destination with your 192.168.0.2, and send the packet back to your machine using port 888.
Now, if I am correct up above (and im fairly sure that I am pretty close) then I dont think that any machine out there could really tell that I had NAT on my network. They could probably probe my network in some way, and find out, but I dont think they could just look at my packets and tell.
Once again, I am not a genius on this, I tried to explain NAT above, and it ended up a lot longer then I expected.
I just find it strange that Linksys and other companies sell these cable/dsl routers, and the providers of that service would really like to handle all that in house (aka, I call up adelphia, ask them for another ip address, they come to my house with a linksys router, set it up, and i get charged 5 more bucks a month).
Another problem I see with this is, lets say I have an mp3 jukebox that connects to the net maybe, 1 time a week, maybe to just collect cddb info or something. Why should I have to pay for something (additional ip) when, I dont want it, I dont need it, and id rather have someone else get the ip address that needs it. That little box does not need an ip address, and its total bandwidth in a month could fit on a floppy. What kind of damage does that do to the cable companies.. None at all, except they see it as more profit that they are not making, but possibly could.
Note: The ending of this post was done when I was getting off work, so i wrote it in haste =)
A packet coming from port 80 on $PRIVATE_IP gets remapped so that it appears as some oddball port number on $PUBLIC_IP. If they see lots of activity involving strange port numbers, they might conclude that $PUBLIC_IP is assigned to a router or a firewall.
I don't think this would matter, because port 80 would never be used in connections going from inside the network to the outside world. Yes, you are *connecting* to port 80 on some other server, but *your* computer uses some random port number anyway. So NAT would only change it from one random port to another.
As far as what I have learned on the subject, any info going outside of NAT looks normal, it only jumps around ports on the internal network, so I am in agreement with you there.
Maybe they can check the number of hops a packet has made. I would think that all of the packets coming from a machine would be allowed so many hops before they expire. Machines behind a firewall would use one hop to go from the machine to the firewall...so unless the firewall also rewrites that part of the packet, that's possibly another method by which a firewall could be sniffed out.
This might be possible, I don't know enough about how NAT works to verify or refute this. To some networking genious: is this possible?
Well, from what I know, im not a genius on the subject, but when a packet leaves your network, and it gets routed to the destination, im sure that with verying network conditions, one packet might get there in 10 hops, while another might get there in 12. I know that if i tracert from an internal machine, it will count the router *my gateway* as a hop, but I really doubt they would use that as a way of testing if I had nat or not. But I could be wrong..
Something similar to the "OS identification" function in nmap ought to fairly easily tell the firewall appliances from Linksys and such apart from a computer. Just as the network stacks in Linux and Windows respond to the same types of traffic in different ways, there's no doubt a similar difference with the firewall appliances.
Many routers have the option of setting up a "DMZ" (demiliterized zone?) in addition to NAT, where you can set up a single computer to accept *all* incoming connections. Outgoing connections via NAT still work normally. This makes the router effectively invisible, even to OS scans (although it does eliminate any of NAT's security benifits). A scan of my box from another computer reveales that I am running Linux 2.4.x on i386, and not Lynksys BIOS 4.235 or whatever.
Yup, my router has a DMZ host setting, which will forward all incoming packets that the router doens't know what machine to send it to. I guess what happens is lets say, my machine sends a request to some server out there. My request is sent to the router on some odd port, lets say 44445. The router will replace my 192 address with the real ip address, it will then say that my address came from 44445, so if this machine im sending info to replies, to replace the real ip address back to my ip address (the 192 one), and sends it to my machine using port 44445. Now, if the server out there replies maybe using a different ip address, my router does not know that, and it will drop the packet. With DMZ, it would forward that packet instead to a machine i designate. This im sure would get around the OS snooping thing.
I am not sure if I understand you correctly.. They can look at a packet that came from my machine, and by the TTL, they can tell that it came from a machine, to a router, to a cable modem, and then out?
Wouldn't this increase the TTL by only a few milliseconds at most? Does the router artifically inflate the TTL so it has more time to get it back to the original machine? Maybe I do not understand what your trying to get at here..
(please dont treat this as anything like a flame, im curious about it and thats it..)
Yea, luckily Adelphia@home wasn't really using any @home infrastructure, so they just dropped the name, still the same service... And yes, they will have to pry my router out of my hands before I willingly pay them more money...
This is what everyone does right now anyway, well anyone who has more then one machine and a cable modem.
You can go buy a linksys dsl/cable router and it will do all this for you. It even has a way to spoof a mac address (some cable modems will get the mac address from the machine they set it up on, and it will only let that mac address connect to the cable modem. You can take your mac address from the machine they set it up on, and just plug the numbers into the router. The cable modem will still think its connected to the original machine, and you can get more then one machine on the cable modem).
The thing is, how can they really tell that I have a router behind my cable modem? Can they analyze my packets going out and see that there might be some NAT going on? (im really not too sure if packets that are going out look different coming from a nat server). I can understand they are not happy with people setting up wireless access points, but why should I have to pay for another IP address just so they can collect more money from me? What if I only want one ip address, maybe my other machine only connects to the net to get cddb info, is that worth 5 bucks a month?
I was somewhat disappointed with the article, it has no mention on what the device can actually do. Sure, the buttons here and there are great, yada yada, but what happens when you turn it on?
From what it sounds like, you can send and recieve text messages between devices, maybe play games, *maybe* send and recieve mp3 files from your friends if you both have that expansion card. Am i missing something? I guess I can say that in the town I live in, I really doubt anyone would have one of these, and those willing would probably rather have one of those motorola 2 way radios, much longer range, and if you just needed to 'talk' to someone else, that would do the trick.
Ah well, maybe it does some other stuff im not aware of.
Slashdot Mirror
Dictionary.com:
boxen /bok'sn/ pl.n. [very common; by analogy with VAXen] Fanciful plural of box often encountered in the phrase `Unix boxen', used to describe commodity {Unix} hardware. The connotation is that any two Unix boxen are interchangeable.
Check for yourself:
Dictionary.com
Note: I find the word annoying dont get me wrong, but it looks like it has slid its way into the english language..
Zeno
Yes
Lets go back a few thousand years, and an earthquake happens. What are you going to think it is? They have no idea that there are shifting plates underneath them which is causing it, they just feel the ground rumble.
What if something like that were to happen, and the local cavemen people gather round, and decide that maybe the earthquake was a message that they have not done something right, or that they are being punished in some way. They then somehow decide what shouldn't be done to cause one of them again, and religion starts. As time goes by, and no other quakes happen, the people feel that they have been doing the right thing, and they trust more in their beliefs.
I myself am agnostic. What I believe is that I cannot be 100% certain if there is or is not a god. I am not going to look at a book that was written a couple thousand years ago, and hold it as truth. Most religions that I know of are based upon books that were written in a much different day and age. I would imagine things like solar eclipses, earthquakes, northern lights, and so on, would be very strange things to see if I didn't have science to explain it to me.
And my on-topic section.. I feel that this cloning buisness could be a good thing, BUT, I can also see that if it is not organized and open 100%, then we could start seeing mutants. I would really hate to live in world where we have a second class of humans, the mutants, and they will be seen as freaks of nature, etc. So, all in all, I support it, but I have many doubts that human nature can do it in a sane and civilized way. I guess it doens't matter much, as there will always be someone who is rich enough, and can fund something like this under wraps.
I was thinking Montana...
Zeno
Well in this day and age, I wouldn't spend over a grand on a tube tv, you can get a nice rear projection wide screen tv for about 2500 bucks. The ones I saw at best buy were pretty nice looking.. Of course the panasonic plasma display is great too, only about 200 bucks a month, if I didn't have a car payment id be all over it.
Zeno
Boy if you could just give everyone's christmas presents that easily. =)
*snap*
Panasonic Plasma Display
Zeno
Well its not the car made by chevy because its called a corvette.
Would the main slashdot page be just http://slashdot, or http://home.slashdot, or http://main.slashdot, etc..
.museum would have to signify what kind of museum, like art, and whatever else.
.com supposed to be commercial buisness's only, I think I had heard that from someplace.
I thought these new TLD's are pretty neat, but when you get what the other poster had up there, 4 domains that point to the Carnegie Museum of Art, it seems to me that they didn't organize this well.
Here is what I mean:
carnegie.art.museum
carnegie.museum.of.art.museum
carnegiemuseum.art.museum
carnegiemuseum.of.art.museum
Now, it seems to me that it would have been more logical to say,
So, now we can have:
.art.museum
.maritime.museum
.ushistory.museum
.euhistory.museum
You could then type out: "http://art.museum" and get a listing of all the museums of art online. And similarly, you could type out "http://maritime.museum" and get a listing of all those. It seems to me that it would be a lot easier to find museums that way online. I guess some museums have multiple sections, you could just list them under multiple domains I guess..
Well anyway, its pretty cool i guess, but I seems its going to end up how our domains are now. Wasn't
Well, I think you can't do that, but it comes down to what was posted up above.
They can threaten you all they want with the law, and its not against the law.
Well I doubt its a feature of HTML, so ya, Id agree, its a bug of some sort, anyone notice if it happens across all browsers?
Id imagine it has something to do with how the comment boxes are done..
Yea, I remember a while back, probably 5 years ago, where I sat down, and viewed the source of a few easy pages, and taught myself HTML. I think that having the ability to look at straight HTML is great, I really dont like the idea of depending on frontpage or something to do this for me.
I recently tried to make a page that would kinda auto resize everything for whatever resolution you came up in, using tables and such. What a pain in the ass.. I used photoshop to make some basic items, cut them up into seperate pieces, and tried to get them to work with tables, and I would always have one or two parts that wouldn't line up correctly, so I just gave up.
It almost seems like now im going to be forced to use some sort of program now to do all this, as my HTML skills are fairly basic at best. Ive tried using homesite, but I fought with it a lot trying to do what I wanted. Anyone by chance know of a good program to make web pages these days? Especially one that doens't mutilate code like frontpage does (im only mentioning frontpage because I think it is probably the worst offender of how it treats your code).
I haven't touched CSS much at all, I like what it does, so i'll probably have to sit down and learn it one day... It it something that can be coded by hand usually, or is there alot involved with CSS that you really need to have a program generate the code?
You could say its a slang word, but dictionaries do not have any meaning for those combination of letters, "virii" in them. Try dictionary.com.
Well, the good thing about the above..
I had DSL before I had a cable modem. With DSL, when something wasn't working, I would have 2 companies that would tell me its the other ones fault, my ISP, and the Telephone company. They never talked between themselves, they would just keep on blaming one or the other about why my dsl wasn't working.
With cable, I have one company to bitch at, as they control the lines and the service.
Good/Bad? Hard to say, I like my cable modem much better though =)
Ive heard that he got called out of the blue..
I think a better suggestion would be this, when they send out the questions to whoever, just have something that says if they are going to call by phone they have to give advance notice. They could then properly tape and transcribe the call.
That is no excuse.. I mean, I am 100% ready to record any call that comes to me, trace it to the source, and have my men on them before I hang u.. oh nevermind..
If he did get a call just out of the blue, from someone that seems to be so busy, he really had no choice but to write as he talked. To tell you the truth, I hadn't really heard of this person before this article came up, and I found it fairly informing, but all the 3rd party references was a bit annoying.
Ah well, the stories will still come, not really a big deal.
Zeno
Yea, when I read the topic, I expected that whoever was talking to him recorded the conversation, and then after that, wrote down what he said word for word.
When I read the first line, "Bruce noted that characters he portrays are pretty fun to start with" it almost sounded like he was talking himself, but in 3rd person.. seems kinda lazy not to do it the correct way..
Zeno
I doubt anyone does because the word virii doesn't exist.
Here is how it works:
Your machine on the network (192.168.0.2) sends a request out to get to www.yahoo.com.
The packets go to your router using a random port number from your machine (lets pick port 888). The router then takes those packets, replaces my ip address with the routers ip address.
The router will also build a table of this. From the info above, it will take my ip address, 192.168.0.2, and link it to port 888.
Alright, so with that done, this is what happens next. The router then sends those packets to www.yahoo.com. Yahoo.com will then send what it needs to back, to the router ip address. The router will know that the packets that it just recieved were a reply from the original packets sent out.
The router will then replace the section in the packet that is the destination with your 192.168.0.2, and send the packet back to your machine using port 888.
Now, if I am correct up above (and im fairly sure that I am pretty close) then I dont think that any machine out there could really tell that I had NAT on my network. They could probably probe my network in some way, and find out, but I dont think they could just look at my packets and tell.
Once again, I am not a genius on this, I tried to explain NAT above, and it ended up a lot longer then I expected.
I just find it strange that Linksys and other companies sell these cable/dsl routers, and the providers of that service would really like to handle all that in house (aka, I call up adelphia, ask them for another ip address, they come to my house with a linksys router, set it up, and i get charged 5 more bucks a month).
Another problem I see with this is, lets say I have an mp3 jukebox that connects to the net maybe, 1 time a week, maybe to just collect cddb info or something. Why should I have to pay for something (additional ip) when, I dont want it, I dont need it, and id rather have someone else get the ip address that needs it. That little box does not need an ip address, and its total bandwidth in a month could fit on a floppy. What kind of damage does that do to the cable companies.. None at all, except they see it as more profit that they are not making, but possibly could.
Note: The ending of this post was done when I was getting off work, so i wrote it in haste =)
I don't think this would matter, because port 80 would never be used in connections going from inside the network to the outside world. Yes, you are *connecting* to port 80 on some other server, but *your* computer uses some random port number anyway. So NAT would only change it from one random port to another.
As far as what I have learned on the subject, any info going outside of NAT looks normal, it only jumps around ports on the internal network, so I am in agreement with you there.
Maybe they can check the number of hops a packet has made. I would think that all of the packets coming from a machine would be allowed so many hops before they expire. Machines behind a firewall would use one hop to go from the machine to the firewall...so unless the firewall also rewrites that part of the packet, that's possibly another method by which a firewall could be sniffed out. This might be possible, I don't know enough about how NAT works to verify or refute this. To some networking genious: is this possible?
Well, from what I know, im not a genius on the subject, but when a packet leaves your network, and it gets routed to the destination, im sure that with verying network conditions, one packet might get there in 10 hops, while another might get there in 12. I know that if i tracert from an internal machine, it will count the router *my gateway* as a hop, but I really doubt they would use that as a way of testing if I had nat or not. But I could be wrong..
Something similar to the "OS identification" function in nmap ought to fairly easily tell the firewall appliances from Linksys and such apart from a computer. Just as the network stacks in Linux and Windows respond to the same types of traffic in different ways, there's no doubt a similar difference with the firewall appliances.
Many routers have the option of setting up a "DMZ" (demiliterized zone?) in addition to NAT, where you can set up a single computer to accept *all* incoming connections. Outgoing connections via NAT still work normally. This makes the router effectively invisible, even to OS scans (although it does eliminate any of NAT's security benifits). A scan of my box from another computer reveales that I am running Linux 2.4.x on i386, and not Lynksys BIOS 4.235 or whatever.
Yup, my router has a DMZ host setting, which will forward all incoming packets that the router doens't know what machine to send it to. I guess what happens is lets say, my machine sends a request to some server out there. My request is sent to the router on some odd port, lets say 44445. The router will replace my 192 address with the real ip address, it will then say that my address came from 44445, so if this machine im sending info to replies, to replace the real ip address back to my ip address (the 192 one), and sends it to my machine using port 44445. Now, if the server out there replies maybe using a different ip address, my router does not know that, and it will drop the packet. With DMZ, it would forward that packet instead to a machine i designate. This im sure would get around the OS snooping thing.
I am not sure if I understand you correctly.. They can look at a packet that came from my machine, and by the TTL, they can tell that it came from a machine, to a router, to a cable modem, and then out?
Wouldn't this increase the TTL by only a few milliseconds at most? Does the router artifically inflate the TTL so it has more time to get it back to the original machine? Maybe I do not understand what your trying to get at here..
(please dont treat this as anything like a flame, im curious about it and thats it..)
Yea, luckily Adelphia@home wasn't really using any @home infrastructure, so they just dropped the name, still the same service... And yes, they will have to pry my router out of my hands before I willingly pay them more money...
Yea, that would kinda suck for me though, as ive been going pretty crazy on audio galaxy, this last month 10 gig upload, 11gig downloads =P
I just hope my cable provider stays just as they are.
This is what everyone does right now anyway, well anyone who has more then one machine and a cable modem.
You can go buy a linksys dsl/cable router and it will do all this for you. It even has a way to spoof a mac address (some cable modems will get the mac address from the machine they set it up on, and it will only let that mac address connect to the cable modem. You can take your mac address from the machine they set it up on, and just plug the numbers into the router. The cable modem will still think its connected to the original machine, and you can get more then one machine on the cable modem).
The thing is, how can they really tell that I have a router behind my cable modem? Can they analyze my packets going out and see that there might be some NAT going on? (im really not too sure if packets that are going out look different coming from a nat server). I can understand they are not happy with people setting up wireless access points, but why should I have to pay for another IP address just so they can collect more money from me? What if I only want one ip address, maybe my other machine only connects to the net to get cddb info, is that worth 5 bucks a month?
No thanks, ill just keep on using my router.
I guess you would really have no idea if they did or not by reading the article. Maybe they don't and I am just making all that up..
I was somewhat disappointed with the article, it has no mention on what the device can actually do. Sure, the buttons here and there are great, yada yada, but what happens when you turn it on?
From what it sounds like, you can send and recieve text messages between devices, maybe play games, *maybe* send and recieve mp3 files from your friends if you both have that expansion card. Am i missing something? I guess I can say that in the town I live in, I really doubt anyone would have one of these, and those willing would probably rather have one of those motorola 2 way radios, much longer range, and if you just needed to 'talk' to someone else, that would do the trick.
Ah well, maybe it does some other stuff im not aware of.