You just know it's a bad idea to DDoS the Department of Homeland Security servers:-). I suspect this investigation would never have gotten off the ground if they hadn't taken out an important government site in the collateral damage when they hit the name servers at one of the ISPs.
This was a concerted and persistent attack on several sites, they didn't just SYN flood, they pulled masses of HTML data (slashdot attack:-) and then hit the name servers. I hope they throw away the key on these scumbags.
However, when has this kind of case *ever* been investigated in the past? We've had any number of similar attacks but the DOJ sat on their lazy ass and did nothing about it. Let's hope this opens their eyes to this type of crime and they start chasing the perpetrators.
If you're talking about the DRI then I have to comment that direct rendering is nothing like DirectX 3. The DRI is an underlying mechanism to get 3D drivers to interface with hardware efficiently and in a modular way, it doesn't affect the higher level ABI in any way what soever. Something like the DRI is essential for efficient hardware acceleration on modern hardware with complexities like high speed DMA from the card. It is completely invisible to applications that don't care. It is not a hack and it's nothing like the crimes Microsoft committed with D3D.
Don't assume that I support RIAA or MPAA, I think they're all crooks. That doesn't mean I have to agree with people who say we should be chasing terrorists instead of shutting down prolific copyright abusers. They've taken a long time to go after copyright breakers but it's not unprecedented. Given that there's a value threshold for DOJ intervention how would you determine someone has tripped the value threshold in abusing a GPL copyright. Do you attach some huge number to the value of the code? It could be hundreds of millions of dollars and one shipment of one software binary could get you prosecuted under that interpretation for having an illegal valuable single copy of the code.
Your post is a classic case of begging the question. It presupposes that some time was taken away from anti-terrorism activities when that is not established and highly unlikely given the demarcation and budgeting of such things. It also ignores tha law of diminishing returns when it comes to anti-terrorism spending. With cases bordering on entrapment of dumb Imams I seriously doubt the DOJ could find something productive to do. You also imply that no time should be devoded to clearly criminal activity, effectively negating the law, simply because is suits your politics in this instance. You could pick any example of law breaking and cite anti-terrorism as a more worthy calling. It's a riddiculous world view that if taken seriously would leave us doing nothing else.
Maybe, I've seen suggestions that there was an ISP involved, however if it is bullshit, I'd be getting mighty sick of Ashcroft's exaggerations. His cyberterror bullshit over the Antartica hack was pretty annoying.
OTOH if you have a network of a few thousand people with an entry limit of 100GB and most weigh in at say 250-500GB or more then then the total capacity of the file sharing network could easily reach 40 petabytes. Exactly what was defined as a hub/node is unclear, it could have been akin to a supernode that made available a directory of a few thousand mapped systems. So a few supernodes and a directory of available files would make this plausible.
Sounds like they hit the supernodes in a grokster like network that had a file collection size threshold as a prerequisite for joining.
Now that I'm thinking along these lines it is worrying. DOJ has the capacity to go after the supernodes in grokster networks using electronic surveilance. Heck is looks like that's almost what they've done here.
The DOJ pretty much runs the whole federal show when it comes to prosecuting criminals. Unfortunately I see a lot of lame comments like "why don't they go after the terrorists instead of kids", (I suspect from the most vocal critics of the DOJ when they really do attempt to go after terrorists). The DOJ goes after all sorts of criminals, it's what they do, they're not going to stop prosecuting kidnappers, robbers or any other kind of criminal because there may be terrorists that also need prosecuting. We can't let the fact that there are suspected terrorists who need to be investigated force us to ignore other offences, there are folks who specialize in chasing terrorists and frankly there aren't enough terrorists on DOJ's turf to keep them busy. Heck they'd be investigating even more innocent folks if they devoted more resources to it, something that really gets the anti-DOJ crown in a tizzy.
These weren't kiddys, these were dedicated mass pirates with fat connections and petabytes of pirated material *peta*bytes, I mean geeze, that's a crap load of data. It's disingenuous and pretty depraved to suggest ignoring some law because you sypmathize with breaking it (on a much smaller scale) using terrorism as the excuse. This is on par with some of the lowest things Ashcroft et.al have been accused of.
Not true. They don't just lug away the computer. A *team* rifles through everything, and they take just about everything from flashcards in your digital camera to your TIVO box. It's all tagged and logged appropriately. Along the way they'll grab your CDROMs computer book collection, USB dongles etc. etc. You should read one of the articles by anyone the Feds have pulled a "Steve Jackson" on. It ain't pretty and you can consider your stuff gone forever (for all intents and purposes, it'll be obsolete by the time you see it again).
Also phishers use spam to net victims, at least some the spamming mentioned is the worst kind, hacked servers forged headers, identity theft and fraud all rolled into one, probably with several hundred counts on more than a few indictments. They're gonna do some serious Federal time, with no discount tickets.
At least they won't spam again, when they get out they won't recognize the voice activated holographic Linux desktop that everyone will be using.
If they used forged headers it is illegal and forensics is vital in prosecution, the computer hardware will have been taken. Moreover, phishers use fraudulent spam to net victims then commit fraud & identity theft with the information they gather, these are very serious crimes. I expect the spam related part of this news is the forged Citibank, ebay style account renewal phishing spam and an integral part of the fraud. All aspects of this announcement fit the profile of a phishing crackdown and that's great news IMHO. These scumbags and no better than street muggers.
There will be a press conference later today, if you're rounding up crooks in a crackdown you don't announce the fact after the initial arrests because you tip off everyone else. I expect they didn't have enough computer forensic specialists to do the classic coast to coast simultaneous door knock. Computer forensics will play a huge part in catching phishers.
This is a good thing, phishing & identity theft is evil and the scumbags doing it have assumed that they can get away with brazen theft. It's about time some serious attempt to jail these a*holes was made.
So now nobody will implement this, and Microsoft, through patenting something obvious and trying to license it has scared everyone away from some pretty good ideas that would have been implemented otherwise, with or without Microsoft's help.
This is just the latest chapter in IP stupidity.
This stuff has been discussed for years, if this had been treated like most other W3C standards we'd be in the clear by now waiting for implementations, instead everyone's scared. Does anyone realistically think that there aren't patents that W3C standards already infringe? Finally we actually get rights to something and we're inspecting the teeth, simply because the subject has been raised.
The crazy part of this whole deal is that most software is riddled with potential patent violations, including Microsoft's and including projects like Mozilla, Gimp and Open Office. That's why MS are trying to retain *defensive* rights, because they know it would be dangerous to give this IP away, anyone could stand on their shoulders, and a widget and then sue them (and that has happened already) and Microsoft would have no way of countering. If they adopted a more GPL oriented license with the rights being rescinded in the event of any patent suit against M$ it would be golden. They could just do to the protagonists what IBM has just done to SCO, infact that wording is almost already in the GPL.
I think this situation can be salvaged with another revision of the license. We should not give up on this or go for the second best option on such an improtant proposal.
We're getting to witness what the beginning of the web would have been like had Tim Bernards Lee patented some of his ideas. It ain't going to be pretty.
Unfortunately in this case the system in question was tested with a live plant running in well beyond normal operating procedures with almost all the safety systems hacked off, not turned off (there was no procedure for that), they hacked around their safety systems.
To use your own analogy, if you're testing your UPS, you don't burn your backup tapes, turn disk software cache to max, rip out a drive from your RAID 5 array to eliminate redundancy, turn the case cooling fans off, start thrashing your harddrive with data writes to your business critical database, give the case a few good kicks and just as you do it pull the plug out.
That's the equivalent of what these Chernobyl morons did, except they had *much* *much* more riding on this than a business, and even a bad UPS is a lot more reliable and predictable and simpler than the nuclear pile they were playing games with, and no this really isn't an exaggeration.
Warped rods jamming is a recurring theme in reactor accidents. The same thing happened at Windscale, although in that case they were trying to push fuel rods out of the pile as an emergency procedure. It was all a bit more crude back then and operators could see the fuel glowing orange in the pile, the pile was on fire due to excess heat.
Chernobyl went way beyond human error, having morons using a massive nuclear power plant for their personal experimentation is not a good thing.
One thing about Soviet Russia though, they kept the other perfectly good reactor running after the meltdown. You can't accuse them of kneejerk political pandering.
The nimrods running the plant deliberately disabled critical safety systems to conduct a test of another safety system. There's a key issue here, if you need to ask the question then you should not put it to the test without considering the very severe consequences and erroded safety margin left should the answer to the question be other than you expect.
It reminds me of a story of the F-16 pilot sitting on the ground who thought the aircraft would stop him raising the gear when on the ground. So he tried it and discovered that yes he could indeed raise the gear contrary to his expectation, now I ask you why would to do something so dumb?
I also ask, why would the plant engineers at Chernobyl disable safety systems to *test* another *backup* safety system? Utterly moronic, and there's not a lot a plant designer can do to avoid that kind of rank stupidity. A good old fashoned Soviet show trial followed by swift execution of the plant managers is the appropriate remedy.
Yea all this walking around we do on the planet, we could run out of Gravity! How do we even know if gravity is sustainable, quick everyone stop moving.
Nimrods, healthy skepticism is one thing, just blurting some bullshit, PC, kneejerk envirofreak jibberish demonstrating your utter ignorance of physical things is quite another. If you want to join in the discussion then study something useful like physics. Until then you'll just be confused about why you're ranting is seen as hysterical.
There's a physical limit to the display, and an accepted format & quality threshold. People buy DVDs instead of anamorphic DVDs (not me but some do). The point is people will buy content and/or rip to their current supported technology bottleneck until they can rip to the new high res format. If they have a player or can display it they'll rip, and of course film & production has it's limits.
Some people *DID* rip to CDs for a while until DVD media came down in price or they could just store on a hard drive, the scenario will just repeat itself.
It ain't going to happen. People pay so much for a movie, this is a long established figure to maximize revenue net of costs. They won't pay more for the same digital content so anything extra on media costs is straight off your top line or your volume and that comes straight off your bottom line. It won't happen, it has to cost the same of be cheaper.
Yup, *I* hate DRM, but if the studios own the content and distribute with DRM that'll only play in your licensed player it won't matter a stuff if you, me and all the geeks in China don't buy it. Not exactly related but how open do you think a DVD is without DeCCS? And DeCCS is thoroughly illegal in the states. Geeks still buy DVDs.
And FWIW the execs would argue that you pay for the digital remastering etc. Not that I agree, I think they're crooks but nobode listens to me except slashdot whiners.
You don't have to compete with the theatre, you have to compete with whatever scraps they throw at your TV. Heck most of Hollywood's big beef right now is compressed NTSC resolution data. Even anamorphic has the same line count as NTSC or less if > 16:9 so it's not exactly gonna stop everyone in their tracks. HD will just increase the lines. Lots of people have HDTVs, most are 1080i capable, or 720p take your pick. It ain't gonna get better than that unless you're on a PC monitor. The point is there's nothing they can sell you on your TV that will be any problem to copy. The whole thing is a ruse anyway, why the heck Hollywood are so scared by PCs & digital media is beyond me, it's the biggest opportunity since the 'talkies' and they're running scared like a bunch if myopic luddites. The greaseballs at these companies are too slow and entrenched to get off their ass and use this stuff to sell content to the public. All they do is rattle their sabres about threats to their monopoly. It's taken decades for these jerks and others like them to get to HDTV, if it had been the PC industry we'd have been there years ago and already be moving on to the next big thing. They don't even want to upgrade DVDs because they fear it'll eat into cinema revenues! What about increasing DVD revenues? What other business deliberately sells a shit product? Oh wait, I know one, official online music stores, they deliberately degrade their product to be crap compared to CDs, there's another great business!
Slashdot Mirror
You just know it's a bad idea to DDoS the Department of Homeland Security servers :-). I suspect this investigation would never have gotten off the ground if they hadn't taken out an important government site in the collateral damage when they hit the name servers at one of the ISPs.
:-) and then hit the name servers. I hope they throw away the key on these scumbags.
This was a concerted and persistent attack on several sites, they didn't just SYN flood, they pulled masses of HTML data (slashdot attack
However, when has this kind of case *ever* been investigated in the past? We've had any number of similar attacks but the DOJ sat on their lazy ass and did nothing about it. Let's hope this opens their eyes to this type of crime and they start chasing the perpetrators.
Nuclear fusion eh? It's a long shot but it just might work.
I know, I know RTFA.... etc......Get over it.
If you're talking about the DRI then I have to comment that direct rendering is nothing like DirectX 3. The DRI is an underlying mechanism to get 3D drivers to interface with hardware efficiently and in a modular way, it doesn't affect the higher level ABI in any way what soever. Something like the DRI is essential for efficient hardware acceleration on modern hardware with complexities like high speed DMA from the card. It is completely invisible to applications that don't care. It is not a hack and it's nothing like the crimes Microsoft committed with D3D.
Don't assume that I support RIAA or MPAA, I think they're all crooks. That doesn't mean I have to agree with people who say we should be chasing terrorists instead of shutting down prolific copyright abusers. They've taken a long time to go after copyright breakers but it's not unprecedented. Given that there's a value threshold for DOJ intervention how would you determine someone has tripped the value threshold in abusing a GPL copyright. Do you attach some huge number to the value of the code? It could be hundreds of millions of dollars and one shipment of one software binary could get you prosecuted under that interpretation for having an illegal valuable single copy of the code.
Your post is a classic case of begging the question. It presupposes that some time was taken away from anti-terrorism activities when that is not established and highly unlikely given the demarcation and budgeting of such things. It also ignores tha law of diminishing returns when it comes to anti-terrorism spending. With cases bordering on entrapment of dumb Imams I seriously doubt the DOJ could find something productive to do. You also imply that no time should be devoded to clearly criminal activity, effectively negating the law, simply because is suits your politics in this instance. You could pick any example of law breaking and cite anti-terrorism as a more worthy calling. It's a riddiculous world view that if taken seriously would leave us doing nothing else.
Maybe, I've seen suggestions that there was an ISP involved, however if it is bullshit, I'd be getting mighty sick of Ashcroft's exaggerations. His cyberterror bullshit over the Antartica hack was pretty annoying.
OTOH if you have a network of a few thousand people with an entry limit of 100GB and most weigh in at say 250-500GB or more then then the total capacity of the file sharing network could easily reach 40 petabytes. Exactly what was defined as a hub/node is unclear, it could have been akin to a supernode that made available a directory of a few thousand mapped systems. So a few supernodes and a directory of available files would make this plausible.
Sounds like they hit the supernodes in a grokster like network that had a file collection size threshold as a prerequisite for joining.
Now that I'm thinking along these lines it is worrying. DOJ has the capacity to go after the supernodes in grokster networks using electronic surveilance. Heck is looks like that's almost what they've done here.
The DOJ pretty much runs the whole federal show when it comes to prosecuting criminals. Unfortunately I see a lot of lame comments like "why don't they go after the terrorists instead of kids", (I suspect from the most vocal critics of the DOJ when they really do attempt to go after terrorists). The DOJ goes after all sorts of criminals, it's what they do, they're not going to stop prosecuting kidnappers, robbers or any other kind of criminal because there may be terrorists that also need prosecuting. We can't let the fact that there are suspected terrorists who need to be investigated force us to ignore other offences, there are folks who specialize in chasing terrorists and frankly there aren't enough terrorists on DOJ's turf to keep them busy. Heck they'd be investigating even more innocent folks if they devoted more resources to it, something that really gets the anti-DOJ crown in a tizzy.
These weren't kiddys, these were dedicated mass pirates with fat connections and petabytes of pirated material *peta*bytes, I mean geeze, that's a crap load of data. It's disingenuous and pretty depraved to suggest ignoring some law because you sypmathize with breaking it (on a much smaller scale) using terrorism as the excuse. This is on par with some of the lowest things Ashcroft et.al have been accused of.
Not true. They don't just lug away the computer. A *team* rifles through everything, and they take just about everything from flashcards in your digital camera to your TIVO box. It's all tagged and logged appropriately. Along the way they'll grab your CDROMs computer book collection, USB dongles etc. etc. You should read one of the articles by anyone the Feds have pulled a "Steve Jackson" on. It ain't pretty and you can consider your stuff gone forever (for all intents and purposes, it'll be obsolete by the time you see it again).
They may be trying to clean up spam's rep (fat chance) but phishing is not merely direct marketing.
He wasn't "being ironic", he was being sarcastic.
Also phishers use spam to net victims, at least some the spamming mentioned is the worst kind, hacked servers forged headers, identity theft and fraud all rolled into one, probably with several hundred counts on more than a few indictments. They're gonna do some serious Federal time, with no discount tickets.
At least they won't spam again, when they get out they won't recognize the voice activated holographic Linux desktop that everyone will be using.
Ah, now I get it, sarcasm....
If they used forged headers it is illegal and forensics is vital in prosecution, the computer hardware will have been taken. Moreover, phishers use fraudulent spam to net victims then commit fraud & identity theft with the information they gather, these are very serious crimes. I expect the spam related part of this news is the forged Citibank, ebay style account renewal phishing spam and an integral part of the fraud. All aspects of this announcement fit the profile of a phishing crackdown and that's great news IMHO. These scumbags and no better than street muggers.
There will be a press conference later today, if you're rounding up crooks in a crackdown you don't announce the fact after the initial arrests because you tip off everyone else. I expect they didn't have enough computer forensic specialists to do the classic coast to coast simultaneous door knock. Computer forensics will play a huge part in catching phishers.
This is a good thing, phishing & identity theft is evil and the scumbags doing it have assumed that they can get away with brazen theft. It's about time some serious attempt to jail these a*holes was made.
So now nobody will implement this, and Microsoft, through patenting something obvious and trying to license it has scared everyone away from some pretty good ideas that would have been implemented otherwise, with or without Microsoft's help.
This is just the latest chapter in IP stupidity.
This stuff has been discussed for years, if this had been treated like most other W3C standards we'd be in the clear by now waiting for implementations, instead everyone's scared. Does anyone realistically think that there aren't patents that W3C standards already infringe? Finally we actually get rights to something and we're inspecting the teeth, simply because the subject has been raised.
The crazy part of this whole deal is that most software is riddled with potential patent violations, including Microsoft's and including projects like Mozilla, Gimp and Open Office. That's why MS are trying to retain *defensive* rights, because they know it would be dangerous to give this IP away, anyone could stand on their shoulders, and a widget and then sue them (and that has happened already) and Microsoft would have no way of countering. If they adopted a more GPL oriented license with the rights being rescinded in the event of any patent suit against M$ it would be golden. They could just do to the protagonists what IBM has just done to SCO, infact that wording is almost already in the GPL.
I think this situation can be salvaged with another revision of the license. We should not give up on this or go for the second best option on such an improtant proposal.
We're getting to witness what the beginning of the web would have been like had Tim Bernards Lee patented some of his ideas. It ain't going to be pretty.
Depends on several factors. Do I have a working cooler? How hot am I? Who's paying?
Unfortunately in this case the system in question was tested with a live plant running in well beyond normal operating procedures with almost all the safety systems hacked off, not turned off (there was no procedure for that), they hacked around their safety systems.
To use your own analogy, if you're testing your UPS, you don't burn your backup tapes, turn disk software cache to max, rip out a drive from your RAID 5 array to eliminate redundancy, turn the case cooling fans off, start thrashing your harddrive with data writes to your business critical database, give the case a few good kicks and just as you do it pull the plug out.
That's the equivalent of what these Chernobyl morons did, except they had *much* *much* more riding on this than a business, and even a bad UPS is a lot more reliable and predictable and simpler than the nuclear pile they were playing games with, and no this really isn't an exaggeration.
One moronic bigoted stereotype deserves another eh?
Warped rods jamming is a recurring theme in reactor accidents. The same thing happened at Windscale, although in that case they were trying to push fuel rods out of the pile as an emergency procedure. It was all a bit more crude back then and operators could see the fuel glowing orange in the pile, the pile was on fire due to excess heat.
Chernobyl went way beyond human error, having morons using a massive nuclear power plant for their personal experimentation is not a good thing.
One thing about Soviet Russia though, they kept the other perfectly good reactor running after the meltdown. You can't accuse them of kneejerk political pandering.
The nimrods running the plant deliberately disabled critical safety systems to conduct a test of another safety system. There's a key issue here, if you need to ask the question then you should not put it to the test without considering the very severe consequences and erroded safety margin left should the answer to the question be other than you expect.
It reminds me of a story of the F-16 pilot sitting on the ground who thought the aircraft would stop him raising the gear when on the ground. So he tried it and discovered that yes he could indeed raise the gear contrary to his expectation, now I ask you why would to do something so dumb?
I also ask, why would the plant engineers at Chernobyl disable safety systems to *test* another *backup* safety system? Utterly moronic, and there's not a lot a plant designer can do to avoid that kind of rank stupidity. A good old fashoned Soviet show trial followed by swift execution of the plant managers is the appropriate remedy.
Yea all this walking around we do on the planet, we could run out of Gravity! How do we even know if gravity is sustainable, quick everyone stop moving.
Nimrods, healthy skepticism is one thing, just blurting some bullshit, PC, kneejerk envirofreak jibberish demonstrating your utter ignorance of physical things is quite another. If you want to join in the discussion then study something useful like physics. Until then you'll just be confused about why you're ranting is seen as hysterical.
There's a physical limit to the display, and an accepted format & quality threshold. People buy DVDs instead of anamorphic DVDs (not me but some do). The point is people will buy content and/or rip to their current supported technology bottleneck until they can rip to the new high res format. If they have a player or can display it they'll rip, and of course film & production has it's limits.
Some people *DID* rip to CDs for a while until DVD media came down in price or they could just store on a hard drive, the scenario will just repeat itself.
It ain't going to happen. People pay so much for a movie, this is a long established figure to maximize revenue net of costs. They won't pay more for the same digital content so anything extra on media costs is straight off your top line or your volume and that comes straight off your bottom line. It won't happen, it has to cost the same of be cheaper.
Yup, *I* hate DRM, but if the studios own the content and distribute with DRM that'll only play in your licensed player it won't matter a stuff if you, me and all the geeks in China don't buy it. Not exactly related but how open do you think a DVD is without DeCCS? And DeCCS is thoroughly illegal in the states. Geeks still buy DVDs.
And FWIW the execs would argue that you pay for the digital remastering etc. Not that I agree, I think they're crooks but nobode listens to me except slashdot whiners.
You don't have to compete with the theatre, you have to compete with whatever scraps they throw at your TV. Heck most of Hollywood's big beef right now is compressed NTSC resolution data. Even anamorphic has the same line count as NTSC or less if > 16:9 so it's not exactly gonna stop everyone in their tracks. HD will just increase the lines. Lots of people have HDTVs, most are 1080i capable, or 720p take your pick. It ain't gonna get better than that unless you're on a PC monitor. The point is there's nothing they can sell you on your TV that will be any problem to copy. The whole thing is a ruse anyway, why the heck Hollywood are so scared by PCs & digital media is beyond me, it's the biggest opportunity since the 'talkies' and they're running scared like a bunch if myopic luddites. The greaseballs at these companies are too slow and entrenched to get off their ass and use this stuff to sell content to the public. All they do is rattle their sabres about threats to their monopoly. It's taken decades for these jerks and others like them to get to HDTV, if it had been the PC industry we'd have been there years ago and already be moving on to the next big thing. They don't even want to upgrade DVDs because they fear it'll eat into cinema revenues! What about increasing DVD revenues? What other business deliberately sells a shit product? Oh wait, I know one, official online music stores, they deliberately degrade their product to be crap compared to CDs, there's another great business!
DRM dude, where have you been hiding? DRM kicks the revenue back to the license holder because they retain control of the content.