Insofar as RPGs are categorizable, "pencil-and-paper" is not a particularly apt category for SR. Rather, "dice, dice, and more 6-sided dice" are the defining feature of SR's gameplay. One of my GMs actually found it useful to buy a hundred dice at a time and sort them according to their entropy.
The SR games I've been in and run are generally the most violent, bloody, gore-filled high-casualty adventures in my fairly wide roleplaying experience. It's wonderful stress relief, you know...
It's not just Silicon Valley...
on
Silicon Hell
·
· Score: 1
...people working along Massachusetts' Route 128 should be aware of the hazards that their new buildings are being built on.
Remember A Civil Action? Woburn is the site of lots of new high-tech construction, and Burlington is almost as bad. Heavy metals are probably the worst threat, but there doesn't appear to be any research available to the public.
The accepted construction method is to "seal off" the contaminated material in place by putting a thick sheet of plastic down before starting construction. Oddly shaped building are a rule because they have to build on top of existing foundations - any further digging would disturb the waste underneath.
Massachusetts techies: ask your company about the potential hazards of your site. Then decide what risks you find acceptable.
It means "before the flood" referring to the Noah's Ark bit. "Anti-diluvian" would be to be against or the opposite of diluvian... which word I do not know.
This article is not about information warfare. It's about atomic/biological/chemical warfare, and has subsequently had the word "Cyber" inserted early and often.
Let me attempt to address the editor's questions:
Using CT, how easy or otherwise is it to bring down or attack vital systems? First you will have to note that every organization has it's own definition of "vital systems". An attack on email servers at any of the larger corporations could cost millions in repair work and lost productivity; turning off electricity for an entire grid could cost millions and kill hundreds. The common view is that most utility companies are relatively undefended, relying on obscurity rather than security. If your vital systems are already exposed, you are at the mercy of every script-kiddy on the planet.
What sort of skills would be needed to do so, and are they common/teachable? The minimum skill-set needed to be a script-kiddy is the ability to read English and follow directions. To launch a sophisticated attack against a hardened target, you'll need some imagination, some raw native talent, and 3-4 years of practice in C, C++, Perl, general UNIX and NT systems administration, and a lot of free time. Chances are there's a college-dropout in your town with all of these prerequisites.
Commercial-off-the-shelf software: can it really do CT?That's an odd question. Do you mean, is there a Microsoft CyberTerrorist package, all shrinkwrapped and with a nice GUI that will let you select attacks off a menu and point them at targets? Not commercial, no, but that's because setting up shop and doing it commercially exposes you too much. You can put together a set of tools and scripts to analyze a target and probe for weaknesses, but you still need that reasonably clever human to interpret the results and supply the right insights.
Which systems are actually attackable? All nontrivial systems can be attacked. A sufficiently determined and patient attacker, working against an unprepared target, will usually succeed.
Can a recovery be made from such attacks? It depends on what damage is done. If you have hooked all of your hospital monitoring equipment to a set of NT servers that centrally control the systems, the damage will be counted in human lives - not something I'd call recoverable. If you make regular offsite backups and practice recovery scenarios, you'll probably survive the loss of your accounting and inventory databases and be back in business in a few days.
Is it likely to improve/get worse? Security is a compromise between ease of use and protection from attack. Open Source software presents the opportunity for peer review and communal bug-checking, traits which are accepted practice in the cryptography community. Once you have bug-free software, you then have to ensure that it is used in the right way -- and that is nigh impossible. As software environments grow more complex, the opportunity for misuse increases.
What sort of preventitive work would you recommend them to carry out?Every organization should have a realistic security policy. Those policies are highly customized affairs, and reflect the needs and priorities of each org. All-purpose advice is useless.
The only odd bit here is that the meteoroid was sufficiently massive to make it to the ground. Asteroids fall into two groups: stony (chondrites) and metallic/igneous. There's no reason not to think that significant percentages of chondritic asteroids are water ice.
Water is common all around the solar system. Saturn's rings are mostly dirty ice. Most comets are primarily dirty snowballs around a chunk of rock. Both of these are potential sources of water for space-based activities.
The real rarity is water as a liquid. Water ice is common, water gas is common, but liquid water requires just enough heat - not a regular situation in the extremes of space.
In the battle for big ecommerce web servers, the OS and the web server don't get too much consideration. It's the development and runtime environment that retains folks. Domino is fairly insignificant as a web server, but as a platform for Notes and for ecommerce apps, it's huge. Similarly, Allaire's ColdFusion (also beng ported to Linux!) is unimportant as a web server, but has a lot of mindshare as a dev environment.
If we can get all the major environment players to ship their software for Linux and an appropriate OSS web server, ecommerce issues will suddenly snap to hardware performance and OS reliability - and we all know where Linux stands on those issues.
A bit faster than "a few years", and Internet backbones get them first - cellphone networks actually have fairly low traffic flows.
You'd want a cluster of routers of that capacity at each physical POP that's connected by high-capacity fiber. Those will connect to metropolitan-area rings, and those to businesses and ISPs.
If the pivoting monitor works the way I think it might - translation: I'm guessing - then you could just program the desired resolution as an alternate in your XF86conf and switch between the two with the keypad combo.
This isn't automatic, but it doesn't require programming, either.
What I did say, though, was that I could not buy or recommend that my company buy Toshiba laptops unless they made programming specifications public.
I got a call back from a Toshiba rep, who seemed very concerned. I explained the situation to him, and he said he would pass it up, although he couldn't promise anything. Guess it worked.
Slashdot Mirror
Insofar as RPGs are categorizable, "pencil-and-paper" is not a particularly apt category for SR. Rather, "dice, dice, and more 6-sided dice" are the defining feature of SR's gameplay. One of my GMs actually found it useful to buy a hundred dice at a time and sort them according to their entropy.
The SR games I've been in and run are generally the most violent, bloody, gore-filled high-casualty adventures in my fairly wide roleplaying experience. It's wonderful stress relief, you know...
Remember A Civil Action? Woburn is the site of lots of new high-tech construction, and Burlington is almost as bad. Heavy metals are probably the worst threat, but there doesn't appear to be any research available to the public.
The accepted construction method is to "seal off" the contaminated material in place by putting a thick sheet of plastic down before starting construction. Oddly shaped building are a rule because they have to build on top of existing foundations - any further digging would disturb the waste underneath.
Massachusetts techies: ask your company about the potential hazards of your site. Then decide what risks you find acceptable.
It means "before the flood" referring to the Noah's Ark bit. "Anti-diluvian" would be to be against or the opposite of diluvian... which word I do not know.
This article is not about information warfare. It's about atomic/biological/chemical warfare, and has subsequently had the word "Cyber" inserted early and often.
Let me attempt to address the editor's questions:
The common view is that most utility companies are
relatively undefended, relying on obscurity rather than security. If your vital systems are already exposed, you are at the mercy of every script-kiddy on the planet.
Water is common all around the solar system. Saturn's rings are mostly dirty ice. Most comets are primarily dirty snowballs around a chunk of rock. Both of these are potential sources of water for space-based activities.
The real rarity is water as a liquid. Water ice is common, water gas is common, but liquid water requires just enough heat - not a regular situation in the extremes of space.
If we can get all the major environment players to ship their software for Linux and an appropriate OSS web server, ecommerce issues will suddenly snap to hardware performance and OS reliability - and we all know where Linux stands on those issues.
A bit faster than "a few years", and Internet backbones get them first - cellphone networks actually have fairly low traffic flows.
You'd want a cluster of routers of that capacity at each physical POP that's connected by high-capacity fiber. Those will connect to metropolitan-area rings, and those to businesses and ISPs.
See the BBN^H^H^HGTE Internetworking fiber map.
might - translation: I'm guessing - then you could just program the desired resolution as an alternate in your XF86conf and switch between
the two with the keypad combo.
This isn't automatic, but it doesn't require programming, either.
or recommend that my company buy Toshiba laptops
unless they made programming specifications public.
I got a call back from a Toshiba rep, who seemed
very concerned. I explained the situation to him,
and he said he would pass it up, although he couldn't promise anything. Guess it worked.
Whew. Now I can go buy a laptop...