Just to make you paranoid, the sum of the mass of oort cloud objects is far more than the mass of the sun and all the planets
Not supposed to be. The mass in the Oort cloud can be estimated by assuming some sort of mass function (i.e., a distributon of number, and thus total mass, with the mass of the object. Unless there a some unknown big objects out there, the total mass is order one Earth mass to maybe 100 Earth masses. And, there have been negative searches in the IR for very large (Jupiter size and larger) objects, so it's almost certainly nowhere near as large as 1 solar mass.
It is interesting that the "knots" seen in the Helix Nebulae are likely to be super-comets (Sedna sized bodies ablating under the bright glare of the dying central star), so if you want to get a look at an Oort cloud, here is a good one.
Prepends affect your outbound announcements, and this affects inbound traffic to you. Prepends are the most effective tool for BGP manipulation because they're transitive - announcing more specifics works too, but that's not quite the same thing.
Oh, and you hear a lot about potential router route kits, but (at lest for the big vendors) not much about them actually being used in the wild. And, really, if you can root the routers of some big ISP, you don't need this attack to do a lot of mischief.
There is a lot of harm you can do, least for a short while. But I have to say, this seems like a lot of FUD to me.
It is not trivial to get BGP peering, or to keep it if you are doing bad things. You will need one or more peers, and they will have to do this for you manually, not automatically. And (as I can attest) the AS prepending this attack relies on is a very blunt instrument.
Here are the troubles I see
- You need to be able to offer a better path from Point A to Point B than the existing Internet topology
- Unless you are Dr. Evil and can afford infinite bandwidth, this better path had better not also apply to a large chunk of the Internet, or you will get hosed with a lot of bandwidth (and, also, instantly stick up on the screens of NOCs all over the place) and
- If you are relying on AS prepends, these affect the path from you, but not directly the path to you. They are notoriously tricky and may stop working (because of changes in other people's advertisements) at any time.
So, to me, this is a might work sometimes for some people in some places, but probably not that well on a general basis.
The DNS cache poisoning sounds a lot worse, frankly.
First, if you could get NASA, Russia or ESA interested, you could probably get it sent onwards for free.
Second, yes, this was done before. That was one take. This is another. Since I fully agree with you that we really have no idea what information from this period will be seen as truly important by whomever might find it, in my opinion there is no reason why not to send a bunch of different takes of "important stuff."
That is why I said Moon and Mars (i.e., landers). They will be found in due course.
For a disk like this to really influence the growth of a new civilization at the stage it first develops high technology, they need the equivalent of wining multiple lotteries at once - the disks need to be found, and to be readable, and to be understood to be readable, and to be in the place the high technology develops, etc. Well, that is a long bet indeed. But, even if that bet doesn't pay off, any civilization that finds these disks (even a non-terrestrial one) is likely to find them interesting and even valuable, so why not take some steps that make that bet have almost a sure pay-off ?
If they could get permission, it might also make sense to bury one of these in a waterproof enclosure at the Georgia Guidestones - the huge Monoliths in Georgia in 8 different languages.
This would be a logical thing to put into deep space - on the Moon or on Mars, say. It is a good environment to preserve things, and any future civilization is going to look up our space probes sooner or later.
First, the ocean that has been postulated is 100 km or more down - that is indeed a possible location for life, although unless there is more radioactivity that expected there won't be much of an energy source. Any life down there could not live at the surface, though, even if it were brought up - at best it would be in spore form.
Second, the surface temperature is about -180 C. Even at -40 C, water will pretty much instantly form a crust of ice. Remember, Niagara Falls used to freeze solid at temperature much, much, warmer than the surface of Titan. So, I think that even a large body of water released a cyro-volcano would "instantly" (in a few hours at most) crust over, and the crust would remain. Lava on Earth behaves in the same fashion.
Titan is a very different place from Earth. Water ice is a rock (surface temperatures never come close to the melting point) and, critically, temperature / entropy gradients are much smaller than on Earth. (It's not just cold, the flow of energy is slow.) So, if there is life, i would anticipate not something like terrestrial extremophiles, but an entirely new form of life, which doesn't use water as a medium and which would be very slow from our viewpoint. I asbolutely think that such life could evolve, if it is possible at all, but who knows if it is possible. Going there would be one way to find out, but that will neither be easy, simple, cheap or quick.
I think that the article is misleading in one respect - a body of liquid water might survive for a while (in the same way that a pool of lava - molten rock - can survive for decades or longer on the Earth, and presumably on Mars), but, just like the pool of lava, it would be quickly encased in a layer of frozen water ice. You might have water at the surface, but you would not have water on the surface for any length of time (think polar ice caps in the middle of winter, and you are still way too warm). It is hard to see how extremophiles could evolve in those circumstances, and it is very hard to see how biological material from the Earth or Mars, blasted out by meteor impacts, could reach Titan intact.
No, if nothing is done it will end when people are holding their heads in their hands amidst the rubble. See Germany, Year Zero or Gone with the Wind for some ideas of what happens when societies loose their moorings.
"Attorney General Michael Mukasey has agreed to allow Congressional hearings
I hope that this is just the usual Slashdot sloppiness. The Attorney General has no role in determining whether Congressional Hearings are held or not.
There's a place where you follow strict orders and shut the fuck up. It's called your job.
Not my job. I have always viewed part of my job to push back and object whenever I see higher ups doing something stupid. I have never been fired for it, either.
This article in Science Magazine indicates that the Sahara was fully formed by 2300 BCE
To me, the timing between that and the rise of the Old Kingdom in Egypt (~ 2600 BCE) is too close to be coincidental. I think we will find that people migrated from sites such Gobero to the Nile, and that precipitated the formation of political organization in Egypt.
... and in that iteration the weapon of choice was LSD. (Both the US and the CSR worked on developing it as a weapon, and IIRC Ken Keasey was first exposed to it as an Air Force volunteer. I wonder from time to time what happened to the tons of it the Czechs synthesized for the Warsaw pact.)
You would think people would be able to learn from the past. I would suggest that Barefoot in the Head by Brian Aldiss be required reading at the DIA.
My experiences taking pictures on Military bases in Israel and in the midwest were hardly like that. No idea why the difference.
Well, there are secure installations and then there are.. secure installations. I really doubt you would be able to pull out a camera and start snapping in almost any SCIF, much less, say, the basement of the NSA or where-ever the Israelis' prep their nuclear weapons.
Uh huh. Perhaps it's just the signs saying Use of Deadly Force Authorized just above the signs saying Photography Prohibited and referencing some US Code, but pardon me if I doubt. In any case, in my experience I was generally searched pretty carefully before I was allowed into such areas, but maybe your experience is different.
there are no laws prohibiting the taking of photographs on public or private property.
This is picky, but I know that this is not true on military installations and other secure government facilities (which are, after all, generally on public property).
When I took the trans-Siberian in the 1970's, there was a long list of things (airports, train stations, bridges) that you weren't supposed to take pictures of. This was enforced (if spottily), too. I heard of people being arrested for photographing a bridge.
At the time, this was viewed (in the West) as evidence of the paranoia of a dictatorship and a closed society. Now, I guess it is a sign that the Soviet Union was in the vanguard of the development of civilization after all. Who knew ?
An interesting aspect to this is that many of the fundamental MPEG patents have expired, and more will expire soon. I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice, but you could probably implement a MPEG-1 encoder and player with Layer II audio patent-free (at least in the US) right now.
Given that the MP3 spec was published in 1991, and that in the US filing have to occur within 1 year of the date of publication, then you could argue that any relevant MP3 patents should expire by 2012. Apparently, some of the patent holders disagree...
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Just to make you paranoid, the sum of the mass of oort cloud objects is far more than the mass of the sun and all the planets
Not supposed to be. The mass in the Oort cloud can be estimated by assuming some sort of mass function (i.e., a distributon of number, and thus total mass, with the mass of the object. Unless there a some unknown big objects out there, the total mass is order one Earth mass to maybe 100 Earth masses. And, there have been negative searches in the IR for very large (Jupiter size and larger) objects, so it's almost certainly nowhere near as large as 1 solar mass.
It is interesting that the "knots" seen in the Helix Nebulae are likely to be super-comets (Sedna sized bodies ablating under the bright glare of the dying central star), so if you want to get a look at an Oort cloud, here is a good one.
The NSA doesn't need these games. They have access to the traffic on the real routes.
Prepends affect your outbound announcements, and this affects inbound traffic to you. Prepends are the most effective tool for BGP manipulation because they're transitive - announcing more specifics works too, but that's not quite the same thing.
Yes, I always get that reversed. Thanks.
Oh, and you hear a lot about potential router route kits, but (at lest for the big vendors) not much about them actually being used in the wild. And, really, if you can root the routers of some big ISP, you don't need this attack to do a lot of mischief.
There is a lot of harm you can do, least for a short while. But I have to say, this seems like a lot of FUD to me.
It is not trivial to get BGP peering, or to keep it if you are doing bad things. You will need one or more peers, and they will have to do this for you manually, not automatically. And (as I can attest) the AS prepending this attack relies on is a very blunt instrument.
Here are the troubles I see
- You need to be able to offer a better path from Point A to Point B than the existing Internet topology
- Unless you are Dr. Evil and can afford infinite bandwidth, this better path had better not also apply to a large chunk of the Internet, or you will get hosed with a lot of bandwidth (and, also, instantly stick up on the screens of NOCs all over the place) and
- If you are relying on AS prepends, these affect the path from you, but not directly the path to you. They are notoriously tricky and may stop working (because of changes in other people's advertisements) at any time.
So, to me, this is a might work sometimes for some people in some places, but probably not that well on a general basis.
The DNS cache poisoning sounds a lot worse, frankly.
First, if you could get NASA, Russia or ESA interested, you could probably get it sent onwards for free.
Second, yes, this was done before. That was one take. This is another. Since I fully agree with you that we really have no idea what information from this period will be seen as truly important by whomever might find it, in my opinion there is no reason why not to send a bunch of different takes of "important stuff."
That is why I said Moon and Mars (i.e., landers). They will be found in due course.
For a disk like this to really influence the growth of a new civilization at the stage it first develops high technology, they need the equivalent of wining multiple lotteries at once - the disks need to be found, and to be readable, and to be understood to be readable, and to be in the place the high technology develops, etc. Well, that is a long bet indeed. But, even if that bet doesn't pay off, any civilization that finds these disks (even a non-terrestrial one) is likely to find them interesting and even valuable, so why not take some steps that make that bet have almost a sure pay-off ?
I would ask the couple that own the farm. And be patient.
Why do you assume any aliens would use modulated sound waves at around 5 KHz as their primary form of communication ?
If they could get permission, it might also make sense to bury one of these in a waterproof enclosure at the Georgia Guidestones - the huge Monoliths in Georgia in 8 different languages.
This would be a logical thing to put into deep space - on the Moon or on Mars, say. It is a good environment to preserve things, and any future civilization is going to look up our space probes sooner or later.
First, the ocean that has been postulated is 100 km or more down - that is indeed a possible location for life, although unless there is more radioactivity that expected there won't be much of an energy source. Any life down there could not live at the surface, though, even if it were brought up - at best it would be in spore form.
Second, the surface temperature is about -180 C. Even at -40 C, water will pretty much instantly form a crust of ice. Remember, Niagara Falls used to freeze solid at temperature much, much, warmer than the surface of Titan. So, I think that even a large body of water released a cyro-volcano would "instantly" (in a few hours at most) crust over, and the crust would remain. Lava on Earth behaves in the same fashion.
Titan is a very different place from Earth. Water ice is a rock (surface temperatures never come close to the melting point) and, critically, temperature / entropy gradients are much smaller than on Earth. (It's not just cold, the flow of energy is slow.) So, if there is life, i would anticipate not something like terrestrial extremophiles, but an entirely new form of life, which doesn't use water as a medium and which would be very slow from our viewpoint. I asbolutely think that such life could evolve, if it is possible at all, but who knows if it is possible. Going there would be one way to find out, but that will neither be easy, simple, cheap or quick.
I think that the article is misleading in one respect - a body of liquid water might survive for a while (in the same way that a pool of lava - molten rock - can survive for decades or longer on the Earth, and presumably on Mars), but, just like the pool of lava, it would be quickly encased in a layer of frozen water ice. You might have water at the surface, but you would not have water on the surface for any length of time (think polar ice caps in the middle of winter, and you are still way too warm). It is hard to see how extremophiles could evolve in those circumstances, and it is very hard to see how biological material from the Earth or Mars, blasted out by meteor impacts, could reach Titan intact.
No, if nothing is done it will end when people are holding their heads in their hands amidst the rubble. See Germany, Year Zero or Gone with the Wind for some ideas of what happens when societies loose their moorings.
"Attorney General Michael Mukasey has agreed to allow Congressional hearings
I hope that this is just the usual Slashdot sloppiness. The Attorney General has no role in determining whether Congressional Hearings are held or not.
There's a place where you follow strict orders and shut the fuck up. It's called your job.
Not my job. I have always viewed part of my job to push back and object whenever I see higher ups doing something stupid. I have never been fired for it, either.
This article in Science Magazine indicates that the Sahara was fully formed by 2300 BCE
To me, the timing between that and the rise of the Old Kingdom in Egypt (~ 2600 BCE) is too close to be coincidental. I think we will find that people migrated from sites such Gobero to the Nile, and that precipitated the formation of political organization in Egypt.
Every dollar spent on DRM is wasted. I don't know how to be more blunt than that.
... and in that iteration the weapon of choice was LSD. (Both the US and the CSR worked on developing it as a weapon, and IIRC Ken Keasey was first exposed to it as an Air Force volunteer. I wonder from time to time what happened to the tons of it the Czechs synthesized for the Warsaw pact.)
You would think people would be able to learn from the past. I would suggest that Barefoot in the Head by Brian Aldiss be required reading at the DIA.
My experiences taking pictures on Military bases in Israel and in the midwest were hardly like that. No idea why the difference.
Well, there are secure installations and then there are.. secure installations. I really doubt you would be able to pull out a camera and start snapping in almost any SCIF, much less, say, the basement of the NSA or where-ever the Israelis' prep their nuclear weapons.
Uh huh. Perhaps it's just the signs saying Use of Deadly Force Authorized just above the signs saying Photography Prohibited and referencing some US Code, but pardon me if I doubt. In any case, in my experience I was generally searched pretty carefully before I was allowed into such areas, but maybe your experience is different.
I'm kind of an asshole.
Good. IMHO we need a lot more assholes standing up for their rights, and just pushing back in general.
there are no laws prohibiting the taking of photographs on public or private property.
This is picky, but I know that this is not true on military installations and other secure government facilities (which are, after all, generally on public property).
When I took the trans-Siberian in the 1970's, there was a long list of things (airports, train stations, bridges) that you weren't supposed to take pictures of. This was enforced (if spottily), too. I heard of people being arrested for photographing a bridge.
At the time, this was viewed (in the West) as evidence of the paranoia of a dictatorship and a closed society. Now, I guess it is a sign that the Soviet Union was in the vanguard of the development of civilization after all. Who knew ?
An interesting aspect to this is that many of the fundamental MPEG patents have expired, and more will expire soon. I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice, but you could probably implement a MPEG-1 encoder and player with Layer II audio patent-free (at least in the US) right now.
Given that the MP3 spec was published in 1991, and that in the US filing have to occur within 1 year of the date of publication, then you could argue that any relevant MP3 patents should expire by 2012. Apparently, some of the patent holders disagree...