Panspermia Makes Evolution Much Less Likely
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Space Lichens
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· Score: 2, Interesting
There are really three different cases for PanSpermia - Interplanetary, Interstellar Accidental, and Friendly Space Aliens. The Scientific American article and the Space Lichens experiment are exploring the possibility that carbon-based lifeforms or at least useful pre-life chemicals could have been transported between planets, at least from Mars to Earth, and while that possibility would be necessary for Interstellar Panspermia to work, it's not sufficient - surviving on a trip from Mars to Earth is much less strenuous than surviving a trip of tens or hundreds of light-years, and the probability that there are enough partially-evolved planets blowing up and splattering their Precious Bodily Fluids around that significant quantities of hit hit the Earth at a time that Earth was chemically ready to accept it sound highly unlikely.
The standard evolutionary model says that Earth had a bunch of Primordial Soup that cooked for hundreds of millions of years until some of it did stuff that was interesting enough to photosynthesize, which started radically changing the chemistry of the planet's atmosphere and the Soup until more of it started doing more interesting stuff and eventually it was interesting enough that we can declare that "It's Alive!" The probability that stars will have planets, and that they'll have the right conditions to let this happen (temperature, available atomic mixtures, gravity, etc.) are pretty low, and people who like to speculate about how heavily populated the universe is and when we'll find aliens come up with estimates like Drake's Equation to try to guess how rare we are.
Interplanetary Panspermia suggests that not only did Earth have to have the right mixture of chemicals and temperature/pressure conditions in the Primordial Soup for all this to happen, but that Mars or maybe Venus also had to have a (presumably different) batch of soup cooking that had either become Alive or else pretty close, and something had to cause a Big Splash to get some Martian Soup mixed in with the Earth Soup at a time that both of them were in the right conditions. If the Earth had been running too far ahead or behind in time, or the Big Splash hadn't happened at the right time or hadn't been big enough, then the Martians would have been told No Soup For You, Next Billion Years, Earth wouldn't have been alive, and Mars would have done the Cosmic Wimpout without us evolving to see it today. Drake's Equation looks much more dodgy under those assumptions. If that's what it takes for life to evolve, I don't expect any space aliens to show up any time soon.
Interplanetary Panspermia doesn't really solve any problems about how life could have evolved, though I suppose it *could* have happened, but it seems much less likely than Earth's Primordial Soup doing the job on its own. Interstellar Panspermia seems much much less likely to me, for reasons I noted above. There's a huge amount of stellar evolution that had to happen just to get the right elements into the Solar System, since some of them only get formed inside supernovae or similar stars. Friendly Space Aliens deliberately seeding the place begs the question of how *they* evolved, but strikes me as no less likely than Interstellar Panspermia happening by accident. You'd think they'd have also left a message, but maybe they were just shooting stuff out at likely stars on spec, hoping that something would work even if they weren't around four billion years later when we were ready to Phone Home, or maybe they really *are* hanging around on the Dark Side of the Moon working on the next chapter of their cookbook before they drop in for a visit.
Each service on each host of the private side of your firewall box grabs a port number on the public side of the firewall and registers a corresponding SRV record with a DNS server, and any application out on the real Internet that wants to reach it finds the port number dynamically from DNS instead of statically hard-coding it. The public side still needs genuine registered addresses, but the private side can use RFC1918 space (e.g. 10.x.x.x), and each public-side IPv4 address can support as many machines behind the firewall as it takes to run out of ports. So if your cellphone has a web server, instead of reaching it through its own IP address and port 80, it looks like 10.11.12.13:80 on the hidden site, but you reach it from the real world at firewall123.cellphone-example.net:4567, and firewall123.cellphone has a real IPv4 address 123.456.789.10. Somebody in the real world who wants to reach your phone either looks up _http_.13115551212.cellphone-example.net and gets an SRV record telling them it's port 4567 on 123.456.789.10, or else you just advertise http://13115551212.cellphone-example.net:4567/ and let their browser go there directly. So if the average cellphone has 16 ports active(counting both directions), then that one IPv4 address can support 4000 phones.
And yes, this still has problems - it encourages service providers of cellphones, DNS, and cable modems to hide their users behind NAT-like service, but it's a two-way NAT-like service, and they don't have to limit the ports or protocols the users offer to the world but many of them will. And it also encourages service providers to provide big web-proxy farms on the private side to reduce the number of ports used on the public side, which makes censorship a bit easier. And there are protocols that *know* which port they live on, so the client and sometimes the server applications would need to change to use SRV records instead, but that's probably less disruptive than teaching them to use IPv6 addresses. Other protocols like http (using URLs with port numbers) and smtp (using MX records) already have ways to specify the port numbers. Some protocols like IPSEC aren't happy with NAT, especially port NAT, but they often end up doing Stupid UDP-wrapper Tricks to work around that.
IPv6's hierarchical design had a goal that it was supposed to help with routing, and one reason it has so much address space is to make sure there's room to do that, but it turns out that nobody's really figured out how to solve the problems very well. Meanwhile, the big ISP-sized routers from the big router vendors are mostly slower at routing IPv6, and the routing and forwarding table sizes are larger because the address space is four times as large.
The two reasons there's so much bloat in IPv4 routing tables are that customers want to have their own provider-independent address space (so they're not tied down to a single provider) and want to multi-home to two different ISPs, advertising their address space on both ISPs so that if either connection fails, there are still routes to their address space. This means that every ISP out there needs table entries for the multi-homed customer's address space, even though the customer might only need one or two IP addresses, and the routing protocols often have calculations that need N**2 or at least N log N space, so it's especially annoying. (By the way, there's work on upgrading BGP from 16-bit ASNs to 32-bit ASNs to deal with the increasing numbers of multi-homed customers.)
IPv6 was supposed to fix this by providing enough address space that customers in the old swamp could be reallocated to provider-aligned space, but the customer-ISP politics problem is still there, and the need for reliable multihoming is still there. Browsers and DNS caching make the problem much worse, because DNS-derived IP addresses are persistent - if www.example.com's connection 1.1.1.1 fails, you can't just use DNS to tell the end users to use 2.2.2.2 instead, because DNS caches mean the update might not appear for days, and browsers and some other applications don't look up DNS entries on every packet either, so multi-homed customers really need to do rerouting to work around failures. That kind of speed is ok for network renumbering when you're changing ISPs with a week of advance preparation, but it's not fast enough for routing around failures.
There's an ugly project called shim6> that's supposed to work around the renumbering and routing issues, and it avoids NAT by replacing it with something IMHO almost if maybe not quite as nasty. AFAICT, the working group's not really finished with it, and it requires host software because it's a routing shim in the end-device's protocol stack.
Ch-chuckposted the URL for a catalog that carries an EMF-protection hat and lots of other scientifically bogus stuff. Not sure if it's quite the same hat, but it's heart is in the right place.
This study was done by grad students. You don't think they actually get paid, do you?:-)
And they used borrowed equipment, though it was good stuff and quite expensive, and if some bureaucrat wanted to amortize the depreciation on it, a few hours use might have made this an expensive project.
Some Federal judge once commented that when he was clerking, they'd occasionally get requests from citizens who wanted the court to order the CIA to stop attacking them with mind-control rays, and they'd occasionally ask the judge to issue such orders if they had spare time. Kept the kooks happy, and it didn't bother the CIA much...
A few years ago, one of the new-agey junk catalogs actually had aluminized hats, as well as the usual collection of crystals, shiny things, bogus magnetic devices, and, ummm, tachyon bracelets. It's been long enough ago that I don't remember the details, but I think the hats were some kind of cloth with an aluminized mylar or aluminum paint layer or something similar. I think they even had a removable grounding strap.
Now, unlike why people want to obtain and wear such things, I don't know - I suspect the joke is much much more common than the actual practice. But the reason why people want to *sell* them is much more obvious - it's because they think there are suckers who want to buy them. The interesting question is whether they found enough suckers who actually *did* buy them to keep making the things.
Personally, if I were to get an aluminum hat (except as a costume for a science fiction conventions), it'd be a bicycle helmet. Doesn't matter that it keeps the CIA space alien hunters from beaming things into my head, as long as it keeps out the car hoods and asphalt, though blinky-lights and reflector tape are probably much more useful than aluminum color would be.
The pictures really make it worthwhile, but here's the text in case it dies (FARK got it this morning, which is probably how the Slashdot poster found it.) The article's actually from February 2005.
On the Effectiveness of Aluminium Foil Helmets: An Empirical Study Ali Rahimi1, Ben Recht 2, Jason Taylor 2, Noah Vawter 2 17 Feb 2005
1: Electrical Engineering and Computer Science department, MIT. 2: Media Laboratory, MIT. Abstract Among a fringe community of paranoids, aluminum helmets serve as the protective measure of choice against invasive radio signals. We investigate the efficacy of three aluminum helmet designs on a sample group of four individuals. Using a $250,000 network analyser, we find that although on average all helmets attenuate invasive radio frequencies in either directions (either emanating from an outside source, or emanating from the cranium of the subject), certain frequencies are in fact greatly amplified. These amplified frequencies coincide with radio bands reserved for government use according to the Federal Communication Commission (FCC). Statistical evidence suggests the use of helmets may in fact enhance the government's invasive abilities. We theorize that the government may in fact have started the helmet craze for this reason. Introduction It has long been suspected that the government has been using satellites to read and control the minds of certain citizens. The use of aluminum helmets has been a common guerrilla tactic against the government's invasive tactics [1]. Surprisingly, these helmets can in fact help the government spy on citizens by amplifying certain key frequency ranges reserved for government use. In addition, none of the three helmets we analyzed provided significant attenuation to most frequency bands.
We describe our experimental setup, report our results, and conclude with a few design guidelines for constructing more effective helmets.
Experimental Setup
The three helmet types tested The Classical The Fez The Centurion
We evaluated the performance of three different helmet designs, commonly referred to as the Classical, the Fez, and the Centurion. These designs are portrayed in Figure 1. The helmets were made of Reynolds aluminium foil. As per best practices, all three designs were constructed with the double layering technique described elsewhere [2].
A radio-frequency test signal sweeping the ranges from 10 Khz to 3 Ghz was generated using an omnidirectional antenna attached to the Agilent 8714ET's signal generator.
The experimental apparatus, including a data recording laptop, a $250,000 network analyser, and antennae.
A network analyser (Agilent 8714ET) and a directional antenna measured and plotted the signals. See Figure 2.
Because of the cost of the equipment (about $250,000), and the limited time for which we had access to these devices, the subjects and experimenters performed a few dry runs before the actual experiment (see Figure 3).
Test subjects during a dry run.
The receiver antenna was placed at various places on the cranium of 4 different subjects: the frontal, occipital and parietal lobes. Once with the helmet off and once with the helmet on. The network analyzer plotted the attenuation betwen the signals in these two settings at different frequencies, from 10Khz to 3 Ghz. Figure 4 shows a typical plot of the attenuation at different frequencies.
A typical attenuation trace form the network analyser Results For all helmets, we noticed a 30 db amplification at 2.6 Ghz and a 20 db amplification at 1.2 Ghz, regardless of the position of the antenna on the cranium. In addition, all helmets exhibited a marked 20 db attenuation at around 1.5 Ghz, with no significant attenuation beyond 10 db anywhere else. Conclusion The helmets amplify frequency bands that coincide with those allocated to the US government between 1.2 Ghz and 1.4 Ghz. According to the FCC, These ban
Managed code means that before you shoot yourself in the foot, you wrap your foot in a baggie to make sure that blood won't get on the floor. It's certainly a good start, and it keeps the floor clean, but basically it doesn't do much for you except have an exception handler print out a message saying "this.status == dead, Jim!" and send a garbage collector to pick up your nicely bagged corpse from the floor.
In practice, you need to do more than that - even if it's just printing a more informative error message or (more typically) rejecting the bad input file and asking the user for another one.
I took CS100 Freshman Computer Science Course about 30 years ago, and among the first couple lessons they taught us, besides structured programming, commenting our code thoroughly, and how to print "Hello World" on punch cards, was Never trust your input and always verify it before using it, and any programming exercises we did had to use the professor's input deck which would be sure to check for off-by-one boundary errors, wrong data types in fields, and more malicious stuff. Off-by-one problems are usually programming errors, though sometimes they're requirements definition errors, but incorrect input, wrong types, and scrambled input are things that real-world input normally contains, and malicious input is not only something you should *expect* crackers to hand to any program that'll expect it, you can also expect CS professors to hand you to test whether your program really got all the critical concepts.
It really irks me that supposedly professional companies sell software that doesn't follow basic lessons like that, especially for the standard libraries they provide so everybody's programs can avoid writing special file format parsers from scratch.
Some of this is because too many people still write in C when they're not good enough to do it competently, and the companies they work for aren't making sure their code is properly reviewed, and they're letting them use a language that lets you shoot yourself in the foot. Don't get me wrong - C is still my favorite programming language, small, clean, elegant, and obvious, but most people shouldn't be allowed to use it.
Back in the 70s, when I was in high school, we didn't have these stupid political-correctness zero-tolerance anti-smoking rules. Until a few years before, students smoking in school was forbidden, and students dealt with it in the traditional ways, by smoking in the bathroom and sneaking smokes outside, and that meant that you couldn't breathe in the bathrooms and there were cigarette butts all over the lawn near the doorways. (You also couldn't breathe in the teachers' lounge, because teachers were allowed to smoke there.)
The school system decided to try treating the students as adults, and set up two areas outside where you were allowed to smoke and provided trash cans and ashtrays. And all of a sudden you could breathe in the bathrooms (plus they were less crowded because there weren't gangs of kids smoking), and the rest of the place became generally cleaner except the main smoking court itself, and the teachers who didn't smoke could tell the teachers who did smoke to go outside with the kids. Worked fine, provided a good place for the kids to hang out, and while the 70s were full of lots of tree-hugging hippie crap, smoking was a lot more common than it is now in spite of all the anti-smoking propaganda we got in health and gym classes.
Sometime in the mid-80s, Republicans started pushing political correctness on everybody, smoking got banned in the schools, and while smoking was a bit less popular by then, kids went back to smoking in the bathroom, so breathing in the bathrooms became impossible again, and the teachers declared one of the two teachers' lounges to be non-smoking and the smokers got the other one.
I went to mostly-suburban junior high and high school, so teachers almost never got physical with kids unless they were breaking up a fight. The one exception I remember was when a kid running an errand walked into the junior high metal shop without stopping at the door to put on safety glasses. The teacher (who was also the football coach) picked him up, slammed him against the wall, and informed him he'd better never do that again. The message apparently got through (:-), and nobody had a problem with it, because the metal shop was potentially dangerous.
But if a teacher had hit a kid with a ruler, I'd expect there'd have been zero tolerance for that sort of thing, and that's the direction that zero tolerance *ought* to be applied, not like the current abuse-of-authority crap that schools like to push around today.
On the Internet, everybody knows what a dog you are...
My earliest material on the net is probably a Usenet posting from 1981 that Google got from the DejaNews archives which got them from somewhere. The only real privacy I've got out there is because Google reports 253,000 hits for "bill stewart", many of which are obviously not me, plus my first decade or so on Usenet had a variety of different addresses as my employer's computing infrastructure evolved. But I've had the same primary home and work email addresses since ~1995 and been on a couple of long-running mailing lists that leave me a long Web trail for anyone who actually cared to look.
For kids today, I'd strongly recommend using disposable screen names, changing them every couple of years, and using different handles for different types of activity. It's nice to be able to demonstrate that good things you wrote were yours; it's not necessarily as good that everything you've said about every topic is linkable. For instance, my great talents and insightfulness and vast experience in network and Internet design and architecture topics are relevant to future employers; my politics shouldn't be, but it's not like they're not easy to find, in case anybody I'd like to work with in the future happens to be a Republican, and the random First Posts and throwaway bad puns I've inflicted on Slashdot may have used up a bit of karma but are similarly inescapable except when I posted them as Anonymous Coward (which I typically only do for material that's significantly at odds with my employer's positions on the telecom business or else is in worse-than-usual taste.)
First of all, this wasn't a Supreme Court decision - it was a Supreme Court refusal-to-decide, which leaves the appeals court for whatever district the case was filed in governing the case in that district only. If the appeals court or the district court below it wrote a really good opinion, it can be influential in other cases in other districts, but it doesn't have to be.
Second, there were obviously contractual issues going on here. The news article doesn't say when or where the programmer wrote the programs, or whether he was a consultant or regular employee, or whether they were "work for hire", or what other contracts they had. It doesn't sound like typical work for hire by an employee, because that would normally be owned by the employer and the case would have been a slam-dunk way earlier. So the results of this case are likely to only be useful if you've got a similar contractual agreement, and we don't know what that agreement is because the article doesn't go into that kind of detail.
ICANN really only cares about one thing, which is trademark enforcement of domain names. They've got a bit of control over cybersquatting kinds of issues, and that might be run differently under a UN bureaucracy, and they insist that every registrar collect lots of detail about domain name registrants and publish it in whois, which makes trademark enforcement lawsuits easier but might violate many European privacy laws, and UN control could try and enforce that on more ccTLDs than ICANN has been able to, but it's unlikely they'd make much change there.
The rest of it doesn't really matter. Google can find pirate software just as easily whether it's www.pirate-software-example.com or yarrrrr.co.jm or http://big-hosting-example.com/pirate-software/for sale.htm. UN control could theoretically let China close down sites that it doesn't like, such as falun-gong.com or possibly all of.tw, but it's unlikely.
The main change UN control could make is that ICANN has been dragging its feet on non-7-bit-ASCII internationalized character sets for DNS, which would be resolved in some manner relatively quickly (at least for China.) To cut ICANN some slack, one reason they haven't done much is that most of the proposed solutions are technically bad, except the proposals from Verisign/NetworkSolutions which are highly connected politically and technically suck even worse.
Country code DNS spaces let China control any of their own namespace - but they'd also like to control.tw and sometimes.com (e.g. censor falun-gong.com)
Controlling the root DNS servers is mostly a silly issue - except for adding new global TLDs, the only thing going on at that layer is ICANN trying to extort money and whois-privacy-violation from the ccTLD operators in return for agreeing not to disconnect them, plus a few rare disputes over control of ccTLD registries (typically governments or their monopoly telcos wanting to take over previously privately-run ccTLDs such as.za, or occasional problems with US enemies like.iq.)
Control over.com is the interesting space - The only IP that ICANN ever cared about was "Intellectual Property", not "Internet Protocol", and the WIPO-types pretty much control the agenda there. It's highly unlikely that.EU will be able to take over.com, though they could run a.com.eu if they wanted.
Back when I was in grad school in Berkeley in 1978-1979, I bought an acre of land on the moon. Unlike this current guy, who claims to have legitimately laid claim to the whole moon and to be selling everybody a unique piece of land, the guy I bought it from showed up on campus wearing a silver space suit and doing a great schtick, making it clear that he's selling everybody the *same* acre of land, and that he's trading you a nice big fancy green piece of paper with engraving and shiny bits on it and pictures of the moon (the deed) in return for a little boring green piece of paper with a picture of a dead politician on it. He'd been arrested a number of times, because some towns don't like guys in space suits selling acres of land on the moon, but they couldn't legitimately charge him with fraud because he was quite upfront about how he's selling everybody the same acre of land, and he had lots of good pictures of the police trying to keep a straight face while busting him. And he finished with an anti-drug message, about how you shouldn't go taking large quantities of LSD or *you* might end up on the streetcorner in a silver spacesuit selling people land on the moon.
Best Current Practices RFCs for ISPs recommend that they block traffic from forged addresses - especially from end customers, which is the easy case, but also blocking forged-address traffic from other ISPs to the extent that that's possible. On Cisco routers, URPF (Unicast Reverse Path Forwarding, IIRC) is an efficient method of blocking forged traffic from end users - basically, if a packet claims to be "from" a given IP address, the interface card on the ISP's router will reject the packet unless the same access line contains a route to that address. I think Juniper has similar capabilities, and if Redback doesn't, you can still get a lower-granularity enforcement by checking it at an upstream router.
Unfortunately, too many ISPs apparently don't enforce forgery-protection, so UDP-based attacks can still work, and it's hard to trace them back to their source. A couple of examples of attacks include the Slammer worm which used very small UDP packets to attack a database, and many of the DDOS attacks which send a small request "from" the victim to servers that send a big response (e.g. DNS smurfing attacks), allowing a low-bandwidth attacker to trick other machines into sending a large attack against the victim. There are large ISPs that enforce spoof-proofing, but it's not everybody yet, or attacks like this would be much less common.
There are special cases - if a customer is multi-homed to multiple ISPs, the ISPs have to be careful not to mess up the multi-homing (typically by adding routes to their tables), and if a customer has a block of addresses (e.g. a/24 with 253 addresses), customer machines at that site can forge packets "from" other addresses at that site, but that's a less important attack because you can still trace and filter that attack traffic if it's attacking you.
Your PCs have become infected with ZOMBIES and ALIEN VIRUSES and are about to be eaten by an Enormous Mutant Star Goat or something about like that. To protect yourself, please put the PC out at the curb and email us with your street address, and we'll disinfect it for you and return it in a couple of weeks.
It's easy to get 100x the compression of LZW, as long as decompression isn't one of your requirements.
And pigs do fly fairly well, for short periods of time, given enough thrust. It's just that steering and landing aren't particularly their strong points.
Cocaine's big problem is that the illegality means that you not only have to spend too much money if you're addicted, but you can't control or predict the quality of stuff you're buying from criminals. Chewing coca leaves or drinking coca-leaf tea is a lot safer than snorting refined powder, but it doesn't have the big kick, and refined powder is too often cut with other things.
An acquaintance of mine and his druggie friends once decided that since the drugs they knew about had differences in speed and strength (and safety) of experience between natural plant form, ingested refined powder, and smoked, that they'd try smoking caffeine pills, so they crunched up some No-Doz and smoked it. You do not want to try this.... Apparently the pattern held true, and all the nasty things that caffeine does to you if you abuse it happen all at once - headaches, jitters, nausea, blood pressure and heartbeat - and it was an extremely unpleasant but fortunately brief experience.
Boingboing recently had an article pointing to a Flickr Photo Set about the Bernal Heights Illegal Soapbox Derby. Lots of silly cars, and the one rule is that every car is required to have a beer holder. Usually Halloween, sometimes other weekends as well.
My lab has a medium-sized AC unit bolted into the ceiling, plus building HVAC, but it periodically chokes and dies. At least one time they put a freestanding AC unit for a couple of months, an ugly 4-foot-high thing fed by hoses from the ceiling with a couple of big holes in the front.
During the years that was going on, we had a guy in our sales group who was a wine expert and also part of a small winery with some friends, and we'd have ~weekly wine-tasting sessions in the evening after work with whatever he'd found that was interesting that week. (Had to be more than one bottle - "Two or more bottles means you're doing a tasting - one bottle is just drinking.") So when we got the ugly AC box in my lab, it was obvious that we ought to do white wine one week - the holes in the front were just about right for two bottles.
Sure, it's an obvious thing, but enough blade servers are going to be used in racks in server rooms that anything smaller than a half-high-rack need to be built on the assumption that it's sharing its cooling with other servers. Blade servers are already annoying enough to data center power designers, who had enough trouble with stacks of 1U servers, but especially the small 3U-10U space heater systems need to be coolable. And obviously just pulling in cold air from the bottom and pushing it out the top as hot air to cook the equipment above it doesn't cut it:-)
1U servers also have this kind of problem, and it's not clear to me that there's an obvious solution, other than perhaps building a cooling system that with a bunch of 1U or half-U slabs cooled by heat-pipe or chilled water that blow air into the box above them, which would be complex and a big hassle.
Yes, the US government paid US universities to invent some of the fundamental technology, and set up the Arpanet backbone and some of the early exchange points. But Bell Labs invented UUCP on its own, and there were a bunch of other networks invented by various people, and there was that AOL thingy, and while Usenet was developed between a state university and a private university, by grad students who may have had NSF funding, most of the transport was UUCP, mostly slush-funded under the table by Bell Labs. And the Commercial Internet Exchange was an explicitly non-government-funded Internet peering point developed so that businesses could have email communications about non-government-related business, which was explicitly verboten under the Arpanet Acceptable Use Policies. And the big reason that the Internet took off as a popular toy was the web, which allowed exchanging pictures and text in ways that were more friendly than ftping GIF files. And of course Ted Nelson had invented Xanadu, a cosmically way cooler system years before, as he keeps reminding everybody (:-).
But this "Governance" nonsense is mostly a smoke-screen for governments that want world-wide censorship, trying to use DNS as a level for lots of currently non-existent control. Sure, there's some US-centricness, and.gov and.mil ought to be shoved under.us, but governments that want to govern their countries' DNS space have country-code DNS with their own personal 2-letter abbreviation on it, and they can call things whatever they want under that (though if they use non-ASCII naming, there are some interoperability issues - but the big player on that issue is China, who can do their own thing just fine.) The US government does meddle a bit, first encouraging ICANN to do.xxx and then ordering them not to, but there's not that much. The problem is that China not only wants to block websites like falun-gong.cn, they also want to block falun-gong.org and falun-gong.co.uk and asian-pr0n.com.
The big policy meddlers at ICANN are the WIPO-types. ICANN really only cares about one kind of IP, and it's "Intellectual Property", not "Internet Protocol", so they do insist that all registrars require and publish lots of privacy-violating information in whois records, to make it easy for companies that want to initiate trademark lawsuits to find who they're suing (and to make sure they don't sue the registrars or registries), but that's pretty easily evaded, and country-code DNS administrations can ignore those requirements if they're big enough.
IPv4 space is another smokescreen excuse - yes, we're running out of the stuff, and there's obviously nowhere close to enough address space if every cellphone in Asia wants its own IP address. The fix is not to impose UN governance on ICANN, it's to deploy IPv6, and the Internet community has been doing a pretty good job of getting universities and other early adopters to hand in their old Class A space, but the big impact was really that HTTP1.1 and sendmail/etc. allowed one IP address to support many domain names for web and email. For a while, ICANN had ridiculous pricing policies for IPv6 space, which appeared designed to delay adoption of the addresses until technical policies had really been worked out (making multi-homing scale without totally exploding all the routing tables on all the world's routers is still a hard problem), but they seem to be backing off on that.
There were also some early WSIS issues like poor third-world countries wanting to tax the Internet to pay to have infrastructure built to their countries, which is a wrong-headed approach. For most of them, the first steps need to be getting rid of their incompetent telecom monopolies, getting rid of radio spectrum monopolies so people can build widespread wireless and satellite, and getting reliable electricity at least to the big cities, and too many of those countries either view telecom as a taxable cash cow or
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The standard evolutionary model says that Earth had a bunch of Primordial Soup that cooked for hundreds of millions of years until some of it did stuff that was interesting enough to photosynthesize, which started radically changing the chemistry of the planet's atmosphere and the Soup until more of it started doing more interesting stuff and eventually it was interesting enough that we can declare that "It's Alive!" The probability that stars will have planets, and that they'll have the right conditions to let this happen (temperature, available atomic mixtures, gravity, etc.) are pretty low, and people who like to speculate about how heavily populated the universe is and when we'll find aliens come up with estimates like Drake's Equation to try to guess how rare we are.
Interplanetary Panspermia suggests that not only did Earth have to have the right mixture of chemicals and temperature/pressure conditions in the Primordial Soup for all this to happen, but that Mars or maybe Venus also had to have a (presumably different) batch of soup cooking that had either become Alive or else pretty close, and something had to cause a Big Splash to get some Martian Soup mixed in with the Earth Soup at a time that both of them were in the right conditions. If the Earth had been running too far ahead or behind in time, or the Big Splash hadn't happened at the right time or hadn't been big enough, then the Martians would have been told No Soup For You, Next Billion Years , Earth wouldn't have been alive, and Mars would have done the Cosmic Wimpout without us evolving to see it today. Drake's Equation looks much more dodgy under those assumptions. If that's what it takes for life to evolve, I don't expect any space aliens to show up any time soon.
Interplanetary Panspermia doesn't really solve any problems about how life could have evolved, though I suppose it *could* have happened, but it seems much less likely than Earth's Primordial Soup doing the job on its own. Interstellar Panspermia seems much much less likely to me, for reasons I noted above. There's a huge amount of stellar evolution that had to happen just to get the right elements into the Solar System, since some of them only get formed inside supernovae or similar stars. Friendly Space Aliens deliberately seeding the place begs the question of how *they* evolved, but strikes me as no less likely than Interstellar Panspermia happening by accident. You'd think they'd have also left a message, but maybe they were just shooting stuff out at likely stars on spec, hoping that something would work even if they weren't around four billion years later when we were ready to Phone Home, or maybe they really *are* hanging around on the Dark Side of the Moon working on the next chapter of their cookbook before they drop in for a visit.
Each service on each host of the private side of your firewall box grabs a port number on the public side of the firewall and registers a corresponding SRV record with a DNS server, and any application out on the real Internet that wants to reach it finds the port number dynamically from DNS instead of statically hard-coding it. The public side still needs genuine registered addresses, but the private side can use RFC1918 space (e.g. 10.x.x.x), and each public-side IPv4 address can support as many machines behind the firewall as it takes to run out of ports. So if your cellphone has a web server, instead of reaching it through its own IP address and port 80, it looks like 10.11.12.13:80 on the hidden site, but you reach it from the real world at firewall123.cellphone-example.net:4567, and firewall123.cellphone has a real IPv4 address 123.456.789.10. Somebody in the real world who wants to reach your phone either looks up _http_.13115551212.cellphone-example.net and gets an SRV record telling them it's port 4567 on 123.456.789.10, or else you just advertise http://13115551212.cellphone-example.net:4567/ and let their browser go there directly. So if the average cellphone has 16 ports active(counting both directions), then that one IPv4 address can support 4000 phones.
And yes, this still has problems - it encourages service providers of cellphones, DNS, and cable modems to hide their users behind NAT-like service, but it's a two-way NAT-like service, and they don't have to limit the ports or protocols the users offer to the world but many of them will. And it also encourages service providers to provide big web-proxy farms on the private side to reduce the number of ports used on the public side, which makes censorship a bit easier. And there are protocols that *know* which port they live on, so the client and sometimes the server applications would need to change to use SRV records instead, but that's probably less disruptive than teaching them to use IPv6 addresses. Other protocols like http (using URLs with port numbers) and smtp (using MX records) already have ways to specify the port numbers. Some protocols like IPSEC aren't happy with NAT, especially port NAT, but they often end up doing Stupid UDP-wrapper Tricks to work around that.
The two reasons there's so much bloat in IPv4 routing tables are that customers want to have their own provider-independent address space (so they're not tied down to a single provider) and want to multi-home to two different ISPs, advertising their address space on both ISPs so that if either connection fails, there are still routes to their address space. This means that every ISP out there needs table entries for the multi-homed customer's address space, even though the customer might only need one or two IP addresses, and the routing protocols often have calculations that need N**2 or at least N log N space, so it's especially annoying. (By the way, there's work on upgrading BGP from 16-bit ASNs to 32-bit ASNs to deal with the increasing numbers of multi-homed customers.)
IPv6 was supposed to fix this by providing enough address space that customers in the old swamp could be reallocated to provider-aligned space, but the customer-ISP politics problem is still there, and the need for reliable multihoming is still there. Browsers and DNS caching make the problem much worse, because DNS-derived IP addresses are persistent - if www.example.com's connection 1.1.1.1 fails, you can't just use DNS to tell the end users to use 2.2.2.2 instead, because DNS caches mean the update might not appear for days, and browsers and some other applications don't look up DNS entries on every packet either, so multi-homed customers really need to do rerouting to work around failures. That kind of speed is ok for network renumbering when you're changing ISPs with a week of advance preparation, but it's not fast enough for routing around failures.
There's an ugly project called shim6> that's supposed to work around the renumbering and routing issues, and it avoids NAT by replacing it with something IMHO almost if maybe not quite as nasty. AFAICT, the working group's not really finished with it, and it requires host software because it's a routing shim in the end-device's protocol stack.
Ch-chuck posted the URL for a catalog that carries an EMF-protection hat and lots of other scientifically bogus stuff. Not sure if it's quite the same hat, but it's heart is in the right place.
And they used borrowed equipment, though it was good stuff and quite expensive, and if some bureaucrat wanted to amortize the depreciation on it, a few hours use might have made this an expensive project.
Tin? How quaint. Regular aluminum? Obsolete too.
If you want to keep out *modern* space alien mind control rays, you need to go with transparent aluminum!
A few years ago, one of the new-agey junk catalogs actually had aluminized hats,
as well as the usual collection of crystals, shiny things, bogus magnetic devices, and, ummm, tachyon bracelets. It's been long enough ago that I don't remember the details, but I think the hats were some kind of cloth with an aluminized mylar or aluminum paint layer or something similar. I think they even had a removable grounding strap.
Now, unlike why people want to obtain and wear such things, I don't know - I suspect the joke is much much more common than the actual practice. But the reason why people want to *sell* them is much more obvious - it's because they think there are suckers who want to buy them. The interesting question is whether they found enough suckers who actually *did* buy them to keep making the things.
Personally, if I were to get an aluminum hat (except as a costume for a science fiction conventions), it'd be a bicycle helmet. Doesn't matter that it keeps the CIA space alien hunters from beaming things into my head, as long as it keeps out the car hoods and asphalt, though blinky-lights and reflector tape are probably much more useful than aluminum color would be.
In practice, you need to do more than that - even if it's just printing a more informative error message or (more typically) rejecting the bad input file and asking the user for another one.
It really irks me that supposedly professional companies sell software that doesn't follow basic lessons like that, especially for the standard libraries they provide so everybody's programs can avoid writing special file format parsers from scratch.
Some of this is because too many people still write in C when they're not good enough to do it competently, and the companies they work for aren't making sure their code is properly reviewed, and they're letting them use a language that lets you shoot yourself in the foot. Don't get me wrong - C is still my favorite programming language, small, clean, elegant, and obvious, but most people shouldn't be allowed to use it.
The school system decided to try treating the students as adults, and set up two areas outside where you were allowed to smoke and provided trash cans and ashtrays. And all of a sudden you could breathe in the bathrooms (plus they were less crowded because there weren't gangs of kids smoking), and the rest of the place became generally cleaner except the main smoking court itself, and the teachers who didn't smoke could tell the teachers who did smoke to go outside with the kids. Worked fine, provided a good place for the kids to hang out, and while the 70s were full of lots of tree-hugging hippie crap, smoking was a lot more common than it is now in spite of all the anti-smoking propaganda we got in health and gym classes.
Sometime in the mid-80s, Republicans started pushing political correctness on everybody, smoking got banned in the schools, and while smoking was a bit less popular by then, kids went back to smoking in the bathroom, so breathing in the bathrooms became impossible again, and the teachers declared one of the two teachers' lounges to be non-smoking and the smokers got the other one.
But if a teacher had hit a kid with a ruler, I'd expect there'd have been zero tolerance for that sort of thing, and that's the direction that zero tolerance *ought* to be applied, not like the current abuse-of-authority crap that schools like to push around today.
My earliest material on the net is probably a Usenet posting from 1981 that Google got from the DejaNews archives which got them from somewhere. The only real privacy I've got out there is because Google reports 253,000 hits for "bill stewart", many of which are obviously not me, plus my first decade or so on Usenet had a variety of different addresses as my employer's computing infrastructure evolved. But I've had the same primary home and work email addresses since ~1995 and been on a couple of long-running mailing lists that leave me a long Web trail for anyone who actually cared to look.
For kids today, I'd strongly recommend using disposable screen names, changing them every couple of years, and using different handles for different types of activity. It's nice to be able to demonstrate that good things you wrote were yours; it's not necessarily as good that everything you've said about every topic is linkable. For instance, my great talents and insightfulness and vast experience in network and Internet design and architecture topics are relevant to future employers; my politics shouldn't be, but it's not like they're not easy to find, in case anybody I'd like to work with in the future happens to be a Republican, and the random First Posts and throwaway bad puns I've inflicted on Slashdot may have used up a bit of karma but are similarly inescapable except when I posted them as Anonymous Coward (which I typically only do for material that's significantly at odds with my employer's positions on the telecom business or else is in worse-than-usual taste.)
Second, there were obviously contractual issues going on here. The news article doesn't say when or where the programmer wrote the programs, or whether he was a consultant or regular employee, or whether they were "work for hire", or what other contracts they had. It doesn't sound like typical work for hire by an employee, because that would normally be owned by the employer and the case would have been a slam-dunk way earlier. So the results of this case are likely to only be useful if you've got a similar contractual agreement, and we don't know what that agreement is because the article doesn't go into that kind of detail.
The rest of it doesn't really matter. Google can find pirate software just as easily whether it's www.pirate-software-example.com or yarrrrr.co.jm or http://big-hosting-example.com/pirate-software/for sale.htm. UN control could theoretically let China close down sites that it doesn't like, such as falun-gong.com or possibly all of .tw, but it's unlikely.
The main change UN control could make is that ICANN has been dragging its feet on non-7-bit-ASCII internationalized character sets for DNS, which would be resolved in some manner relatively quickly (at least for China.) To cut ICANN some slack, one reason they haven't done much is that most of the proposed solutions are technically bad, except the proposals from Verisign/NetworkSolutions which are highly connected politically and technically suck even worse.
Controlling the root DNS servers is mostly a silly issue - except for adding new global TLDs, the only thing going on at that layer is ICANN trying to extort money and whois-privacy-violation from the ccTLD operators in return for agreeing not to disconnect them, plus a few rare disputes over control of ccTLD registries (typically governments or their monopoly telcos wanting to take over previously privately-run ccTLDs such as .za, or occasional problems with US enemies like .iq.)
Control over .com is the interesting space - The only IP that ICANN ever cared about was "Intellectual Property", not "Internet Protocol", and the WIPO-types pretty much control the agenda there. It's highly unlikely that .EU will be able to take over .com, though they could run a .com.eu if they wanted.
Back when I was in grad school in Berkeley in 1978-1979, I bought an acre of land on the moon. Unlike this current guy, who claims to have legitimately laid claim to the whole moon and to be selling everybody a unique piece of land, the guy I bought it from showed up on campus wearing a silver space suit and doing a great schtick, making it clear that he's selling everybody the *same* acre of land, and that he's trading you a nice big fancy green piece of paper with engraving and shiny bits on it and pictures of the moon (the deed) in return for a little boring green piece of paper with a picture of a dead politician on it. He'd been arrested a number of times, because some towns don't like guys in space suits selling acres of land on the moon, but they couldn't legitimately charge him with fraud because he was quite upfront about how he's selling everybody the same acre of land, and he had lots of good pictures of the police trying to keep a straight face while busting him. And he finished with an anti-drug message, about how you shouldn't go taking large quantities of LSD or *you* might end up on the streetcorner in a silver spacesuit selling people land on the moon.
Unfortunately, too many ISPs apparently don't enforce forgery-protection, so UDP-based attacks can still work, and it's hard to trace them back to their source. A couple of examples of attacks include the Slammer worm which used very small UDP packets to attack a database, and many of the DDOS attacks which send a small request "from" the victim to servers that send a big response (e.g. DNS smurfing attacks), allowing a low-bandwidth attacker to trick other machines into sending a large attack against the victim. There are large ISPs that enforce spoof-proofing, but it's not everybody yet, or attacks like this would be much less common.
There are special cases - if a customer is multi-homed to multiple ISPs, the ISPs have to be careful not to mess up the multi-homing (typically by adding routes to their tables), and if a customer has a block of addresses (e.g. a /24 with 253 addresses), customer machines at that site can forge packets "from" other addresses at that site, but that's a less important attack because you can still trace and filter that attack traffic if it's attacking you.
And pigs do fly fairly well, for short periods of time, given enough thrust. It's just that steering and landing aren't particularly their strong points.
An acquaintance of mine and his druggie friends once decided that since the drugs they knew about had differences in speed and strength (and safety) of experience between natural plant form, ingested refined powder, and smoked, that they'd try smoking caffeine pills, so they crunched up some No-Doz and smoked it. You do not want to try this.... Apparently the pattern held true, and all the nasty things that caffeine does to you if you abuse it happen all at once - headaches, jitters, nausea, blood pressure and heartbeat - and it was an extremely unpleasant but fortunately brief experience.
Boingboing recently had an article pointing to a Flickr Photo Set about the Bernal Heights Illegal Soapbox Derby. Lots of silly cars, and the one rule is that every car is required to have a beer holder. Usually Halloween, sometimes other weekends as well.
During the years that was going on, we had a guy in our sales group who was a wine expert and also part of a small winery with some friends, and we'd have ~weekly wine-tasting sessions in the evening after work with whatever he'd found that was interesting that week. (Had to be more than one bottle - "Two or more bottles means you're doing a tasting - one bottle is just drinking.") So when we got the ugly AC box in my lab, it was obvious that we ought to do white wine one week - the holes in the front were just about right for two bottles.
1U servers also have this kind of problem, and it's not clear to me that there's an obvious solution, other than perhaps building a cooling system that with a bunch of 1U or half-U slabs cooled by heat-pipe or chilled water that blow air into the box above them, which would be complex and a big hassle.
But this "Governance" nonsense is mostly a smoke-screen for governments that want world-wide censorship, trying to use DNS as a level for lots of currently non-existent control. Sure, there's some US-centricness, and .gov and .mil ought to be shoved under .us, but governments that want to govern their countries' DNS space have country-code DNS with their own personal 2-letter abbreviation on it, and they can call things whatever they want under that (though if they use non-ASCII naming, there are some interoperability issues - but the big player on that issue is China, who can do their own thing just fine.) The US government does meddle a bit, first encouraging ICANN to do .xxx and then ordering them not to, but there's not that much. The problem is that China not only wants to block websites like falun-gong.cn, they also want to block falun-gong.org and falun-gong.co.uk and asian-pr0n.com.
The big policy meddlers at ICANN are the WIPO-types. ICANN really only cares about one kind of IP, and it's "Intellectual Property", not "Internet Protocol", so they do insist that all registrars require and publish lots of privacy-violating information in whois records, to make it easy for companies that want to initiate trademark lawsuits to find who they're suing (and to make sure they don't sue the registrars or registries), but that's pretty easily evaded, and country-code DNS administrations can ignore those requirements if they're big enough.
IPv4 space is another smokescreen excuse - yes, we're running out of the stuff, and there's obviously nowhere close to enough address space if every cellphone in Asia wants its own IP address. The fix is not to impose UN governance on ICANN, it's to deploy IPv6, and the Internet community has been doing a pretty good job of getting universities and other early adopters to hand in their old Class A space, but the big impact was really that HTTP1.1 and sendmail/etc. allowed one IP address to support many domain names for web and email. For a while, ICANN had ridiculous pricing policies for IPv6 space, which appeared designed to delay adoption of the addresses until technical policies had really been worked out (making multi-homing scale without totally exploding all the routing tables on all the world's routers is still a hard problem), but they seem to be backing off on that.
There were also some early WSIS issues like poor third-world countries wanting to tax the Internet to pay to have infrastructure built to their countries, which is a wrong-headed approach. For most of them, the first steps need to be getting rid of their incompetent telecom monopolies, getting rid of radio spectrum monopolies so people can build widespread wireless and satellite, and getting reliable electricity at least to the big cities, and too many of those countries either view telecom as a taxable cash cow or