I thought they could shut down the GPS in sections at will already? Didn't they do this when they invaded Iraq (er, 2nd time)?
They sure could shut down GPS. Best that is doable is probably switching it off on a per satellite basis. As the Satellites are not stationary, that would mean swithing on and off different Satellites while being in line of sight of a specific location. Or (hardcore method) all sattelites.
Nevertheless my GPSr worked just fine during the Iraq war, just as it did before and after. I was in germany at that time.
When Clinton allowed for more accurate GPS signals to be used by civilians, it sure seemed like they just flipped a switch one day and it was suddenly more accurate for everyone...
They basically just switched off the encryption for the "good signal". I am not too sure if they would switch it off easily, as lots of fleet management systems and navigational systems rely on GPS. The US goverment could not care less for many of these, but there are some Airplanes/Ships/Enterprises owned by payers of significant amount of bribes, err taxes in the US, so I think this will not happen.
Okay I do not know much about BGP, but the MD5 on the peering session is happening within the BGP, right? How does that make the underlying TCP connection more stable or less vulnerable to this attack? Maybe I am wrong about the design of IP-layers, but changing the upper layer should not fix the lower one... And attacking the lower one will affect all higher ones. Or does BGP with MD5 checksums no longer require a persistant TCP connection?
Either I have a stupid day or I do not understand the benefit of putting MD5 into BGP.
To make an end user example: If I have a very long POP3 session (because somebody zipped the google cache and sent it by mail) I would be vulnerable, because this long lasting session could be attacked. Then I loose the session and have to establish a new one. Building a checksum into POP3 won't change much about that.
Ballmer, recognizing that virus-infected home PCs pose a risk to business users, said the company is studying how consumers can get software patches automatically when flaws are detected in Microsoft software.
Attention IT managers: the PCs you're in charge of fixing may change their OS behavior at times of their choosing.
Oh, thats good news. For the last days my win-xp Box in the office is asking me on a daily basis wether I want to install a windows media update. I said yes twice and no twice by now, but still it is asking me everyday. And downloading it every day, BTW. So this will save some expensive seconds of my worktime, by just installing the same update every day, instead of bothering me as a user with it.
I think today I am going to install it again and tomorrow I won't. Just for the fun of it. And now I am going to bite my keyboard...
Nils
Re:This subject already covered millions of times!
on
The Trouble with RFID
·
· Score: 1
The problem with that is, that many customers are happily volunteering to be tracked. And that in detail. It is (for example) called collecting airmiles. With that airmiles card (or any other rebate system using the same idea) it is very easy to create a highly valuable (that is to marketing and law enforcement, not for you) profile of your economical behaviour.
I think either the average customer does not bother being tracked or he does not understand what is going on. In both cases RFID-Tags is something geeks will be against, but Joe Average is not interested at all.
We have recycling centers in every city. The one here around the corner accepts electronical devices for recycling for free from private persons. Companies have to pay some money to get rid of their stuff. That is in Hamburg, Germany. You forgot to mention where you are.
Heise.de has an article about the interetaccess on this conference: http://www.heise.de/newsticker/data/jk-08.12.03-00 6/ (in german). The main info: Internetaccess for participants on this conference will cost about 128Euro. Participants from the third world, already having problems to bring up the money to attend, might not be able to afford the Internetaccess on the "World Summit on the Information Society". An attendee from Bulgaria mentioned that in Bulgaria this is about the amount of money you have to live from... for two months.
With this system you are looking at the radio waves bouncing of solid objects. Thats okay for general analysis of traffic situations (and it could be fun having such a device) but it is completely useless for tracking persons, as it is nearly impossible to identify the objects.
Cell phones can be tracked anyway: I can log in to a website of my cell phone provider and locate my mobile phone. When it is switched on it will be located to a few hundred meters.
This is a lot more useful for tracking people, because I can see a specific device. "Mr. Does cell phone is there" is a lot more interesting than "there is some random car, the size of a minivan".
Bind gets a configuration-option, disallowing specific zones to have anything else but delegation. You effectively can configure, that the.com. zone no longer is allowed to return A-records, but only NS-records.
Nevertheless Verisign can make a workaround: They intruduce a wildcard NS-Record and return A-records from that delegation. That is at least the idea somebody on a mailinglist mentioned, and it seems to make sense. I do not know wether this is possible by the standards (Anyone with more DNS-Knowledge available)?
From my point of view, there are some employees willing to do exactly that. I am currently applying for a job on the other side of the atlantic ocean (that is: I plan to move from germany to canada) and my salary there would be less then it is here. But at the same time, cost of living is lower there, so thats okay for me. But most of my colleagues tend to ask me, wether I'm mad. They just get it calculated, that the canadian dollar is worth less than the euro (1CAN$ is about 0.64EUR). I will get about the same money in.ca, but in Canadian Dollars instead of Euro. They do not understand, that the value of your salary also depends on your cost of living.
If I could get a Job in a country, where cost of living is 10% of the costs here, I could live with being paid 10% of what I get now.
But most people won't. Many people are stuck to their country somehow. Moving to another one is not even an option for them... And for less money? Every change of Job must and in a rise of salary. Thats how many people see it.
The other point is, that you have to think of changing the type of work you do. I did sysadmin at an ISP. When.com went down, I changed the business, and I'm working in a different field now. Now everything is outsourced in my company, so I changed what I did: I no longer do the programming, but rather control the work of other programmers. I do projectmanagement, write whitepapers and functional specifications.
An outsourcer never knows, what his customer actually needs. And they have another approach: If your programming at an outsourcer then you are programming for one of many customers. When a company is doing the work internally your programming for your company... And nobody else. This is often forgotten.
My job now is mostly to make sure our outsourcing partner consideres us as the most important customer...
It all comes down to a simple fact: If you are flexible enough, to change your job or your location, then there are a lot of options. If you are stuck to some picture of your job, it will be tough for you. But still I know a lot o people whining about not getting a job. But they only want to work at an ISP, get at least EUR60,000 a year, are religiously offended when they have to touch a windows machine...
IPv6 is ready for prime time. People are using it (I, for example). You can buy access to IPv6-native backbones. All the major OSses support it. There is really no excuse not to be already using it.
Privately, you can use it, correct. In an commercial environment you can not really setup an IPv6-network, because there are many devices not supporting ist. At least printers are a show stopper. All those other devices (barcode-scanners, IP-Phones, cameras.. whatever speaks IP today) is part of the infrastrucure and has to be IPv6-capable to start using it. So at first we have to get the vendors to make the devices capable of IPv6, then wait for about 5 years and then we can use it in a commercial area.
I am working in the network (Siegmund, why did I just type "notwork"? Any other psychologist here who can enlighten me on this?) department of a company, which very much relies on its international network. And I would be very happy, if I could advise my CIO to make an IPv6-Rollout on our network. But I can't.
This list is showing us, that there are a lot of open source applications already supporting IPv6. Fine, that means I can do test installations in a lab. But in normal business there will be many years until I can do anything in IPv6.
The reasons are simple: There are about 17,000 PCs in our network, and they all run windows. Though some newer versions of this OS support IPv6, they do not support the features that would be needed, like end to end encryption (the NULL-encryption built into the stack does not get me anywhere).
In addition to this most applications do not support it at all. First thing I can think of is our main business application, running on AS/400. I guess the developers of this did not hear of v6 at all. And then there are all the hardware devices, currently being addressed by v4: Airline Ticket Printers, Barcodescanners, Networkprinters, securitysystems at our doors, switches, CPE-Routers etc.
Currently this list shows us what we knew beforehand: IPv6 is a nice playground for nerds. And nerds should play with it, if they do not expect to retire within the next 15years. But today it is far from being usable in normal business. There are only very few companies, the smaller the better, which have sufficiently controllable environment to be able to roll it out.
What we would need today, to be able to roll it out in the near future (within the next 5 to 10 years) is a decision from our managements. The decision has to be not to make any investments in new hard- or software unless it is capable of IPv6. With that decision we could starve out all the v4-only devices over a period of time. But nobody makes the decision currently, again for good reasons: The v4-Stuff works. Additionally there are many cheap devices available on the market and they do not support v6. Pay 3 times the money for a printer, only to have support for a technology like v6? I mean get real, it is very unsure that it will be in mass market within the next 10 years. High risk of investing into something completely useless here.
So we have a simple problem here: Nobody builds v6 technology (at least nobody with commercial interests in it) because nobody buys it. Nobody buys it, because it is not produced in large numbers. (nobody that is with some exceptions, but I'm talking real mass market devices, and these are not Cisco-Routers or something. Compare the number of printer sold to the number of routers sold, to get my point).
Like with any new technology one has not only got to ask what it can do for you but also what it can do against you. Though the possibilities of this Idea seem very charming for personal use there come up some questions:
Isn't your stored profile a great way to track your movement? As well for "law enforcement" as for "clean his house of everything thats expensive" people?
Won't the marketing guys just love to know, you are close to one of their shops and a young man? As you obviously using a computer you must be the target audience for Viagra.
Like with every new network technology one has to be aware of what informations he gives out to almost everyone interested. Only having the advantages and the disadvantages in mind you can make a good decision on wether you want to use that software or not.
I took a look into v6 and found some nice things in there. But I wouldn't want to use it currently. Having PA-Addresses on every networkstation in our internal network and not having to use NAT sounds like a good Idea. Until you change your provider. Big renumbering ante Portas. And the autoassignments might be nice, only I do not trust them yet. There will always be boxes configured by Hand.
And then there is the vendor support. Not only the software missing (that was mentioned before), but also the missing Hardware: I'm talking about network printers, Barcodescanners, telephonesystems, powerswitches... All that little things, already supporting IP. They only can do v4.
So we cannot switch until all the devices we need support it. And that won't be the case within the next 5 to 10 years I guess.
In germany there already is an official title for all these guys which is "Fachinformatiker für Systemintegration" ("informatics guy specialized in system integration" is the closest translation I can think of).
You are already able to get this title with a 3-year training time (thats a special thing in.de-country: For almost every Job you normally do a 2 to 3 year training, combined of school lessons and work in a company).
This results in 2 things: 1. Because of the long title everyone still calls us sysadmins 2. nobody works in the job he learned originally
Theres one important thing about Web-Based Discussionboards: The usenet can do all they can, only better.
I currently live in a country, where Phonecosts are something, that is based on the time you use your phoneline. While I can read News very comfortable when offline, I've got to pay for every single second of Slashdotting.
And Newsgroups were invented for Discussion. Web seems just to be the wrong Media for a discussion forum.
Slashdot Mirror
According to this article on Full Disclosure you better have your credit card within reach in case you are planning to use this product.
Nils
I thought they could shut down the GPS in sections at will already? Didn't they do this when they invaded Iraq (er, 2nd time)?
They sure could shut down GPS. Best that is doable is probably switching it off on a per satellite basis. As the Satellites are not stationary, that would mean swithing on and off different Satellites while being in line of sight of a specific location. Or (hardcore method) all sattelites.
Nevertheless my GPSr worked just fine during the Iraq war, just as it did before and after. I was in germany at that time.
When Clinton allowed for more accurate GPS signals to be used by civilians, it sure seemed like they just flipped a switch one day and it was suddenly more accurate for everyone...
They basically just switched off the encryption for the "good signal". I am not too sure if they would switch it off easily, as lots of fleet management systems and navigational systems rely on GPS. The US goverment could not care less for many of these, but there are some Airplanes/Ships/Enterprises owned by payers of significant amount of bribes, err taxes in the US, so I think this will not happen.
Nils
For those having problems with some of these terms I recommend the Software engineer glossary of product terminology.
Nils
AlphaGrip's 3D Keyboard Ready For Pre-Orders
One "D" always seemed to be enough for me.
Nils
You can download now without any login required from MS.
Guess this will be breaking down within minutes...
Nils
Nothing is permanently installed on a hard drive. These details can be verified in the 'install.log' file in the computer's root directory.
1. What is the root directory on a windows machine?
2. How does install.log get there, when nothing is stored on the computers HDD?
Okay I do not know much about BGP, but the MD5 on the peering session is happening within the BGP, right? How does that make the underlying TCP connection more stable or less vulnerable to this attack? Maybe I am wrong about the design of IP-layers, but changing the upper layer should not fix the lower one ... And attacking the lower one will affect all higher ones. Or does BGP with MD5 checksums no longer require a persistant TCP connection?
Either I have a stupid day or I do not understand the benefit of putting MD5 into BGP.
To make an end user example: If I have a very long POP3 session (because somebody zipped the google cache and sent it by mail) I would be vulnerable, because this long lasting session could be attacked. Then I loose the session and have to establish a new one. Building a checksum into POP3 won't change much about that.
Nils
But what do you do when someone takes your entire web site and hosts it in a foreign country?
You mean like when I create a website on my server in germany and google cache mirrors it on their system? Yeah, that would be bad.
To be honest, I think it is the best thing that can happen. I get said, whatever I want to say, they pay for the traffic. Fair enough for me.
Nils
Ballmer, recognizing that virus-infected home PCs pose a risk to business users, said the company is studying how consumers can get software patches automatically when flaws are detected in Microsoft software.
Attention IT managers: the PCs you're in charge of fixing may change their OS behavior at times of their choosing.
Oh, thats good news. For the last days my win-xp Box in the office is asking me on a daily basis wether I want to install a windows media update. I said yes twice and no twice by now, but still it is asking me everyday. And downloading it every day, BTW. So this will save some expensive seconds of my worktime, by just installing the same update every day, instead of bothering me as a user with it.
I think today I am going to install it again and tomorrow I won't. Just for the fun of it. And now I am going to bite my keyboard...
Nils
The problem with that is, that many customers are happily volunteering to be tracked. And that in detail. It is (for example) called collecting airmiles. With that airmiles card (or any other rebate system using the same idea) it is very easy to create a highly valuable (that is to marketing and law enforcement, not for you) profile of your economical behaviour.
I think either the average customer does not bother being tracked or he does not understand what is going on. In both cases RFID-Tags is something geeks will be against, but Joe Average is not interested at all.
Nils
We have recycling centers in every city. The one here around the corner accepts electronical devices for recycling for free from private persons. Companies have to pay some money to get rid of their stuff. That is in Hamburg, Germany. You forgot to mention where you are.
Nils
Heise.de has an article about the interetaccess on this conference: http://www.heise.de/newsticker/data/jk-08.12.03-00 6/ (in german). The main info: Internetaccess for participants on this conference will cost about 128Euro. Participants from the third world, already having problems to bring up the money to attend, might not be able to afford the Internetaccess on the "World Summit on the Information Society". An attendee from Bulgaria mentioned that in Bulgaria this is about the amount of money you have to live from ... for two months.
Nils
With this system you are looking at the radio waves bouncing of solid objects. Thats okay for general analysis of traffic situations (and it could be fun having such a device) but it is completely useless for tracking persons, as it is nearly impossible to identify the objects.
Cell phones can be tracked anyway: I can log in to a website of my cell phone provider and locate my mobile phone. When it is switched on it will be located to a few hundred meters.
This is a lot more useful for tracking people, because I can see a specific device. "Mr. Does cell phone is there" is a lot more interesting than "there is some random car, the size of a minivan".
What is BIND doing?
.com. zone no longer is allowed to return A-records, but only NS-records.
Bind gets a configuration-option, disallowing specific zones to have anything else but delegation. You effectively can configure, that the
Nevertheless Verisign can make a workaround: They intruduce a wildcard NS-Record and return A-records from that delegation. That is at least the idea somebody on a mailinglist mentioned, and it seems to make sense. I do not know wether this is possible by the standards (Anyone with more DNS-Knowledge available)?
From my point of view, there are some employees willing to do exactly that. I am currently applying for a job on the other side of the atlantic ocean (that is: I plan to move from germany to canada) and my salary there would be less then it is here. But at the same time, cost of living is lower there, so thats okay for me. .ca, but in Canadian Dollars instead of Euro. They do not understand, that the value of your salary also depends on your cost of living.
... And for less money? Every change of Job must and in a rise of salary. Thats how many people see it.
.com went down, I changed the business, and I'm working in a different field now. Now everything is outsourced in my company, so I changed what I did: I no longer do the programming, but rather control the work of other programmers. I do projectmanagement, write whitepapers and functional specifications.
... And nobody else. This is often forgotten.
But most of my colleagues tend to ask me, wether I'm mad. They just get it calculated, that the canadian dollar is worth less than the euro (1CAN$ is about 0.64EUR). I will get about the same money in
If I could get a Job in a country, where cost of living is 10% of the costs here, I could live with being paid 10% of what I get now.
But most people won't. Many people are stuck to their country somehow. Moving to another one is not even an option for them
The other point is, that you have to think of changing the type of work you do. I did sysadmin at an ISP. When
An outsourcer never knows, what his customer actually needs. And they have another approach: If your programming at an outsourcer then you are programming for one of many customers. When a company is doing the work internally your programming for your company
My job now is mostly to make sure our outsourcing partner consideres us as the most important customer...
It all comes down to a simple fact: If you are flexible enough, to change your job or your location, then there are a lot of options. If you are stuck to some picture of your job, it will be tough for you. But still I know a lot o people whining about not getting a job. But they only want to work at an ISP, get at least EUR60,000 a year, are religiously offended when they have to touch a windows machine...
Nils
IPv6 is ready for prime time. People are using it (I, for example). You can buy access to IPv6-native backbones. All the major OSses support it. There is really no excuse not to be already using it.
.. whatever speaks IP today) is part of the infrastrucure and has to be IPv6-capable to start using it.
Privately, you can use it, correct. In an commercial environment you can not really setup an IPv6-network, because there are many devices not supporting ist. At least printers are a show stopper. All those other devices (barcode-scanners, IP-Phones, cameras
So at first we have to get the vendors to make the devices capable of IPv6, then wait for about 5 years and then we can use it in a commercial area.
I am working in the network (Siegmund, why did I just type "notwork"? Any other psychologist here who can enlighten me on this?) department of a company, which very much relies on its international network. And I would be very happy, if I could advise my CIO to make an IPv6-Rollout on our network. But I can't.
This list is showing us, that there are a lot of open source applications already supporting IPv6. Fine, that means I can do test installations in a lab. But in normal business there will be many years until I can do anything in IPv6.
The reasons are simple: There are about 17,000 PCs in our network, and they all run windows. Though some newer versions of this OS support IPv6, they do not support the features that would be needed, like end to end encryption (the NULL-encryption built into the stack does not get me anywhere).
In addition to this most applications do not support it at all. First thing I can think of is our main business application, running on AS/400. I guess the developers of this did not hear of v6 at all. And then there are all the hardware devices, currently being addressed by v4: Airline Ticket Printers, Barcodescanners, Networkprinters, securitysystems at our doors, switches, CPE-Routers etc.
Currently this list shows us what we knew beforehand: IPv6 is a nice playground for nerds. And nerds should play with it, if they do not expect to retire within the next 15years. But today it is far from being usable in normal business. There are only very few companies, the smaller the better, which have sufficiently controllable environment to be able to roll it out.
What we would need today, to be able to roll it out in the near future (within the next 5 to 10 years) is a decision from our managements. The decision has to be not to make any investments in new hard- or software unless it is capable of IPv6. With that decision we could starve out all the v4-only devices over a period of time. But nobody makes the decision currently, again for good reasons: The v4-Stuff works. Additionally there are many cheap devices available on the market and they do not support v6. Pay 3 times the money for a printer, only to have support for a technology like v6? I mean get real, it is very unsure that it will be in mass market within the next 10 years. High risk of investing into something completely useless here.
So we have a simple problem here: Nobody builds v6 technology (at least nobody with commercial interests in it) because nobody buys it. Nobody buys it, because it is not produced in large numbers. (nobody that is with some exceptions, but I'm talking real mass market devices, and these are not Cisco-Routers or something. Compare the number of printer sold to the number of routers sold, to get my point).
Nils
Like with any new technology one has not only got to ask what it can do for you but also what it can do against you. Though the possibilities of this Idea seem very charming for personal use there come up some questions:
Isn't your stored profile a great way to track your movement? As well for "law enforcement" as for "clean his house of everything thats expensive" people?
Won't the marketing guys just love to know, you are close to one of their shops and a young man? As you obviously using a computer you must be the target audience for Viagra.
Like with every new network technology one has to be aware of what informations he gives out to almost everyone interested. Only having the advantages and the disadvantages in mind you can make a good decision on wether you want to use that software or not.
Nils
A breath of freedom in a world owned by Microsoft.
But you should have in mind, that the headquarter of Microsoft-Germany is located in Munich.
Nils
I took a look into v6 and found some nice things in there. But I wouldn't want to use it currently. Having PA-Addresses on every networkstation in our internal network and not having to use NAT sounds like a good Idea. Until you change your provider. Big renumbering ante Portas. And the autoassignments might be nice, only I do not trust them yet. There will always be boxes configured by Hand.
... All that little things, already supporting IP. They only can do v4.
And then there is the vendor support. Not only the software missing (that was mentioned before), but also the missing Hardware: I'm talking about network printers, Barcodescanners, telephonesystems, powerswitches
So we cannot switch until all the devices we need support it. And that won't be the case within the next 5 to 10 years I guess.
Nils
In germany there already is an official title for all these guys which is "Fachinformatiker für Systemintegration" ("informatics guy specialized in system integration" is the closest translation I can think of).
.de-country: For almost every Job you normally do a 2 to 3 year training, combined of school lessons and work in a company).
You are already able to get this title with a 3-year training time (thats a special thing in
This results in 2 things:
1. Because of the long title everyone still calls us sysadmins
2. nobody works in the job he learned originally
Nils
How come, that I must think of Monthy Pyton right now: "Your american beer is like making love in a canoe -- fucking close to water"
Nils
Theres one important thing about Web-Based Discussionboards: The usenet can do all they can, only better.
I currently live in a country, where Phonecosts are something, that is based on the time you use your phoneline. While I can read News very comfortable when offline, I've got to pay for every single second of Slashdotting.
And Newsgroups were invented for Discussion. Web seems just to be the wrong Media for a discussion forum.
Just my 0.02 EUR
Nils