It's nice, but I'll be a heretic and note that for me, it doesn't have as good a "feel" as Civ2 or MOO2. While the unit design is interesting, most of the weapons are for all practical purposes just a short series of numbers and same for the armor, instead of having the radical differences between AF Disrupters, BHGs, MIRV/EMG missiles and so forth... so it's nice, but not THAT huge of a deal.
Terraforming is damn slow. 'specially if you're raising lots of land from the sea, which IS admittedly a cool feature. Managing an ever-expanding perimeter of clean/super formers is tedious, at best, and there's no option to automate formers specifically for growing one's islands -- and IIRC, the stack system is too weak to create a stack of formers and order them to all do the same thang with a minimum of keystrokes.
You'd also better have a good tolerance for "issues", like delusional "governors" whose priorities can be remarkably strange (not quite as bad as in _Civ II_, perhaps, where the Domestic Advisor would suggest spaceship parts before, say, *ANY* buildings are built), and the occasional odd starting arrangement (like a player being stuck on a tiny, mostly rocky island with room for exactly *one* base. There seems to be a bit more randomness here, as your initial units might get eaten by those of Planet, or you might start next to a *nice* "Landmark" giving you bonuses, or so forth. CivII allowed for *huge* continents with, say, 5 players on 'em, but I don't remember ever starting in the middle of a nearly un-terraformable rockfield.)
If you wanted to render a population incommunicado -- that is, a large-enough and spread-out-enough population so that cutting the power, the links, and jamming any packet-radio frequencies wouldn't be feasible -- then that's one of the targets you'd want to add to the list, along with the phone exchanges. If you wanted to prevent ANY messages being sent -- including one-way -- you'd also have to stop radio / TV broadcasts as well, of course.
{shrug}
Might be useful if you want to cause sufficient confusion and distraction to increase your odds of getting away with a random terrorist act -- or impose martial law (choose your conspiracy at will. {shrug} Feh.). Alternately, if somebody's an utter punk who seeks naught but notoriety, this would definitely do it. Why? There are a few billion people in the world; a goodly number are twisted enough to consider something like this. Most don't have the means, yet.
As for practicality... there was an incident involving the "Florida Interent Exchange" (a small ISP) claiming via BGP that it was the best route for a rather large portion of the world, resulting in a bit of chaos for hours -- and that was just an accidental misconfiguration at a single site, not sabotage. Getting multiple routers to do something like that simultaneously could cause some significant issues, unless BGP's been rejected or fixed.
It's not like the much of the rest of the competition -- namely, evening "in-depth" news programs -- provides more than fluff, emotional manipulation, and the occasional biased piece of news.
However, Joe the New Sysadmin might not have much experience with whatever system he's running; or, perhaps, it's a small operation -- for now -- and so the thinking is "Grow now, security later". Students, for instance, tend to spend more time worrying about their coursework, research, Slashdot, and so forth than fanatically reading Bugtraq and the various vendor-specific alert lists. These folks may get burned -- and if you do business with them, you may also get burned. It shouldn't happen, but look at even the more commercialized Linux distros, for instance -- they tend to ship with many, many services enabled by default.
For instance, if Amazon.com's customer databases were somehow accessed by an intruder, they could get names, (shipping) addresses, and credit card numbers -- as well as purchasing history, most likely. It doesn't matter if one of these customers is the most godly of sysadmins; it's Amazon.com's sysadmins that matter, but a LOT of people could feel the pain.
It's similar to the rest of life. You don't even have to be driving to be the victim of somebody else's horrific driving, and even if you're driving a PzVG -- which probably doesn't have to worry about Geo Metros -- the fellow next to you on a motorcycle is still endangered by others, such as the Geo Metros of Doom.
I take it you've never known anybody that had a cracked system -- either that, or they didn't care a whit about their data.
I used to have a box on a dorm network. The expectation was that all communication was sniffed, that all other machines were possible hostiles, and that being port-scanned was just part of the usual routine. These expectations hold for the office machines; one of my daemons serves as a crude portscan detector, because a) it's on an unusual port, and b) because it's utterly non-critical and non-privileged, it's simply designed to terminate based on any unexpected (out-of-protocol) traffic.
Most of the cracking attempts apparently come from bozos who'd basically replace a few binaries with backdoors, start a sniffer, and log onto IRC. However, some try things like 'rm -rf/' when they're done, which tends to render the log files not particularly useful in finding out WHAT was the vulnerability, and thus what needs to be updated, reconfigured, repaired or removed. In addition, for those that actually employ subtlety, you might not find out about the penetration immediately -- which can be an issue if you do frequent backups.
As noted in previous discussions, no sysadmin worth the name is simply going to restore-and-forget. Any that would? Fire 'em.
They're probably counting the costs of the full security audit, including lost business due to downtime -- since it's a BAD idea to not bring the system down for a full check if some loser's obtained root access. At the very least, one needs to eliminate the possibility of remaining backdoors (probably a full re-install if possible), lock it down, and preferably try to figure out the points of entry and anything, such as database records, that may have been affected.
For instance, it sometimes happens that my office box (a PII/400) has a load average > 3 for weeks continuously, running compute-intensive jobs. Replacing its SE440BX with something SMP-capable, and using two processors could actually help as a lot of the work is actually quite parallelizable. If the kernel weren't an archaic kernel altered by others in ways about which I have minimal information, it might actually be worth it to save time and sanity...
About states which receive more than they send? Sure, it happens. I believe I saw the same article, which noted that Southern and Western states with relatively sparse populations typically got more than they sent (although it might have just been income taxes, instead of total; I don't remember); while the more populated Northeast and Mid-Atlantic states basically got screwed over -- especially Conn.
Why? Governments today typically feel entitled to your money. For instance, it's called the *government's* budget surplus, not the people's...
Anything that threatens to reduce that income is considered wrong; this includes the burgeoning e-commerce business, which they see as denying them what they believe is their fair share of what otherwise might go to local businesses.
It's not that they can justify an instrinsic right to the transaction; it's that they believe they have a right to your money, be it through property taxes, lottery and liquor monopolies, or whatever.
It would NOT be a good idea for them to botch a conversion and deny their 45 million accounts e-mail access, even for a week... and these aren't meant to be beta-testers, either. Not all of these folks are spammers or trolls using throwaway accounts, either.
To convert the entire system -- interface, backends and all -- might mean re-designing an entirely new Hotmail optimized for an NT variant rather than BSD/Solaris.
There'd be too much contention, and given the user base large sectors of the world might be utterly ignored.
Here are some reminders, largely based on a NY Times Almanac, at times twisted by sarcasm... and this is just a sampling.
Presidents Jiang Zemin and Boris Yeltsin could easily be chosen for scaring the West witless, 'tho. Between threatening to hit LA with nuclear weapons, and actually putting Tupelov ICBMs on full alert, they've come close to reviving the Cold War. It's so much easier to claim national sovereignty when you've got nuclear-tipped MIRVed ICBMs ready to launch; poor Saddam.
President Clinton was more influential than Bezos, but that's to be expected. Besides, he's already won once. Four Presidents -- William Clinton, Slobodan Milosevic, Jiang Zemin and Boris Yelstin could deservedly share "Bastards of the Year", but that's not the name of the award...
Possibly-next president George Bush has demonstrated to the world that an average-at-best student with (admitted) previous issues with alcohol and parties, and (probable) cocaine use can in fact aspire to raise ridiculous amounts of money and become leading candidates for President.
Gerry Adams and [what's-his-first-name-maybe-David} Trimble could deserve some credit, but their peace process appears to be running second to molasses, so it's premature.
The lawyers who won the very first suit against the tobacco companies and thus opened the floodgates arguably made one very large impact: they put huge dollar signs in the sky and basically made it open-season on unpopular industries for everybody from cities to the Federal Government to sue.
Klebold and Harris definitely had an influence, although not quite the grandiose one they were planning on (including hijacking a jumbo jet and crashing it into NYC). Add perhaps the most shrill of the screaming reporters, HCI lobbyists, and fellow travelers in Congress.
JFK Jr. provided an illustration that the cult of pointless celebrity still exists today, and why inexperienced pilots flying in bad conditions can be a remarkably poor idea.
PM Barak and President Assad have reopened negotiations in the Mideast; if everything goes as planned, there may be a Golan Heights-for-Peace deal. In the case of peace between Syria, Lebanon and Israel, even Hezbollah has pledged to cease fire.
Dr. Marcy and Dr. Noyes, of SFSU and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics showed that the solar system is not the only system with planets.
I'm pretty sure that this was allegedly a research mission, but what research project uses just a single subject, and apparently generates minimal non-PR results?
He's demonstrated to an extreme degree how much the economy revolves on faith. In his case, faith that he can eventually establish a profitable business model before enough debt piles up to create the Black Hole of Bankruptcy.
It also shows how quickly an entrepreneur can rise in a young industry -- online mail-order -- to become a household name, and how quickly it can impact brick-and-mortar operations. Already, there are debates about sales taxes, whether local bookstores can compete, about the alliances between distributors and retailers...
And yes, one might as well highlight the absurdity. What better candidate than Mr. Bezos?
If it were just about building up $, then Mr. Gates would probably lead (in pure $; not necessarily *relative* gains 'tho).
Go ask Canter and Siegel. They did, after all, manage to get some customers... and e-mail can be *cheap*.
All you need to do is find some gullible folks -- like those who'll cheerfully buy hordes of magazines and *repeatedly* year-after-year take trips to Florida thinking they've won a sweepstakes -- to send you some money and it'll be worth it if you can somehow dodge the lawyers, like by staying (barely) legal. There are enough fools on the 'net that the numbers probably work out right.
Re:lawyer: no new law needed (trespass)
on
Suing the Spammers
·
· Score: 1
If you notify the offender first, and specifically warn them to cease and desist -- at the very least, *most* (not all) phone solicitors in the States need to maintain a "don't call" list.
If they violate that, then it may become harrassment, but IANAL.
...and when it's interstate wire fraud (forging the FROM headers, sometimes with a real account...), what then? In this case, AOL was arguably the main victim, with its trademark and name stolen...
And it usually is... which normally is a federal offense in the States.
Would a thorough, practiced study of _Doom_ and _Quake_ levels teach people about logical ambush locations, lines-of-sight, and other tactical concepts that might be useful *if* they already intended to go shoot up a place?
Aye. A concern would be, as another poster noted, that guards pay *too* much attention to the system and not enough elsewhere.
Even w/o automated systems, there have been deliberate diversions of police before. If memory serves, at least one supremacist group had the habit of setting off small explosive devices in locations shortly before bank robberies elsewhere.
If some schmo is simply lurking around in the shadows -- which could be against loitering ordinances, but if he's not carrying anything incriminating perhaps not much more -- he could perhaps cause a guard to watch him, at least briefly.
Both ethically, and possibly pragmatically -- their case is less clear-cut when suing the ISP, so while the potential payoff was much greater, the chance of winning anything at all was somewhat less.
It's still not zero, since it wasn't the Supreme Court...
Slashdot Mirror
It's nice, but I'll be a heretic and note that for me, it doesn't have as good a "feel" as Civ2 or MOO2. While the unit design is interesting, most of the weapons are for all practical purposes just a short series of numbers and same for the armor, instead of having the radical differences between AF Disrupters, BHGs, MIRV/EMG missiles and so forth... so it's nice, but not THAT huge of a deal.
Terraforming is damn slow. 'specially if you're raising lots of land from the sea, which IS admittedly a cool feature. Managing an ever-expanding perimeter of clean/super formers is tedious, at best, and there's no option to automate formers specifically for growing one's islands -- and IIRC, the stack system is too weak to create a stack of formers and order them to all do the same thang with a minimum of keystrokes.
You'd also better have a good tolerance for "issues", like delusional "governors" whose priorities can be remarkably strange (not quite as bad as in _Civ II_, perhaps, where the Domestic Advisor would suggest spaceship parts before, say, *ANY* buildings are built), and the occasional odd starting arrangement (like a player being stuck on a tiny, mostly rocky island with room for exactly *one* base. There seems to be a bit more randomness here, as your initial units might get eaten by those of Planet, or you might start next to a *nice* "Landmark" giving you bonuses, or so forth. CivII allowed for *huge* continents with, say, 5 players on 'em, but I don't remember ever starting in the middle of a nearly un-terraformable rockfield.)
If you wanted to render a population incommunicado -- that is, a large-enough and spread-out-enough population so that cutting the power, the links, and jamming any packet-radio frequencies wouldn't be feasible -- then that's one of the targets you'd want to add to the list, along with the phone exchanges. If you wanted to prevent ANY messages being sent -- including one-way -- you'd also have to stop radio / TV broadcasts as well, of course.
{shrug}
Might be useful if you want to cause sufficient confusion and distraction to increase your odds of getting away with a random terrorist act -- or impose martial law (choose your conspiracy at will. {shrug} Feh.). Alternately, if somebody's an utter punk who seeks naught but notoriety, this would definitely do it. Why? There are a few billion people in the world; a goodly number are twisted enough to consider something like this. Most don't have the means, yet.
As for practicality... there was an incident involving the "Florida Interent Exchange" (a small ISP) claiming via BGP that it was the best route for a rather large portion of the world, resulting in a bit of chaos for hours -- and that was just an accidental misconfiguration at a single site, not sabotage. Getting multiple routers to do something like that simultaneously could cause some significant issues, unless BGP's been rejected or fixed.
It's not like the much of the rest of the competition -- namely, evening "in-depth" news programs -- provides more than fluff, emotional manipulation, and the occasional biased piece of news.
See the Accuracy in Media site, which includes interesting articles such as a piece on "journalism" with an agenda, and one on the Food Lion incident, which was perpetrated by another ABC "news" program -- PTL.
They may not be directly dangerous to you.
However, Joe the New Sysadmin might not have much experience with whatever system he's running; or, perhaps, it's a small operation -- for now -- and so the thinking is "Grow now, security later". Students, for instance, tend to spend more time worrying about their coursework, research, Slashdot, and so forth than fanatically reading Bugtraq and the various vendor-specific alert lists. These folks may get burned -- and if you do business with them, you may also get burned. It shouldn't happen, but look at even the more commercialized Linux distros, for instance -- they tend to ship with many, many services enabled by default.
For instance, if Amazon.com's customer databases were somehow accessed by an intruder, they could get names, (shipping) addresses, and credit card numbers -- as well as purchasing history, most likely. It doesn't matter if one of these customers is the most godly of sysadmins; it's Amazon.com's sysadmins that matter, but a LOT of people could feel the pain.
It's similar to the rest of life. You don't even have to be driving to be the victim of somebody else's horrific driving, and even if you're driving a PzVG -- which probably doesn't have to worry about Geo Metros -- the fellow next to you on a motorcycle is still endangered by others, such as the Geo Metros of Doom.
I take it you've never known anybody that had a cracked system -- either that, or they didn't care a whit about their data.
/' when they're done, which tends to render the log files not particularly useful in finding out WHAT was the vulnerability, and thus what needs to be updated, reconfigured, repaired or removed. In addition, for those that actually employ subtlety, you might not find out about the penetration immediately -- which can be an issue if you do frequent backups.
I used to have a box on a dorm network. The expectation was that all communication was sniffed, that all other machines were possible hostiles, and that being port-scanned was just part of the usual routine. These expectations hold for the office machines; one of my daemons serves as a crude portscan detector, because a) it's on an unusual port, and b) because it's utterly non-critical and non-privileged, it's simply designed to terminate based on any unexpected (out-of-protocol) traffic.
Most of the cracking attempts apparently come from bozos who'd basically replace a few binaries with backdoors, start a sniffer, and log onto IRC. However, some try things like 'rm -rf
As noted in previous discussions, no sysadmin worth the name is simply going to restore-and-forget. Any that would? Fire 'em.
They're probably counting the costs of the full security audit, including lost business due to downtime -- since it's a BAD idea to not bring the system down for a full check if some loser's obtained root access. At the very least, one needs to eliminate the possibility of remaining backdoors (probably a full re-install if possible), lock it down, and preferably try to figure out the points of entry and anything, such as database records, that may have been affected.
It depends on what you do.
For instance, it sometimes happens that my office box (a PII/400) has a load average > 3 for weeks continuously, running compute-intensive jobs. Replacing its SE440BX with something SMP-capable, and using two processors could actually help as a lot of the work is actually quite parallelizable. If the kernel weren't an archaic kernel altered by others in ways about which I have minimal information, it might actually be worth it to save time and sanity...
About states which receive more than they send? Sure, it happens. I believe I saw the same article, which noted that Southern and Western states with relatively sparse populations typically got more than they sent (although it might have just been income taxes, instead of total; I don't remember); while the more populated Northeast and Mid-Atlantic states basically got screwed over -- especially Conn.
Why? Governments today typically feel entitled to your money. For instance, it's called the *government's* budget surplus, not the people's...
Anything that threatens to reduce that income is considered wrong; this includes the burgeoning e-commerce business, which they see as denying them what they believe is their fair share of what otherwise might go to local businesses.
It's not that they can justify an instrinsic right to the transaction; it's that they believe they have a right to your money, be it through property taxes, lottery and liquor monopolies, or whatever.
Don't forget the estate taxes.
You do have something there, 'tho. While the top marginal rate for a married couple filing jointly was 39.6% (sum over $250,000)...
...those filing with total personal income exceeding $100,000 in '96-'97 (5,260,500 such returns), the average tax and penalty per return was $29,005.
Between $25 and $50K? Average of $15,861.
For those filing a 1040A with TPI under $25K, the average T-and-P was $16,794; with a non-1040A, $9,544.
Figures according to the _NYT Almanac_, p. 179.
{\HPL
Sounds like Y2K's going to be worse than we thought. Time to memorize "Come All Ye Old Ones"...
}
That's consistent with what we already know.
It would NOT be a good idea for them to botch a conversion and deny their 45 million accounts e-mail access, even for a week... and these aren't meant to be beta-testers, either. Not all of these folks are spammers or trolls using throwaway accounts, either.
To convert the entire system -- interface, backends and all -- might mean re-designing an entirely new Hotmail optimized for an NT variant rather than BSD/Solaris.
Oh, and one obvious omission -- Joel Klein, for showing that the DoJ's anti-trust still has teeth.
There'd be too much contention, and given the user base large sectors of the world might be utterly ignored.
Here are some reminders, largely based on a NY Times Almanac, at times twisted by sarcasm... and this is just a sampling.
Presidents Jiang Zemin and Boris Yeltsin could easily be chosen for scaring the West witless, 'tho. Between threatening to hit LA with nuclear weapons, and actually putting Tupelov ICBMs on full alert, they've come close to reviving the Cold War. It's so much easier to claim national sovereignty when you've got nuclear-tipped MIRVed ICBMs ready to launch; poor Saddam.
President Clinton was more influential than Bezos, but that's to be expected. Besides, he's already won once. Four Presidents -- William Clinton, Slobodan Milosevic, Jiang Zemin and Boris Yelstin could deservedly share "Bastards of the Year", but that's not the name of the award...
Possibly-next president George Bush has demonstrated to the world that an average-at-best student with (admitted) previous issues with alcohol and parties, and (probable) cocaine use can in fact aspire to raise ridiculous amounts of money and become leading candidates for President.
Gerry Adams and [what's-his-first-name-maybe-David} Trimble could deserve some credit, but their peace process appears to be running second to molasses, so it's premature.
The lawyers who won the very first suit against the tobacco companies and thus opened the floodgates arguably made one very large impact: they put huge dollar signs in the sky and basically made it open-season on unpopular industries for everybody from cities to the Federal Government to sue.
Klebold and Harris definitely had an influence, although not quite the grandiose one they were planning on (including hijacking a jumbo jet and crashing it into NYC). Add perhaps the most shrill of the screaming reporters, HCI lobbyists, and fellow travelers in Congress.
JFK Jr. provided an illustration that the cult of pointless celebrity still exists today, and why inexperienced pilots flying in bad conditions can be a remarkably poor idea.
PM Barak and President Assad have reopened negotiations in the Mideast; if everything goes as planned, there may be a Golan Heights-for-Peace deal. In the case of peace between Syria, Lebanon and Israel, even Hezbollah has pledged to cease fire.
Dr. Marcy and Dr. Noyes, of SFSU and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics showed that the solar system is not the only system with planets.
...on folks like Sen. Glenn?
I'm pretty sure that this was allegedly a research mission, but what research project uses just a single subject, and apparently generates minimal non-PR results?
He's demonstrated to an extreme degree how much the economy revolves on faith. In his case, faith that he can eventually establish a profitable business model before enough debt piles up to create the Black Hole of Bankruptcy.
It also shows how quickly an entrepreneur can rise in a young industry -- online mail-order -- to become a household name, and how quickly it can impact brick-and-mortar operations. Already, there are debates about sales taxes, whether local bookstores can compete, about the alliances between distributors and retailers...
And yes, one might as well highlight the absurdity. What better candidate than Mr. Bezos?
If it were just about building up $, then Mr. Gates would probably lead (in pure $; not necessarily *relative* gains 'tho).
And why:
Equal assignment of overhead.
Hm. Just a few questions from somebody who's never been to Brazil...
Are these handguns or long guns (esp. hunting arms)?
Mostly in urban areas, or rural?
A few owning many, or many owning few?
Go ask Canter and Siegel. They did, after all, manage to get some customers... and e-mail can be *cheap*.
All you need to do is find some gullible folks -- like those who'll cheerfully buy hordes of magazines and *repeatedly* year-after-year take trips to Florida thinking they've won a sweepstakes -- to send you some money and it'll be worth it if you can somehow dodge the lawyers, like by staying (barely) legal. There are enough fools on the 'net that the numbers probably work out right.
If you notify the offender first, and specifically warn them to cease and desist -- at the very least, *most* (not all) phone solicitors in the States need to maintain a "don't call" list.
If they violate that, then it may become harrassment, but IANAL.
...and when it's interstate wire fraud (forging the FROM headers, sometimes with a real account...), what then? In this case, AOL was arguably the main victim, with its trademark and name stolen...
And it usually is... which normally is a federal offense in the States.
Lock 'em up.
Would a thorough, practiced study of _Doom_ and _Quake_ levels teach people about logical ambush locations, lines-of-sight, and other tactical concepts that might be useful *if* they already intended to go shoot up a place?
Aye. A concern would be, as another poster noted, that guards pay *too* much attention to the system and not enough elsewhere.
Even w/o automated systems, there have been deliberate diversions of police before. If memory serves, at least one supremacist group had the habit of setting off small explosive devices in locations shortly before bank robberies elsewhere.
If some schmo is simply lurking around in the shadows -- which could be against loitering ordinances, but if he's not carrying anything incriminating perhaps not much more -- he could perhaps cause a guard to watch him, at least briefly.
Both ethically, and possibly pragmatically -- their case is less clear-cut when suing the ISP, so while the potential payoff was much greater, the chance of winning anything at all was somewhat less.
It's still not zero, since it wasn't the Supreme Court...
...hence my choice of subject line.