>I just logged into your machine using ssh and made the change from here..
In other words you need a dedicated linux sysadmin to do basic tasks for you that you can do in Windows with right-clicking.
No, in other words you have support options in Linux that simply do not fucking exist in Windows.
If you weren't so dead set on scoring points, you'd realise that I was replying to a scenario in which someone was trying to explain how to perform a simple action over the phone. That characterisation was stupidly inaccurate.
And yeah, if you're the family tech support guy, then.. guess what? You're going to be performing sysadmin tasks. And if you're doing them on Linux, you're way ahead of the game, because these kind of tasks are easy compared to Windows.
(By the way, the issue of the 'X' being in the other corner is a stupid example anyway. The real conversation is more like: "Granma, the X is on the other side. Just like on the Mac.")
I cannot express to you how tiring it is to seeing people bitch about Linux because it's not like Windows. If you like what Windows does, then use Windows. But please, at least be willing to accept that other options are allowed to exist.
And by the way, you can run GUI apps just fine over SSH, thank you very much.
More like they never fucking comment their motherfucking code.
Perl programmers never put in profane comments, because cursing in Perl itself is much more satisfying.
There's a perfectly reasonable explanation for all of this: PHP is a web language, whereas everyone knows that most curses-based programs are written in C or C++.
>You can change the button_layout string to reflect that ordering
"Grandma, quit calling me, just change the button_layout string with vi. Sheez. No lets do it the easy way, type menu:maximize,minimize,close in the earlier box."
"No, Granma, everything's fine. I just logged into your machine using ssh and made the change from here.... No, I'm not in your house, Granma. I just connected to your computer through the Internet. The Internet. It's a... a series of tubes... no, not so much like a truck. Granma, look. Everything's fine now, your buttons are on the right side again and they'll stay that way.... Okay, love you too."
Yeah, I wonder why Ubuntu isn't at 99% marketshre.
I don't give a shit about market share. I give a shit about my granma. And if using Ubuntu means I can manage her PC from a continent away, then yeah, I like it.
That isn't enough. You have to simulate an entire network restart to simulate a long power failure. Discover how your UPSs behave and simulate a full unattended restart. Amazing how many small glitches you can find where a key machine comes up too late to provide DHCP or DNS and that cascades to the NFS server not being available, etc.
I just had to do this today. We had a category 4 cyclone warning over the weekend (I live in the Southern Hemisphere) and I had to take everything offline and secure the hardware in protected storage. The order in which we returned the various machines to service is part of our protocol, because experience has taught us exactly this lesson.
Unsurprisingly, one of our DNS servers didn't come back properly, meaning that a bunch of related services were delayed.
I think the submitter had that point in mind. The author of the TFA happened to have a Kindle, so that's what he showed off. I imagine that any charity organization that would send e-readers would be sending an open format.
You might think so, but you'd be wrong, as often as not.
International Development is a pretty corrupt game, often dominated long-time civil servants positioning themselves to become high-paid consultants in the field. It's hardly unknown for donors to recommend 'solutions' that don't reflect the recipients' priorities nearly as well as their own.
Considering the uphill struggle we've faced over the last five years to get very basic things like the OLPC into the common dialogue (too much resistance from vested interests) or to properly liberalise the telecoms market (competing strategic interests - nobody wants China invested in the infrastructure, for example), I'd say if something like this were to be proposed, the odds are better than even that a proprietary, inefficient and sub-par solution would be the result. locking the people (and more importantly, the donors and the consultants) into long-term commitment to something that will make a lot of money for the vendor.
This development blog may be a satire, but it's bitterly bitterly true.
I doubt they'd be grabbing books from the Amazon store over their local 3G connection. Freely licensed content pre-loaded in a DRM free format would be the way to go, whether on Kindle or on another similar reader, and I doubt that the connectivity would be turned on anyway - it'd be an unnecessary drain on the battery.
Better yet, find a way to put reading material on a phone. Everyone's got one already.
Seriously, there are more drawbacks to using such devices (smaller screen, higher power consumption, etc.), but at least the infrastructure exists to support them, and it's more useful in the short term that people be able to talk together. Besides, they will typically choose different sources of information than you or I might choose from them.
3G and Wi-Fi aren't that far away for those who don't have it already. But paying for and caring for two devices instead of one is often more than a struggling family can manage.
It's a good idea, and I'm sure they'd get used... until they break.. If you send high tech electronics to the middle of Africa to help schools, what will happen when they break? There is no local Apple Store, Best Buy, or Kindle repair hut to help get them back up and running...
Hello from the developing world. Two quick points:
Most of the developing world is NOT in Africa, so please stop using it as shorthand.
The cost of lock-in is higher in developing countries, because they often lack basic market forces. If an NGO were to drop 100 Kindles into a village, they would effectively suck all the oxygen from other development/literacy initiatives, including future ones. Proceed carefully if your idea implies expenditures (no matter how small) from the beneficiaries..
[Software sharing] was a problem, and the thrust of Gates' letter was that unless something changed, nobody would ever be able to produce any commercial software.
On a server, what could I possible need to do that doesn't require root?
"Man, if you gotta ask, you ain't never gonna know!"
For my file server 159 out of the last 500 commands featured sudo in them. On my database server, the number is 199.
On one of my main application servers, the user account for the service itself isn't even in/etc/sudoers. All of the maintenance and administrative tasks are done without resorting to extra permissions.
seriously. I guess real old-school UNIX sysadmins just log in as root, or setuid everything. that's the mark of a grizzled old coot that uses logic!
Or, as in the case of a server I inherited, put everything -data, source code, binaries and scripts- in one user directory, then log in as that user. That way, they don't FUBAR the whole system when they log in, just the stuff that matters.
Almost every comment posted so far is bashing Microsoft or Windows for being an insecure OS but I can't find any mention of either in the article. It doesn't give any information about what kind of system the Ambulance Service was running.
It said, 'Virus'. That means Windows.
I hate to be the pee on your your empiricism, but the preponderance of evidence accumulated over the last 15 years leads to the conclusion that Windows is a necessary precondition for a virus to take down an entire system (as opposed to a single PC).
Secondly, if this had been a Mac or Linux virus, you can bet your bottom dollar the headline would say so. In 4 inch letters. And red type. With Drudge-style cherries spinning. And a klaxon.
Plus, the very next story would be about the spontaneous, simultaneous death by shock-and-horror of the entire editorial staff at the Register. And Wired. And boingboing.
And then Slashdot would slashdot itself. And dogs would play with cats...
In other news, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak has resigned and handed over power to the military, ousted by a historic 18-day wave of pro-democracy demonstrations by hundreds of thousands of Egyptians who demanded his removal.
Were the demonstrations planned in coffeeshops?
No, but tellingly, they were organised largely using hand-held electronic devices.
So, in my best Soup Nazi voice, allow to to say, "NO REVOLUTION FOR YOU, NEW YORK!"
Further, there is nothing secure about communications, however well encrypted they might be as people in Egypt found out when the entire country's net went dark.
We need to disintermediate the network. It's an ugly duckling of a word, but cutting out the middle man matters more now than ever.
As long as the cables, wires and frequencies over which we communicate are susceptible to being controlled, curtailed or even disconnected when the things we say -or the way we say them- become upsetting, we will find ourselves increasingly confined.
As I said during an Internet policy session yesterday, if you ask anyone -anyone- whether there should be limits on Behaviour X on the Internet, the answer will always be a resounding Yes. That's not a problem in and of itself, because X is usually anti-social and contrary to the public good. The problem is that anything capable of curtailing Behaviour X can be brought to bear on Behaviours A through W as well.
The only way out of this is to provide the technical means to do what we have always done in democratic societies: Keep our private discussions private and our public discussions free.
RedPhone (well, the ZRTP protocol, anyway) is a pretty important component of that.
Solving one deficiency can occur in a separate channel and in a separate timeframe than other deficiencies and still be valuable in any sphere where development is not wholly homogeneous. Or, put more simply, where there are some people in the developing world that have all the prerequisites and still no internet, this potentially helps them (though I'm not sure how they're even expected to receive the signals).
That's true enough. But there are a couple of constants in that equation that bear remembering....
I live and work in a Least Developed Country, and in fact I'll be attending an Internet Governance meeting as soon as I finish this note. I've seen a lot of inspired (but not very realistic) ideas aiming to provide Internet for all. But the plain fact is that it's really costly. Especially in countries like mine where satellite is the only option. (USD 4000 per Mb per month is the retail rate for uncontended bandwidth here). Unless someone ponies up USD 20-30 million for a fibre connection, that's not going to change.
But even if we could make the Internet universally accessible, there would still be no way to sustainably run even a few desktop PCs. Power generation is a huge problem. While there are localised generation options (solar, wind, micro-hydro), transmission means that the energy generated from them remain highly localised. We can't even build a grid for an entire village.
That doesn't stop us from trying, and it sure as shit doesn't mean the Internet doesn't have exactly the kind of value you speak of. But the GP's point is fundamentally correct: The Internet sits at the top of a number of technological prerequisites. While there are, as you suggest, some places that might benefit from something like this, I suspect that the ones who have boostrapped their way to being ready for Internet have already got mom-and-pop ISPs providing rudimentary but usable service to them.
This proposal is a noble one, but far more quixotic than the OLPC project.
The "point" to me sounded like a bunch of bullshit cyberspeak about how the internet is going to turn government into a big drum circle where we all join hands and sing songs of peace and love.
I'll be the first to admit that a lot of Progressive activism does suffer from its (often impractical) idealism. That said, the assertion that the Internet, with its FOSS-style approach to standards and its preference for unmediated communication, really is a democratising force.
The problem is, the powers-that-be are becoming aware of this fact, and they don't like it. I may be getting cynical in my old age, but recently all I've been seeing is how susceptible to coercion modern networks are. I've written a series of newspaper columns and blog posts on the topic. Here's the basic take-away:
We can take two closely related lessons from this:
Centrally controlled communications resources are, in times of social crisis, extremely vulnerable to compromise; and
Information networks that rely on the ‘End to End Principle’ – that is, networks that join two end points without particularly caring how those two points connect – are still subject to compromise, but the damage can be mitigated either by routing around trouble spots or by connecting to different end points.
In short, the core design principle of the Internet, the concept of the ‘end to end’ network, is inherently democratic, empowering the individual at the expense of central control.
Will the revolution be twittered? If Egypt is any example, it's increasingly likely that it won't. That said, Internet protocols and FOSS philosophy still hold some important ground. They can be used to organise groups and share experience/intelligence. Not all hope is lost.
And only 246 hops to reach Slashdot... response times blow out to 30 seconds instead of sub-second response times. I don't think so...
You make a valid point, but the hacker in all of us should be seeing that as a challenge, not as a show-stopper.
If we really want a distributed, mesh-like network architecture (and I use that term loosely), we could have it without a huge amount of work. As with all things Internet, we'd have to appropriate a bunch of tools, invent a few others, cobble them together into a shape which they weren't really intended to take, then somehow find the means to play nicely together....
... Sounds a lot like the way the Internet itself came about, doesn't it?
Sure the basic elements were very much designed, but compare that to the amount that was appropriated or just whipped off in a half-assed way -only to be formalised and made robust later. So there may be 249 hops between me and Slashdot, but you know what? They'll be my hops.
The problem we face today is that centralised networks are not the way to go. They are nothing more than a hold-over from the telco era, in which big monolithic networks made some kind of sense. More and more as the years go by, they have proven to be the problem, not the solution.
Having spent much of my professional life on the frontier (literally -first in the Canadian Arctic and now in the South Pacific), I've never really had the luxury of waiting for the telcos to bring me the services I need. That's why I'm inclined to agree with anyone who sees the danger in any network that aggregates too much traffic. Experience has taught me to look at them as nothing more than choke-points
I'm pretty pessimistic about our prospects though. The big problem is that the vast majority of consumer devices are network-dependent now. The iPhone's great crime is not that it indulged an entire generation of hipster-wannabes but that it blurred the lines between device, network and content, causing marketers to package everything together. This means that it's harder than ever before to be network-agnostic and to focus instead on unmediated end-to-end communications.
Oh well, it was a good run while it lasted. I don't think I'll be applying for an Internet license when they become compulsory.... I'll miss it, though.
The idea that NAT will go away just because a network is IPv6 is a pipe dream. No sane security admin would ever allow that. The idea that the firewall is the only thing between you and the outside world is, and should be, a non starter.
IT security is all about multiple layers, and one of them is the fact that you have a DMZ between you and the internet, and that the internet can't route outside of it. That is not going anywhere.
Look, I don't want to be disrespectful to you as a person, but your understanding of network security is... limited. What the fuck does having a DMZ have to do with NAT? It's true that NAT is how the most common way to configure a segregated v4 network, but if you think that NAT is the only (or even the best) way to handle this, you're sorely mistaken.
This may strike you as heresy, but you can construct your network with public-facing addresses, a DMZ and a network of addresses inaccessible from the outside world (except under prescribed circumstances)... all using public IPv6 addresses. The secret is... wait for it... don't fucking route to them, except when you decide it's okay.
The simplest way to do this would be simply to refuse connections originating from outside your network for a designated subnet. Hey presto! All the benefits of NAT without the insanity of NAT!
My employer, a university with campuses in 12 countries, does this already with a public IPv4 block. Last I checked, it was working just fine, thank you very much.
What it does mean is that the discussion about a kill-switch is moot. In most countries, only a handful of organizations run international backbones. Just about every country could take the net down in such a fashion.
In most other countries, even the government would have to get lawyers and judges involved. In most functioning democracies, they wouldn't succeed, except perhaps in wartime.
A literal kill-switch might just work a bit faster.
Mostly because it would remove the role of lawyers and judges...
WTF is the damn difference? What BS is this statement trying to make? Am I supposed to feel better about the pending 'Kill Switch'?
It actually does make a difference, because it means that the Mubarak regime was able to keep each ISP scared enough to intimidate them into doing exactly what they said, even when that meant effectively cutting off their business. The timing of the calls -a little more than 13 minutes total- tells us that there was no hesitation from any of the ISPs. The only exception was the Noor group, who somehow managed to evade this order and remain online for days after the others had disappeared.
The fact that a government functionary can pick up the phone, say, "Shut down your network" and be complied with without the slightest hesitation doesn't say a thing about technology, but it teaches us a lot about the nature of government, and perhaps makes it a little clearer to those of us in the outside world just what the pro-democracy protesters were willing to risk their lives for.
Side note: It was James Cowie at Renesys who first posited this scenario within hours of the shutdown.
I wrote a much longer consideration of the effects of the Egyptian outage for my country's national daily. In a nutshell, the design of our physical networks makes them vulnerable to the kind of coercive pressure exerted by the Mubarak regime. And a some of the powers-that-be like it like that.
The fly in the ointment is that we can't buy bandwidth from China or the Philippines or whatever other sweatshop country you would care to name because bandwidth is ruled by the laws of physics not by the "Invisible Hand".
Point taken (and nicely made), but that doesn't entirely do justice to the situation.
The plain truth is that telcos want (and arguably need) a certain kind of network to maximise their profits. This implies centralised control and lots of management overhead on existing networks, with little incentive -if any- to aggressively attack the problem of maximising network efficiency.
I know from bitter experience about how damnably difficult efficient wireless networks can be, so I'm not going to pretend that there's a cornucopia of bandwidth just waiting to be dropped in our laps. I realise that, past a certain point, there simply is no more bandwidth to be had. That said, telcos could be doing vastly more than they are to cope.
The bottom line is that the idea of just being a utility like the power or water company is anathema to telcos and other carriers, because that reduces their ability to squeeze profits out of each product and service by slicing and dicing their offering. But until our networks do become utilities, provided along the same principles as electrical power or water, there will always be more money to be made from scarcity than from plenty.
Here's a hint: in most parts of the world, Wikileaks is celebrated without "but"s or "if"s
So group think and no diversity. OK.
No, not group think, Sherlock. Many non-US societies don't actually accuse people of treason for disclosing the truth. In some places, they actually applaud it.
The fact that a society might feel that its people don't deserve to know what its actual foreign policy is, or how its wars are prosecuted, is nothing to be particularly proud of.
Slashdot Mirror
>I just logged into your machine using ssh and made the change from here..
In other words you need a dedicated linux sysadmin to do basic tasks for you that you can do in Windows with right-clicking.
No, in other words you have support options in Linux that simply do not fucking exist in Windows.
If you weren't so dead set on scoring points, you'd realise that I was replying to a scenario in which someone was trying to explain how to perform a simple action over the phone. That characterisation was stupidly inaccurate.
And yeah, if you're the family tech support guy, then.. guess what? You're going to be performing sysadmin tasks. And if you're doing them on Linux, you're way ahead of the game, because these kind of tasks are easy compared to Windows.
(By the way, the issue of the 'X' being in the other corner is a stupid example anyway. The real conversation is more like: "Granma, the X is on the other side. Just like on the Mac.")
I cannot express to you how tiring it is to seeing people bitch about Linux because it's not like Windows. If you like what Windows does, then use Windows. But please, at least be willing to accept that other options are allowed to exist.
And by the way, you can run GUI apps just fine over SSH, thank you very much.
HTH HAND
More like they never fucking comment their motherfucking code.
Perl programmers never put in profane comments, because cursing in Perl itself is much more satisfying.
There's a perfectly reasonable explanation for all of this: PHP is a web language, whereas everyone knows that most curses-based programs are written in C or C++.
>You can change the button_layout string to reflect that ordering
"Grandma, quit calling me, just change the button_layout string with vi. Sheez. No lets do it the easy way, type menu:maximize,minimize,close in the earlier box."
"No, Granma, everything's fine. I just logged into your machine using ssh and made the change from here.... No, I'm not in your house, Granma. I just connected to your computer through the Internet. The Internet. It's a... a series of tubes... no, not so much like a truck. Granma, look. Everything's fine now, your buttons are on the right side again and they'll stay that way.... Okay, love you too."
Yeah, I wonder why Ubuntu isn't at 99% marketshre.
I don't give a shit about market share. I give a shit about my granma. And if using Ubuntu means I can manage her PC from a continent away, then yeah, I like it.
That isn't enough. You have to simulate an entire network restart to simulate a long power failure. Discover how your UPSs behave and simulate a full unattended restart. Amazing how many small glitches you can find where a key machine comes up too late to provide DHCP or DNS and that cascades to the NFS server not being available, etc.
I just had to do this today. We had a category 4 cyclone warning over the weekend (I live in the Southern Hemisphere) and I had to take everything offline and secure the hardware in protected storage. The order in which we returned the various machines to service is part of our protocol, because experience has taught us exactly this lesson.
Unsurprisingly, one of our DNS servers didn't come back properly, meaning that a bunch of related services were delayed.
I think the submitter had that point in mind. The author of the TFA happened to have a Kindle, so that's what he showed off. I imagine that any charity organization that would send e-readers would be sending an open format.
You might think so, but you'd be wrong, as often as not.
International Development is a pretty corrupt game, often dominated long-time civil servants positioning themselves to become high-paid consultants in the field. It's hardly unknown for donors to recommend 'solutions' that don't reflect the recipients' priorities nearly as well as their own.
Considering the uphill struggle we've faced over the last five years to get very basic things like the OLPC into the common dialogue (too much resistance from vested interests) or to properly liberalise the telecoms market (competing strategic interests - nobody wants China invested in the infrastructure, for example), I'd say if something like this were to be proposed, the odds are better than even that a proprietary, inefficient and sub-par solution would be the result. locking the people (and more importantly, the donors and the consultants) into long-term commitment to something that will make a lot of money for the vendor.
This development blog may be a satire, but it's bitterly bitterly true.
I doubt they'd be grabbing books from the Amazon store over their local 3G connection. Freely licensed content pre-loaded in a DRM free format would be the way to go, whether on Kindle or on another similar reader, and I doubt that the connectivity would be turned on anyway - it'd be an unnecessary drain on the battery.
Better yet, find a way to put reading material on a phone. Everyone's got one already.
Seriously, there are more drawbacks to using such devices (smaller screen, higher power consumption, etc.), but at least the infrastructure exists to support them, and it's more useful in the short term that people be able to talk together. Besides, they will typically choose different sources of information than you or I might choose from them.
3G and Wi-Fi aren't that far away for those who don't have it already. But paying for and caring for two devices instead of one is often more than a struggling family can manage.
It's a good idea, and I'm sure they'd get used... until they break.. If you send high tech electronics to the middle of Africa to help schools, what will happen when they break? There is no local Apple Store, Best Buy, or Kindle repair hut to help get them back up and running...
Hello from the developing world. Two quick points:
[Software sharing] was a problem, and the thrust of Gates' letter was that unless something changed, nobody would ever be able to produce any commercial software.
Uh-huh. How did that work out for him?
Bet the poor guy lost a fortune because of it....
On a server, what could I possible need to do that doesn't require root?
"Man, if you gotta ask, you ain't never gonna know!"
For my file server 159 out of the last 500 commands featured sudo in them. On my database server, the number is 199.
On one of my main application servers, the user account for the service itself isn't even in /etc/sudoers. All of the maintenance and administrative tasks are done without resorting to extra permissions.
seriously. I guess real old-school UNIX sysadmins just log in as root, or setuid everything. that's the mark of a grizzled old coot that uses logic!
Or, as in the case of a server I inherited, put everything -data, source code, binaries and scripts- in one user directory, then log in as that user. That way, they don't FUBAR the whole system when they log in, just the stuff that matters.
With the audience of this site, it wouldn't surprise me if Lynx is a test case when the design is modified.
Lynx is my 'What does this look like to Google?' browser.
Every time someone claims not to care about whether blind people can access their site, I remind them that search engine crawlers are blind.
http://www.channel4.com/programmes/the-it-crowd :)
I tried watching that. But I turned it off....
... then on again.
Almost every comment posted so far is bashing Microsoft or Windows for being an insecure OS but I can't find any mention of either in the article. It doesn't give any information about what kind of system the Ambulance Service was running.
It said, 'Virus'. That means Windows.
I hate to be the pee on your your empiricism, but the preponderance of evidence accumulated over the last 15 years leads to the conclusion that Windows is a necessary precondition for a virus to take down an entire system (as opposed to a single PC).
Secondly, if this had been a Mac or Linux virus, you can bet your bottom dollar the headline would say so. In 4 inch letters. And red type. With Drudge-style cherries spinning. And a klaxon.
Plus, the very next story would be about the spontaneous, simultaneous death by shock-and-horror of the entire editorial staff at the Register. And Wired. And boingboing.
And then Slashdot would slashdot itself. And dogs would play with cats...
... And everyone would finally get their pony.
Were the demonstrations planned in coffeeshops?
No, but tellingly, they were organised largely using hand-held electronic devices.
So, in my best Soup Nazi voice, allow to to say, "NO REVOLUTION FOR YOU, NEW YORK!"
Further, there is nothing secure about communications, however well encrypted they might be as people in Egypt found out when the entire country's net went dark.
Secure also means Operational.
RedPhone is just one piece of a larger puzzle that could create some very exciting stories for freedom-lovers everywhere:
RedPhone (well, the ZRTP protocol, anyway) is a pretty important component of that.
Solving one deficiency can occur in a separate channel and in a separate timeframe than other deficiencies and still be valuable in any sphere where development is not wholly homogeneous. Or, put more simply, where there are some people in the developing world that have all the prerequisites and still no internet, this potentially helps them (though I'm not sure how they're even expected to receive the signals).
That's true enough. But there are a couple of constants in that equation that bear remembering....
I live and work in a Least Developed Country, and in fact I'll be attending an Internet Governance meeting as soon as I finish this note. I've seen a lot of inspired (but not very realistic) ideas aiming to provide Internet for all. But the plain fact is that it's really costly. Especially in countries like mine where satellite is the only option. (USD 4000 per Mb per month is the retail rate for uncontended bandwidth here). Unless someone ponies up USD 20-30 million for a fibre connection, that's not going to change.
But even if we could make the Internet universally accessible, there would still be no way to sustainably run even a few desktop PCs. Power generation is a huge problem. While there are localised generation options (solar, wind, micro-hydro), transmission means that the energy generated from them remain highly localised. We can't even build a grid for an entire village.
That doesn't stop us from trying, and it sure as shit doesn't mean the Internet doesn't have exactly the kind of value you speak of. But the GP's point is fundamentally correct: The Internet sits at the top of a number of technological prerequisites. While there are, as you suggest, some places that might benefit from something like this, I suspect that the ones who have boostrapped their way to being ready for Internet have already got mom-and-pop ISPs providing rudimentary but usable service to them.
This proposal is a noble one, but far more quixotic than the OLPC project.
The "point" to me sounded like a bunch of bullshit cyberspeak about how the internet is going to turn government into a big drum circle where we all join hands and sing songs of peace and love.
I'll be the first to admit that a lot of Progressive activism does suffer from its (often impractical) idealism. That said, the assertion that the Internet, with its FOSS-style approach to standards and its preference for unmediated communication, really is a democratising force.
The problem is, the powers-that-be are becoming aware of this fact, and they don't like it. I may be getting cynical in my old age, but recently all I've been seeing is how susceptible to coercion modern networks are. I've written a series of newspaper columns and blog posts on the topic. Here's the basic take-away:
Will the revolution be twittered? If Egypt is any example, it's increasingly likely that it won't. That said, Internet protocols and FOSS philosophy still hold some important ground. They can be used to organise groups and share experience/intelligence. Not all hope is lost.
And only 246 hops to reach Slashdot... response times blow out to 30 seconds instead of sub-second response times. I don't think so...
You make a valid point, but the hacker in all of us should be seeing that as a challenge, not as a show-stopper.
If we really want a distributed, mesh-like network architecture (and I use that term loosely), we could have it without a huge amount of work. As with all things Internet, we'd have to appropriate a bunch of tools, invent a few others, cobble them together into a shape which they weren't really intended to take, then somehow find the means to play nicely together....
... Sounds a lot like the way the Internet itself came about, doesn't it?
Sure the basic elements were very much designed, but compare that to the amount that was appropriated or just whipped off in a half-assed way -only to be formalised and made robust later. So there may be 249 hops between me and Slashdot, but you know what? They'll be my hops.
The problem we face today is that centralised networks are not the way to go. They are nothing more than a hold-over from the telco era, in which big monolithic networks made some kind of sense. More and more as the years go by, they have proven to be the problem, not the solution.
Having spent much of my professional life on the frontier (literally -first in the Canadian Arctic and now in the South Pacific), I've never really had the luxury of waiting for the telcos to bring me the services I need. That's why I'm inclined to agree with anyone who sees the danger in any network that aggregates too much traffic. Experience has taught me to look at them as nothing more than choke-points
I'm pretty pessimistic about our prospects though. The big problem is that the vast majority of consumer devices are network-dependent now. The iPhone's great crime is not that it indulged an entire generation of hipster-wannabes but that it blurred the lines between device, network and content, causing marketers to package everything together. This means that it's harder than ever before to be network-agnostic and to focus instead on unmediated end-to-end communications.
Oh well, it was a good run while it lasted. I don't think I'll be applying for an Internet license when they become compulsory.... I'll miss it, though.
You never know, maybe he had it coming. I'm curious to see what he did to deserve this kind of response.
My guess? He gave her up. He let her down. He never came around. HE HURT HER.
The idea that NAT will go away just because a network is IPv6 is a pipe dream. No sane security admin would ever allow that. The idea that the firewall is the only thing between you and the outside world is, and should be, a non starter.
IT security is all about multiple layers, and one of them is the fact that you have a DMZ between you and the internet, and that the internet can't route outside of it. That is not going anywhere.
Look, I don't want to be disrespectful to you as a person, but your understanding of network security is... limited. What the fuck does having a DMZ have to do with NAT? It's true that NAT is how the most common way to configure a segregated v4 network, but if you think that NAT is the only (or even the best) way to handle this, you're sorely mistaken.
This may strike you as heresy, but you can construct your network with public-facing addresses, a DMZ and a network of addresses inaccessible from the outside world (except under prescribed circumstances)... all using public IPv6 addresses. The secret is... wait for it... don't fucking route to them, except when you decide it's okay.
The simplest way to do this would be simply to refuse connections originating from outside your network for a designated subnet. Hey presto! All the benefits of NAT without the insanity of NAT!
My employer, a university with campuses in 12 countries, does this already with a public IPv4 block. Last I checked, it was working just fine, thank you very much.
P.S. Yes, we're IPv6-ready.
What it does mean is that the discussion about a kill-switch is moot. In most countries, only a handful of organizations run international backbones. Just about every country could take the net down in such a fashion.
In most other countries, even the government would have to get lawyers and judges involved. In most functioning democracies, they wouldn't succeed, except perhaps in wartime.
A literal kill-switch might just work a bit faster.
Mostly because it would remove the role of lawyers and judges...
.., and Democracy.
WTF is the damn difference? What BS is this statement trying to make? Am I supposed to feel better about the pending 'Kill Switch'?
It actually does make a difference, because it means that the Mubarak regime was able to keep each ISP scared enough to intimidate them into doing exactly what they said, even when that meant effectively cutting off their business. The timing of the calls -a little more than 13 minutes total- tells us that there was no hesitation from any of the ISPs. The only exception was the Noor group, who somehow managed to evade this order and remain online for days after the others had disappeared.
The fact that a government functionary can pick up the phone, say, "Shut down your network" and be complied with without the slightest hesitation doesn't say a thing about technology, but it teaches us a lot about the nature of government, and perhaps makes it a little clearer to those of us in the outside world just what the pro-democracy protesters were willing to risk their lives for.
Side note: It was James Cowie at Renesys who first posited this scenario within hours of the shutdown.
I wrote a much longer consideration of the effects of the Egyptian outage for my country's national daily. In a nutshell, the design of our physical networks makes them vulnerable to the kind of coercive pressure exerted by the Mubarak regime. And a some of the powers-that-be like it like that.
Point taken (and nicely made), but that doesn't entirely do justice to the situation.
The plain truth is that telcos want (and arguably need) a certain kind of network to maximise their profits. This implies centralised control and lots of management overhead on existing networks, with little incentive -if any- to aggressively attack the problem of maximising network efficiency.
I know from bitter experience about how damnably difficult efficient wireless networks can be, so I'm not going to pretend that there's a cornucopia of bandwidth just waiting to be dropped in our laps. I realise that, past a certain point, there simply is no more bandwidth to be had. That said, telcos could be doing vastly more than they are to cope.
The bottom line is that the idea of just being a utility like the power or water company is anathema to telcos and other carriers, because that reduces their ability to squeeze profits out of each product and service by slicing and dicing their offering. But until our networks do become utilities, provided along the same principles as electrical power or water, there will always be more money to be made from scarcity than from plenty.
No, for Murdoch, that would be literally unthinkable... :)
Nono, he meant to thay unthinkable, jutht like the Titanic.
Here's a hint: in most parts of the world, Wikileaks is celebrated without "but"s or "if"s
So group think and no diversity. OK.
No, not group think, Sherlock. Many non-US societies don't actually accuse people of treason for disclosing the truth. In some places, they actually applaud it.
The fact that a society might feel that its people don't deserve to know what its actual foreign policy is, or how its wars are prosecuted, is nothing to be particularly proud of.