Ummm... If slashdot is any indicator, we could anticipate reveiwing lots of Natalie Portman bills, and petitions for more hot grits.
Two reasons this wouldn't be a problem:
1. Admissions requirements. Like I mentioned, citizenship is a priviledge not a right; applicants will be sanity-checked. Before you go nuts and scream "HITLER!!!" all I'm saying is the people should be committed to good government. How to test that properly is hard, but maybe some sort of interview process would work.
2. There's no anonymous legislation proposal. You have to vote on each piece, but if it's from some guy who proposes lots of this kind of tripe, you can safely just punch up "Nay" and be done with it. And there would presumably be some sort of method for ejecting such spammers from the country, just as we have here with moderation and on Usenet with cancels.
I hope you don't really believe that the current government is composed of people who are better at governing than the rest of us. I can't speak for any other country, but in.us, this would constitute a sick joke at best and treason at worst.
Try to imagine a govt. where *everybody* had to spend 2 hours a day reading proposed legislation. Society would rapidly becomed bogged down as time was diverted from things like education, medicine, healthy exercise, etc...
I don't think so. I think that instead there would be a hell of a lot less legislation. Since there would be no full-time "government" per se, people wouldn't have lots of time to come up with this kind of spam legislation. What would end up happening is a nation with a very few, very good laws and citizens that spend virtually no time governing themselves but instead have more time to dedicate to useful tasks.
I'm familiar with basic economics as you mention. In fact, there is a theory of economics that states that over extended periods of stability, economic interests become entrenched within government and innovation and competition are stifled, leading to less efficient markets. By extrapolation, occasional revolutions are beneficial, strange as it would seem. But by having a government of this alternative type, this effect could be greatly reduced - it's hard to lobby a hundred million people but easy to lobby a few dozen. Citizens under Open Government would be expected to debate issues and vote independently. Voting would be mandatory, and anyone could propose and refine legislation. (Sound familiar? "I've got this new feature added in. Comments appreciated..." "Yeah, there's a huge bug, here's a patch..." "Ok, I think this is ready for inclusion (vote)") This could be seriously made to work if some kind of sanity requirement were made of citizens (think Jeff V Merkey).
How long until a new nation is founded, which has openness as its first principle? Much like Open Source, it'd be populated by people who take good government seriously, and are willing to dedicate the time and effort to it. Despite what anyone may say, it's never actually been done before. Most people even in democratic nations believe they have more important things to do than try to improve the government, and just accept that it will be seriously flawed. Just like most computer users don't want to dedicate time and effort to improving software, and instead just accept that it will be seriously flawed.
So, who's interested?:)
Re:How did you hit these speeds? Read this:
on
Cheap Gigabit Ether
·
· Score: 1
Yes indeed. Interrupt loading is a very serious problem with gigabit ethernet, and even with other high-speed devices. And jumbo packets do help quite a bit. There is also a mechanism called interrupt mitigation which uses the same wire packet size but stores N packets at a time before triggering an interrupt. Either method, or both, will significantly improve interrupt loading. Unfortunately, this increases latency, a classic tradeoff.
If in fact identical hardware was used, they must have been exceedingly lucky with that used on the linux system. Why? Simple - a true hardware failure will crash the system. Every. Single. Time. If it's a survivable problem (single-bit error, timing glitch, scsi error, failure of non-system disk, etc), then a crash brought on by it is a software problem and cannot be attributed to hardware. So I find it hard to believe that the nt system had 68 times as many hardware failures. Either, as I said, they were exceedingly lucky, or 68 more crashes should be blamed on enntee, not hardware problems. A crash caused by a nonfatal hardware problem is not a hardware problem at all. It's the responsibility of the os to handle hardware problems as gracefully as possible. This means that other than hard, undetectable memory or processor errors (a three-bit error, a cooling problem, etc), pretty much nothing should cause a system crash. Linux does a decent, but not great, job of recovering from hardware problems. I have no idea how well enntee recovers from them because every time I've used it it's killed itself so quickly it's impossible to tell what caused the problem. Linux will at least dump an oops or panic if at all possible, but enntee seems to just freeze up most of the time.
My own experience tells me that Linux and Solaris are comparable in reliability.
I would have to give the edge to solaris. It can withstand the equivalent of a nuclear bomb blast, but it's so damn slow that it'd take 15 minutes to tell whether the damn thing had crashed or was operating normally. So I use Linux and not solaris, with the understanding that Linux may crash in some circumstances solaris would survive. These rarely occur, however.
I know you're just a troll, but jeezus. More stable than solaris? I doubt anything is more stable than solaris. When it boots it halves the effective speed of the machine, but that doesn't mean it's unstable, just that it sucks big monkey balls.
This is not new. They've been trying quite hard to break samba with every piece of code they've turned out for the past couple years. Of course, samba isn't blameless either - it's not really a very good piece of software. Naturally that's not really all samba's fault either; it's not like there are real standards for these things, and even if there were, it's not like m$ follows their own standards anyway.
It's trying to hit a moving target you can't see while the guy holding the target is doing his damnedest to stab you in the back and take away your arrows. I don't envy the samba people.
heck, they really dumbed it down too, check out the help in the login screen, I laughed my ass off
While I haven't seen this particular gem, I can assure you that, in my experience as a uni lab administrator, lusers need all the help they can get. Of course, no matter what kind of system they're using or what kind of help it provides, they're still too stupid to figure out how to use it.
Interestingly, this brings up a great counter to the argument that windoze is easier to use than *nix. From what I can see, the average user (these are engineering students too, for crissakes) can't really wrap his noodle around either system at first. It's not until a few weeks/months of use that they really get a handle on either system, and even then only for what they've been explicitly shown how to do. I suspect therefore that if people had as much experience with *nix as they have with the old microshit, they'd all argue that windoze was too hard to use. It's all about edumakation and training, or "clue installation."
So don't mock the presence of help, no matter how simplified. Now, it would be nice if non-stupid individuals could enable an "I have a brain" mode, but I assure you, most lusers need all the help they can get.
A mere 64 megs??? Is that like a mere million dollars? Or a mere billion people? I'm hopelessly confused here. Please tell me that, at 20 years old, I'm not thinking "in my day, sonny,..." Geesh. 64 megs is burly for a lightweight workstation and more than adequate for a personal system. Most people without windoze will never even use all 64. Anything more is overkill for individuals.
--TM, wondering what's happening with the kids today
Actually, the Sun Ray 1 is a fantastic idea. Implementation, maybe, is a problem. But the only reason no employee wants to work in an office with a little Sun Ray is that people are too heavily influenced by having moderately powerful standalone machines. The concept of administration cost or simplicity just isn't going to occur to these people. It's the old DSW all over again "my office computer is more powerful than yours." I keep hoping somebody will finally get the NC right. And at the same time I'm afraid that nobody will go for it for this very reason.
as PC servers get better and better, thier maket zone is shrinking day by day
Not to me. Sun's low to midrange servers (those with which I have experience) are excellent. Much less expensive than an S/390, much more powerful and reliable than anything with "Intel" on it. I dare [c|*|*|*|*|q] and friends to come up with something that really competes with (say) the UE450 rather than just a bigger, less compatible version of Uncle Joe's $500 peecee.
If you've ever actually used a Sun system, you'll know what it's about. It's knowing that somebody who actually gave a flying fuck about what "correct" and "better" means designed your system from start to finish. It's about hardware that knows what the fuck it is, to say nothing of how to do its job. It's having a bootloader that says "happy to help" instead of "sorry, you couldn't do that 20 years ago so you can't do it now either." It's having a machine that was designed, not just assembled. It's about having something better than "plug broken commodity chipset A into slots B, run NT boot test (optional), ship."
And it's not just Sun that builds things right. In fact, all the non-peecee vendors do. SGI does. IBM does, when they care to. HP has been known to, when they were still called that. DEC did, once upon a long time ago. And so on.
FWIW, I share Sun's (admittedly self-destructive) attitude: we are too good for you. You're all a bunch of fuckwits that don't appreciate what good hardware is, and then whine that your el-cheapo peecee shit doesn't work as well as you'd like. I'm fucking tired of it. If you don't like Sun, fine. Don't buy their stuff. And when your business fails because your cheezball peecee enntee server goes casters-up, don't bitch about it. You'll have deserved it.
Why doesn't intel give their stuff away? What is that you say, they'd be out of business next year?
I doubt that very much. I suspect that getting everything Intel has would be much like getting the source code to windows (or netscape???). Everybody would look at it briefly, express amazement that the thing works at all, and quickly return to their previous work.
There's just no reason to want anything more from something that's already so well-known, and, quite frankly, so archaic it isn't even useful any more. Intel isn't in business because they protect the ability to make chips that implement a particular instruction set. They are in business because they are the best-known maker of such chips. AMD has proven that anyone can make x86 chips. What nobody has yet demonstrated (to me anyway) is why anyone would want to use them.
Now, if I could have unfettered access to everything in Transmeta's safes, all I would take is the documentation for programming the chip itself. And port Linux to native Crusoe. I don't really care how (or even whether) their "code morphing" stuff works. If it's fast at emulating an x86, it'll be faster emulating itself. And there's zero incentive for me to want x86 emulation if it's faster without it. But then, that's because I don't use closed-source operating systems. Funny how that works. Transmeta derives value from people's foolish use of closed-source operating systems. If everyone used Free Software, any chip would be as good as any other and emulation would be irrelevant. Chips would be chosen for their real characteristics, not for compatibility with a 1971 ISA. What a world that would be, huh?
Let's see. Ignoring for a moment the question of whether Slashdot has polluted my mind (hint: these guys are a bunch of wankers), give me one good reason I should give anything from Redmond a chance. Why should I plonk down my hard-earned money for a goddamned trial copy??? Why should I use an os with a built-in gui when most of the time I don't even want a gui at all? Why should I use an os that restricts me to one platform when I already have one that works on all my platforms? Why should I use an os that won't run on a 486? Why should I trust a company that has, for over 15 years, released nothing but a steady stream of shit?
And the most important question of all: Why should I pay microsoft one dime of my money for something that might or might not work, might or might not meet my needs (actually, it just won't - I doubt very much there's a sparc version or a 386/sx 8MB version), when I already have operating systems that meet my needs perfectly, for free?
I don't need Slashdot to tell me that microsoft's products suck. You see, like many people here, I once used them. That's far more damning than any article posted here. Whether things are better now or not is irrelevant; you've (if your address is really correct) lost my business and I've committed to alternate technologies. Promising that the next release will be better won't get me to come back. I have something you don't - software that works. Why should I consider changing that?
Interesting. Except for the Ultra 5 and 10, which are just sick jokes anyway, I find Sun hardware to be the most reliable on the market. At $ORKPLACE we have 3 E150s that have been up for their entire existence, save for a secondary network card failing in one of them. At about the same time a dozen peecees were purchased, and made to run Linux. So this is a hardware comparison only; software is ignored here. Of the 12 peecees, 5 are still functioning, in many cases because the remaining good parts of otherwise failed machines have been aggregated back into one working machine.
I don't really know whether Sun has had QA problems more recently or not. All I know is that I have several Sun systems, made between 1989 and 1997, and none of them has ever failed.
That said, I would go with peecees (not running windoze of course) over Ultra 5's. The hardware's the same, and the peecee is much cheaper. The use of perfectly good sparcs to build U5s is a crime against nature.
I think this is obvious flamebait and offers great opportunities for Microsoft-bashers to get their daily fix. Everyone knows Windows has lots of bugs. Do we really need a story to tell us that? Furrfu. I consider this type of story a massive troll on the part of Slashdot. "Shocking NEWS - Windows Sucks!!!" Show of hands; who didn't already know that? Shame on you.
Well, you asked.:)
-- TM, thinking that 64k isn't really so many, considering that's about 1 bug per 700 lines of code, and that for every known bug there are hundreds of unknown ones, the discovery of each of which will be yet another Slashdot troll.
I find that 100 Mbit is more than enough most of the time; most systems aren't fast enough to fill a gigabit pipe anyway, and if you have one that is, cost probably isn't your primary concern. (Hint: 125 MB/s is faster than a standard PCI bus can deliver, is about 5 times faster than most ultra/160 scsi disks can deliver data, and thus requires a double-speed fibre-channel controller connected to a striped RAID - or at least two ultra/160 scsi controllers, and at least a 64-bit PCI, sbus, or equivalent on the host side. Not cheap.)
No, gigabit ethernet for LANs doesn't help much. The supporting technology (hubs, switches, etc) is still prohibitively expensive, as are systems that can make effective use of it. The biggest problem today isn't LAN bandwidth; it's Internet bandwidth and the prohibitive costs associated with it. It doesn't help if I can set up a gigabit LAN for -- TM, watching crucial bugfixes trickle in over $CHEAP_UNI's dogslow link
Sure, having kernel modules might make it easier to participate in a DDoS, but it certainly isn't necessary. It can be done from userland, in fact.
Of course, even if it did require kernel access, windows will happily grant such access to anyone who sits down in front of it. Write your own "third party" device driver that does DoS, and bobsyouruncle, you're DDoS'ing.
So just because it seems unlikely that windows was involved in this case doesn't mean it couldn't be in this, future, or other attacks. And while we're at it, how about the proliferation of "wingates" behind which conservatively 100% of the world's skript kiddiez hide when performing their various oh-so-1337 activites? On operating systems with access control, setting up such a thing would require root access and some clues. The lack of such measures makes it easy for anyone to do it on any old dos box.
So microsoft is distorting the truth to try and make themselves look good. Bully for them. Probably because we don't even read about the hundreds of NT/IIS sites that get 0wn3d every day any more. Everybody enjoys not being the culprit at some point. When the tables are turned, we'll be doing the same thing.
Bottom line: misconfigured systems, of any type, can easily be cracked and used for nefarious purposes. Regardless of what specific type happened to be prevalent in the latest well-publicized attacks.
There's no way anything like a lawsuit in international court or whatever is going to matter. The US at least tends to ignore international law when it feels like it, and if the suit is actually in France, then there's nothing obligating the defendents to even show up.
This is what used to be done in an exceedingly classy fashion as the old "international incident." Foreign power spies. You spy back. You catch $FOREIGN_POWER's spy. You make a big deal about it. Scandal ensues, lots of fun for everyone, etc. A lawsuit of any kind is just a prissier version of the same old thing.
Of course, good may come of this - greater exposure of Echelon is ultimately a good thing for everyone as it keeps the US and its allies a little more honest. Of course, the fact that we're here discussing Echelon means it's been superceded, but it's the idea that counts, eh?
-- TM, listening in on my Congressman's Phone Sex session on his cell.
Indeed. Despite any other measures you may take: plugging holes, using bug-free ip implementations, etc, it eventually comes down to this:
If site A has more bandwidth than site B, site A can DoS site B.
If sites A1, A2, A3,...An together have more bandwidth than site B, they can DDoS site B.
If sites A1, A2, A3,...An forge ip headers and use sufficient methods to obfuscate their true locations, they can DDoS site B with impunity, and for a much longer period of time since once their original IPs are blocked, they can simply forge new ones.
Finally, if any of sites A1, A2, A3,...An are in countries with little or no motivation/resources to track down/extradite/prosecute the offenders, they can DDoS site B with total impunity, even without disguising themselves.
So yes, there really is no way to prevent this completely. It becomes a slugging match: whoever has more bandwidth wins. Every single time. Which, incidentally, is what makes this week's attacks so interesting - the sites being DoS'd have tremendous bandwidth.
A "normal" distributed attack might consume a few hundred megabits per second and affect a few sites with less bandwidth themselves. This attack consumed 8+ gigabits per second and affected the best-connected sites in the world, and the entire us backbone. So I reiterate - distributed or not, that's a helluva lot of bandwidth. I find it difficult to believe that skript kiddies would be able to get access to that much, even at 50 different sites. It makes sense to consider alternatative theories in this context. It might turn out to be nothing unusual, but I do think the circumstances warrant a closer look even by the non-paranoid.
Personally, I blame seti@home. They probably put some DoS code in their client when they realized that they were running out of real work to do. That's why they won't open source it.
No way man, at's actually yeti@home, and the DoS is really just due to a sudden increase in yeti activity. Stay in your homes, people!!!
Slashdot Mirror
s/use/need/
Two reasons this wouldn't be a problem:
1. Admissions requirements. Like I mentioned, citizenship is a priviledge not a right; applicants will be sanity-checked. Before you go nuts and scream "HITLER!!!" all I'm saying is the people should be committed to good government. How to test that properly is hard, but maybe some sort of interview process would work.
2. There's no anonymous legislation proposal. You have to vote on each piece, but if it's from some guy who proposes lots of this kind of tripe, you can safely just punch up "Nay" and be done with it. And there would presumably be some sort of method for ejecting such spammers from the country, just as we have here with moderation and on Usenet with cancels.
Try to imagine a govt. where *everybody* had to spend 2 hours a day reading proposed legislation. Society would rapidly becomed bogged down as time was diverted from things like education, medicine, healthy exercise, etc...
I don't think so. I think that instead there would be a hell of a lot less legislation. Since there would be no full-time "government" per se, people wouldn't have lots of time to come up with this kind of spam legislation. What would end up happening is a nation with a very few, very good laws and citizens that spend virtually no time governing themselves but instead have more time to dedicate to useful tasks.
I'm familiar with basic economics as you mention. In fact, there is a theory of economics that states that over extended periods of stability, economic interests become entrenched within government and innovation and competition are stifled, leading to less efficient markets. By extrapolation, occasional revolutions are beneficial, strange as it would seem. But by having a government of this alternative type, this effect could be greatly reduced - it's hard to lobby a hundred million people but easy to lobby a few dozen. Citizens under Open Government would be expected to debate issues and vote independently. Voting would be mandatory, and anyone could propose and refine legislation. (Sound familiar? "I've got this new feature added in. Comments appreciated..." "Yeah, there's a huge bug, here's a patch..." "Ok, I think this is ready for inclusion (vote)") This could be seriously made to work if some kind of sanity requirement were made of citizens (think Jeff V Merkey).
So, who's interested? :)
--TM
If in fact identical hardware was used, they must have been exceedingly lucky with that used on the linux system. Why? Simple - a true hardware failure will crash the system. Every. Single. Time. If it's a survivable problem (single-bit error, timing glitch, scsi error, failure of non-system disk, etc), then a crash brought on by it is a software problem and cannot be attributed to hardware. So I find it hard to believe that the nt system had 68 times as many hardware failures. Either, as I said, they were exceedingly lucky, or 68 more crashes should be blamed on enntee, not hardware problems. A crash caused by a nonfatal hardware problem is not a hardware problem at all. It's the responsibility of the os to handle hardware problems as gracefully as possible. This means that other than hard, undetectable memory or processor errors (a three-bit error, a cooling problem, etc), pretty much nothing should cause a system crash. Linux does a decent, but not great, job of recovering from hardware problems. I have no idea how well enntee recovers from them because every time I've used it it's killed itself so quickly it's impossible to tell what caused the problem. Linux will at least dump an oops or panic if at all possible, but enntee seems to just freeze up most of the time.
I would have to give the edge to solaris. It can withstand the equivalent of a nuclear bomb blast, but it's so damn slow that it'd take 15 minutes to tell whether the damn thing had crashed or was operating normally. So I use Linux and not solaris, with the understanding that Linux may crash in some circumstances solaris would survive. These rarely occur, however.
I know you're just a troll, but jeezus. More stable than solaris? I doubt anything is more stable than solaris. When it boots it halves the effective speed of the machine, but that doesn't mean it's unstable, just that it sucks big monkey balls.
It's trying to hit a moving target you can't see while the guy holding the target is doing his damnedest to stab you in the back and take away your arrows. I don't envy the samba people.
Finally, Microsoft employees posting as ACs. Oh wait...I'm pretty sure that's been happening for some time.
While I haven't seen this particular gem, I can assure you that, in my experience as a uni lab administrator, lusers need all the help they can get. Of course, no matter what kind of system they're using or what kind of help it provides, they're still too stupid to figure out how to use it.
Interestingly, this brings up a great counter to the argument that windoze is easier to use than *nix. From what I can see, the average user (these are engineering students too, for crissakes) can't really wrap his noodle around either system at first. It's not until a few weeks/months of use that they really get a handle on either system, and even then only for what they've been explicitly shown how to do. I suspect therefore that if people had as much experience with *nix as they have with the old microshit, they'd all argue that windoze was too hard to use. It's all about edumakation and training, or "clue installation."
So don't mock the presence of help, no matter how simplified. Now, it would be nice if non-stupid individuals could enable an "I have a brain" mode, but I assure you, most lusers need all the help they can get.
A mere 64 megs??? Is that like a mere million dollars? Or a mere billion people? I'm hopelessly confused here. Please tell me that, at 20 years old, I'm not thinking "in my day, sonny,..." Geesh. 64 megs is burly for a lightweight workstation and more than adequate for a personal system. Most people without windoze will never even use all 64. Anything more is overkill for individuals.
--TM, wondering what's happening with the kids today
as PC servers get better and better, thier maket zone is shrinking day by day
Not to me. Sun's low to midrange servers (those with which I have experience) are excellent. Much less expensive than an S/390, much more powerful and reliable than anything with "Intel" on it. I dare [c|*|*|*|*|q] and friends to come up with something that really competes with (say) the UE450 rather than just a bigger, less compatible version of Uncle Joe's $500 peecee.
If you've ever actually used a Sun system, you'll know what it's about. It's knowing that somebody who actually gave a flying fuck about what "correct" and "better" means designed your system from start to finish. It's about hardware that knows what the fuck it is, to say nothing of how to do its job. It's having a bootloader that says "happy to help" instead of "sorry, you couldn't do that 20 years ago so you can't do it now either." It's having a machine that was designed, not just assembled. It's about having something better than "plug broken commodity chipset A into slots B, run NT boot test (optional), ship."
And it's not just Sun that builds things right. In fact, all the non-peecee vendors do. SGI does. IBM does, when they care to. HP has been known to, when they were still called that. DEC did, once upon a long time ago. And so on.
FWIW, I share Sun's (admittedly self-destructive) attitude: we are too good for you. You're all a bunch of fuckwits that don't appreciate what good hardware is, and then whine that your el-cheapo peecee shit doesn't work as well as you'd like. I'm fucking tired of it. If you don't like Sun, fine. Don't buy their stuff. And when your business fails because your cheezball peecee enntee server goes casters-up, don't bitch about it. You'll have deserved it.
--TM, wandering away, muttering
Well, let's remember that Ethernet isn't really a very good technology. :)
I doubt that very much. I suspect that getting everything Intel has would be much like getting the source code to windows (or netscape???). Everybody would look at it briefly, express amazement that the thing works at all, and quickly return to their previous work.
There's just no reason to want anything more from something that's already so well-known, and, quite frankly, so archaic it isn't even useful any more. Intel isn't in business because they protect the ability to make chips that implement a particular instruction set. They are in business because they are the best-known maker of such chips. AMD has proven that anyone can make x86 chips. What nobody has yet demonstrated (to me anyway) is why anyone would want to use them.
Now, if I could have unfettered access to everything in Transmeta's safes, all I would take is the documentation for programming the chip itself. And port Linux to native Crusoe. I don't really care how (or even whether) their "code morphing" stuff works. If it's fast at emulating an x86, it'll be faster emulating itself. And there's zero incentive for me to want x86 emulation if it's faster without it. But then, that's because I don't use closed-source operating systems. Funny how that works. Transmeta derives value from people's foolish use of closed-source operating systems. If everyone used Free Software, any chip would be as good as any other and emulation would be irrelevant. Chips would be chosen for their real characteristics, not for compatibility with a 1971 ISA. What a world that would be, huh?
And the most important question of all: Why should I pay microsoft one dime of my money for something that might or might not work, might or might not meet my needs (actually, it just won't - I doubt very much there's a sparc version or a 386/sx 8MB version), when I already have operating systems that meet my needs perfectly, for free?
I don't need Slashdot to tell me that microsoft's products suck. You see, like many people here, I once used them. That's far more damning than any article posted here. Whether things are better now or not is irrelevant; you've (if your address is really correct) lost my business and I've committed to alternate technologies. Promising that the next release will be better won't get me to come back. I have something you don't - software that works. Why should I consider changing that?
I don't really know whether Sun has had QA problems more recently or not. All I know is that I have several Sun systems, made between 1989 and 1997, and none of them has ever failed.
That said, I would go with peecees (not running windoze of course) over Ultra 5's. The hardware's the same, and the peecee is much cheaper. The use of perfectly good sparcs to build U5s is a crime against nature.
I think this is obvious flamebait and offers great opportunities for Microsoft-bashers to get their daily fix. Everyone knows Windows has lots of bugs. Do we really need a story to tell us that? Furrfu. I consider this type of story a massive troll on the part of Slashdot. "Shocking NEWS - Windows Sucks!!!" Show of hands; who didn't already know that? Shame on you.
Well, you asked. :)
-- TM, thinking that 64k isn't really so many, considering that's about 1 bug per 700 lines of code, and that for every known bug there are hundreds of unknown ones, the discovery of each of which will be yet another Slashdot troll.
No, gigabit ethernet for LANs doesn't help much. The supporting technology (hubs, switches, etc) is still prohibitively expensive, as are systems that can make effective use of it. The biggest problem today isn't LAN bandwidth; it's Internet bandwidth and the prohibitive costs associated with it. It doesn't help if I can set up a gigabit LAN for -- TM, watching crucial bugfixes trickle in over $CHEAP_UNI's dogslow link
Of course, even if it did require kernel access, windows will happily grant such access to anyone who sits down in front of it. Write your own "third party" device driver that does DoS, and bobsyouruncle, you're DDoS'ing.
So just because it seems unlikely that windows was involved in this case doesn't mean it couldn't be in this, future, or other attacks. And while we're at it, how about the proliferation of "wingates" behind which conservatively 100% of the world's skript kiddiez hide when performing their various oh-so-1337 activites? On operating systems with access control, setting up such a thing would require root access and some clues. The lack of such measures makes it easy for anyone to do it on any old dos box.
So microsoft is distorting the truth to try and make themselves look good. Bully for them. Probably because we don't even read about the hundreds of NT/IIS sites that get 0wn3d every day any more. Everybody enjoys not being the culprit at some point. When the tables are turned, we'll be doing the same thing.
Bottom line: misconfigured systems, of any type, can easily be cracked and used for nefarious purposes. Regardless of what specific type happened to be prevalent in the latest well-publicized attacks.
This is what used to be done in an exceedingly classy fashion as the old "international incident." Foreign power spies. You spy back. You catch $FOREIGN_POWER's spy. You make a big deal about it. Scandal ensues, lots of fun for everyone, etc. A lawsuit of any kind is just a prissier version of the same old thing.
Of course, good may come of this - greater exposure of Echelon is ultimately a good thing for everyone as it keeps the US and its allies a little more honest. Of course, the fact that we're here discussing Echelon means it's been superceded, but it's the idea that counts, eh?
-- TM, listening in on my Congressman's Phone Sex session on his cell.
Wow, too naive for Slashdot??? He must be very naive indeed.
If site A has more bandwidth than site B, site A can DoS site B.
If sites A1, A2, A3,...An together have more bandwidth than site B, they can DDoS site B.
If sites A1, A2, A3,...An forge ip headers and use sufficient methods to obfuscate their true locations, they can DDoS site B with impunity, and for a much longer period of time since once their original IPs are blocked, they can simply forge new ones.
Finally, if any of sites A1, A2, A3,...An are in countries with little or no motivation/resources to track down/extradite/prosecute the offenders, they can DDoS site B with total impunity, even without disguising themselves.
So yes, there really is no way to prevent this completely. It becomes a slugging match: whoever has more bandwidth wins. Every single time. Which, incidentally, is what makes this week's attacks so interesting - the sites being DoS'd have tremendous bandwidth.
Red Hat 6.1 Beta, which has been on FTP sites for some months now.
Personally, I blame seti@home. They probably put some DoS code in their client when they realized that they were running out of real work to do. That's why they won't open source it.
No way man, at's actually yeti@home, and the DoS is really just due to a sudden increase in yeti activity. Stay in your homes, people!!!