So, say you're a hacker and you're hired by the US government to work securing.mil networks, and make good money, and later on you are offered a position on a black hat squad for things like messing with an enemy country's phone system, et cetera.
Military pay sucks, and your skills are in demand, so you blow off suggestions that you go through boot camp (who needs that, right?). In another world, the army would respond by offering you huge pay if only you agree to go to boot camp and an officer training course. But there's hardly enough budget to get you even to look at the armed forces, and they need you.
And then a war starts. From the comfort of your office in a military base you set out to root machines on the other side of the front, you're having the time of your life. But, guess what: you're a fair target for the enemy now. Look sharp, soldier! On the bounce! Forget about going to your favorite net cafe until the end of the war. Don't show your face in public. You don't know who might be waiting to shoot you in the back of the head.
Think about. If you're engaging in efforts to disrupt an enemy's infrastructure, why should he not try to find you and shoot you? Why should you be regarded as a civilian?
So, I don't know uder what terms the military hired its current crop of crackers, but I do have to wonder..
1. The signal-to-noise in Slashdot makes it only so much better than Usenet for this purpose.
2. Journalists have a duty to learn their topic well enough not to need Slashdot before writing about it. Asking Slashdot for proofreading is tantamount to admitting profound ignorance of a topic.
3. Slashdot writers have clue, but that does not make them unbiased.
On the other hand:
1. Journalists in general are profoundly clueless about things like net security.
2. So, one might as well admit it.
3. Jane's has done much better by trolling Slashdot for revisions than many publications that have printed clueless pap and then, contrary to Cringely's prescription not bothered to print corrections. For examples, visit Adam Penenberg's column archive. In particular, this one, in which CNNfn and ZDTV, printed false details from one of his stories and refused to correct them.
If MS had succeeded in going above 1% to say, 10%, and I were Ellison, I would gladly pay MS a million dollads to say it publically.
A proposal: the Slashdot Media Dunce Award.
on
Jesux is a Bad Pun
·
· Score: 4
This could be a new section (with dunce cap icon) of links to media articles whose authors show a severe lack of clue. (The purpose of making it a section would be so that people could cross it out of their preferences. Not everyone wants to read all about how Jesse Berst needs another harshing.)
What this would accomplish would be to institutionalize the capacity of Slashdot to review and respond to mainstream media articles, in a way that does not involve floods of email flames toward the Dunce Cap candidate.
The reason I am advocating this is shown well by this Forbes story. This can harness Slashdot's vitriol to good use: whipping the media into shape. There could be a poll with every story (weighted by/. Karma, maybe).
Read his book The Demon Haunted World.. he has a whole chapter devoted to the issue of the general populace's superstitious treatment of geeks in the context of the life of a proto-geek named James Clerk Maxwell.
His gist: "geeks will be geeks; let them be."
Why is that so hard to grok? Why does the public have to act like every teenager who wears unkempt clothes and plays with a soldering iron in his garage is a threat to society?
(And as for Aspberger's Syndrome, sorry, no go. Geeks can spot nuance in text. Folks with AS can't spot nuance when it is biting their noses.)
It's not just cracking codes. If you have to find files containing evidence somewhere amidst all those MP3's, those clock cycles running grep and find begin to add up.
Also, if you're scanning someone's drive for illegal images, it helps to automate a process so a human being doesn't have to mark which are illegal and which are netscape-cached Slashdot icons, for example.
Finally, in case of a nuked drive, it's useful to the feds to be able to dd if=confiscated-drive of=beowulf and then let it chug along.
They could setup a few clusters (if they decide to enter this niche), give telnet access with registration, and let people run their own benchmark programs. That would truly rock over benchmarketing.
Some programs cannot be structured well enough to be easily parallelized, and for them the time lost resynching the Beowulf's machines makes it a net loss.
For example, some data structures are so irregularly organized (unlike the average matrix inversion) and use algorithms that alter their structure in mid run. All you can do is parallelize some of the for(;;) loops and then resynch constantly.
Barbecued locusts, both the real and the noisy American variety. Lots of protein, and they're even kosher. If they let him eat those, he won't be so bad off.
And hey, it's not a cheap marketing stunt. It's an amusing marketing stunt.
Going to play Harry the Handsome Executive right now.
Slashdot Mirror
So, say you're a hacker and you're hired by the US government to work securing .mil networks, and make good money, and later on you are offered a position on a black hat squad for things like messing with an enemy country's phone system, et cetera.
Military pay sucks, and your skills are in demand, so you blow off suggestions that you go through boot camp (who needs that, right?). In another world, the army would respond by offering you huge pay if only you agree to go to boot camp and an officer training course. But there's hardly enough budget to get you even to look at the armed forces, and they need you.
And then a war starts. From the comfort of your office in a military base you set out to root machines on the other side of the front, you're having the time of your life. But, guess what:
you're a fair target for the enemy now. Look sharp, soldier! On the bounce! Forget about going to your favorite net cafe until the end of the war. Don't show your face in public. You don't know who might be waiting to shoot you in the back of the head.
Think about. If you're engaging in efforts to disrupt an enemy's infrastructure, why should he not try to find you and shoot you? Why should you be regarded as a civilian?
So, I don't know uder what terms the military hired its current crop of crackers, but I do have to wonder..
On the one hand:
1. The signal-to-noise in Slashdot makes it only so much better than Usenet for this purpose.
2. Journalists have a duty to learn their topic well enough not to need Slashdot before writing about it. Asking Slashdot for proofreading is tantamount to admitting profound ignorance of a topic.
3. Slashdot writers have clue, but that does not make them unbiased.
On the other hand:
1. Journalists in general are profoundly clueless about things like net security.
2. So, one might as well admit it.
3. Jane's has done much better by trolling Slashdot for revisions than many publications that have printed clueless pap and then, contrary to Cringely's prescription not bothered to print corrections. For examples, visit Adam Penenberg's column archive. In particular, this one, in which CNNfn and ZDTV, printed false details from one of his stories and refused to correct them.
http://www.beowulf.org/listarchives/beowulf/199
http://www.eet.com/story/OEG19990302S0026
Are any flea circuses going to start a spinoff
from this vital new technology?
Hey, if it puts NASA in the black, let'em.
No more cases of clueless Congresscritters causing NASA to miss one launch window after another.
A good invention makes you first ask "how?"
A bad invention makes you first as "why???"
As for this one, do we really want a worse
garbage problem for the sake of animated cereal boxes?
1. a military host was compromised and then used to attack the Aussie stock exchange,
or,
2. the US Army decided to audit the Aussie stock exchange without authorization.
Quite frankly, I hope it's the latter.
Hah! Didn't take very long for Need to Know to comment: http://www.ntk.net/
I am willing to bet that the London Times read about Adi Shamir's TWINKLE concept computer and somehow thought it had already been done.
They tend to do that.
It was a piece of self-depracating humor which as you may have noticed in the thread, Christians found funny.
What is not so funny was that journalists took it seriously.
If Solaris were GPL'd, it would not compete with Linux. It would merge with it.
Sun might increase profits on hardware if they do it, so it's not that far-fetched.
If MS had succeeded in going above 1% to say, 10%, and I were Ellison, I would gladly pay MS a million dollads to say it publically.
This could be a new section (with dunce cap icon) of links to media articles whose authors show a severe lack of clue. (The purpose of making it a section would be so that people could cross it out of their preferences. Not everyone wants to read all about how Jesse Berst needs another harshing.)
/. Karma, maybe).
What this would accomplish would be to institutionalize the capacity of Slashdot to review and respond to mainstream media articles, in a way that does not involve floods of email flames toward the Dunce Cap candidate.
The reason I am advocating this is shown well by
this Forbes story. This can harness Slashdot's vitriol to good use: whipping the media into shape. There could be a poll with every story (weighted by
Allright, enough punting. Back to work.
Read his book The Demon Haunted World.. he has a whole chapter devoted to the issue of the general populace's superstitious treatment of geeks in the context of the life of a proto-geek named James Clerk Maxwell.
His gist: "geeks will be geeks; let them be."
Why is that so hard to grok? Why does the public have to act like every teenager who wears unkempt clothes and plays with a soldering iron in his garage is a threat to society?
(And as for Aspberger's Syndrome, sorry, no go.
Geeks can spot nuance in text. Folks with AS can't spot nuance when it is biting their noses.)
Lets the cabbies take the scenic route without the :-)
passengers noticing.
Thanks.
Time to be pedantic: Beowulfs are defined as running on open source software. Piles of PC's, on the other hand, might run other OS's.
See beowulf.org
It's not just cracking codes. If you have to find files containing evidence somewhere amidst all those MP3's, those clock cycles running grep and find begin to add up.
Also, if you're scanning someone's drive for illegal images, it helps to automate a process so a human being doesn't have to mark which are illegal and which are netscape-cached Slashdot icons, for example.
Finally, in case of a nuked drive, it's useful to the feds to be able to dd if=confiscated-drive of=beowulf and then let it chug along.
And all of that beats this situation:
NYT article that says law enforcement agencies routinely seize hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of computers and hard drives as evidence, but have so few computer experts that confiscated equipment can gather dust for months or years until someone decides whether or not they contain criminal information.
They could setup a few clusters (if they decide to enter this niche), give telnet access with registration, and let people run their own benchmark programs. That would truly rock over benchmarketing.
http://www.fadetoblack.com//interviews/mikecameron /
Student suspended for wearing Pepsi shirt during high school's Coke Day (old, but ironically relevant to today).
There are many company execs in need of a bitch-slap, methinks.
Some programs cannot be structured well enough to be easily parallelized, and for them the time lost resynching the Beowulf's machines makes it a net loss.
For example, some data structures are so irregularly organized (unlike the average matrix inversion) and use algorithms that alter their structure in mid run. All you can do is parallelize some of the for(;;) loops and then resynch constantly.
For those you have no choice but better big iron.
you never lose the Dane.
of all the policies I've heard, this is the most short sighted. Of course, not much detail is given out, but I can see this already:
1. crack root on one bank's machine.
2. metastatize into the whole LAN.
3. install backdoors everywhere.
Now:
4. give a vivid demo + ransom instructions, signed
with one handle. Obtain ransom. Observe which backdoors are undone. Restore what you can.
5. wait.
6. if (backdoors >= 1) {
a. select new handle and set of ransom
instructions.
b. repeat steps 4 and 5.
}
Lovely, eh?
1. make a cream pie.
2. take bookend from living room, place on kitchen table.
3. lean pie against bookend, at 45 degrees.
4. take 5 steps back.
5. run into pie, head first.
6. go to step one.
Problem solved.
Barbecued locusts, both the real and the noisy American variety. Lots of protein, and they're even kosher. If they let him eat those, he won't be so bad off.
And hey, it's not a cheap marketing stunt. It's an amusing marketing stunt.
Going to play Harry the Handsome Executive right now.