And the whole net result of 9/11 and ensuing madness is:
Chaos and loss of life in both Afghanistan and Iraq.
Loss of freedom and major loss of rights for the US citizens.
The first point explains itself, I think. There have even been talks of giving power back to the Taliban because they are the only organisation structured(!) enough to run the country. Iraq has more civil unrest now that before the invasion and no-one likes the US there. All the nice retoric about why the invasion has been nullified by the action afterwards. Both the actions of the soldiers and the actions of the economic interests that wanted a piece of the reconstruction pie. I will disregards the whole WOMD embarrasment.
The last point has been made over and over and over in this discussion. Everyone who for some reason does not believe in the actions resulting from 9/11 is called a traitor to the nation. Although it is improving, speaking out against the measures taken after 9/11 was 'disrespect' for those who died then. This is a limitation of freedom. Your opinions are not respected and accoding to some posts some states are even considering passing laws to prevent you to say such things.
Preventing Moore's film would have proven this point. Apparantly those in power do not yet feel secure enough to silence Moore (maybe break into his house and place a phonecall to some relative of Bin Laden would be enough to label him a traitor?).
Further: the patriot act, the extensive fingerprinting in airports, the Homeland security office... all these things are there maybe not so much to limit your freedom as give the administration the power to limit your freedom as you do things that do not stroke with goverment approved policy. No obvious freedom has actually been limited, but you are being watched *very* closely. In other words, the battle on the legislative field isn't going terribly well.
From my point of view (safely outside) the US is turning into a police state. The only question is, will it be run by military or money?
Well, this should level the playing field somewhat. One of the powers of Microsoft is that everything is (more or less) backwards compatble. Upgrades to a new windows version are easy and painless (much easier than say drop in a linux box instead), install and copy your data: done. They focused on this more than on security.
Now this is backfiring however. This will take a bit of their advantage off and will most likely add extra annoyances for all users:)
I agree. It would, for example, be interesting to see how they can keep all their databases synced all over the globe or if they pass on request between sites.
The search code they might publish, it is detail on page-ranking (and related techniques) that are not going to be distributed. (It would allow too many people to manipulate these ratings and it is their competitive edge...)
Personally, I think this is a very good move of Google. In the long run, it is more likely that Google will "be getting something back" however. That is, if they have the guts to publish enough of their code for people to be able to participate.
Search technology is still in its infancy. Afterall, it is little more than a glorified grep on a huge database. It does not understand about context, topic, concepts or even text purpose. (For example, a combination of a moderation system with bayesian filters could most likely be used to differentiate between technical documentation and marketing fudd.) There is *lots* people can contribute.
The DNS tunneling system uses a kind of double bling drop. You drop data into an external dns server by requesting a certain name. You receive data by resolving certain names (and receiving the reply). All these request look like legitimate DNS request to the server (they *are* legitimate requests), you firewall isn't just going to be bypassed, it will happily act as a proxy cache for your data.
The way to detect this for a sysadmin would be inordinarily high DNS load from single IP address (assuming local IP spoofing is prevented). Short messages are probably undetectable.
To prevent incoming data, only allow *all* internal machines to resolv internal addresses. Webaccess needs a proxy and email a forwarding service. Even then it going to be hard to prevent any system that does have external DNS access to being tricked into resolving a name.
Outgoing streams can only be prevented by also prohibiting webaccess and sending external emails.
(as you can easily trick these services in resolving names).
All of this, btw, without actually comprimising a single machine.
His techniques allow someone to set up a cryptographically secure network that most likely completely ignores firewalls. It features high bandwidth-high latency connection, low bandwidth-low latency connections and is virtually untraceable, even to both parties involved in the connection. An initial hostname and time would act as the 'phonenumber'. (By keeping a certain request alive, one can even implement a dailing service with TTL delay.) A message service is freely included.
It is virtually impossible to shut these networks down without replacing/patching dns. Not an easy task.
The bandwidth available to this network most likely exceeds that of most irc-botnets. Especially since the root servers are defending themselves against DDoS attacks.
The tools he's still developing might be able to trace these things but it will still require cooperation of dns server administrators (to get their logs). You will never get them all and you'll have a LOT data to process. Accorfing to this the ICS root server continuosly handles almost 8Mbps (and can handle upto 80Mbps) of traffic. I seriously doubt they can log that...
(if so, transferring the logs would continually consume a healthy percent of the servers bandwidth.)
Pretty smart man indeed and very idealistic or shortsighted. Both the right and the wrong sort of people would pay a lot of money for that...
Not to mention recognisable, permit-needing and common among police and military. While the (il)legality of wireless networking in Nepal is at least questionable, mainly it is far harder to find. A small dish in a tree somewhere transmitting directionally in Ghz range is going to be less likely to be found than plain old voice radios.
This is especially important in a country that has an active resistance.
Alive and kicking last time I was there. They were planning to expand to include another grade year. This is one of the biggest schools around.
About being remote: it is a six hour drive over lousy roads and then a heavy 8 hour hike up the mountain. (1500 meters up on 7 km 'as the bird flies').
They have main nepal hydro power, but that goes down at least once a day and when they think it might storm, the company turns it off... lighting protection, you see.
I was there from day one of the network, did the research, build some of those DIY antennas. They worked, but the professional equipment worked better... I can tell you it is quite a kick to sit at 3200 meters height, aiming a hand build 8 feet antenna to some vageuly seen city in the distance and then read you email sitting against a tree in the snow (especially if you have been offline for a few weeks in the village).
I think this is great for the village as it is going to make this a lot better place to go for volunteers, not to mention cheaper to support them. Many people were scared away from being out of touch with the rest of the world. This will lower the treshold and reduce the commuting to the city.
And last but not least... i wonder what the effect of this access is going to be on the village people. Can you imagine a people where mariage out of love is still romantic? Where a girl escaping from an arranged marriage to marry her loved one is actually news (and required a trial)? Where saying you like a girl is almost proposing? Then plunge these people face first in the internet... I wonder what the next generation will be like.
Well anyone here so brave as to crack down on the Pern university... why don't you put out a few mp3s to which you do own the rights (ie record yourself banging a kettle or something), make a bunch of copies and give them nice RIAA-provoking names and put them online?
If the RIAA grabs the bait, you can sue all you like.
Good luck, David.
Even if they do not take the bait, this technique is a nice way of using their own tactics against them. They will have to listen to each mp3 before sending letters to anyone.
I think you are missing something. What makes great science fiction is politics and psychology. I have never read a single science fiction piece that really got into my skull that wasn't challenging some present-day assumption about society or the individual..
Yes. I think science fiction, except the good characters, plot and narrative (which every type of literature needs) needs to challenge our views of our world and ourselves.
Sci-Fi paints pictures of the future and gives us ideas and warnings about where some roads might take us. It is those elements that make sci-fi good sci-fi. If I write a love story with space ships in it, however good a story, who would call it (good) sci-fi?
Good sci-fi asks that question every one of us should ask themselves sooner or later: where is this all going to end up?
Everyone complains about music being too expensive and I haven't read of any music industry representatives that actually denied this (I must admit: I haven't searched.) nor have I seen any (reality based) comments on what a track of music should cost.
Does anyone actually know what it costs to make a track of music? I am not talking about how much the artist gets paid, but more to general production costs like studio time, studio hardware, personnel costs, graphics artists (CD booklets) and so on. What are the (average) costs per track?
And as long as this is unclear, how do you know what a good price is?
Slashdot Mirror
- Chaos and loss of life in both Afghanistan and Iraq.
- Loss of freedom and major loss of rights for the US citizens.
The first point explains itself, I think. There have even been talks of giving power back to the Taliban because they are the only organisation structured(!) enough to run the country. Iraq has more civil unrest now that before the invasion and no-one likes the US there. All the nice retoric about why the invasion has been nullified by the action afterwards. Both the actions of the soldiers and the actions of the economic interests that wanted a piece of the reconstruction pie. I will disregards the whole WOMD embarrasment.The last point has been made over and over and over in this discussion. Everyone who for some reason does not believe in the actions resulting from 9/11 is called a traitor to the nation. Although it is improving, speaking out against the measures taken after 9/11 was 'disrespect' for those who died then. This is a limitation of freedom. Your opinions are not respected and accoding to some posts some states are even considering passing laws to prevent you to say such things.
Preventing Moore's film would have proven this point. Apparantly those in power do not yet feel secure enough to silence Moore (maybe break into his house and place a phonecall to some relative of Bin Laden would be enough to label him a traitor?).
Further: the patriot act, the extensive fingerprinting in airports, the Homeland security office... all these things are there maybe not so much to limit your freedom as give the administration the power to limit your freedom as you do things that do not stroke with goverment approved policy. No obvious freedom has actually been limited, but you are being watched *very* closely. In other words, the battle on the legislative field isn't going terribly well.
From my point of view (safely outside) the US is turning into a police state. The only question is, will it be run by military or money?
Now this is backfiring however. This will take a bit of their advantage off and will most likely add extra annoyances for all users :)
I agree. It would, for example, be interesting to see how they can keep all their databases synced all over the globe or if they pass on request between sites.
The search code they might publish, it is detail on page-ranking (and related techniques) that are not going to be distributed. (It would allow too many people to manipulate these ratings and it is their competitive edge...)
Personally, I think this is a very good move of Google. In the long run, it is more likely that Google will "be getting something back" however. That is, if they have the guts to publish enough of their code for people to be able to participate.
Search technology is still in its infancy. Afterall, it is little more than a glorified grep on a huge database. It does not understand about context, topic, concepts or even text purpose. (For example, a combination of a moderation system with bayesian filters could most likely be used to differentiate between technical documentation and marketing fudd.) There is *lots* people can contribute.
I think you missed the point (or I missed yours).
The DNS tunneling system uses a kind of double bling drop. You drop data into an external dns server by requesting a certain name. You receive data by resolving certain names (and receiving the reply). All these request look like legitimate DNS request to the server (they *are* legitimate requests), you firewall isn't just going to be bypassed, it will happily act as a proxy cache for your data.
The way to detect this for a sysadmin would be inordinarily high DNS load from single IP address (assuming local IP spoofing is prevented). Short messages are probably undetectable.
To prevent incoming data, only allow *all* internal machines to resolv internal addresses. Webaccess needs a proxy and email a forwarding service. Even then it going to be hard to prevent any system that does have external DNS access to being tricked into resolving a name.
Outgoing streams can only be prevented by also prohibiting webaccess and sending external emails. (as you can easily trick these services in resolving names).
All of this, btw, without actually comprimising a single machine.
His techniques allow someone to set up a cryptographically secure network that most likely completely ignores firewalls. It features high bandwidth-high latency connection, low bandwidth-low latency connections and is virtually untraceable, even to both parties involved in the connection. An initial hostname and time would act as the 'phonenumber'. (By keeping a certain request alive, one can even implement a dailing service with TTL delay.) A message service is freely included.
It is virtually impossible to shut these networks down without replacing/patching dns. Not an easy task.
The bandwidth available to this network most likely exceeds that of most irc-botnets. Especially since the root servers are defending themselves against DDoS attacks.
The tools he's still developing might be able to trace these things but it will still require cooperation of dns server administrators (to get their logs). You will never get them all and you'll have a LOT data to process. Accorfing to this the ICS root server continuosly handles almost 8Mbps (and can handle upto 80Mbps) of traffic. I seriously doubt they can log that... (if so, transferring the logs would continually consume a healthy percent of the servers bandwidth.)
Pretty smart man indeed and very idealistic or shortsighted. Both the right and the wrong sort of people would pay a lot of money for that...
Not to mention recognisable, permit-needing and common among police and military. While the (il)legality of wireless networking in Nepal is at least questionable, mainly it is far harder to find. A small dish in a tree somewhere transmitting directionally in Ghz range is going to be less likely to be found than plain old voice radios. This is especially important in a country that has an active resistance.
Alive and kicking last time I was there.
They were planning to expand to include another grade year. This is one of the biggest schools around.
About being remote: it is a six hour drive over lousy roads and then a heavy 8 hour hike up the mountain. (1500 meters up on 7 km 'as the bird flies').
They have main nepal hydro power, but that goes down at least once a day and when they think it might storm, the company turns it off... lighting protection, you see.
I was there from day one of the network, did the research, build some of those DIY antennas. They worked, but the professional equipment worked better... I can tell you it is quite a kick to sit at 3200 meters height, aiming a hand build 8 feet antenna to some vageuly seen city in the distance and then read you email sitting against a tree in the snow (especially if you have been offline for a few weeks in the village).
I think this is great for the village as it is going to make this a lot better place to go for volunteers, not to mention cheaper to support them. Many people were scared away from being out of touch with the rest of the world. This will lower the treshold and reduce the commuting to the city.
And last but not least... i wonder what the effect of this access is going to be on the village people.
Can you imagine a people where mariage out of love is still romantic? Where a girl escaping from an arranged marriage to marry her loved one is actually news (and required a trial)? Where saying you like a girl is almost proposing?
Then plunge these people face first in the internet... I wonder what the next generation will be like.
JoVe.
If the RIAA grabs the bait, you can sue all you like.
Good luck, David.
Even if they do not take the bait, this technique is a nice way of using their own tactics against them. They will have to listen to each mp3 before sending letters to anyone.
The real cool part is that these names are not just randomly funny. They have a point.
Yes. I think science fiction, except the good characters, plot and narrative (which every type of literature needs) needs to challenge our views of our world and ourselves.
Sci-Fi paints pictures of the future and gives us ideas and warnings about where some roads might take us. It is those elements that make sci-fi good sci-fi. If I write a love story with space ships in it, however good a story, who would call it (good) sci-fi?
Good sci-fi asks that question every one of us should ask themselves sooner or later: where is this all going to end up?
Does anyone actually know what it costs to make a track of music? I am not talking about how much the artist gets paid, but more to general production costs like studio time, studio hardware, personnel costs, graphics artists (CD booklets) and so on. What are the (average) costs per track? And as long as this is unclear, how do you know what a good price is?