God, being very lenient, didn't hate spam from the very beginning. Only after spammers discovered his secret e-mail address, and didn't stop spamming him after he repeatedly clicked on the dysfunctional "remove me" links, did he become upset and started complaining by raising big hurricanes.
Didn't you consider using the alternatives? Competition^WRedundancy can be quite useful in cases like these.
Seriously: that was a good opportunity to test the quality of Yahoo!s results yesterday. Not that bad, and certainly much better than no search engine at all!
People from random businesses around here are pretty paranoid now
... and still use Windows? I know the cost of migrating a lot of corporate stuff to Linux is pretty high, but if they don't even get started, their paranoia ain't getting them nowhere at all.
BTW, I've seen similar attitudes recently: a lot of companies are very untrustful w.r.t. Microsoft's crypto libs and suspect all kinds of backdoors etc.. It may be paranoia, but it may also be true (wasn't there an NSA key somewhere in Windows in the past?).
All the court needs to do is issue a subpoena for the password. Refuse, and you're now in contempt.
Three strategies:
"The password? Hmm... I'm sorry, I can't remember it! This whole lawsuit is detrimental to my ability to remember such things."
Give another password that kills the master keys. Then, when asked about it say: "Oh darn, that was the password for the second partition!" (bad if they say: okay, we've made a backup, what was that password again?)
Encrypt with a passphrase drawn from/dev/random (like encrypted swap partitions!). As long as you don't reboot, files are available. And you don't know the passphrase as well, so you're not in contempt.
Sure, wiretapping land lines is nearly trivial, compared to underwater activities! Just add some probes at the major interconnects, and you're all set! In the US, the NSA would need to cooperate with the FBI, which would almost likely need to obtain some pretty broad warrants, but that's procedural, not technical.
Regarding Google, Yahoo, Altavista, MSN Search etc...: it is near-trivial for the feds to subponea them, so that they hand over the search history of specified IP addresses or, more likely, netblocks. Or a search history sorted by keywords . There's no need to wiretap their pipes at all, if they already do all the processing themselves.
Anyway, I bet countries do meddle with int'l links.
With RF links, sure. With underwater fibre, quite unlikely.
Have you ever tried to first cut through a big steel mantle, and then find out from a few hundered thousand fibres the right one to tap (don't forget demultiplexing and spreading channels over multiple wires), and then splice that open, and all that under 12000 feet (on average) of water?
And even if you tapped every fibre: reading this amounts to drinking water from a firefighter's waterhose!
Wiretapping modern unterwater fibre links is one of the most challenging tasks there is. I won't bet this happens so frequently.
Been out of that game for a couple of years, so this experience is far from current perhaps there's less open relays now that there were then, but I assure you it was a significant problem.
I can confirm your experience. I was network admin for 4 clients with big backbones in the US, Europe and Australia. China was leading the top approx. 2 years ago w.r.t. open relays, closely followed by Korea. We also used to block the complete APNIC netblock (minus a few manually selected routes) at the edges of the backbones, exactly because of the open relay problems.
That gradually changed though, as more and more spam started to move to open relays in the ARIN blocks, and this has been (at least from the perspective of the probes we've colocated at the major interconnects) continuously going on from then on.
We really can't fathom why spam sources now gravitate towards ARIN blocks, but it does very persistently and consistently. We shortly assumed that it was due to a huge raise in numbers of home users with broadband access; but that number increased in RIPE networks too by the same proportions; though spam from there remained relatively constant.
Are there any forms of law against the destruction of property in international waters?
The waters may be international, but the pipes are property of... what? A country? A national company? A multinational company? I dunno.
It would probably amount to pirates attacking a ship. How the affected countries react is probably entirely up to them.
Sabotage actions in international waters are normally quite easy to spot exactly with satellite and reconnaissance plane pictures, but also with hydrophones and seismometers: You know exactly where the cut is, and when it happened. Compare this with satellite pictures from that location and time frame, looking for ships and subs. Just to be sure: correlate with other sensor's data. Then track those ships back in time until you know which ports they came from. From there on, resume investigation, hopping from port to port, checking freight papers. If the path leads to China, and if they obstructed investigations, that would be a big clue (though not yet a proof).
About legal issues: IANAL. International Sea Laws are a complex mesh of bilateral and multilateral treaties. It would probably be much cheaper and lightningly faster to just repair the pipes, than to hire an army of lawyers to sort that mess out. Plus: against superpowers like China, even laws would be unenforceable. But don't worry: the likelihood of China cutting fibers in international waters is close to nil.
What I'm trying to say here: it's a political, not a legal issue. If one country starts meddling with international fiber (or radio!) links, other countries would too, and sooner than later, the whole communications network would break down. That's why no country would do something as crazy as that. Not even China. Not even US.
1984 seems to be 30 years ahead of it's time, but it seems to be on the way nicely.
Are you sure? It may have been just 20 years ahead of its time: we carry cellphones with us, so the phone companies (and therefore the state) knows exactly our whereabouts. In London, the complete inner city is surveilled by video cameras, and as we now have a complete digital telephone system, monitoring that is also trivial.
We're already living in a 1984-like world. We're just not seeing it.
% traceroute www.via.com.tw [...] 9 p16-7-1-2.r20.londen03.uk.bb.verio.net (129.250.5.64) 79.332 ms 85.510 ms 82.460 ms 10 p16-0-0-0.r81.nycmny01.us.bb.verio.net (129.250.2.134) 151.867 ms 150.723 ms 152.835 ms 11 p16-1-1-3.r21.nycmny01.us.bb.verio.net (129.250.5.36) 151.138 ms 151.056 ms 151.000 ms 12 p16-1-1-3.r21.sttlwa01.us.bb.verio.net (129.250.5.56) 209.680 ms 210.892 ms 210.008 ms 13 p64-1-3-0.r21.tokyjp01.jp.bb.verio.net (129.250.4.186) 320.698 ms 1091.530 ms 1064.743 ms 14 p16-2-0-0.r01.taiptw01.tw.bb.verio.net (129.250.4.202) 1307.348 ms 360.559 ms 360.001 ms 15 ge-1-0-0.a01.taiptw01.tw.ra.verio.net (61.58.32.67) 358.966 ms ge-2-0-0.a01.taiptw01.tw.ra.verio.net (61.58.32.226) 359.996 ms ge-1-0-0.a01.taiptw01.tw.ra.verio.net (61.58.32.67) 359.822 ms [...]
Though verio.net is certainly not the only pipe they have!
Interesting to note, that many spam mails can be traced back to.cn domains
That's actually a myth. Most spam comes from the US. Just because spammers forge 'From: ' headers doesn't mean they are sending spam from chinese networks.
In a recent survey, more than 72% of the spam came from the ARIN netblock (the US being the biggest part of it), 16% from RIPE and the puny remaining rest from APNIC (where most.hk and.cn domains belong).
software they are not allowed to posses and replace it with software they are allowed to posses (think: Linux, FreeBSD,...)
How long will people be allowed to posses, or even (*gasp*) use Linux, FreeBSD etc...? Give MSFT, MPAA, RIAA and others a few more years or decades to turn the DMCA into something much more restrictive. In a few years from now, we could very well be watching SWAT teams hunting down those hairy, unwashed, the "national security" threatening "Linux terrorists" on Fox News. Hunt the penguin, so to say.
Of course: the less people use "pirated" versions of Windows, the more people will use a free OS. Unfortunately, not everyone will switch, not even 10%.
and then hire about 5000 very well paid lawyers... if you want to dispute the Patent.
All it takes is one (not necessarily well-paid) lawyer with the right arguments to invalidate a patent. It's not the number of lawyers that's going to win a patent litigation case, it's the amount and quality of research (for prior art) that does...
... which still sucks, because it places the burden on a lot of people, while filing a bogus patent is absolutely trivial. Since USPTO examiners started awarding patents for every crappy application because they are absolutely unqualified for their jobs, things have been going downhill for the whole system.
Yes, you can do that. But for people compiling and then releasing complete distros, it is best to stick to a more conservative instruction set. Think VIA C3, GEODE, and other low-power or fanless CPUs out there that don't support the whole fancy P4 instruction set! People willing to install a standard distro on those boxes would be pissed off, if the bootloader or kernel freezes, just because of some weird instruction.
It can be argued that it is the distro-maker's responsibility to switch gcc to a more conservative setting before building the distro, but it's 1. easily overlooked and 2. still not the default, once installed (which would break things again on those boxes).
To rephrase a known strategy: "Be liberal in what you accept, be conservative in what you output" (and let the users turn on optimizations, don't force it on them)!
4.0.0 broke backward compatibility big time
on
A Review of GCC 4.0
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Recently, a discussion took place on a FreeBSD mailing list wether the project wanted to use GCC 4.0.0 as the system compiler. Some objections where:
... or lobby your congressperson to push for a patent reform, that would either abolish software patents completely, or at least lower the protection time to something more realistic and decent, like, say, 5 years.
Nice thought, but a few more SAN clusters would be all it takes to absorb the additional residual spam (and a few more Solaris and BSD servers upfront to filter the increased incoming spam flood). You can't DDoS them this way.
First of all, paid links are specially marked as such by Google. You can't influence your google ranking by merely paying them. It would ruin both their algorithm, and their reputation.
Second: if it really were so with MSN Search (I highly doubt it), it should be published somewhere on their pages. Just sneakingly boosting IIS sites seems incredibly silly, if they don't also state plain and simple: if you want better rankings, sign up with us.
Then again, we never know how the search engines (including Google) really work. If we only had an open source search engine, all conspiracy theories would become moot.
Slashdot Mirror
God, being very lenient, didn't hate spam from the very beginning. Only after spammers discovered his secret e-mail address, and didn't stop spamming him after he repeatedly clicked on the dysfunctional "remove me" links, did he become upset and started complaining by raising big hurricanes.
Here's an article (sorry, in German) from the Chaos Computer Club about this. Just look at the screenshot at the bottom.
It's quite old, but that's certainly not a confidence building measure from Microsoft.
Didn't you consider using the alternatives? Competition^WRedundancy can be quite useful in cases like these.
Seriously: that was a good opportunity to test the quality of Yahoo!s results yesterday. Not that bad, and certainly much better than no search engine at all!
People from random businesses around here are pretty paranoid now
... and still use Windows? I know the cost of migrating a lot of corporate stuff to Linux is pretty high, but if they don't even get started, their paranoia ain't getting them nowhere at all.
BTW, I've seen similar attitudes recently: a lot of companies are very untrustful w.r.t. Microsoft's crypto libs and suspect all kinds of backdoors etc.. It may be paranoia, but it may also be true (wasn't there an NSA key somewhere in Windows in the past?).
All the court needs to do is issue a subpoena for the password. Refuse, and you're now in contempt.
Three strategies:
Sure, wiretapping land lines is nearly trivial, compared to underwater activities! Just add some probes at the major interconnects, and you're all set! In the US, the NSA would need to cooperate with the FBI, which would almost likely need to obtain some pretty broad warrants, but that's procedural, not technical.
Regarding Google, Yahoo, Altavista, MSN Search etc...: it is near-trivial for the feds to subponea them, so that they hand over the search history of specified IP addresses or, more likely, netblocks. Or a search history sorted by keywords . There's no need to wiretap their pipes at all, if they already do all the processing themselves.
Anyway, I bet countries do meddle with int'l links.
With RF links, sure. With underwater fibre, quite unlikely.
Have you ever tried to first cut through a big steel mantle, and then find out from a few hundered thousand fibres the right one to tap (don't forget demultiplexing and spreading channels over multiple wires), and then splice that open, and all that under 12000 feet (on average) of water?
And even if you tapped every fibre: reading this amounts to drinking water from a firefighter's waterhose!
Wiretapping modern unterwater fibre links is one of the most challenging tasks there is. I won't bet this happens so frequently.
Been out of that game for a couple of years, so this experience is far from current perhaps there's less open relays now that there were then, but I assure you it was a significant problem.
I can confirm your experience. I was network admin for 4 clients with big backbones in the US, Europe and Australia. China was leading the top approx. 2 years ago w.r.t. open relays, closely followed by Korea. We also used to block the complete APNIC netblock (minus a few manually selected routes) at the edges of the backbones, exactly because of the open relay problems.
That gradually changed though, as more and more spam started to move to open relays in the ARIN blocks, and this has been (at least from the perspective of the probes we've colocated at the major interconnects) continuously going on from then on.
We really can't fathom why spam sources now gravitate towards ARIN blocks, but it does very persistently and consistently. We shortly assumed that it was due to a huge raise in numbers of home users with broadband access; but that number increased in RIPE networks too by the same proportions; though spam from there remained relatively constant.
That's a complete mystery.
Are there any forms of law against the destruction of property in international waters?
The waters may be international, but the pipes are property of... what? A country? A national company? A multinational company? I dunno.
It would probably amount to pirates attacking a ship. How the affected countries react is probably entirely up to them.
Sabotage actions in international waters are normally quite easy to spot exactly with satellite and reconnaissance plane pictures, but also with hydrophones and seismometers: You know exactly where the cut is, and when it happened. Compare this with satellite pictures from that location and time frame, looking for ships and subs. Just to be sure: correlate with other sensor's data. Then track those ships back in time until you know which ports they came from. From there on, resume investigation, hopping from port to port, checking freight papers. If the path leads to China, and if they obstructed investigations, that would be a big clue (though not yet a proof).
About legal issues: IANAL. International Sea Laws are a complex mesh of bilateral and multilateral treaties. It would probably be much cheaper and lightningly faster to just repair the pipes, than to hire an army of lawyers to sort that mess out. Plus: against superpowers like China, even laws would be unenforceable. But don't worry: the likelihood of China cutting fibers in international waters is close to nil.
What I'm trying to say here: it's a political, not a legal issue. If one country starts meddling with international fiber (or radio!) links, other countries would too, and sooner than later, the whole communications network would break down. That's why no country would do something as crazy as that. Not even China. Not even US.
1984 seems to be 30 years ahead of it's time, but it seems to be on the way nicely.
Are you sure? It may have been just 20 years ahead of its time: we carry cellphones with us, so the phone companies (and therefore the state) knows exactly our whereabouts. In London, the complete inner city is surveilled by video cameras, and as we now have a complete digital telephone system, monitoring that is also trivial.
We're already living in a 1984-like world. We're just not seeing it.
Why won't you traceroute yourself?
Though verio.net is certainly not the only pipe they have!
It could happen, as soon as governments realize that terrorists are using spam to avoid traffic analysis.
Of course, it won't happen immediately, but they are already gradually taking freedom of speech away, piece by piece.
Interesting to note, that many spam mails can be traced back to .cn domains
That's actually a myth. Most spam comes from the US. Just because spammers forge 'From: ' headers doesn't mean they are sending spam from chinese networks.
In a recent survey, more than 72% of the spam came from the ARIN netblock (the US being the biggest part of it), 16% from RIPE and the puny remaining rest from APNIC (where most .hk and .cn domains belong).
software they are not allowed to posses and replace it with software they are allowed to posses (think: Linux, FreeBSD, ...)
How long will people be allowed to posses, or even (*gasp*) use Linux, FreeBSD etc...? Give MSFT, MPAA, RIAA and others a few more years or decades to turn the DMCA into something much more restrictive. In a few years from now, we could very well be watching SWAT teams hunting down those hairy, unwashed, the "national security" threatening "Linux terrorists" on Fox News. Hunt the penguin, so to say.
Of course: the less people use "pirated" versions of Windows, the more people will use a free OS. Unfortunately, not everyone will switch, not even 10%.
That program doesn't apply outside the US? Should people abroad be happy or sad about it?
and then hire about 5000 very well paid lawyers ... if you want to dispute the Patent.
All it takes is one (not necessarily well-paid) lawyer with the right arguments to invalidate a patent. It's not the number of lawyers that's going to win a patent litigation case, it's the amount and quality of research (for prior art) that does...
... which still sucks, because it places the burden on a lot of people, while filing a bogus patent is absolutely trivial. Since USPTO examiners started awarding patents for every crappy application because they are absolutely unqualified for their jobs, things have been going downhill for the whole system.
Yes, you can do that. But for people compiling and then releasing complete distros, it is best to stick to a more conservative instruction set. Think VIA C3, GEODE, and other low-power or fanless CPUs out there that don't support the whole fancy P4 instruction set! People willing to install a standard distro on those boxes would be pissed off, if the bootloader or kernel freezes, just because of some weird instruction.
It can be argued that it is the distro-maker's responsibility to switch gcc to a more conservative setting before building the distro, but it's 1. easily overlooked and 2. still not the default, once installed (which would break things again on those boxes).
To rephrase a known strategy: "Be liberal in what you accept, be conservative in what you output" (and let the users turn on optimizations, don't force it on them)!
Recently, a discussion took place on a FreeBSD mailing list wether the project wanted to use GCC 4.0.0 as the system compiler. Some objections where:
If I understood it right, We won't have a GCC 4.0.0 system compiler on FreeBSD anytime soon. Installing the gcc40 port is, of course, always possible.
Yes, indeed. BTW, the whole Prolog syntax and inference engine have been rewritten in Lisp and look pretty good there too.
Actually, XSLT looks and acts pretty LISP-ish, with the only difference that, compared to Lisp, it is horrible to read!
Just wait 20 years until the patent expires...
... or lobby your congressperson to push for a patent reform, that would either abolish software patents completely, or at least lower the protection time to something more realistic and decent, like, say, 5 years.
Nice thought, but a few more SAN clusters would be all it takes to absorb the additional residual spam (and a few more Solaris and BSD servers upfront to filter the increased incoming spam flood). You can't DDoS them this way.
Just use poor man's image pattern maching:
Just make sure to rename linus_torvalds.jpg to bill_gates.jpg though!
First of all, paid links are specially marked as such by Google. You can't influence your google ranking by merely paying them. It would ruin both their algorithm, and their reputation.
Second: if it really were so with MSN Search (I highly doubt it), it should be published somewhere on their pages. Just sneakingly boosting IIS sites seems incredibly silly, if they don't also state plain and simple: if you want better rankings, sign up with us.
Then again, we never know how the search engines (including Google) really work. If we only had an open source search engine, all conspiracy theories would become moot.
RMS will be PISSED you have confused free with free