I should have mentioned (and you should have known) that each TCP connection uses a different port number, and thus would be assigned a different Y value. Therefore, multiple simultaneous connections between the same IPs on different port numbers would appear arrayed along a vertical line.
We already have an answer, it's called rotational gravity. Of course, nobody's going to put up the trillions of dollars needed to build a spaceship large enough to use it effectively.
You can't spoof your own IP if you expect to get any results from a port scan, so all your connections will be in the same Z plane. I expect that would show up quite well, especially if the cube was viewed from several different angles. Also, it displays a fairly large period of time simultaneously, so randomizing the connection order wouldn't be all that helpful.
I imagine it would look like a thick, mottled square or blob drawn on a plane perpendicular to the X axis. It would represent a large number of external systems (large Z extent) connecting to a single web server (single X value) and taking up a large number of ports with HTTP transfers (large Y extent).
The cube displays 3 pieces of information (assuming you know how TCP works):
The X axis represents the local IP. Every computer on the LAN is at a unique location on this line.
The Z axis represents all possible IP addresses. Every computer in the *world* is a unique location on that line, so every possible connection that can be made between a SCinet computer and an external system is somewhere on the "floor" of the cube. Think of it like an old phone switchboard.
The Y axis represents the port number, so as two computers establish multiple TCP connections to each other they "stack" and move up towards the top of the cube.
The upshot of all this is that all network activity on the LAN during a specific time period can be placed in this cube. And once it's here in visual form, it becomes easy for a human operator to apply our brain's pattern recognition abilities to the problem of noticing unusual activity, which is hard to do with just a text dump from a normal IDS. Normal Internet usage would be a single point, or a small vertical line, which would represent a single persistent TCP connection for a specific service (for SSH or something) or a small number of TCP connections established momentarily (for a stateless protocol like HTTP), and this can be seen in the example as a lot of random dots scattered throughout the cube.
If there was an attack in progress, it would be some sort of procedural scan from one external system (a single Z location, or a constant depth in the example) across the LAN address space (going left to right) and/or the ports on a single LAN system (going up and down). A simple port scan would be a solid vertical line, as the attacker hit each port on a single system in sequence (Z and X constant, Y varying). I think there's one of these visible in the example, in the back; this short vertical line would be an attacker hitting all the privileged service ports between 0 and 1024. A more advanced attack pattern would attempt to randomize the ports it scanned or hit several different IPs - in a text log, this would be very hard to pick out from the "random" connections that a normal busy LAN is also handling, so the attacker could go undetected for some time. But on the Cube, this would appear as a filigree of closely packed dots all at the same depth (Z would be constant, X and Y varying), and would be immediately obvious to a human viewer.
This isn't really meant to convey detailed information, it's just supposed to let the admin see at a glance that something suspicious may be happening, by making the data easier to examine as a whole.
That's why I said "successful", as in they succeed at the task they were designed for, which is operating above the break-even point, which only ever been done for a fraction of a second inside nuclear weaponry.
Actually, the sun is a fusion reactor. All our reactors are fission; the only successful fusion reactors the human race has ever built are called H-bombs.
Re:Did we really need a link to slashdot in the st
on
On Collaborative Weblogs
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· Score: 2, Funny
Well now at least one link in the article won't get/.ed.
Don't buy a fancy bag that obviously has a laptop in it, just get some generic (or even better, old and slightly beaten up) bag and put your laptop in there, with a padded cover so it stays protected.
There are two different types of difficulty: challenging and frustrating. NG has a lot of both, but the latter does not improve the game. Finally beating a boss through skill is gratifying, but does it make up for all the time wasted running back from the distant save point, beating up the same low-level monsters, and navigating the same jumping puzzle? Losing to a pile of enemies because you weren't good enough is one thing, losing to the same pile of enemies because the camera decided to aim at the wall instead of the danger and throw off your timing is another. Shops are a major source of health and ammo, but by the end of the game getting back to one requires a five-minute trip through hostile territory. There's at least one save point I can think of where the monster regeneration system virtually guarantees that you will be attacked by offscreen enemies within seconds of restoring a game there. And death is always followed by an excruciatingly long load screen on top of the aforementioned obstacles between the save point and whatever challenge you're currently retrying. There are a lot of minor things that could be changed in NG without making the combat, which is supposed to be the meat of the game and source of the challenge, any less difficult.
Re:We really need to repurpose the sticky bit...
on
Is Swap Necessary?
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· Score: 1
Then, sooner or later, your total usage by active apps would exceed your physical memory, and either you'd be unable to launch a new app or existing apps would start crashing as they are denied mallocs. There's no way to make room for a new allocation if 100% of the physical memory is marked as not swappable...
Most modern OSes do mark some parts of the kernel as unswappable (I believe the term is "wired down"), but this is done only where it's absolutely necessary and for the minimum amount of data possible.
Re:Thinking of Switching to a OSX for a laptop
on
Fix a Troubled Mac
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· Score: 1
Pretty much, yes. Whatever you can say about the desktops, Apple laptops lead the industry.
You can already be easily tracked without RFID technology through the time-honored tradition of having somebody to follow you around and write down or photograph everything you do. The legal requirements for leveraging RFID data should be similar to this procedure.
Re:Computer will replace certain kinds of workers
on
Thirty Years in Computing
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· Score: 2, Insightful
A computer could easily replace the DSM and probably has already done so in many places, but if you really think that's all that doctors do and is the only skill required to practice medicine then I'd really hate to end up in your operating theater.
You're probably right, but why load down the interface with technical terms? The user shouldn't even need to know what "code" is, nor should he have been required to manage the files and data needed to define the mortgage, he should be able to just tell the computer "figure out the future payments on this mortgage" and let the system deal with it.
Games can already be modded, but modern single-player games tend to require an overall plan for the gameplay and story, and consistency in art and design. It would be difficult to maintain all of that while giving up direct control over the game's contents. I'm not saying it's impossible to make a game that way, just that you're not going to see the equivalent of an A-list commercial title without a similarly centralized development process.
To me, it's more that there's so much bullshit on both sides of the fence (it's possible to find scientific support for "global warming is a myth" and "global warming will render the planet uninhabitable within our lifetime" and anything in between) that I refuse to enter arguments over it. Also, as another post in this thread (and the article) states, we know so little about the accuracy of our predictions that there's a chance that doing nothing is not the worst possible course of action.
If it doesn't "make the grade", it will be because engine technology is no longer important. A large part of Doom's success was due to the fact that there was really nothing else like it at the time; this won't be true of Doom 3. id's content department is nothing to sneeze at, but they've been outdone before (Unreal Tournament vs Quake 3, for instance), and they won't be leagues ahead of everyone else like they were with, say, 3D models in Quake.
Nobody's forcing you to download and install this hypothetical program. How a computer is used is entirely up to its owner; you can keep running SETI@home and Joe Beowulf across the street can render movie frames if he wants.
Slashdot Mirror
The iPod doesn't actually use its HD very much; it has a 32MB RAM cache so the disk is spun down most of the time during playback.
I don't think "reputation" is the right word there. It's a major advertised feature that works out of the box, there's nothing reputed about it.
I should have mentioned (and you should have known) that each TCP connection uses a different port number, and thus would be assigned a different Y value. Therefore, multiple simultaneous connections between the same IPs on different port numbers would appear arrayed along a vertical line.
We already have an answer, it's called rotational gravity. Of course, nobody's going to put up the trillions of dollars needed to build a spaceship large enough to use it effectively.
You can't spoof your own IP if you expect to get any results from a port scan, so all your connections will be in the same Z plane. I expect that would show up quite well, especially if the cube was viewed from several different angles. Also, it displays a fairly large period of time simultaneously, so randomizing the connection order wouldn't be all that helpful.
I imagine it would look like a thick, mottled square or blob drawn on a plane perpendicular to the X axis. It would represent a large number of external systems (large Z extent) connecting to a single web server (single X value) and taking up a large number of ports with HTTP transfers (large Y extent).
- The X axis represents the local IP. Every computer on the LAN is at a unique location on this line.
- The Z axis represents all possible IP addresses. Every computer in the *world* is a unique location on that line, so every possible connection that can be made between a SCinet computer and an external system is somewhere on the "floor" of the cube. Think of it like an old phone switchboard.
- The Y axis represents the port number, so as two computers establish multiple TCP connections to each other they "stack" and move up towards the top of the cube.
The upshot of all this is that all network activity on the LAN during a specific time period can be placed in this cube. And once it's here in visual form, it becomes easy for a human operator to apply our brain's pattern recognition abilities to the problem of noticing unusual activity, which is hard to do with just a text dump from a normal IDS. Normal Internet usage would be a single point, or a small vertical line, which would represent a single persistent TCP connection for a specific service (for SSH or something) or a small number of TCP connections established momentarily (for a stateless protocol like HTTP), and this can be seen in the example as a lot of random dots scattered throughout the cube.If there was an attack in progress, it would be some sort of procedural scan from one external system (a single Z location, or a constant depth in the example) across the LAN address space (going left to right) and/or the ports on a single LAN system (going up and down). A simple port scan would be a solid vertical line, as the attacker hit each port on a single system in sequence (Z and X constant, Y varying). I think there's one of these visible in the example, in the back; this short vertical line would be an attacker hitting all the privileged service ports between 0 and 1024. A more advanced attack pattern would attempt to randomize the ports it scanned or hit several different IPs - in a text log, this would be very hard to pick out from the "random" connections that a normal busy LAN is also handling, so the attacker could go undetected for some time. But on the Cube, this would appear as a filigree of closely packed dots all at the same depth (Z would be constant, X and Y varying), and would be immediately obvious to a human viewer.
This isn't really meant to convey detailed information, it's just supposed to let the admin see at a glance that something suspicious may be happening, by making the data easier to examine as a whole.
That's why I said "successful", as in they succeed at the task they were designed for, which is operating above the break-even point, which only ever been done for a fraction of a second inside nuclear weaponry.
In a typical theater, there are dozens of people staring at the back of your head for the entire movie. Is adding one more really that much worse?
Actually, the sun is a fusion reactor. All our reactors are fission; the only successful fusion reactors the human race has ever built are called H-bombs.
Well now at least one link in the article won't get /.ed.
I don't remember exactly what the time is, but compared to most other games I own it's much too long.
Don't buy a fancy bag that obviously has a laptop in it, just get some generic (or even better, old and slightly beaten up) bag and put your laptop in there, with a padded cover so it stays protected.
There are two different types of difficulty: challenging and frustrating. NG has a lot of both, but the latter does not improve the game. Finally beating a boss through skill is gratifying, but does it make up for all the time wasted running back from the distant save point, beating up the same low-level monsters, and navigating the same jumping puzzle? Losing to a pile of enemies because you weren't good enough is one thing, losing to the same pile of enemies because the camera decided to aim at the wall instead of the danger and throw off your timing is another. Shops are a major source of health and ammo, but by the end of the game getting back to one requires a five-minute trip through hostile territory. There's at least one save point I can think of where the monster regeneration system virtually guarantees that you will be attacked by offscreen enemies within seconds of restoring a game there. And death is always followed by an excruciatingly long load screen on top of the aforementioned obstacles between the save point and whatever challenge you're currently retrying. There are a lot of minor things that could be changed in NG without making the combat, which is supposed to be the meat of the game and source of the challenge, any less difficult.
Then, sooner or later, your total usage by active apps would exceed your physical memory, and either you'd be unable to launch a new app or existing apps would start crashing as they are denied mallocs. There's no way to make room for a new allocation if 100% of the physical memory is marked as not swappable...
Most modern OSes do mark some parts of the kernel as unswappable (I believe the term is "wired down"), but this is done only where it's absolutely necessary and for the minimum amount of data possible.
Pretty much, yes. Whatever you can say about the desktops, Apple laptops lead the industry.
You can already be easily tracked without RFID technology through the time-honored tradition of having somebody to follow you around and write down or photograph everything you do. The legal requirements for leveraging RFID data should be similar to this procedure.
A computer could easily replace the DSM and probably has already done so in many places, but if you really think that's all that doctors do and is the only skill required to practice medicine then I'd really hate to end up in your operating theater.
Sure, but what are all the P2P addicts going to do afterwards?
You're probably right, but why load down the interface with technical terms? The user shouldn't even need to know what "code" is, nor should he have been required to manage the files and data needed to define the mortgage, he should be able to just tell the computer "figure out the future payments on this mortgage" and let the system deal with it.
Games can already be modded, but modern single-player games tend to require an overall plan for the gameplay and story, and consistency in art and design. It would be difficult to maintain all of that while giving up direct control over the game's contents. I'm not saying it's impossible to make a game that way, just that you're not going to see the equivalent of an A-list commercial title without a similarly centralized development process.
No, they aren't cheap. Apple spent a large amount on R&D for the iPod design and interface, that's why they sue to protect it.
To me, it's more that there's so much bullshit on both sides of the fence (it's possible to find scientific support for "global warming is a myth" and "global warming will render the planet uninhabitable within our lifetime" and anything in between) that I refuse to enter arguments over it. Also, as another post in this thread (and the article) states, we know so little about the accuracy of our predictions that there's a chance that doing nothing is not the worst possible course of action.
If it doesn't "make the grade", it will be because engine technology is no longer important. A large part of Doom's success was due to the fact that there was really nothing else like it at the time; this won't be true of Doom 3. id's content department is nothing to sneeze at, but they've been outdone before (Unreal Tournament vs Quake 3, for instance), and they won't be leagues ahead of everyone else like they were with, say, 3D models in Quake.
Nobody's forcing you to download and install this hypothetical program. How a computer is used is entirely up to its owner; you can keep running SETI@home and Joe Beowulf across the street can render movie frames if he wants.