So was hacking an addiction for you?
on
Ask Kevin Mitnick
·
· Score: 1
In your book you allude the the possibility that hacking was a behavioral addiction, and at one point you were "clean" for a long stretch, but then returned to old behaviors to investigate your brother's death. Do you consider that your drive to hack, at great risk to a normal life, was an addiction after all?
Interns are inherently worthless: they cost more to educate than they deliver in productivity. I hire interns every year, and they get paid WHEN THEY WORK, not when they SHOW UP. For most interns, this means they get paid for perhaps 10% of their onsite time. Why? Because 90% of their onsite time is unproductive learning -- studying technical materials, being taught procedures by full-time employees, etc. EVERYTHING an intern does has to be double-checked by a competent staffer, because interns are inexperienced and make many, many mistakes. The liability for using interns is high, especially where safety-related products and services are involved.
When a prospective intern asks me if he gets paid the moment he "clocks in", I always say "No, you only get paid when you make money for us. You're lucky we don't charge you tuition."
Vortex,
Your experiment is a very poor design, fatally flawed. What is your controlled source for mutations? As far as I can see, you have none. Thus this is not an experiment demonstrating evolution, which would require a source of beneficial mutations. You are simply redistributing existing genetic traits in descendant populations. This is nothing more than selective breeding, such as Man has done for millennia.
In reality, evolutionary "science" will never actually be a branch of science until we have the ability to conduct experiments testing Darwin's key hypothesis: that RANDOM MUTATIONS provide beneficial variations upon which natural selection can act. That appears to be dozens, if not hundreds, of yeas off.
Dual stack works but is has failed in the sense that it can't be the singular solution during the transition from IPv4 to IPv6.
Chang,
Dual-stack was never intend to be a singular solution. But it is the solution for everyone who already has static IPv4 space. Newcomers to the Internet, and those without static ipv4, were always destined to muddle along with variants of Large Scale NAT until IPv4 fades from existence.
"There's no reason to pay any attention to this Internet Protocol and the anarchistic ARPAnet. It's all a fad, and what could you use it for anyway? X.25 does anything you might need, and unlike the "best effort" Approach of IP, X.25 _guarantees_ your datagram is delivered. Even at speed as high as 1.5 megabits per second! Smart people are ignoring the Internet, and putting their money in reliable proprietary networks."
-telephone company executives, circa 1990
When I spoke with Mr. Beckman, he was not clear on how the Internet numbering system works and, while he was was close in this article, he still does not appear to quite get it.
Kev,
Thanks for participating in the article. In our interview it was never my intention to try and convey to you my depth of knowledge, but rather to elicit from you a clear explanation of your NANOG paper. Which I did, thank you very much! I assure you, however, that I'm reasonably competent at IP addressing concepts, since I run BGP myself and also deploy BGP and IPv6 implementations for enterprises. And I teach IPv6 courses around the world (I was in Toronto doing ao last week, which is why I had a deadline crunch on your interview).
Actually, the public routing table isn't so neatly managed. It contains whatever ISPs are willing to advertise via BGP and the RADBs. Actual ownership is seldom verified unless someone complains about spam or other abuse. That's why ARIN has a new policy letting IPv4 holders designate a specific recipient when they release IPv4 space, essentially enabling IP address sales of/24 and larger prefixes. It's very important that the address registration records accurately reflect who is actually responsible for a particular IP allocation.
Computers are just dandy at math, thank you. Some programmers aren't so hot, but they can be trained. Slashdot, on the other hand, continues to generate gratuitous inflammatory headlines. Training does not appear to be effective.
As others have pointed out, abusing a computer does not make the computer "sucky", anymore than abusing English makes it suck at expressing thoughts concisely. Slashdot consistently abuses its audience with misleading and downright false headlines, such as this one.
Your logic doesn't make sense when applied to other battery devices, such as the iPod or Mac Book. Does Apple prevent you from using the power hungry audio equalizer? Do they stop you from cranking the MacBook screen brightness all the way up on battery? No, of course not. Users are perfectly capable of managing apps that run in the background. Anyone who doesn't could simply click a box saying "run no apps in the background."
A telling thing is that Apple itself lets certain apps of its own run in the background, such as the email push function. And these apps will eat your battery if you let it. And Apple tells you this, and users actually read and understand the caution and figure it out without being treated like helpless children.
I run a couple jailbroken iPhones and can count on one hand the apps that do background processing (because they tell you they do). I have learned how much battery power they consume when enabled, and I shut them down easily when I want to conserve power.
This kind of paternalism iPhone customers can do without!
You repeat an oft-believed myth: that Xerox lost its trademark through "genericide." Xerox successfully defended its trademark (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genericized_trademark). If you infringe the Xerox mark today, you can and will be prosecuted. Xerox is more persistent than Scient010gy in that regard.
Another common misconception is that the "first misuse" of a trademark must be prosecuted, or that even most infringements must be prosecuted. A TM owner only has to show that they made an effort to defend their trademark in a reasonable number of cases, in a reasonable timeframe. The term "Netbook" is new -- try to find a reference before 2007. Psion is easily within the PTO's sense of a reasonable timeframe.
Anyone fighting this battle will lose. Just look at the Cisco lawsuit against Apple over iPhone: Apple had to settle despite the fact that Cisco only obtained the trademark through the acquisition of Infogear Technology. Cisco won the iPhone VPN franchise -- not likely a coincidence, and a heck of a spoil in anyone's book. And Cisco can _still_ use the iPhone trademark for its own products.
Calm down all you flamers. Psion is doing nothing wrong. This is perfectly moral and legal behavior on their part. They invented the term Netbook and are entitled to keep it as a trademark as long as they want. They still use the term in commerce and thus they still hold legal ownership under U.S. and international trademark law. No different from Apple's continued ownership of PowerBook.
It's Psion's property and if you're griping about it you're simply being hypocritical, unless you are willing to give up your own intellectual property without a fight.
The right thing for all of us to do is to simply switch to another term. Netbook is inaccurate in any case. The salient feature of these devices is not their network connectivity -- every notebook has that. It's their miniature size. These devices are all about the dimensions of the defunct palmtop form factor (sold by IBM, Sony, Acer, etc). Those did _not_ have much in the way of network ability, so a natural and more accurate name for these new devices is netpalmtop.
I once worked for a company that did the same parasitic hosting thing. Eventually they sold to a bigger company for millions. But the founder cheated his employees out if their stock options. He had revealed his true character early on, but we foolishly believed that it would not be turned against us. We toiled endless uncompensated hours writing the much more complex code required to do what we called "weasel sharing".
Your boss is an unethical crook. Get out now before he has a chance to cheat you too, if he hasn't already.
For one thing, the report states that compared to piston aircraft, turbines have no better fuel efficiency. The report states:
"...it can be concluded that the last piston-powered aircraft were as fuel-efficient as the current average jet...which reveals a sharp increase in fuel consumption per seat-kilometre as piston-engined aircraft were replaced by jet-engined. "
That's an idiotic conclusion, which Plane Simple Truth demonstrates is based on incorrect assumptions, faulty analysis, and misuse of statistics.
Of course, to see that you have to read both the report and the book, as I have.
This needs a wikipedia entry:
"The Peeters Principle is the philosophical rule of thumb that "Incompetent research reports tend to rise to the top of public perception." An allusion to Dr. Laurence J. Peter's et. al. Peter Principle, the Peeters Principle derives from the P.M. Peeters et. al. report "Fuel efficiency of commercial aircraft: An overview of historical and future trends", which falsely claims declining fuel efficiency in airline turbine aircraft engines. The Peeters Principle in summary is that, at the general public level, people are often misled by their lack of common sense, their deficiency in understanding statistics and basic science, and therefore fall victim to the lies of the myriad charlatans that claim to have something that fixes everything."
Bell Labs didn't invent the laser. Gordon Gould did. The courts awarded him inventor status back in the 1990s, along with many millions of dollars from Bell. Such a monumental invention at least should be attributed to the true inventor!
Two Media converters. If you can run ethernet over it, it's good.
Alas, this can give you very misleading results. Ethernet is such an error-tolerant protocol that you can "run it" over even a very poor fiber link. You'll get rotten performance, but most people won't notice right away, and won't know how to isolate the problem to the fiber link even if they do notice.
One particularly insidious performance degradation occurs when only one fiber in a send-receive pair has high power loss: random spanning-tree packet storms that can take down an entire network. Even pros have trouble curing this kind of systemic problem.
If you verify the optical integrity of your fiber network, then you'll be able to troubleshoot other components -- such as transceivers and pach cables -- much more easily (since these parts can be readily swapped out to check for failures). By far the single most common cause of campus LAN problems I see as a network engineer are defective but working fiber links.
Sometimes it's just dirty connectors (cleaning fiber cables consistently every time you manipulate them is the best defense against this), but often it's poor installation quality, remedied by re-terminating high-loss connectors.
The primary tools you need are a fiberscope for visual connector inspection and a power meter with laser source, a set of laser goggles (if you plan to work on single-mode or long-haul multimode fiber), an assortment of fiber patch cables, and a mini-maglite with fiber adapter (for simple continuity tests).
You can get these used on eBay all day long for a few hundred dollars for the entire set (search terms: "fiber test*" "fiber patch*" "fiber splice*"). You may have to watch a few days for a bargain, but I'm constantly amazed at how often high-quality fiber test gear goes for a song on eBay. Purchase only name-brand gear, such as Fluke, Noyes, Microtest, TestUM, etc. (You can learn the name brands by looking at new-equipment listings at places like CDW).
There are many tutorials on the web showing how to use these tools, most from equipment vendors themselves, and some are even high quality video presentations. A useful starting point is http://fiberu.com/ (although it's become less useful since Fluke took it over).
The mini-maglite will instantly identify any fiber -- the light will be clearly visible at the far end of even a thousand-foot run. If high-power IR lasers are in use on the network, be careful to be wearing fiber goggles whenever looking at fiber ends, even at your own white light. You can't tell when a fiber is energized with high-power IR, since it's invisible.
The power meter lets you measure the light loss through a fiber path, which when correctly interpreted will give you performance information. Get one that reads tenths of a microwatt, and that also directly displays dB loss from a reference signal. If you know the installed fiber specifications (you can read these off the fiber jacket), you can compute the available bandwidth based on fiber length.
The fiberscope reveals otherwise-invisible defects in a connector so that you don't spend hours trying to make an unworkable connection work. Again, be sure you're wearing laser goggles if you don't have both ends of a fiber in your hands. Magnifying harmful IR radiation is very dangerous.
For routine work you don't need an OTDR. Besides measuring the length of a fiber, an OTDR will locate defects along a fiber span so you can locate and repair them. If you're not repairing cable, or splicing it, an OTDR is overkill. Fiber installers have such gear, and they'll be happy to use theirs on your network for a fee when you need that capability.
Slashdot Mirror
In your book you allude the the possibility that hacking was a behavioral addiction, and at one point you were "clean" for a long stretch, but then returned to old behaviors to investigate your brother's death. Do you consider that your drive to hack, at great risk to a normal life, was an addiction after all?
P - E - A.P. - O!
Interns are inherently worthless: they cost more to educate than they deliver in productivity. I hire interns every year, and they get paid WHEN THEY WORK, not when they SHOW UP. For most interns, this means they get paid for perhaps 10% of their onsite time. Why? Because 90% of their onsite time is unproductive learning -- studying technical materials, being taught procedures by full-time employees, etc. EVERYTHING an intern does has to be double-checked by a competent staffer, because interns are inexperienced and make many, many mistakes. The liability for using interns is high, especially where safety-related products and services are involved. When a prospective intern asks me if he gets paid the moment he "clocks in", I always say "No, you only get paid when you make money for us. You're lucky we don't charge you tuition."
Vortex, Your experiment is a very poor design, fatally flawed. What is your controlled source for mutations? As far as I can see, you have none. Thus this is not an experiment demonstrating evolution, which would require a source of beneficial mutations. You are simply redistributing existing genetic traits in descendant populations. This is nothing more than selective breeding, such as Man has done for millennia. In reality, evolutionary "science" will never actually be a branch of science until we have the ability to conduct experiments testing Darwin's key hypothesis: that RANDOM MUTATIONS provide beneficial variations upon which natural selection can act. That appears to be dozens, if not hundreds, of yeas off.
Dual stack works but is has failed in the sense that it can't be the singular solution during the transition from IPv4 to IPv6.
Chang, Dual-stack was never intend to be a singular solution. But it is the solution for everyone who already has static IPv4 space. Newcomers to the Internet, and those without static ipv4, were always destined to muddle along with variants of Large Scale NAT until IPv4 fades from existence.
Um, shouldn't that be "assault on a pair of _piracy_ enemies? I'm just saying.
"There's no reason to pay any attention to this Internet Protocol and the anarchistic ARPAnet. It's all a fad, and what could you use it for anyway? X.25 does anything you might need, and unlike the "best effort" Approach of IP, X.25 _guarantees_ your datagram is delivered. Even at speed as high as 1.5 megabits per second! Smart people are ignoring the Internet, and putting their money in reliable proprietary networks." -telephone company executives, circa 1990
Please correct the blatantly disingenuous headline. There is no ban here. The headline writer should be modded down to obscurity. Sheesh!
A day that will live in Ormandy.
I presume the festering implant also qualifies this "scientist" as the first instantiation of "AI" -- Artificial Idiocy.
When I spoke with Mr. Beckman, he was not clear on how the Internet numbering system works and, while he was was close in this article, he still does not appear to quite get it.
Kev, Thanks for participating in the article. In our interview it was never my intention to try and convey to you my depth of knowledge, but rather to elicit from you a clear explanation of your NANOG paper. Which I did, thank you very much! I assure you, however, that I'm reasonably competent at IP addressing concepts, since I run BGP myself and also deploy BGP and IPv6 implementations for enterprises. And I teach IPv6 courses around the world (I was in Toronto doing ao last week, which is why I had a deadline crunch on your interview).
Actually, the public routing table isn't so neatly managed. It contains whatever ISPs are willing to advertise via BGP and the RADBs. Actual ownership is seldom verified unless someone complains about spam or other abuse. That's why ARIN has a new policy letting IPv4 holders designate a specific recipient when they release IPv4 space, essentially enabling IP address sales of /24 and larger prefixes. It's very important that the address registration records accurately reflect who is actually responsible for a particular IP allocation.
That's actually a brilliant idea! (assyming the hardware really exists ;)
Computers are just dandy at math, thank you. Some programmers aren't so hot, but they can be trained. Slashdot, on the other hand, continues to generate gratuitous inflammatory headlines. Training does not appear to be effective. As others have pointed out, abusing a computer does not make the computer "sucky", anymore than abusing English makes it suck at expressing thoughts concisely. Slashdot consistently abuses its audience with misleading and downright false headlines, such as this one.
Your logic doesn't make sense when applied to other battery devices, such as the iPod or Mac Book. Does Apple prevent you from using the power hungry audio equalizer? Do they stop you from cranking the MacBook screen brightness all the way up on battery? No, of course not. Users are perfectly capable of managing apps that run in the background. Anyone who doesn't could simply click a box saying "run no apps in the background."
A telling thing is that Apple itself lets certain apps of its own run in the background, such as the email push function. And these apps will eat your battery if you let it. And Apple tells you this, and users actually read and understand the caution and figure it out without being treated like helpless children. I run a couple jailbroken iPhones and can count on one hand the apps that do background processing (because they tell you they do). I have learned how much battery power they consume when enabled, and I shut them down easily when I want to conserve power. This kind of paternalism iPhone customers can do without!
I'm surprised no provider has yet tumbled to this oh so natural euphemism for throttling. There would be warnings, of course.
"May cause nervousness, high blood pressure, loss of appetite, urinary problems, increased heart rate, and irritation of the lining of the wallet."
-mel
Another common misconception is that the "first misuse" of a trademark must be prosecuted, or that even most infringements must be prosecuted. A TM owner only has to show that they made an effort to defend their trademark in a reasonable number of cases, in a reasonable timeframe. The term "Netbook" is new -- try to find a reference before 2007. Psion is easily within the PTO's sense of a reasonable timeframe.
Anyone fighting this battle will lose. Just look at the Cisco lawsuit against Apple over iPhone: Apple had to settle despite the fact that Cisco only obtained the trademark through the acquisition of Infogear Technology. Cisco won the iPhone VPN franchise -- not likely a coincidence, and a heck of a spoil in anyone's book. And Cisco can _still_ use the iPhone trademark for its own products.
Sailed schailed. This ship is in dry dock.
Calm down all you flamers. Psion is doing nothing wrong. This is perfectly moral and legal behavior on their part. They invented the term Netbook and are entitled to keep it as a trademark as long as they want. They still use the term in commerce and thus they still hold legal ownership under U.S. and international trademark law. No different from Apple's continued ownership of PowerBook. It's Psion's property and if you're griping about it you're simply being hypocritical, unless you are willing to give up your own intellectual property without a fight. The right thing for all of us to do is to simply switch to another term. Netbook is inaccurate in any case. The salient feature of these devices is not their network connectivity -- every notebook has that. It's their miniature size. These devices are all about the dimensions of the defunct palmtop form factor (sold by IBM, Sony, Acer, etc). Those did _not_ have much in the way of network ability, so a natural and more accurate name for these new devices is netpalmtop.
I once worked for a company that did the same parasitic hosting thing. Eventually they sold to a bigger company for millions. But the founder cheated his employees out if their stock options. He had revealed his true character early on, but we foolishly believed that it would not be turned against us. We toiled endless uncompensated hours writing the much more complex code required to do what we called "weasel sharing". Your boss is an unethical crook. Get out now before he has a chance to cheat you too, if he hasn't already.
For one thing, the report states that compared to piston aircraft, turbines have no better fuel efficiency. The report states: "...it can be concluded that the last piston-powered aircraft were as fuel-efficient as the current average jet...which reveals a sharp increase in fuel consumption per seat-kilometre as piston-engined aircraft were replaced by jet-engined. " That's an idiotic conclusion, which Plane Simple Truth demonstrates is based on incorrect assumptions, faulty analysis, and misuse of statistics. Of course, to see that you have to read both the report and the book, as I have.
Sigh. It's a parody. The original Peters Principle vs the new Peeters Principle. One e vs two e's. Get it?
This needs a wikipedia entry: "The Peeters Principle is the philosophical rule of thumb that "Incompetent research reports tend to rise to the top of public perception." An allusion to Dr. Laurence J. Peter's et. al. Peter Principle, the Peeters Principle derives from the P.M. Peeters et. al. report "Fuel efficiency of commercial aircraft: An overview of historical and future trends", which falsely claims declining fuel efficiency in airline turbine aircraft engines. The Peeters Principle in summary is that, at the general public level, people are often misled by their lack of common sense, their deficiency in understanding statistics and basic science, and therefore fall victim to the lies of the myriad charlatans that claim to have something that fixes everything."
Bell Labs didn't invent the laser. Gordon Gould did. The courts awarded him inventor status back in the 1990s, along with many millions of dollars from Bell. Such a monumental invention at least should be attributed to the true inventor!
Two Media converters. If you can run ethernet over it, it's good.
Alas, this can give you very misleading results. Ethernet is such an error-tolerant protocol that you can "run it" over even a very poor fiber link. You'll get rotten performance, but most people won't notice right away, and won't know how to isolate the problem to the fiber link even if they do notice.
One particularly insidious performance degradation occurs when only one fiber in a send-receive pair has high power loss: random spanning-tree packet storms that can take down an entire network. Even pros have trouble curing this kind of systemic problem.
If you verify the optical integrity of your fiber network, then you'll be able to troubleshoot other components -- such as transceivers and pach cables -- much more easily (since these parts can be readily swapped out to check for failures). By far the single most common cause of campus LAN problems I see as a network engineer are defective but working fiber links.
Sometimes it's just dirty connectors (cleaning fiber cables consistently every time you manipulate them is the best defense against this), but often it's poor installation quality, remedied by re-terminating high-loss connectors.
You can get these used on eBay all day long for a few hundred dollars for the entire set (search terms: "fiber test*" "fiber patch*" "fiber splice*"). You may have to watch a few days for a bargain, but I'm constantly amazed at how often high-quality fiber test gear goes for a song on eBay. Purchase only name-brand gear, such as Fluke, Noyes, Microtest, TestUM, etc. (You can learn the name brands by looking at new-equipment listings at places like CDW).
There are many tutorials on the web showing how to use these tools, most from equipment vendors themselves, and some are even high quality video presentations. A useful starting point is http://fiberu.com/ (although it's become less useful since Fluke took it over).
The mini-maglite will instantly identify any fiber -- the light will be clearly visible at the far end of even a thousand-foot run. If high-power IR lasers are in use on the network, be careful to be wearing fiber goggles whenever looking at fiber ends, even at your own white light. You can't tell when a fiber is energized with high-power IR, since it's invisible.
The power meter lets you measure the light loss through a fiber path, which when correctly interpreted will give you performance information. Get one that reads tenths of a microwatt, and that also directly displays dB loss from a reference signal. If you know the installed fiber specifications (you can read these off the fiber jacket), you can compute the available bandwidth based on fiber length.
The fiberscope reveals otherwise-invisible defects in a connector so that you don't spend hours trying to make an unworkable connection work. Again, be sure you're wearing laser goggles if you don't have both ends of a fiber in your hands. Magnifying harmful IR radiation is very dangerous.
For routine work you don't need an OTDR. Besides measuring the length of a fiber, an OTDR will locate defects along a fiber span so you can locate and repair them. If you're not repairing cable, or splicing it, an OTDR is overkill. Fiber installers have such gear, and they'll be happy to use theirs on your network for a fee when you need that capability.