I think they were waiting to get a patch written, and to give all the vendors time to do their research.
Core SDI developed the exploit. CERT is just notoriously slow... which is a shame, because most vendor patches don't come out until after the CERT vulnerability.
Yeah, I've been curious about the penetration of DSL and cable into the American internet market... nobody has compiled hard numbers, that I know, but it would be interesting to find out what effect broadband has had on backbone traffic to date.
Even with all the tier 1 ISPs hauling giant circuits, interexchanges are still hosed. This will be the limiting factor, I think.
OK, I love the hype about connecting to the "internet" at blazing fast speeds... especially since eventually all of these connections must go into telecommunications circuits that tie into a tier 1 isp and to the Internet backbone, utilizing private and public interexchanges, and the rest of the resources that we all share right now.
Access technology is worthless without the backbone to back it up, and right now the MAEs and other interexchanges, along w/ private peers and international cables, are our bottleneck points. You can't jam a gigabit pipe into a T1 and expect any performance.
So the moral of the story is that 8 years of psych education in a secluded university environment makes you think that everyone else is crazy... I'm going to have to tell my sister (psych Ph.D.) that one.
Not surprising, however. You spend so many years, so much pain, and all the horrors of dissertation time on an education about craziness, you learn every possible indicator of mental illness from the most insignificant to the most blatant, you diagnose subjects until it becomes second nature... I could see that leaving the student a little, er, trigger happy. Maybe they should add courses about normalcy, so that the students have a little something to compare their test subjects with.
Yeah, 22% of the population has a mental disorder... that would be the 22% that is always walking around trying to figure out what's wrong with the rest of us.
As far as I can tell, the NSA still has to obey court orders... which is what EPIC will be seeking. The worse question, of course, is how you tell if they aren't complying. How much work will it take to falsify a bunch of documents, provide them to the court, and never let on whether or not they are actually doing civilian surveillance.
The only way you could be sure they were complying would be to have open access to the information they are collecting... and that isn't likely to happen when NSA pulls the national security card for real.
How do you monitor something that is considered so secret that even judges and courts can't really review it?
Absolutely, it's a start... as microwave systems were also a start. Problem here is that your basic distribution systems are all fiber-based. Satellite (in current form) is too latent, RF or Microwave doesn't go far enough clean enough, etc. etc.
So even if it is built in such a way that you are freed from the local loop charges of your DSL line, the cost is still going to be handed to you by your provider as they have to pay localtelco for local loop charges on the circuits they add to take care of increased capacity, and long-haul carriers for more backbone capacity, and so on.
An even better start, in my mind, would be to design a system like this that does voice/vid/data, and frees you as a consumer from Ma Bell's + Cableco's presence in your house. Of course, that requires 99.999% reliability, and all that, so it is a long way off.
OK, here's your flame, you paranoid fart. I didn't read anything in Katz's article that said Christianity was invalid. He bitched about the worn out motif of the end of the world, and preemptively celebrated the turning of the millenium because Hollywood wouldn't have Y2K to kick around anymore. He even called it a wholesome message for hollywood.
But you overly touchy religious types, like hyper-feminists, beefed-up steroid pumping jocks, or any other group that takes their ideas too seriously, needs no real provocation to fly off the handle and accuse somebody of stepping on your oversized toes.
I really don't want to sound that mean, but for God's sake.. CHILL OUT. Everything that somebody writes that mentions religion isn't necessarily a bash, and if Katz didn't like a movie with technology themes and bashed it the same way nobody would be accusing him of being a luddite...
Nice tech and all (I work w/Cisco prod all day long, and am a cheerleader most of the time) but there is no way that this will free us from telecoms. Distance limitations are unacceptable, unless someone wanted to build a system that bounced data from one side of the country to another using this... and that would be very prohibitively expensive.
I like the tech, on the other hand, if it can be developed as a service-provider based alternative to microwave. I have seen DS3 microwave systems going moderate distances across a metro area, and you end up saving the cost of the hardware very quickly when compared to paying local loop fees for that kind of circuit. If this could be rolled out by a motorola as a point-to-point connection between business buildings, with cpe hardware costing a few hundred dollars, they could bank.
Maybe that mythical Metro Area Network will emerge eventually, after all...
The accident wasn't in releasing the worm... he planned on doing that. The internals of the software checked a new system to see if it had been installed, and didn't install itself again if it had. The accident was that he wrote the code in such a way that every 6th or 7th time the worm saw itself, it would copy itself anyway, which caused massive resource drain on the systems it inhabited once it spiralled out of control. He just wanted a quiet worm, and accidentally took down large chunks of the net.
Keypad Zen is possible
on
Interface Zen
·
· Score: 2
Great column, Tom (especially as I jammed the caps lock key at some point and kept getting a lowercase g on Great). I take issue, however, with the idea that you can't have a zen experience with the number keypad and the keyboard at the same time.
When I was working at an ISP, I found myself consoled into 4 or 5 cisco routers on a regular basis, typing things like:
sh ip bgp 192.168.1.0 sh ip route 10.1.1.0 access-list 110 permit ip 172.31.10.0 0.0.0.255 10.1.1.0 0.0.0.255 eq any ip route 192.168.20.0 255.255.255.0 10.14.21.10 1 ip route 192.168.20.0 255.255.255.0 null0 255
The typing would be... (keyboard, obviously) access-list 110 permit ip *this keeps my hands near the keys when I do the 110, so I can quickly move back to permit ip*
and then (number pad) 172.31.10.0 0.0.0.255 10.1.1.0 0.0.0.255
and back to the keyboard for permit/deny, etc.
There was absolutely no interruption in the flow of movement from keyboard to number pad and back, mostly because the action was repeated under extreme stress and network-down failures over and over until it was reflex. In the routing world, at least, the beautiful nearness and easy access to period (.) from the number pad allows the entry of IP addresses and masks with blazing speed. Still, a quick hand on the keyboard is necessary... so if you are going to do it correctly, and reach that Zen state of routing, you find yourself moving seamlessly between keyboard and number pad.
Of course, I don't blame you for missing this possibility, as it wouldn't be apparent to anyone who didn't drill in a lot of IP addresses on a regular basis.
This kind of manipulation doesn't just happen in the consumer hardware space. Network hardware, in particular, seems to be based entirely on marketingspeak and fudged benchmarks. I haven't seen anyone go so far as to try to poison reviews in a public forum, but I have seen:
Single-processor 250Mhz Sun servers tested against Quad P3-500 Xeons
Performance numbers which assume that there are no features running on the product
Liberal use of "catchphrases" like "non-blocking switch" when technical details disagree
Benchmarks which favor vendor-specific implementations (just see how much better ASAPI does than Perl/CGI in a benchmark)
Blaming everything else around the device which seems to be having a problem (it's the router/firewall/switch/NIC/Server Proc, not my load-balancing device)
The more someone thinks they can get away with, the more they'll try. We should just crucify/boycott companies who use these tactics, as it will be impossible to trust them in the future. The free market, if properly informed, will take care of these abusers of consumer trust.
I believe there is not 100 gbps fiber running anywhere in a production telco network. The fastest box I have seen anything plugged into is OC-192, at 10 Gbps. I am not sure if they have jacked the signalling above 10 on undersea links, but that is as fast as I have seen switching hardware.
Yeah, but that's a telco box and the GSR is an ISP box. Different market segments entirely.
Avici's box is essentially a bigass frame relay switch. That doesn't take care of high-speed IP infrastructure any better than a bigass ATM switch. The GSR rocks because I can run BGP 4 and a variety of IGPs on it, making it an ISP device rather than a telco box.
While the idea of a bigass frame relay switch is intriguing, I really couldn't give a shit about it. I am more interested in something I can run pure packet over sonet on, like a GSR. When I can plug a DWDM circuit into the avici box and ROUTE ip over it, dealing only with the layer 1/2 signalling overhead of SONET (and not FR or ATM), I will pay a little more attention to it... but it looks as if the company is going to market itself to the telcos exclusively, which means the box will always be a switch.
It was almost a year ago that frontier globalcenter turned up the first OC-48 Packet Over Sonet link between SF and LA, so this is less than impressive. That link was turned up into a production network, using Cisco GSR routers (which will take OC-48 POS cards with no sweat). I don't see where these people get off saying this is the first application.
OC-192 POS, on the other hand, would be something nice and new...
i'm not a beowulf geek, but 256 nodes seems like a lot of boxes to be running all those scheduling and message passing protocols between. I am curious what they are using to switch that much traffic, and if the GigE is going to be enough to handle all of the traffic between nodes.
I couldn't find any info on the network hardware, however. Sigh.
As far as I can tell, it worked really well for microsoft. Incidentally, it has worked REALLY well for Cisco. It didn't work too well for AOL, but as a general rule acquiring companies that have already developed useful applications in your market space is a good way to grow your business.
If Red Hat follows in the footsteps of Microsoft when it comes to growing your business, we should all be relatively happy as the (open source) product line becomes more robust and feeds more good code (and paid coders) into the community.
OK, I build networks. Lately I have been building e-commerce networks in co-location facilities. Here's what's wrong with the benchmarks... they don't represent real-world conditions. Most benchmarks don't. Some specifics.
CGI: NT, somehow, in all the benches, gets good performance numbers out of active content (isapi dlls, in the case of webbench). Sun w/Netscape's Enterprise Server, as a reference, spawns a new version of perl every time it takes a CGI request for perl-based content (apache, on the other hand, using mod_perl, will not spawn all the extra processes.) I don't know how the NT kernel deals with these requests, but it pulls better benchmark numbers, likely because it is using isapi dlls.
All of these, of course, are entirely dependant on middleware server performance. As webbench doesn't actually query a database, I'm not sure how accurate of a description of active content serving this is. Page serving lag time is as dependant on your backend database as it is on isapi, nsapi, or perl/cgi calls.
SSL: SSL processing is a bitch. This is just reality. Several studies show that you can peg 4 beefy processors running a few (teens) SSL requests against them. WebBench runs around 8% SSL. Curiously, NT and Linux show about the same performance numbers (IIS vs. Apache) on SSL processing, but the resource drain that 8% SSL hits create adversely affects the rest of the system in unpredictable ways. I can't say with any surety what the final impact on web serving systems are by putting the SSL in webbench, but my standard builds do not run SSL and static/dynamic content on the same server.
Then, there are the real variables. Active to static content percentage, database to web server connectivity, page size, graphics load, etc. etc. etc.
A real OS-to-OS benchmark is going to be using the same method to query active content (everybody does CGI, not everybody does ISAPI), and is not going to load down the servers with superflouos (sp?) SSL processing. Even then, the only real indicator of performance is to run site-specific, application specific benchmarks on your own web site. The real story is that IIS is a decent web server platform (if they've cured the memory leaks... I haven't looked in a while), as is Apache, Zeus, etc. The OS choice to run your web server can be made on performance, reliability, scalability, ease of use, security, and all the other external reasons why you use an OS for any server. No, it isn't clean cut, and it doesn't say "OS X is better than OS Y for web servers", but it is reality.
Fabulous JP, dodge all the questions, use the one (mostly) humorous question posted at you as a launching point to call the slashdot community a bunch of babies, refuse to justify the removal of packetstorm (and claim that you didn't threaten legal action, even though your letter to harvard did... promote misconception by refusing to explain what you do with your time (no, that little 'graph you gave us isn't an explanation of what you do), brag about how many hacks you withstand on an hourly basis, and generally behave like a dolt.
I'm confused. There is a slashdot for people interested in Linux (and BSD, and Mac, and Be), why is there no central gathering place for windows users? If there was, then slashdot could post the location of a poll, the windows page could do the same, and we wouldn't be able to stuff the internet ballot box so badly. Why hasn't MS figured this out yet? Or are they entirely uninterested in community?
Monster fines are in order, if only because the findings of the antitrust investigation show that MS not only damaged other corporations with it's unethical business practices, but the users of windows suffered technologically.
Splitting the corporation is a good thing, for both MS, the users, and the technology community. Why?
Good for MS users: Splitting MS will force it into groups which focus on smaller market shares. No dumbass web tv, less OS bloat, substantially reduced influence in internet standards arenas, less ability to stifle innovation both in hardware and software technology. The end result, if done correctly, would force a segment of MS to focus on creating solid operating systems with easy GUIs that continue to reduce the technological barriers to computing for the average user.
Good for MS: Focus, focus, focus. Rather than trying to do everything, a split of the company could create a company which concentrates on OS development, a company which concentrates on application development for x86, mac and unix platforms, and a company which concentrates on internet technology. By doing so, and removing the overarching goal of supporting windows and its product goals, the talented developers that MS currently employs could have more freedom to innovate without all of the restrictions they currently operate under.
Good for us: Netscape, Sun, and the hundreds of underrepresented software companies who could have made great products for all software platforms are freed from the unnatural restrictions MS imposed on them if they attempted to infringe on "core business", which currently includes everything under the sun. This leads directly to better software offerings, broader OS support for existing apps, and less hoops for developers to jump through.
If done right, I think this could be the best thing to happen to computing since (gasp!) the GUI.
The annoying part of this whole Echelon deal is that it has commonly been reported (sources are questionable, but becoming less so) that the US and UK set up monitoring of each other's citizens to technically get around monitoring laws that apply to citizens of the country.
This must infuriate the FBI, as domestic surveillance is supposed to be their game. I wonder if we are not going to set off a serious inter-governmental turf war if/when solid proof of broad-based domestic surveillance is provided.
(link to the london telegraph article that references the eu report) complaining about echelon practices, but it has managed to stay out of mainstream American press to date. I'm curious how our citizens, assured at every step of their freedom and rights, will react to the idea of every phone call, fax, email, etc. being collected and monitored by the NSA and their flunkies. Congress, also, could have something interesting to say, if they were ever really informed.
I think it's time to start talking about this kind of surveillance in mainstream media, where it will reach the ears of those who don't want to hear.
Slashdot Mirror
I think they were waiting to get a patch written, and to give all the vendors time to do their research.
... which is a shame, because most vendor patches don't come out until after the CERT vulnerability.
Core SDI developed the exploit. CERT is just notoriously slow
Yeah, I've been curious about the penetration of DSL and cable into the American internet market ... nobody has compiled hard numbers, that I know, but it would be interesting to find out what effect broadband has had on backbone traffic to date.
Even with all the tier 1 ISPs hauling giant circuits, interexchanges are still hosed. This will be the limiting factor, I think.
Sure, we'll just haul new fiber, redesign all of the public and private interexchanges, and upgrade all of the routers across the globe ...
OK, I love the hype about connecting to the "internet" at blazing fast speeds ... especially since eventually all of these connections must go into telecommunications circuits that tie into a tier 1 isp and to the Internet backbone, utilizing private and public interexchanges, and the rest of the resources that we all share right now.
Access technology is worthless without the backbone to back it up, and right now the MAEs and other interexchanges, along w/ private peers and international cables, are our bottleneck points. You can't jam a gigabit pipe into a T1 and expect any performance.
So the moral of the story is that 8 years of psych education in a secluded university environment makes you think that everyone else is crazy ... I'm going to have to tell my sister (psych Ph.D.) that one.
... I could see that leaving the student a little, er, trigger happy. Maybe they should add courses about normalcy, so that the students have a little something to compare their test subjects with.
Not surprising, however. You spend so many years, so much pain, and all the horrors of dissertation time on an education about craziness, you learn every possible indicator of mental illness from the most insignificant to the most blatant, you diagnose subjects until it becomes second nature
Yeah, 22% of the population has a mental disorder ... that would be the 22% that is always walking around trying to figure out what's wrong with the rest of us.
As far as I can tell, the NSA still has to obey court orders ... which is what EPIC will be seeking. The worse question, of course, is how you tell if they aren't complying. How much work will it take to falsify a bunch of documents, provide them to the court, and never let on whether or not they are actually doing civilian surveillance.
... and that isn't likely to happen when NSA pulls the national security card for real.
The only way you could be sure they were complying would be to have open access to the information they are collecting
How do you monitor something that is considered so secret that even judges and courts can't really review it?
Absolutely, it's a start ... as microwave systems were also a start. Problem here is that your basic distribution systems are all fiber-based. Satellite (in current form) is too latent, RF or Microwave doesn't go far enough clean enough, etc. etc.
So even if it is built in such a way that you are freed from the local loop charges of your DSL line, the cost is still going to be handed to you by your provider as they have to pay localtelco for local loop charges on the circuits they add to take care of increased capacity, and long-haul carriers for more backbone capacity, and so on.
An even better start, in my mind, would be to design a system like this that does voice/vid/data, and frees you as a consumer from Ma Bell's + Cableco's presence in your house. Of course, that requires 99.999% reliability, and all that, so it is a long way off.
OK, here's your flame, you paranoid fart. I didn't read anything in Katz's article that said Christianity was invalid. He bitched about the worn out motif of the end of the world, and preemptively celebrated the turning of the millenium because Hollywood wouldn't have Y2K to kick around anymore. He even called it a wholesome message for hollywood.
.. CHILL OUT. Everything that somebody writes that mentions religion isn't necessarily a bash, and if Katz didn't like a movie with technology themes and bashed it the same way nobody would be accusing him of being a luddite ...
... it's a freaking movie review.
But you overly touchy religious types, like hyper-feminists, beefed-up steroid pumping jocks, or any other group that takes their ideas too seriously, needs no real provocation to fly off the handle and accuse somebody of stepping on your oversized toes.
I really don't want to sound that mean, but for God's sake
After all
Nice tech and all (I work w/Cisco prod all day long, and am a cheerleader most of the time) but there is no way that this will free us from telecoms. Distance limitations are unacceptable, unless someone wanted to build a system that bounced data from one side of the country to another using this ... and that would be very prohibitively expensive.
I like the tech, on the other hand, if it can be developed as a service-provider based alternative to microwave. I have seen DS3 microwave systems going moderate distances across a metro area, and you end up saving the cost of the hardware very quickly when compared to paying local loop fees for that kind of circuit. If this could be rolled out by a motorola as a point-to-point connection between business buildings, with cpe hardware costing a few hundred dollars, they could bank.
Maybe that mythical Metro Area Network will emerge eventually, after all...
The accident wasn't in releasing the worm ... he planned on doing that. The internals of the software checked a new system to see if it had been installed, and didn't install itself again if it had. The accident was that he wrote the code in such a way that every 6th or 7th time the worm saw itself, it would copy itself anyway, which caused massive resource drain on the systems it inhabited once it spiralled out of control. He just wanted a quiet worm, and accidentally took down large chunks of the net.
Great column, Tom (especially as I jammed the caps lock key at some point and kept getting a lowercase g on Great). I take issue, however, with the idea that you can't have a zen experience with the number keypad and the keyboard at the same time.
... (keyboard, obviously) access-list 110 permit ip *this keeps my hands near the keys when I do the 110, so I can quickly move back to permit ip*
... so if you are going to do it correctly, and reach that Zen state of routing, you find yourself moving seamlessly between keyboard and number pad.
When I was working at an ISP, I found myself consoled into 4 or 5 cisco routers on a regular basis, typing things like:
sh ip bgp 192.168.1.0
sh ip route 10.1.1.0
access-list 110 permit ip 172.31.10.0 0.0.0.255 10.1.1.0 0.0.0.255 eq any
ip route 192.168.20.0 255.255.255.0 10.14.21.10 1
ip route 192.168.20.0 255.255.255.0 null0 255
The typing would be
and then (number pad) 172.31.10.0 0.0.0.255 10.1.1.0 0.0.0.255
and back to the keyboard for permit/deny, etc.
There was absolutely no interruption in the flow of movement from keyboard to number pad and back, mostly because the action was repeated under extreme stress and network-down failures over and over until it was reflex. In the routing world, at least, the beautiful nearness and easy access to period (.) from the number pad allows the entry of IP addresses and masks with blazing speed. Still, a quick hand on the keyboard is necessary
Of course, I don't blame you for missing this possibility, as it wouldn't be apparent to anyone who didn't drill in a lot of IP addresses on a regular basis.
Just a thought. Cheers!
This kind of manipulation doesn't just happen in the consumer hardware space. Network hardware, in particular, seems to be based entirely on marketingspeak and fudged benchmarks. I haven't seen anyone go so far as to try to poison reviews in a public forum, but I have seen:
Single-processor 250Mhz Sun servers tested against Quad P3-500 Xeons
Performance numbers which assume that there are no features running on the product
Liberal use of "catchphrases" like "non-blocking switch" when technical details disagree
Benchmarks which favor vendor-specific implementations (just see how much better ASAPI does than Perl/CGI in a benchmark)
Blaming everything else around the device which seems to be having a problem (it's the router/firewall/switch/NIC/Server Proc, not my load-balancing device)
The more someone thinks they can get away with, the more they'll try. We should just crucify/boycott companies who use these tactics, as it will be impossible to trust them in the future. The free market, if properly informed, will take care of these abusers of consumer trust.
I believe there is not 100 gbps fiber running anywhere in a production telco network. The fastest box I have seen anything plugged into is OC-192, at 10 Gbps. I am not sure if they have jacked the signalling above 10 on undersea links, but that is as fast as I have seen switching hardware.
Yeah, but that's a telco box and the GSR is an ISP box. Different market segments entirely.
... but it looks as if the company is going to market itself to the telcos exclusively, which means the box will always be a switch.
Avici's box is essentially a bigass frame relay switch. That doesn't take care of high-speed IP infrastructure any better than a bigass ATM switch. The GSR rocks because I can run BGP 4 and a variety of IGPs on it, making it an ISP device rather than a telco box.
While the idea of a bigass frame relay switch is intriguing, I really couldn't give a shit about it. I am more interested in something I can run pure packet over sonet on, like a GSR. When I can plug a DWDM circuit into the avici box and ROUTE ip over it, dealing only with the layer 1/2 signalling overhead of SONET (and not FR or ATM), I will pay a little more attention to it
It was almost a year ago that frontier globalcenter turned up the first OC-48 Packet Over Sonet link between SF and LA, so this is less than impressive. That link was turned up into a production network, using Cisco GSR routers (which will take OC-48 POS cards with no sweat). I don't see where these people get off saying this is the first application.
...
OC-192 POS, on the other hand, would be something nice and new
can be found here:
/ docs/betagrid/EvardEL99/index.htm
http://www.extremelinux.org/activities/usenix99
i'm not a beowulf geek, but 256 nodes seems like a lot of boxes to be running all those scheduling and message passing protocols between. I am curious what they are using to switch that much traffic, and if the GigE is going to be enough to handle all of the traffic between nodes.
I couldn't find any info on the network hardware, however. Sigh.
As far as I can tell, it worked really well for microsoft. Incidentally, it has worked REALLY well for Cisco. It didn't work too well for AOL, but as a general rule acquiring companies that have already developed useful applications in your market space is a good way to grow your business.
If Red Hat follows in the footsteps of Microsoft when it comes to growing your business, we should all be relatively happy as the (open source) product line becomes more robust and feeds more good code (and paid coders) into the community.
cheers.
OK, I build networks. Lately I have been building e-commerce networks in co-location facilities. Here's what's wrong with the benchmarks ... they don't represent real-world conditions. Most benchmarks don't. Some specifics.
... I haven't looked in a while), as is Apache, Zeus, etc. The OS choice to run your web server can be made on performance, reliability, scalability, ease of use, security, and all the other external reasons why you use an OS for any server. No, it isn't clean cut, and it doesn't say "OS X is better than OS Y for web servers", but it is reality.
CGI: NT, somehow, in all the benches, gets good performance numbers out of active content (isapi dlls, in the case of webbench). Sun w/Netscape's Enterprise Server, as a reference, spawns a new version of perl every time it takes a CGI request for perl-based content (apache, on the other hand, using mod_perl, will not spawn all the extra processes.) I don't know how the NT kernel deals with these requests, but it pulls better benchmark numbers, likely because it is using isapi dlls.
All of these, of course, are entirely dependant on middleware server performance. As webbench doesn't actually query a database, I'm not sure how accurate of a description of active content serving this is. Page serving lag time is as dependant on your backend database as it is on isapi, nsapi, or perl/cgi calls.
SSL: SSL processing is a bitch. This is just reality. Several studies show that you can peg 4 beefy processors running a few (teens) SSL requests against them. WebBench runs around 8% SSL. Curiously, NT and Linux show about the same performance numbers (IIS vs. Apache) on SSL processing, but the resource drain that 8% SSL hits create adversely affects the rest of the system in unpredictable ways. I can't say with any surety what the final impact on web serving systems are by putting the SSL in webbench, but my standard builds do not run SSL and static/dynamic content on the same server.
Then, there are the real variables. Active to static content percentage, database to web server connectivity, page size, graphics load, etc. etc. etc.
A real OS-to-OS benchmark is going to be using the same method to query active content (everybody does CGI, not everybody does ISAPI), and is not going to load down the servers with superflouos (sp?) SSL processing. Even then, the only real indicator of performance is to run site-specific, application specific benchmarks on your own web site. The real story is that IIS is a decent web server platform (if they've cured the memory leaks
Cheers.
Fabulous JP, dodge all the questions, use the one (mostly) humorous question posted at you as a launching point to call the slashdot community a bunch of babies, refuse to justify the removal of packetstorm (and claim that you didn't threaten legal action, even though your letter to harvard did ... promote misconception by refusing to explain what you do with your time (no, that little 'graph you gave us isn't an explanation of what you do), brag about how many hacks you withstand on an hourly basis, and generally behave like a dolt.
Eat shit, JP.
You claimed to be working for NASA, the Air Force, and the NSA. None of these organizations would claim to have anything to do with you.
Explain, please?
I'm confused. There is a slashdot for people interested in Linux (and BSD, and Mac, and Be), why is there no central gathering place for windows users? If there was, then slashdot could post the location of a poll, the windows page could do the same, and we wouldn't be able to stuff the internet ballot box so badly. Why hasn't MS figured this out yet? Or are they entirely uninterested in community?
OK, here's a thought or two.
Monster fines are in order, if only because the findings of the antitrust investigation show that MS not only damaged other corporations with it's unethical business practices, but the users of windows suffered technologically.
Splitting the corporation is a good thing, for both MS, the users, and the technology community. Why?
Good for MS users:
Splitting MS will force it into groups which focus on smaller market shares. No dumbass web tv, less OS bloat, substantially reduced influence in internet standards arenas, less ability to stifle innovation both in hardware and software technology. The end result, if done correctly, would force a segment of MS to focus on creating solid operating systems with easy GUIs that continue to reduce the technological barriers to computing for the average user.
Good for MS:
Focus, focus, focus. Rather than trying to do everything, a split of the company could create a company which concentrates on OS development, a company which concentrates on application development for x86, mac and unix platforms, and a company which concentrates on internet technology. By doing so, and removing the overarching goal of supporting windows and its product goals, the talented developers that MS currently employs could have more freedom to innovate without all of the restrictions they currently operate under.
Good for us: Netscape, Sun, and the hundreds of underrepresented software companies who could have made great products for all software platforms are freed from the unnatural restrictions MS imposed on them if they attempted to infringe on "core business", which currently includes everything under the sun. This leads directly to better software offerings, broader OS support for existing apps, and less hoops for developers to jump through.
If done right, I think this could be the best thing to happen to computing since (gasp!) the GUI.
The annoying part of this whole Echelon deal is that it has commonly been reported (sources are questionable, but becoming less so) that the US and UK set up monitoring of each other's citizens to technically get around monitoring laws that apply to citizens of the country.
O N/echelon.html
This must infuriate the FBI, as domestic surveillance is supposed to be their game. I wonder if we are not going to set off a serious inter-governmental turf war if/when solid proof of broad-based domestic surveillance is provided.
The EU commissioned a report in 97
http://www.accessone.com/~rivero/POLITICS/ECHEL
(link to the london telegraph article that references the eu report) complaining about echelon practices, but it has managed to stay out of mainstream American press to date. I'm curious how our citizens, assured at every step of their freedom and rights, will react to the idea of every phone call, fax, email, etc. being collected and monitored by the NSA and their flunkies. Congress, also, could have something interesting to say, if they were ever really informed.
I think it's time to start talking about this kind of surveillance in mainstream media, where it will reach the ears of those who don't want to hear.