Warfare is the ability to strike at the military and incapacitate it's ability to fight. I would figure that this is nearly impossible to do. A friend working at the DOE at Sandia described the "air gap" between the classified and unclassified parts *in a single mainframe*. There's no physical method for the information to move between the two parts of this monster computer. I believe that standard procedure on all government computers states that no classified information can be stored on machines connected to the outside world. Similarly, military's have plans to deal with bombs dropping on their communications centers, I don't think that a regular DoS will bother them much.
Terrorism on the other hand, involves striking at civilian targets in an attempt to advance a political agenda. (Which is distinct from war: Clauswitz was wrong, war is not an extension of podlitics, see Keegan, and others). In general, these actions are going to be attempting to disable civilian infrastructure: power plants, power grids, phone networks, etc. I would guess that as these institutions move to exploit the power of modern computing, some will use remote administration tools. Some of these tools will be buggy, some of these bugs will enable attackers to incapacitate the utility. I don't think that these attacks will be common, or effective, as most of these company's are large enough to hire some smart computer security people once the first such attack makes the newspapers.
Crime, on the other hand, is going to be theft or fraud of various kinds. These issues will affect financial institutions, ecommerce, etc. Like terrorism, as these institutions move towards more computing, they will become initially more vulnerable, but eventually they will settle into the same type of security as they currently possess.
Once a failure occurs, Americans (as opposed to say, the Japanese) are usually pretty good at identifying the problem, publicizing it to their peers, and fixing it. I would expect that as society moves more into the information age, various illegal elements will follow us. However, as always, we will have methods of policing them and limiting their damage.
Distinguish between these cases, as the principals have very different motivations and goals. The difference in funding (for attackers of these different classes) is irrelevant as most of these systems are just as vulnerable to a lone kook as to a well funded organization.
btw: the authoritative computer security book is O'Reilly's by Spaf and Garfinkel. It covers most of these threats and more. I'd highly recommend it for anyone interested in computer security.
It's only the hard disk makers (and other permanent storage types like Iomega) that consider a megabyte to be 10^6 bytes. Everything else is with respect to base 2. 10 megabit Ethernet refers to 2^20 bits (not bytes), 128 MB of RAM would be 128 * 2^20 bytes, etc., etc. It's only the hard disk makers who hit on this years ago as a marketing gag to make their disks look a little bit bigger. it's really inane of them considering the rest of the computer world uses base 2 for everything.
I wouldn't recommend going with GAG if you are trying to debug a disk problem. GUIs are great and all, and it would be sweet if a new product was bug free, but I would go with a well tested program such as lilo. You want to rule out possibilities for the causes of the corruption. I recommend switching from the NT loader to lilo.
I would guess that it's not the NT loader at all, but other information that you haven't told us, such as are you mounting your NT partitions and running file access there (such as via locatedb)? I would not mount any non-ext2 partitions in linux until you discover the causes of the corruption.
everybody knows that transmeta is just a front for the aliens. they are in constant contact with the motherbase back on Transmeta Prime, and are busily building a spacetime portal in the basement. You laugh now, and engage in idle speculation about these "patents", but see who's laughing when they pour through their portal and enslave us all.:-)
You neglect to mention the chief benefits of the journal system, namely that articles undergo some kind of review in order that the journal maintains its reputation for quality journalism. While I'm not claiming that such a thing is impossible for a startup e-journal, it would face all the usual challenges to any startup in establishing itself. For most of us, we wouldn't understand articles outside our field and it would be difficult to try and differentiate the genuine science from the crackpots. This would pose difficulties to your system of public review. I certainly think that a public database of scientific articles would be a great boon (we could actually use the Internet for the purpose it was designed, porn^H^H^H^H^H^H, scientific research). But, we shouldn't discard the benefits of peer review and accountability of a editorial body. --sam
I totally agree. You are advocating criminal action. I would be careful about this for several reasons:
it's probably illegal. Inciting a criminal action is probably against the law; I'm not a lawyer but I'm pretty sure you can get busted for this.
More importantly, you just doing it wrong. The correct method to protest an bad rule or law is not by petty theft, but through civil disobediance. Civil disobediance in short, demands that you get caught, and then relies on the publicity to expose the foolishness of the authority. In this case, if you go to a theatre and have a complaint about ridiculous policy, you would follow a procedure something like:
decide the exact manner in which you are going to break the rule
notify the press that you intend to do this, provide a date and time
notify the theatre
notify the police
proceed with the action, and hope that the publicity forces reasonable action upon the theatre
petty crime will not bring about change, it will just get your ass busted. the best method for toppling an unpopular authority is through lots of publicity. --sam
Slashdot Mirror
Warfare is the ability to strike at the military and incapacitate it's ability to fight. I would figure that this is nearly impossible to do. A friend working at the DOE at Sandia described the "air gap" between the classified and unclassified parts *in a single mainframe*. There's no physical method for the information to move between the two parts of this monster computer. I believe that standard procedure on all government computers states that no classified information can be stored on machines connected to the outside world. Similarly, military's have plans to deal with bombs dropping on their communications centers, I don't think that a regular DoS will bother them much.
Terrorism on the other hand, involves striking at civilian targets in an attempt to advance a political agenda. (Which is distinct from war: Clauswitz was wrong, war is not an extension of podlitics, see Keegan, and others). In general, these actions are going to be attempting to disable civilian infrastructure: power plants, power grids, phone networks, etc. I would guess that as these institutions move to exploit the power of modern computing, some will use remote administration tools. Some of these tools will be buggy, some of these bugs will enable attackers to incapacitate the utility. I don't think that these attacks will be common, or effective, as most of these company's are large enough to hire some smart computer security people once the first such attack makes the newspapers.
Crime, on the other hand, is going to be theft or fraud of various kinds. These issues will affect financial institutions, ecommerce, etc. Like terrorism, as these institutions move towards more computing, they will become initially more vulnerable, but eventually they will settle into the same type of security as they currently possess.
Once a failure occurs, Americans (as opposed to say, the Japanese) are usually pretty good at identifying the problem, publicizing it to their peers, and fixing it. I would expect that as society moves more into the information age, various illegal elements will follow us. However, as always, we will have methods of policing them and limiting their damage.
Distinguish between these cases, as the principals have very different motivations and goals. The difference in funding (for attackers of these different classes) is irrelevant as most of these systems are just as vulnerable to a lone kook as to a well funded organization.
btw: the authoritative computer security book is O'Reilly's by Spaf and Garfinkel. It covers most of these threats and more. I'd highly recommend it for anyone interested in computer security.
just my $0.02,
--sam
It's only the hard disk makers (and other permanent storage types like Iomega) that consider a megabyte to be 10^6 bytes. Everything else is with respect to base 2. 10 megabit Ethernet refers to 2^20 bits (not bytes), 128 MB of RAM would be 128 * 2^20 bytes, etc., etc. It's only the hard disk makers who hit on this years ago as a marketing gag to make their disks look a little bit bigger. it's really inane of them considering the rest of the computer world uses base 2 for everything.
--sam
I wouldn't recommend going with GAG if you are trying to debug a disk problem. GUIs are great and all, and it would be sweet if a new product was bug free, but I would go with a well tested program such as lilo. You want to rule out possibilities for the causes of the corruption. I recommend switching from the NT loader to lilo.
I would guess that it's not the NT loader at all, but other information that you haven't told us, such as are you mounting your NT partitions and running file access there (such as via locatedb)? I would not mount any non-ext2 partitions in linux until you discover the causes of the corruption.
--sam
silly man,
:-)
everybody knows that transmeta is just a front for the aliens. they are in constant contact with the motherbase back on Transmeta Prime, and are busily building a spacetime portal in the basement. You laugh now, and engage in idle speculation about these "patents", but see who's laughing when they pour through their portal and enslave us all.
--sam
You neglect to mention the chief benefits of the journal system, namely that articles undergo some kind of review in order that the journal maintains its reputation for quality journalism. While I'm not claiming that such a thing is impossible for a startup e-journal, it would face all the usual challenges to any startup in establishing itself. For most of us, we wouldn't understand articles outside our field and it would be difficult to try and differentiate the genuine science from the crackpots. This would pose difficulties to your system of public review. I certainly think that a public database of scientific articles would be a great boon (we could actually use the Internet for the purpose it was designed, porn^H^H^H^H^H^H, scientific research). But, we shouldn't discard the benefits of peer review and accountability of a editorial body.
--sam
- it's probably illegal. Inciting a criminal action is probably against the law; I'm not a lawyer but I'm pretty sure you can get busted for this.
- More importantly, you just doing it wrong. The correct method to protest an bad rule or law is not by petty theft, but through civil disobediance. Civil disobediance in short, demands that you get caught, and then relies on the publicity to expose the foolishness of the authority. In this case, if you go to a theatre and have a complaint about ridiculous policy, you would follow a procedure something like:
- decide the exact manner in which you are going to break the rule
- notify the press that you intend to do this, provide a date and time
- notify the theatre
- notify the police
- proceed with the action, and hope that the publicity forces reasonable action upon the theatre
petty crime will not bring about change, it will just get your ass busted. the best method for toppling an unpopular authority is through lots of publicity.--sam