This is big enough to seriously f'up the Internet - get it?
Oh come on, you're exaggerating. A failure of 10 root DNS servers is big enough problem to seriously f'up the Internet. The mishandling of 302 redirects allows easy mischief and much confusion, but no catastrophic problems as far as I can tell.
Is making sure that we all routinely use PGP/GPG in say home/office computing and email communications. Over time this will drive home the fact that privacy is a right, it is something that the computing public has come to expect. Using crypto should not in itself mean anything with respect to criminal intent. I use crypto to keep my documents and communications private. Whether or not I am doing anything illegal is a separate issue altogether.
Yup, I've done this too. Got an affordably large Compact Flash card and used a simple interface device that just connects the appropriate pins to an IDE cord; Compact Flash has an "IDE" mode on it since by specification it is designed to run as an IDE device. Great for rugged applications. I know of other people doing this locally as they are deploying embedded systems outdoors.
The only problem with this approach appears to be the size and quality of the Compact Flash. Ideally you want a newer type of flash memory that supports more write cycles.
That's my take on it, any way. I've watched business people come and go over decades. They always do the same thing, latch onto whatever is known to be hot and get greedy, until the industry has beaten the theme to death and there is no more money to be made. They make a lot of money in the mean time but in the end only the few who quit while they're ahead have made the real money. For the rest, it's all on paper and easy come easy go.
Technology was obviously an example in the 90s. Everybody thought that all they had to do to make money was be involved in IT. A lot of them made great money, unfortunately the expectations got so crazy that stocks surged to unreasonable valuations and eventually corrected quite naturally. So now business people have a really bad taste in their mouth when they think of technology, "I got burned before" they think and avoid it like the plague.
Today what's hot is the financial sector and banking. Take a look at the stock market today, it is driven by the financial sector. These business people have become geniuses again, making easy money. My buddies at the London School of Economics say they're all going to become investment bankers. My friends from comp sci are working at financial institutions. See, the same shit's happening all again, the new bubble is in finance.
And business people are sooo smart to be making money where everyone else is making money. Of course, until this bubble pops too. Then everyone will have a bad taste in their mouth about banking and finance.
It's kind of a funny game. This is what happens in markets where people chase trends. There is not a lot of IT spending these days, nor a lot of research and development in technology. Both are short sighted mistakes, driven by the psychology of business people who will easily pass up on tomorrow's opportunities for profits today.
ah beautiful DOS, where any application could take over system-wide interrupt vectors, abuse memory however it wanted, and rudely tickle the hardware in dangerous ways. Now DOS viruses, * those * were works of art. I almost threw up the first time I heard of a virus written in "VB"!
working for a large bank on a program trading system
I'm sure it's interesting work, but do you realize that your software skills are being used to create widespread instability and volatility in the stock markets? Banks try to constantly arbitrage whatever they can (quickly take advantage of price discrepancies, exploitable market inefficiencies) and if you are using a lot of leverage in the process, you are contributing to a stock market that has become nothing more than a speculator's playground.
I don't want to say "You're destroying America" but man, if I wrote program trading systems for a major bank that moved trillions daily, and there was a spectacular market event, I would feel guilty about it and all the pension funds and life savings that would evaporate due to my work.
Believe you me, the NASDAQ is one of the only major exchanges I mildly trust precisely because it is electronic. Other major exchanges, notably the NYSE, involve human floor traders gathering around posts and barking out bid and ask prices.
Do you have any idea how crooked stock trading through middlemen is? There are a thousand ways the retail investor and small trader gets screwed. For instance, market makers are definitely not impartial and favour their own trades ahead of clients'. You can not even catch the fraud the occurs. There are about a dozen NYSE market specialists that are charged with fraud every year.
There is absolutely no reason to involve humans in the securities trading process any more. None! The rampant fraud can be easily avoided. When things like this are publicized, I almost wonder if it's got some bias in favor of the human trade specialists who make trading floor operations tick. They're useless middlemen, profiting from spreads and leverage.
Electronic trading is the only way to go. When an exchange switches to electronic, you should see that as a sign of quality and a commitment to do away with the fraud that EVERY insider knows is a standard mode of operation in stock trading.
your kids PC is helping terrorists send unsolicited email
Actually that isn't far from the truth. Slashdot ran an article about DDoS extortionists threatening to clobber commerce sites, unless they received a payment. These criminals often collect zombie hosts to perform their DDoS with, by initially infecting regular home PCs either through email worms or other kinds of malware caught while web browsing. These guys are extorting money and threatening businesses and livelihoods; indeed, the activity they routinely perform threatens global commerce itself because it threatens capitalist endeavours over the Internet. All major sites have to hide behind someone like akamai or otherwise invest millions in anti-DDoS measures. They aren't scared of random script kiddies, but organized terrorists.
So in a very real way, the DDoS extortionists are terrorists and everyone who leaves their systems unpatched is helping support terrorism.
Can anyone suggest a motherboard I can easily install inside my car? Power supply is what it comes down to I think. I can then use compact flash cards as EIDE hard drives, so there are no moving parts. There are various things I'd like to play around with, including a jukebox and wireless network, but I have yet to figure out how to power this stuff conveniently.
When they fire that warning shot, you dump all the attacking IPs to a log and circulate the list to AHBL, Spamhaus, CBL etc so that the extortionist's zombie network is now worth half of what it was before. Zombies are only worth anything if they are novel. And you tell the extortionist that for each additional shot, their botnet monetary value will decrease by 10% or whatever.
Thanks for the reply Hans! Quite something seeing your post on slashdot. I guess I was wrong about the reliability being a consideration... but from having implemented a database system based on reiserfs I can say that the performance is spectacular compared to our earlier SQL version which for us was the main consideration.
This is an appeal to network admins working at ISPs, whether large or small. You have a responsibility to make sure that spam/attack zombies don't exist on your networks. These days it's a trivial task to check to make sure you're not part of the problem. This can be scripted so that you receive periodic reports of problem hosts on your system, which you can then firewall, disconnect, or restrict access to.
There are so many blacklists these days, so just use rsync to grab fresh copies of AHBL, CBL, DSBL, SORBS, whatever. Then run through grepcidr to see if any IPs from your network(s) are on the blacklists. So easy, and you'll be protecting both yourself and others from malicious zombies.
Quick! Lower interest rates, let's hope they start buying more... if they keep thinking about quality and affordability of their purchases, Americans could kill the economy
How many times have we heard of huge sites going down because databases become corrupt or unrecoverable, or of the huge resource strain (memory and CPU) from a large database?
In my opinion, the future of databases is nothing so complicated as pitched here -- but rather a move to simpler, more reliable back ends where the filesystem is the database. This is certainly the vision pitched by Hans Reiser and reiserfs, which aims to put more database like intelligence within the filesystem. So you eliminate extra unnecessary layers that just eat up resources and create fragile databases.
Easy. Disconnect them at the first sign of virus trouble
I don't think that's practical for what this fellow described. What is practical is to cripple the host's connectivity in some ways so that it does not harm its neighbors, doesn't harm the internet, but still doesn't create a pain the ass for the admin. If you can somehow put the host on a separate network or move it to a certain range of "infected" IPs, that would be nice -- then the routers/firewall can limit these host's bandwidth and ports, limiting extent of damage.
The guy mentioned he had control over DHCP. So it seems to me the easiest thing to do would be to automate detection of infected hosts (easy), and then move infected hosts to a separate range of IP addresses. Those IPs can be treated differently from normal, well run hosts. This is probably the smallest headache you could hope for.
A quick way to handle the situation you describe is to detect the infection from outside and then shut down (or limit) service to the affected hosts. Sniffing network traffic to assess infections is the most accurate way, but here's another technique. Most viruses are involved with spamming in one way or another, and as such, infected hosts are detected out on the Internet.
What you should do is routinely grab (rsync) a full listing of blacklisted hosts from CBL, DSBL and elsewhere... and then use the grepcidr program to hunt for IP addresses from your network inside those huge lists.
This can be totally scripted. If you locate infected hosts, you can then revoke or cripple service to them one way or another. Examples of crippling would be to reduce available bandwidth (tarpit on a linux router), blocking all but the most essential outbound ports at the firewall. Or you could be more brutal and just revoke their IP connectivity.
The u.s. is in the transition to a wholely IP based economy
America is done innovating; they are done producing. They suck 80% of the world's savings and produce hardly anything of any value. Corporate America thinks they have discovered the low-cost future of business; lawyers. Appropriately, this will damn them to hell.
Right now the US economy is walking a rather fine line
I just wanted to add, if you think this is just a lefty slashdotter doomsday scenario or something, it's time you read this article by Paul A. Volcker, the past Federal Reserve chief before Alan Greenspan. The piece from last month entitled "An Economy On Thin Ice" articulates the warnings many of us in economic circles know; excess credit bubble, dependence on foreign capital; sucking dry 80% of world's savings without producing growth, etc.
Here is an article describing the proposed changes to Canadian copyright law, as well as the background -- industry lobby from the USA. This article is pulled from the Digital Copyright Canada web site which is trying to organize citizens feedback to politicians, with respect to the DMCA in Canada.
I can't believe this issue of Windows security is so difficult to understand. You read all these articles about viruses and trojans but people keep failing to mention the obvious - you must never casually run Windows with Administrator privileges.
It's because so many people are used to doing this by default, and so many third party apps demand Admin privileges, that Windows security is a nightmare.
There's more to the Windows security picture of course (insecure services as well) but you can prevent so many problems just by avoiding that Admin account. It's quite normal to have raw sockets via root/Administrator privileges. The problem is that all windows users (and any software they download) are Admins.
No, I'm smart enough to know that my desires mean absolutely nothing in the market place. Let me lay out a more plausible scenario for you. Foreigners withdraw their investments in the US, China revalues their currency, treasuries plummet taking 80% of the world's savings with it, grinding global economy to a halt. Demand goes way down, China's growth slows way down (temporarily at least), oil comes back to $30 or less. Suddenly we're consuming less resources.
The article makes it sound like there is a major difference between the viewpoint of environmentalists and scientists. What I'm trying to point out is that many scientists and scientific reports, as published in media, are heavily industry biased (because they are industry employed). In reality the difference between scientific opinion and environmental opinion is not as great as made out to be.
Increasing demand for power and other resources isn't going away.
Wow, it's interesting to watch the same mistakes in reasoning over and over again. A lot of the increase in demand for power and resources is artifically created. In other words, increase in demand for resource is not a necessity; it is a situation that exists due to the business environment.
With increased government levvies, and education on future impacts of piggish consumption, overall demand can actually decrease. But such is not good for business at all, so it is violently opposed (including government lobbies)
In the past few years I've woken up to the power of this thing called money, as a driving force in human motivation (at least in societies where material wealth is valued over social relationships). Money makes people say anything and do anything, for their personal gain. It's really a very powerful force, and it trumps logic, common sense, and in many cases, morals.
Certainly, some environmentalists have financial motives but the majority do not. When scientists are concerned about global climate change, they are publishing these warnings in the hope of drawing attention to what they genuinely perceive as a serious problem. Ditto for polution concerns, supplies of natural resources, biological diversity and ecosystem damage. These are FACTS.
In contrast, the news releases from industry which make their way across television and newspaper spread absolute lies. Examples:
there is no global climate change (flies in the face of 90%+ of scientific opinion)
business can continue as usual without worrying about environmental factors (a hope, for short term business as usual)
the economy can survive $100 oil
nuclear is the solution to our energy needs
Here's the important point: a lot of scientists work for industry. So they have a distinct bias. In many cases they are providing reports for their employer. So next time you run into a scientific report, check the source... not all scientists are funded equally.
I have no idea what outlook does. I use jbmail (it's for windows though) and when you save messages from the inbox, or copyself they become individual ASCII files named intelligently to reflect the address and subject involved. So future filing is just a matter of dealing with text files, which will be around forever and easily identified.
Slashdot Mirror
Is making sure that we all routinely use PGP/GPG in say home/office computing and email communications. Over time this will drive home the fact that privacy is a right, it is something that the computing public has come to expect. Using crypto should not in itself mean anything with respect to criminal intent. I use crypto to keep my documents and communications private. Whether or not I am doing anything illegal is a separate issue altogether.
Yup, I've done this too. Got an affordably large Compact Flash card and used a simple interface device that just connects the appropriate pins to an IDE cord; Compact Flash has an "IDE" mode on it since by specification it is designed to run as an IDE device. Great for rugged applications. I know of other people doing this locally as they are deploying embedded systems outdoors.
The only problem with this approach appears to be the size and quality of the Compact Flash. Ideally you want a newer type of flash memory that supports more write cycles.
That's my take on it, any way. I've watched business people come and go over decades. They always do the same thing, latch onto whatever is known to be hot and get greedy, until the industry has beaten the theme to death and there is no more money to be made. They make a lot of money in the mean time but in the end only the few who quit while they're ahead have made the real money. For the rest, it's all on paper and easy come easy go.
Technology was obviously an example in the 90s. Everybody thought that all they had to do to make money was be involved in IT. A lot of them made great money, unfortunately the expectations got so crazy that stocks surged to unreasonable valuations and eventually corrected quite naturally. So now business people have a really bad taste in their mouth when they think of technology, "I got burned before" they think and avoid it like the plague.
Today what's hot is the financial sector and banking. Take a look at the stock market today, it is driven by the financial sector. These business people have become geniuses again, making easy money. My buddies at the London School of Economics say they're all going to become investment bankers. My friends from comp sci are working at financial institutions. See, the same shit's happening all again, the new bubble is in finance.
And business people are sooo smart to be making money where everyone else is making money. Of course, until this bubble pops too. Then everyone will have a bad taste in their mouth about banking and finance.
It's kind of a funny game. This is what happens in markets where people chase trends. There is not a lot of IT spending these days, nor a lot of research and development in technology. Both are short sighted mistakes, driven by the psychology of business people who will easily pass up on tomorrow's opportunities for profits today.
ah beautiful DOS, where any application could take over system-wide interrupt vectors, abuse memory however it wanted, and rudely tickle the hardware in dangerous ways. Now DOS viruses, * those * were works of art. I almost threw up the first time I heard of a virus written in "VB"!
I don't want to say "You're destroying America" but man, if I wrote program trading systems for a major bank that moved trillions daily, and there was a spectacular market event, I would feel guilty about it and all the pension funds and life savings that would evaporate due to my work.
Believe you me, the NASDAQ is one of the only major exchanges I mildly trust precisely because it is electronic. Other major exchanges, notably the NYSE, involve human floor traders gathering around posts and barking out bid and ask prices.
Do you have any idea how crooked stock trading through middlemen is? There are a thousand ways the retail investor and small trader gets screwed. For instance, market makers are definitely not impartial and favour their own trades ahead of clients'. You can not even catch the fraud the occurs. There are about a dozen NYSE market specialists that are charged with fraud every year.
There is absolutely no reason to involve humans in the securities trading process any more. None! The rampant fraud can be easily avoided. When things like this are publicized, I almost wonder if it's got some bias in favor of the human trade specialists who make trading floor operations tick. They're useless middlemen, profiting from spreads and leverage.
Electronic trading is the only way to go. When an exchange switches to electronic, you should see that as a sign of quality and a commitment to do away with the fraud that EVERY insider knows is a standard mode of operation in stock trading.
So in a very real way, the DDoS extortionists are terrorists and everyone who leaves their systems unpatched is helping support terrorism.
Can anyone suggest a motherboard I can easily install inside my car? Power supply is what it comes down to I think. I can then use compact flash cards as EIDE hard drives, so there are no moving parts. There are various things I'd like to play around with, including a jukebox and wireless network, but I have yet to figure out how to power this stuff conveniently.
When they fire that warning shot, you dump all the attacking IPs to a log and circulate the list to AHBL, Spamhaus, CBL etc so that the extortionist's zombie network is now worth half of what it was before. Zombies are only worth anything if they are novel. And you tell the extortionist that for each additional shot, their botnet monetary value will decrease by 10% or whatever.
Thanks for the reply Hans! Quite something seeing your post on slashdot. I guess I was wrong about the reliability being a consideration... but from having implemented a database system based on reiserfs I can say that the performance is spectacular compared to our earlier SQL version which for us was the main consideration.
This is an appeal to network admins working at ISPs, whether large or small. You have a responsibility to make sure that spam/attack zombies don't exist on your networks. These days it's a trivial task to check to make sure you're not part of the problem. This can be scripted so that you receive periodic reports of problem hosts on your system, which you can then firewall, disconnect, or restrict access to.
There are so many blacklists these days, so just use rsync to grab fresh copies of AHBL, CBL, DSBL, SORBS, whatever. Then run through grepcidr to see if any IPs from your network(s) are on the blacklists. So easy, and you'll be protecting both yourself and others from malicious zombies.
Quick! Lower interest rates, let's hope they start buying more... if they keep thinking about quality and affordability of their purchases, Americans could kill the economy
How many times have we heard of huge sites going down because databases become corrupt or unrecoverable, or of the huge resource strain (memory and CPU) from a large database?
In my opinion, the future of databases is nothing so complicated as pitched here -- but rather a move to simpler, more reliable back ends where the filesystem is the database. This is certainly the vision pitched by Hans Reiser and reiserfs, which aims to put more database like intelligence within the filesystem. So you eliminate extra unnecessary layers that just eat up resources and create fragile databases.
The guy mentioned he had control over DHCP. So it seems to me the easiest thing to do would be to automate detection of infected hosts (easy), and then move infected hosts to a separate range of IP addresses. Those IPs can be treated differently from normal, well run hosts. This is probably the smallest headache you could hope for.
A quick way to handle the situation you describe is to detect the infection from outside and then shut down (or limit) service to the affected hosts. Sniffing network traffic to assess infections is the most accurate way, but here's another technique. Most viruses are involved with spamming in one way or another, and as such, infected hosts are detected out on the Internet.
What you should do is routinely grab (rsync) a full listing of blacklisted hosts from CBL, DSBL and elsewhere... and then use the grepcidr program to hunt for IP addresses from your network inside those huge lists.
This can be totally scripted. If you locate infected hosts, you can then revoke or cripple service to them one way or another. Examples of crippling would be to reduce available bandwidth (tarpit on a linux router), blocking all but the most essential outbound ports at the firewall. Or you could be more brutal and just revoke their IP connectivity.
Here is an article describing the proposed changes to Canadian copyright law, as well as the background -- industry lobby from the USA. This article is pulled from the Digital Copyright Canada web site which is trying to organize citizens feedback to politicians, with respect to the DMCA in Canada.
I can't believe this issue of Windows security is so difficult to understand. You read all these articles about viruses and trojans but people keep failing to mention the obvious - you must never casually run Windows with Administrator privileges.
It's because so many people are used to doing this by default, and so many third party apps demand Admin privileges, that Windows security is a nightmare.
There's more to the Windows security picture of course (insecure services as well) but you can prevent so many problems just by avoiding that Admin account. It's quite normal to have raw sockets via root/Administrator privileges. The problem is that all windows users (and any software they download) are Admins.
No, I'm smart enough to know that my desires mean absolutely nothing in the market place. Let me lay out a more plausible scenario for you. Foreigners withdraw their investments in the US, China revalues their currency, treasuries plummet taking 80% of the world's savings with it, grinding global economy to a halt. Demand goes way down, China's growth slows way down (temporarily at least), oil comes back to $30 or less. Suddenly we're consuming less resources.
The article makes it sound like there is a major difference between the viewpoint of environmentalists and scientists. What I'm trying to point out is that many scientists and scientific reports, as published in media, are heavily industry biased (because they are industry employed). In reality the difference between scientific opinion and environmental opinion is not as great as made out to be.
With increased government levvies, and education on future impacts of piggish consumption, overall demand can actually decrease. But such is not good for business at all, so it is violently opposed (including government lobbies)
Certainly, some environmentalists have financial motives but the majority do not. When scientists are concerned about global climate change, they are publishing these warnings in the hope of drawing attention to what they genuinely perceive as a serious problem. Ditto for polution concerns, supplies of natural resources, biological diversity and ecosystem damage. These are FACTS.
In contrast, the news releases from industry which make their way across television and newspaper spread absolute lies. Examples:
- there is no global climate change (flies in the face of 90%+ of scientific opinion)
- business can continue as usual without worrying about environmental factors (a hope, for short term business as usual)
- the economy can survive $100 oil
- nuclear is the solution to our energy needs
Here's the important point: a lot of scientists work for industry. So they have a distinct bias. In many cases they are providing reports for their employer. So next time you run into a scientific report, check the source... not all scientists are funded equally.I have no idea what outlook does. I use jbmail (it's for windows though) and when you save messages from the inbox, or copyself they become individual ASCII files named intelligently to reflect the address and subject involved. So future filing is just a matter of dealing with text files, which will be around forever and easily identified.