SSH tunnel via port knocking to 443 to a server. Sure, you can't use HTTPS on that box but it gets around most filters.
Actually with a sophisticated enough series of iptables rules you probably could run both HTTPS and SSH. After your port knocking just intercept the packet bound for 443 from the IP that did the port knocking and send it to the SSH server. All others go to the HTTPS server.
I didn't claim it was a solution. Only that external economic factors will drive space exploration. IANARS (I am not a rocket scientist) but my hunch would be that resource shortages will drive the initial commercialization of space. Over time as the spaceflight components become standardized and mass produced it would stand to reason that the costs will come down.
I know you'll probably mod me a troll but I have a sinking felling that me and actually many of the people reading slashdot will never see a real push into space by humanity
We'll see a real push into space by humanity when there is an actual economic incentive for doing so. When Earth becomes completely overpopulated and/or runs into resource shortages, that's when we'll see space flight really take off. As much as I love NASA, as a Governmentally funded agency they are always going to be held hostage to political considerations -- and you just know some Congressman needs some pork^Weconomic development back home more than NASA needs to go to Mars.
We'll be at Alpha centuri in a few years, if all goes well.
Nah, I prefer to win the game by global conquest. It's much more entertaining to pour all of your resources into armies, fleets and aircraft than spaceship components. Those fucking Celts will soon pay for sacking Athens back in 3400 BC, muhahahahahahahahaha.
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
( ) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
(X) The meme is tired and worn out and I'm just as likely to get a -1 troll as a +5 funny.
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
(X) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
( ) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(X) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatibility with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(X) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your
house down!
Well, like I said, I was drifting out of their political orbit anyway. And there wasn't a caller to inform -- it was a recording. Which brings me back to the bit about properly configuring your computer dialer....
This past election, I actually abstained from voting because the party that I intended to vote for sent me spam.
That's funny, I withdrew my support from the Working Families Party because they cold-called me in Spanish. In the 607 area code. Not exactly an area known for having tons of non-English speakers.
Mind you, I was drifting out of their political orbit anyway, but you morons can't even figure your computer dialer appropriately for the areas that it's calling? That's just annoying.
I don't know enough about electrical engineering to know what would be involved in building a resistant system but TFA suggests that the aspects of the electrical grid that are most vulnerable are those directly connected to long distance transmission lines (i.e: giant antennas). A small system might not require that much modification to shield.
PUUUULLLEEEZE, let's not start making up usage statistics wildly.
I didn't "make up" anything. Almost every study I've ever read places the number of Americans who have tried pot in the 40% to 50% range. Here's a Time article that quotes a study saying the number is 42%.
The non-government-funded research my company performs continues to agree with this as well
Ah, so you have a vested interest in the war on civil liberties^W^Wdrugs, do you? Well, thanks for at least telling us you are probably biased.
I wasn't referring to this specific case, as should have been clear by the fact that I was referring to child porn, which this clearly isn't. I was shooting down the boneheaded comparison of the GP between music piracy and the consumers of kiddie porn. That comparison was utterly absurd.
Have your observations of politics lead you to believe that it doesn't work in this manner? If so, please share. My observation of politics is that virtually all political figures will do anything they can to generate headlines (preferably with their name in it) and that elections are determined by name recognition and party affiliation.
If that makes a cynical member of the/. "groupthink", then so be it.
Then you charge them anyway, generate some publicity about how you are "cracking down on child porn" and ride the name recognition into re-election. Anybody who took District Attorney School 101 knows this....
There are plenty of roads in towns and cities that are 45MPH
Those roads generally aren't (in my experience) located in areas with a high volume of pedestrian traffic.
Oh shut up, are a fucking civil engineer?
Do you live in my fucking town or are you just making assumptions about our roadways?
YOU DON'T KNOW THE SPEED LIMIT IS CORRECT
A 30mph speed limit is perfectly appropriate for a roadway in an area with lots of businesses/foot traffic/people making sudden stops/turns/etc/etc/etc.
Funny, earlier you told me the yellow light time for this intersection was three seconds
Citation needed.
Also, I'd like to see some accident statistics for the intersection on question.
Who said I was talking about one intersection? It's a common problem around these parts, something you would actually know if weren't some random internet jackass making assumptions about an area where you don't live. Friends of mine from out of town have even observed it -- buddy of mine who moved here couldn't figure out why people wait a few seconds before going when the light turns green until he saw how many people run red lights.
Especially since you say the problem is this one particular intersection...
Citation needed. You are just great at putting words into my mouth aren't you? A three second claim that I don't recall (and can't find) making and now this.
You see what you want to see, and no one will tell you're wrong.
Oh, don't get me wrong, I'm sure we could throw resources at the problem and solve it a faster time frame than TFA speaks of. I just don't think the people who are dismissing it out of hand comprehend just how bad things would get if electrical power couldn't be restored within a few days.
Think about it. Fuel distribution comes to an end. Sewage treatment ends. Municipal water systems stop pumping water. The "just-in-time" delivery system for all sorts of goods (including food) breaks down. Refrigeration isn't widely available. Most communications systems cease functioning. If you live in a cold climate you probably can't heat your home.
Just as long as the space weather doesn't render my firearms inoperable;)
I should have bought that riot gun instead of a taser.:(
Yeah, the taser isn't going to be real useful for getting yourself food, if it comes to that. Though the image of Bambi lying on the ground screaming "Don't tase me bro!" is kind of amusing;)
If they have a 12 month production cycle, what do you think that factory is doing right now?
Building transformers for a different utility? You did notice the "usually built to order" part, right? These aren't plug and play pieces of equipment you are talking about. They are usually specifically designed for the electrical grid they are destined for.
Your also basing your argument on the assumption that nothing has occured since 1859 which makes our electrical grid more robust and resistant to such disturbances.
I'm not making any argument other than TFA makes some legitimate points. You apparently refuse to even read TFA and I see no further point in having an argument with someone who is trying to counter arguments that he hasn't even read.
Having almost been one of those wacky survivalists (mostly interested in turning my property into a self-sustaining system), it's damned hard.
First, if you aren't willing to give up all your modern conveniences
Isn't the point of small 's' survivalism (as opposed to Survivalism) to have the ability to survive without those conveniences, not necessarily to go without them entirely?
But aren't these things fairly well shielded anyway?
No, they aren't. The part of the grid that picks up the load is the distribution lines themselves. They aren't shielded in any deployment that I'm aware of and it would probably be prohibitively expensive to do so.
The inductive load imparts a huge amount of DC current onto the AC power grid and trashes the windings in the connected transformers. The defense is to disconnect those transformers from the grid but that only works if you have enough advance warning. Currently we have no formal process to handle this early warning (though the technology does exist) and no plans/procedures in place to disseminate that warning to the power utilities and for them to take action.
RTFA. It's actually a pretty interesting read. It's not a doomsday scenario -- we'd survive as a people and as a country. We'd just suffer some pretty substantial damage in the process.
They go boom, they get replaced or otherwise repaired. The situation if so drastic would right itself due to economic forces that encourage such.
What part of 12 months to build them is so hard to understand? Even if that timescale could be shortened do you think the infrastructure exists to produce large numbers of these items in a short period of time? Yes the situation would eventually right itself through economic and other factors. Yes the human race would survive. But you'd still have hundreds of millions of people without power and the benefits of modern civilization for months. Almost every single piece of technology that supports civilization (particularly high population density civilization) depends on the electrical grid
I could imagine alongside you all day, but it won't ever come to pass. Have fun RTFA.
It has come to pass in the past. Within the last 200 years as a matter of fact. If a similiar event happened today (the whole point of the article that you apparently refuse to read) it would wreck havoc with modern infrastructure. In 1859 all that existed to disrupt were telegraph networks. Today our entire civilization depends on infrastructure that is vulnerable.
Sticking your head in the sand and refusing to even read the article might be typical/. behavior but all it accomplishes in the end is to confirm your ignorance.
I remember when the northeast US had a power outage that lasted a few days just a few years back. It was no where near as dramatic or dire as this summary suggests the situation could be. I still had water and gas in Ohio.
Then you should RTFA. I read this article yesterday and toyed with submitting it but didn't bother. One of the things that could happen with a large enough space weather event is the destruction of distribution transformers on a region wide (nationwide in the case of small countries like the Scandinavian ones) scale.
No power utility has enough spare distribution transformers on hand to replace all of them after they go. They are usually built to order and take 12 months or more to produce. So why don't you imagine a power outage that lasts for months or years across the entire Northeast United States and tell me how undramatic it is? No refrigeration, no gasoline for your car (no electric to pump it through pipelines or service stations), limited and rationed modern medicine, no pumped potable water, no water treatment plants, no HVAC systems, limited communications, etc, etc, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
SSH tunnel via port knocking to 443 to a server. Sure, you can't use HTTPS on that box but it gets around most filters.
Actually with a sophisticated enough series of iptables rules you probably could run both HTTPS and SSH. After your port knocking just intercept the packet bound for 443 from the IP that did the port knocking and send it to the SSH server. All others go to the HTTPS server.
I didn't claim it was a solution. Only that external economic factors will drive space exploration. IANARS (I am not a rocket scientist) but my hunch would be that resource shortages will drive the initial commercialization of space. Over time as the spaceflight components become standardized and mass produced it would stand to reason that the costs will come down.
I know you'll probably mod me a troll but I have a sinking felling that me and actually many of the people reading slashdot will never see a real push into space by humanity
We'll see a real push into space by humanity when there is an actual economic incentive for doing so. When Earth becomes completely overpopulated and/or runs into resource shortages, that's when we'll see space flight really take off. As much as I love NASA, as a Governmentally funded agency they are always going to be held hostage to political considerations -- and you just know some Congressman needs some pork^Weconomic development back home more than NASA needs to go to Mars.
We'll be at Alpha centuri in a few years, if all goes well.
Nah, I prefer to win the game by global conquest. It's much more entertaining to pour all of your resources into armies, fleets and aircraft than spaceship components. Those fucking Celts will soon pay for sacking Athens back in 3400 BC, muhahahahahahahahaha.
Your post advocates a...
Your post advocates a
( ) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante (X) form-based
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
( ) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
(X) The meme is tired and worn out and I'm just as likely to get a -1 troll as a +5 funny.
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
(X) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
( ) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(X) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatibility with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(X) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
Well, like I said, I was drifting out of their political orbit anyway. And there wasn't a caller to inform -- it was a recording. Which brings me back to the bit about properly configuring your computer dialer....
This past election, I actually abstained from voting because the party that I intended to vote for sent me spam.
That's funny, I withdrew my support from the Working Families Party because they cold-called me in Spanish. In the 607 area code. Not exactly an area known for having tons of non-English speakers.
Mind you, I was drifting out of their political orbit anyway, but you morons can't even figure your computer dialer appropriately for the areas that it's calling? That's just annoying.
I don't know enough about electrical engineering to know what would be involved in building a resistant system but TFA suggests that the aspects of the electrical grid that are most vulnerable are those directly connected to long distance transmission lines (i.e: giant antennas). A small system might not require that much modification to shield.
PUUUULLLEEEZE, let's not start making up usage statistics wildly.
I didn't "make up" anything. Almost every study I've ever read places the number of Americans who have tried pot in the 40% to 50% range. Here's a Time article that quotes a study saying the number is 42%.
The non-government-funded research my company performs continues to agree with this as well
Ah, so you have a vested interest in the war on civil liberties^W^Wdrugs, do you? Well, thanks for at least telling us you are probably biased.
I wasn't referring to this specific case, as should have been clear by the fact that I was referring to child porn, which this clearly isn't. I was shooting down the boneheaded comparison of the GP between music piracy and the consumers of kiddie porn. That comparison was utterly absurd.
Have your observations of politics lead you to believe that it doesn't work in this manner? If so, please share. My observation of politics is that virtually all political figures will do anything they can to generate headlines (preferably with their name in it) and that elections are determined by name recognition and party affiliation.
If that makes a cynical member of the /. "groupthink", then so be it.
And I guarantee you at least one of these prosecutors streaked, went skinny-dipping, etc. in their youth
Statistically, 40% to 50% of them also tried marijuana, but I doubt you'll find 40% of district attorneys willing to advocate for legalization.
but who is to say their lifestyle choice is any less valid than any other?
Because their lifestyle is based on something (child porn) that harms other human beings during production?
What if they do it by their own will?
Then you charge them anyway, generate some publicity about how you are "cracking down on child porn" and ride the name recognition into re-election. Anybody who took District Attorney School 101 knows this....
There are plenty of roads in towns and cities that are 45MPH
Those roads generally aren't (in my experience) located in areas with a high volume of pedestrian traffic.
Oh shut up, are a fucking civil engineer?
Do you live in my fucking town or are you just making assumptions about our roadways?
YOU DON'T KNOW THE SPEED LIMIT IS CORRECT
A 30mph speed limit is perfectly appropriate for a roadway in an area with lots of businesses/foot traffic/people making sudden stops/turns/etc/etc/etc.
Funny, earlier you told me the yellow light time for this intersection was three seconds
Citation needed.
Also, I'd like to see some accident statistics for the intersection on question.
Who said I was talking about one intersection? It's a common problem around these parts, something you would actually know if weren't some random internet jackass making assumptions about an area where you don't live. Friends of mine from out of town have even observed it -- buddy of mine who moved here couldn't figure out why people wait a few seconds before going when the light turns green until he saw how many people run red lights.
Especially since you say the problem is this one particular intersection...
Citation needed. You are just great at putting words into my mouth aren't you? A three second claim that I don't recall (and can't find) making and now this.
You see what you want to see, and no one will tell you're wrong.
Pot, kettle, black?
Oh, don't get me wrong, I'm sure we could throw resources at the problem and solve it a faster time frame than TFA speaks of. I just don't think the people who are dismissing it out of hand comprehend just how bad things would get if electrical power couldn't be restored within a few days.
Think about it. Fuel distribution comes to an end. Sewage treatment ends. Municipal water systems stop pumping water. The "just-in-time" delivery system for all sorts of goods (including food) breaks down. Refrigeration isn't widely available. Most communications systems cease functioning. If you live in a cold climate you probably can't heat your home.
At least until you run out of ammo.
Any self-respecting survivalist/religious extremist/rural dweller/compound leader has the equipment on hand to make his or her own ammo ;)
I hate to be a grammer nazi type
Heil Webster!
(Sorry, I've always wanted to do that ;)
Just as long as the space weather doesn't render my firearms inoperable ;)
I should have bought that riot gun instead of a taser. :(
Yeah, the taser isn't going to be real useful for getting yourself food, if it comes to that. Though the image of Bambi lying on the ground screaming "Don't tase me bro!" is kind of amusing ;)
If they have a 12 month production cycle, what do you think that factory is doing right now?
Building transformers for a different utility? You did notice the "usually built to order" part, right? These aren't plug and play pieces of equipment you are talking about. They are usually specifically designed for the electrical grid they are destined for.
Your also basing your argument on the assumption that nothing has occured since 1859 which makes our electrical grid more robust and resistant to such disturbances.
I'm not making any argument other than TFA makes some legitimate points. You apparently refuse to even read TFA and I see no further point in having an argument with someone who is trying to counter arguments that he hasn't even read.
Having almost been one of those wacky survivalists (mostly interested in turning my property into a self-sustaining system), it's damned hard.
First, if you aren't willing to give up all your modern conveniences
Isn't the point of small 's' survivalism (as opposed to Survivalism) to have the ability to survive without those conveniences, not necessarily to go without them entirely?
But aren't these things fairly well shielded anyway?
No, they aren't. The part of the grid that picks up the load is the distribution lines themselves. They aren't shielded in any deployment that I'm aware of and it would probably be prohibitively expensive to do so.
The inductive load imparts a huge amount of DC current onto the AC power grid and trashes the windings in the connected transformers. The defense is to disconnect those transformers from the grid but that only works if you have enough advance warning. Currently we have no formal process to handle this early warning (though the technology does exist) and no plans/procedures in place to disseminate that warning to the power utilities and for them to take action.
RTFA. It's actually a pretty interesting read. It's not a doomsday scenario -- we'd survive as a people and as a country. We'd just suffer some pretty substantial damage in the process.
They go boom, they get replaced or otherwise repaired. The situation if so drastic would right itself due to economic forces that encourage such.
What part of 12 months to build them is so hard to understand? Even if that timescale could be shortened do you think the infrastructure exists to produce large numbers of these items in a short period of time? Yes the situation would eventually right itself through economic and other factors. Yes the human race would survive. But you'd still have hundreds of millions of people without power and the benefits of modern civilization for months. Almost every single piece of technology that supports civilization (particularly high population density civilization) depends on the electrical grid
I could imagine alongside you all day, but it won't ever come to pass. Have fun RTFA.
It has come to pass in the past. Within the last 200 years as a matter of fact. If a similiar event happened today (the whole point of the article that you apparently refuse to read) it would wreck havoc with modern infrastructure. In 1859 all that existed to disrupt were telegraph networks. Today our entire civilization depends on infrastructure that is vulnerable.
Sticking your head in the sand and refusing to even read the article might be typical /. behavior but all it accomplishes in the end is to confirm your ignorance.
Yes, it could take days for the power to come back
Try months or years if the event is large enough to destroy transformers on a region or nationwide scale.
I remember when the northeast US had a power outage that lasted a few days just a few years back. It was no where near as dramatic or dire as this summary suggests the situation could be. I still had water and gas in Ohio.
Then you should RTFA. I read this article yesterday and toyed with submitting it but didn't bother. One of the things that could happen with a large enough space weather event is the destruction of distribution transformers on a region wide (nationwide in the case of small countries like the Scandinavian ones) scale.
No power utility has enough spare distribution transformers on hand to replace all of them after they go. They are usually built to order and take 12 months or more to produce. So why don't you imagine a power outage that lasts for months or years across the entire Northeast United States and tell me how undramatic it is? No refrigeration, no gasoline for your car (no electric to pump it through pipelines or service stations), limited and rationed modern medicine, no pumped potable water, no water treatment plants, no HVAC systems, limited communications, etc, etc, etc.
Sound dire enough to take seriously now?