There are lots of very smart people who work for AT&T and other companies who make stuff that can do this.
Consider the various US firms which helped make the great firewall of China - that certainly takes skill.
Now, could someone evade detection? Probably. Given the lack of detail in TFA or in TFATILT (the June source for this), the impression I got was that this was a "hey check out that user" sort of system: something which sends an alert about some squicky behavior, and then a human takes a look. It sorta scales - just like an IDS.
Every US ISP must comply with lawful court orders to intercept data of identified targets. This currently requires a subpoena and is viewed as a huge PITA by engineers.
However, if what you were talking about was a foreign tunnel encryption service, such a thing could certainly work. However, if your local DSL or cable provider sees nothing by crypto packets, that might be a violation of terms of service. Perhaps what you want is a service which provides you the ability to tunnel nasty stuff in harmless-looking good stuff. IPv6 might have finally found a use after all!
Or you could set up a split tunnel: send some harmless stuff straight to the ISP, and when you want to get to stuff you don't want to be traceable, encrypt it to the far end.
Too late. Every US ISP must comply with lawful court orders to intercept data of identified targets. This currently requires a subpoena and is viewed as a huge PITA by engineers.
When AT&T permitted NSA to infiltrate/subvert its network in order to monitor all domestic and foreign Intarweb traffic, it broke enough privacy laws that the legal consequences would require the dissolution of the company.
Source please?
Here's a thought experiment for you: you're a big company with lots of government contracts. A well-known government law enforcement agency comes to you and says "we need you do X, and it needs to be secret." Wouldn't you think that you could presume that the actions the government asks you to do are by definition legal? Or if they turn out to be illegal, you have reason to have acted in the manner you did, which dramatically lowers any punishment.
Has any controlling legal authority (to use former VP Gore's phrase) actually ruled that AT&T et. al. violated the law as opposed to having done something which smells bad?
I'm not a lawyer (thank God), but I've hung out with a bunch to know the difference between unpleasant acts and illegal ones.
Now, mind you, the above has no bearing whatsoever on any dealings between AT&T and the MPAA - I prefer my ISPs to behave as common carriers in the technical and legal sense. I do know that an ISP which actively filters then becomes more responsible when *bad stuff* gets through, so AT&T could be buying themselves a barrel of trouble if they implement this on a widespread basis (as opposed to an ad-hoc, subpoena-driven basis).
The problem is that "link-local" isn't. Layer-2 devices will happily forward frames with fe80:: source and destination addresses. Routers are supposed to stop it, but that requires a layer-3 boundary, which defeats the point of having a/64 for a single site (i.e. single router or router-pair)
I haven't used Xen with v6. VMWare had problems getting the guest to do the autoconfiguration instead of having the host do it - that provides a vector to get from guest -> host...
You do have a fair point: I should probably consider that a VMWare issue rather than an autoconf issue, but the general v6 approach is to have a single gigantic broadcast domain per "site," instead of learning the lessons we all have in the past 10 years about the benefits of small layer-2 islands connected with layer-3... So the natural way of doing things in v6 will encounter this problem.
Yes, you can get your IP address and router, but you won't get a DNS server. I don't know about you, but I'm not a huge fan of manually entering 128-bit addresses...
IPv6 Autoconf resembles bootP or inverse-arp more than it does DHCP. Also, DHCP has steadily developed a bunch of knobs over the years so that (for instance) IP phones can be told about which TFTP server to use - that sort of functionality doesn't exist in v6 autoconf today. Not to say that it never will, but v6 autoconf doesn't currently have anywhere near the capabilities that v4 DHCP does.
IPv6 Autoconfiguration is close but no cigar in a couple of signignificant ways:
1) DNS server information wasn't baked in from the beginning (there are now some drafts to fix this, but I haven't yet seen the working code) - all this time, and we managed to recreate BootP...
2) Because autoconfiguration uses/64 addresses for hosts, the address size gain, while large, isn't anywhere near the original promise, and encoding the MAC address into a globally-visable IP address does release information about hosts which was formerly private (NIC vendor, for one, as well as the more theoretical complaint about the layering violation).
3) Just try it with VMWare or other virtualization software. Ouch. There's a whole lot of borked there.
4) Obviously you wouldn't want to use it for a true server, becuase who wants their server IP to change when a NIC burns out?
All that said, in a dual-stack environment it works reasonably well: but it doesn't honestly look like anyone gave much thought to a time when IPv4 wouldn't be present on the LAN or on the hosts...
I mostly agree with the tone and content, except in this paragraph:
Now, on the general issue of 'natural medecine'. There are TONS of natural medicines that work REALLY well. We identify them, purify them, and they become drugs, at which point some people decide they are no longer 'natural'. (what, because we know why they work?). The rest of the commonly known herbal remedies you can buy today have not become drugs because they don't work.
Correct in tone, but incorrect in the implication that FDA approval and marketing by a big company mean that we understand why they work, as opposed to merely having demonstrated that they work. Check out the package inserts on pretty much any non-antibiotic prescription: it'll say "mechanism of action unknown." - this is true for asprin (salycilic acid = willow bark derivative), and true for the vast majority of new stuff too.
We know a lot less than we think we do about why things work. Eventually, we'll get a model which will explain it, but until then we'll have to be content with double-blind trials and empiricism.
Indeed. I would say that peer-review is essential to good science: in fact, experimental repeatability is a hallmark of the scientific method. Being open and honest about how data are collected, and how they are processed can only work in favor of advancing human knowledge.
One thing which more openness can fix is an over-analysis of and over-reliance on small data sets: that tends to exaggerate the effect of the experimental outliers which are always present, and it's easy to treat a "massaged" data set as authoritative (and forget the margins of error which were introduced).
Fare thee well, AppleWorks - you kept me from having to buy a copy of Office for several years, and at one point knowledge of your inner workings was tremendously helpful at a job (I briefly worked at a small school which had an Apple ][e running AppleWorks in 1998...
I've linked to the soap a few times: I don't have any involvement with them except as a satisfied customer. I just wanted to let some of the folks who were looking for non-antibacterial soap know about a particular brand which is known to be affordable and good.
If you're worried about the harshness of soap, I'd stay away from the lye+lard stuff: it's pretty rough on the skin. I'm a big fan of castile soap (I really like Kirk's - it's old-school, and cheap too), and that's not quite so rough but it still does the job.
I've suggested to all of my friends with children that they should let their kids play with (and be licked by) my dog, as a pre-emptive anti-allergy exposure. I agree that the world nowadays is way to "sterile."
I became convinced that antibacterial soap was a horrible idea for everyday use when I read The Coming Plague. While the plague she described hasn't yet emerged, I don't think it's a good idea to tempt fate.
I've found that Kirk's Castile Soap is antibacterial, high-quality, and cheap too. In the mid-atlantic, Rodman's sells it for $.99 per bar.
Try Kirk's Castile Soap - in my area, Rodman's carries it for $.99 per bar, and it's excellent. I haven't used their liquids, but the bars are really high quality.
I singled out Bach from the rest of the classical music world for a reason: his work on counterpoint stands as the basis for much of Western musical theory. Whether or not one likes Bach is irrelevant to the question at hand, which is "what type of pitched sound would be most likely to be appreciated (and for that matter even recognized as music) by an alien?"
Folk music by its nature tends to encapsulate many of the ways of thinking which are specific to a culture - thus someone who is familiar with Indian culture is vastly more likely to appreciate Sitar music, as they'll have associations with it, etc. I come back to Bach's counterpoints because even if they are played on a non-dynamic instrument (such as a harpsichord [in fact, most were written for a harpsichord], the pianoforte having only been invented when Bach was old), they are very easy to analyze.
Because they're so clear, it's very simple to build a musical grammar on top of the counterpoints, which leads to harmony, and then the various other composers who, in essence, broke all sorts of the rules to a variety of effects.
It would be possible to create other musical grammars, but I do not believe that any would be as easy to explain as Bach's - the ratio of string lengths as a source for tonality is pretty apparent...
Notice that none of this has anything to do with whether or not one actually likes Bach. I happen to like his work, but there's lots of classical music which sounds like total crap to me - the same is certainly true of literature: I can't for the life of me figure out what anyone ever saw in Ethan Frome...
I like the suggestion, but a challenge is that the dates of the elections are fixed because we don't have a Parlimentary system. That creates an incentive for the party out of power to start campaigning early, and of course the party in power must respond, and it keeps creeping earlier and earlier.
But as a denizen of Washington DC, I would be thrilled if the political seasons were shorter...
(and btw, funniest.sig I've seen in a long time...)
You've got some good points challenging some of the unstated premeses of some of the other posters.
I do think that there is an objective reason to believe that a species which was truly alien would like some (not all) classical music more than modern music: it has fewer musical assumptions.
Specifically, Bach's counterpoints make very few assumptions of the listener - you won't have to understand any other art forms to appreciate Bach. Most modern music (Rap, Rock, etc) uses a shared language which has been built up over centuries, and has a whole lot of cultural assumptions built into it. To pick an example, Eminim's song "Stan," which used the Dido song as a backdrop, makes a bunch of assumptions of the listener: we have to understand obsessive fandom, we have to have an appreciation of the irony of using a sweet pop melody to tell a murderous story, and we get all kinds of references to Eminim's earlier work.
Most artists draw on the shared body of culture to express their art - it's a very rare piece which will seem beautiful to radically different cultures. I would put forth that some early Bach would be more likely to succeed in that than, say, Elvis Presley. Also the lack of lyrics helps: if you listen to Rap, or most Rock without lyrics, it's clearly missing something major - many of the older classical pieces are designed as instrumentals, and thus avoid the language barrier.
Virtualization is great for some things, but security concerns are substantial - PCI compliance generally means that all of the guests on a host have to be at the same security level. Also, some of the virtual environments don't handle IPv6 properly (and a few other things). These aren't showstoppers, but they can reduce some of the benefit.
I absolutely agree with you: now's the time to start working on it, and we'll need to find out about all of the broken things and fix them (for instance, VMWare and IPv6 autoconfig don't play nicely together, violating the VM security model...)
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There are lots of very smart people who work for AT&T and other companies who make stuff that can do this.
Consider the various US firms which helped make the great firewall of China - that certainly takes skill.
Now, could someone evade detection? Probably. Given the lack of detail in TFA or in TFATILT (the June source for this), the impression I got was that this was a "hey check out that user" sort of system: something which sends an alert about some squicky behavior, and then a human takes a look. It sorta scales - just like an IDS.
Every US ISP must comply with lawful court orders to intercept data of identified targets. This currently requires a subpoena and is viewed as a huge PITA by engineers.
However, if what you were talking about was a foreign tunnel encryption service, such a thing could certainly work. However, if your local DSL or cable provider sees nothing by crypto packets, that might be a violation of terms of service. Perhaps what you want is a service which provides you the ability to tunnel nasty stuff in harmless-looking good stuff. IPv6 might have finally found a use after all!
Or you could set up a split tunnel: send some harmless stuff straight to the ISP, and when you want to get to stuff you don't want to be traceable, encrypt it to the far end.
Too late. Every US ISP must comply with lawful court orders to intercept data of identified targets. This currently requires a subpoena and is viewed as a huge PITA by engineers.
Source please?
Here's a thought experiment for you: you're a big company with lots of government contracts. A well-known government law enforcement agency comes to you and says "we need you do X, and it needs to be secret." Wouldn't you think that you could presume that the actions the government asks you to do are by definition legal? Or if they turn out to be illegal, you have reason to have acted in the manner you did, which dramatically lowers any punishment.
Has any controlling legal authority (to use former VP Gore's phrase) actually ruled that AT&T et. al. violated the law as opposed to having done something which smells bad?
I'm not a lawyer (thank God), but I've hung out with a bunch to know the difference between unpleasant acts and illegal ones.
Now, mind you, the above has no bearing whatsoever on any dealings between AT&T and the MPAA - I prefer my ISPs to behave as common carriers in the technical and legal sense. I do know that an ISP which actively filters then becomes more responsible when *bad stuff* gets through, so AT&T could be buying themselves a barrel of trouble if they implement this on a widespread basis (as opposed to an ad-hoc, subpoena-driven basis).
The problem is that "link-local" isn't. Layer-2 devices will happily forward frames with fe80:: source and destination addresses. Routers are supposed to stop it, but that requires a layer-3 boundary, which defeats the point of having a /64 for a single site (i.e. single router or router-pair)
I haven't used Xen with v6. VMWare had problems getting the guest to do the autoconfiguration instead of having the host do it - that provides a vector to get from guest -> host...
You do have a fair point: I should probably consider that a VMWare issue rather than an autoconf issue, but the general v6 approach is to have a single gigantic broadcast domain per "site," instead of learning the lessons we all have in the past 10 years about the benefits of small layer-2 islands connected with layer-3... So the natural way of doing things in v6 will encounter this problem.
Yes, you can get your IP address and router, but you won't get a DNS server. I don't know about you, but I'm not a huge fan of manually entering 128-bit addresses...
IPv6 Autoconf resembles bootP or inverse-arp more than it does DHCP. Also, DHCP has steadily developed a bunch of knobs over the years so that (for instance) IP phones can be told about which TFTP server to use - that sort of functionality doesn't exist in v6 autoconf today. Not to say that it never will, but v6 autoconf doesn't currently have anywhere near the capabilities that v4 DHCP does.
IPv6 Autoconfiguration is close but no cigar in a couple of signignificant ways:
/64 addresses for hosts, the address size gain, while large, isn't anywhere near the original promise, and encoding the MAC address into a globally-visable IP address does release information about hosts which was formerly private (NIC vendor, for one, as well as the more theoretical complaint about the layering violation).
1) DNS server information wasn't baked in from the beginning (there are now some drafts to fix this, but I haven't yet seen the working code) - all this time, and we managed to recreate BootP...
2) Because autoconfiguration uses
3) Just try it with VMWare or other virtualization software. Ouch. There's a whole lot of borked there.
4) Obviously you wouldn't want to use it for a true server, becuase who wants their server IP to change when a NIC burns out?
All that said, in a dual-stack environment it works reasonably well: but it doesn't honestly look like anyone gave much thought to a time when IPv4 wouldn't be present on the LAN or on the hosts...
Correct in tone, but incorrect in the implication that FDA approval and marketing by a big company mean that we understand why they work, as opposed to merely having demonstrated that they work. Check out the package inserts on pretty much any non-antibiotic prescription: it'll say "mechanism of action unknown." - this is true for asprin (salycilic acid = willow bark derivative), and true for the vast majority of new stuff too.
We know a lot less than we think we do about why things work. Eventually, we'll get a model which will explain it, but until then we'll have to be content with double-blind trials and empiricism.
Indeed. I would say that peer-review is essential to good science: in fact, experimental repeatability is a hallmark of the scientific method. Being open and honest about how data are collected, and how they are processed can only work in favor of advancing human knowledge.
One thing which more openness can fix is an over-analysis of and over-reliance on small data sets: that tends to exaggerate the effect of the experimental outliers which are always present, and it's easy to treat a "massaged" data set as authoritative (and forget the margins of error which were introduced).
As long as it supported PR#6 and call -151, I'd be there.
Fare thee well, AppleWorks - you kept me from having to buy a copy of Office for several years, and at one point knowledge of your inner workings was tremendously helpful at a job (I briefly worked at a small school which had an Apple ][e running AppleWorks in 1998...
I've linked to the soap a few times: I don't have any involvement with them except as a satisfied customer. I just wanted to let some of the folks who were looking for non-antibacterial soap know about a particular brand which is known to be affordable and good.
As an example, Kirk's Castile isn't antibacterial, and it's both high-quality, and pretty inexpensive. I'm a big fan, myself.
If you're worried about the harshness of soap, I'd stay away from the lye+lard stuff: it's pretty rough on the skin. I'm a big fan of castile soap (I really like Kirk's - it's old-school, and cheap too), and that's not quite so rough but it still does the job.
I've suggested to all of my friends with children that they should let their kids play with (and be licked by) my dog, as a pre-emptive anti-allergy exposure. I agree that the world nowadays is way to "sterile."
I became convinced that antibacterial soap was a horrible idea for everyday use when I read The Coming Plague. While the plague she described hasn't yet emerged, I don't think it's a good idea to tempt fate.
I've found that Kirk's Castile Soap is antibacterial, high-quality, and cheap too. In the mid-atlantic, Rodman's sells it for $.99 per bar.
Try Kirk's Castile Soap - in my area, Rodman's carries it for $.99 per bar, and it's excellent. I haven't used their liquids, but the bars are really high quality.
It's refreshing to hear someone say that so cogently.
I singled out Bach from the rest of the classical music world for a reason: his work on counterpoint stands as the basis for much of Western musical theory. Whether or not one likes Bach is irrelevant to the question at hand, which is "what type of pitched sound would be most likely to be appreciated (and for that matter even recognized as music) by an alien?"
Folk music by its nature tends to encapsulate many of the ways of thinking which are specific to a culture - thus someone who is familiar with Indian culture is vastly more likely to appreciate Sitar music, as they'll have associations with it, etc. I come back to Bach's counterpoints because even if they are played on a non-dynamic instrument (such as a harpsichord [in fact, most were written for a harpsichord], the pianoforte having only been invented when Bach was old), they are very easy to analyze.
Because they're so clear, it's very simple to build a musical grammar on top of the counterpoints, which leads to harmony, and then the various other composers who, in essence, broke all sorts of the rules to a variety of effects.
It would be possible to create other musical grammars, but I do not believe that any would be as easy to explain as Bach's - the ratio of string lengths as a source for tonality is pretty apparent...
Notice that none of this has anything to do with whether or not one actually likes Bach. I happen to like his work, but there's lots of classical music which sounds like total crap to me - the same is certainly true of literature: I can't for the life of me figure out what anyone ever saw in Ethan Frome...
I like the suggestion, but a challenge is that the dates of the elections are fixed because we don't have a Parlimentary system. That creates an incentive for the party out of power to start campaigning early, and of course the party in power must respond, and it keeps creeping earlier and earlier.
.sig I've seen in a long time...)
But as a denizen of Washington DC, I would be thrilled if the political seasons were shorter...
(and btw, funniest
I've always loved some of the polemics JMS gives to his characters - another good pair from B5 are:
"sometimes peace is just another word for surrender - so we became the last, best hope... for victory" - Ivanova
and "faith and reason are like the shoes on your feet - you get much further with both than with just the one." - Bro. Theo.
You've got some good points challenging some of the unstated premeses of some of the other posters.
I do think that there is an objective reason to believe that a species which was truly alien would like some (not all) classical music more than modern music: it has fewer musical assumptions.
Specifically, Bach's counterpoints make very few assumptions of the listener - you won't have to understand any other art forms to appreciate Bach. Most modern music (Rap, Rock, etc) uses a shared language which has been built up over centuries, and has a whole lot of cultural assumptions built into it. To pick an example, Eminim's song "Stan," which used the Dido song as a backdrop, makes a bunch of assumptions of the listener: we have to understand obsessive fandom, we have to have an appreciation of the irony of using a sweet pop melody to tell a murderous story, and we get all kinds of references to Eminim's earlier work.
Most artists draw on the shared body of culture to express their art - it's a very rare piece which will seem beautiful to radically different cultures. I would put forth that some early Bach would be more likely to succeed in that than, say, Elvis Presley. Also the lack of lyrics helps: if you listen to Rap, or most Rock without lyrics, it's clearly missing something major - many of the older classical pieces are designed as instrumentals, and thus avoid the language barrier.
Just my $.0196 (adjusted for inflation)
Virtualization is great for some things, but security concerns are substantial - PCI compliance generally means that all of the guests on a host have to be at the same security level. Also, some of the virtual environments don't handle IPv6 properly (and a few other things). These aren't showstoppers, but they can reduce some of the benefit.
I absolutely agree with you: now's the time to start working on it, and we'll need to find out about all of the broken things and fix them (for instance, VMWare and IPv6 autoconfig don't play nicely together, violating the VM security model...)