There's certainly no excuse for implementing it as a worm when it could have just as well been a scanner program that operated at a controlled rate from an identifiable site. But one of the biggest problems with Nachi was that it generated too much internet traffic. It did lots of pings deciding what to infect, and worked fast enough that it generally made a bigger mess of any networks it was on than the original Blaster had.
Oh, come on, you're saying we'll call you a "Microsoft Basher" as if that's a Bad Thing. Here on Slashdot, that's sort of like karma-whoring:-)
My home PC runs WinXP most of the time, behind a hardware firewall of course, and security updates are relatively painless. I have them set to download automatically, and only update when I want them to (it's not the default, but I don't like the machine rebooting itself when I'm not around or don't want to be interrupted), but the nag balloon pops up any time there are updates ready. I think their default is to update automatically as well. It's a big change for MS, but it's a lot safer than it used to be.
When my uncle was living in Italy, there was one day that he was driving through the mountains and one of his wheels came off. He avoided falling off the cliff, and to hold his spare tire on, he decided to take one nut from each of the other wheels. He put the wrench on the first one to remove it, and it was loose, and so were the others. After checking that nobody he knew was trying to kill him, he decided that it was probably just thieves trying to steal his fancy wheels who'd been interrupted before they'd gotten them off.
All these people filling out forms with bogus information - really now. My cat provided perfectly true information when she got her hotmail account, and when the Child Online Protection Act came in, the bums dropped her because she was under 13 years old. (Age: 3 Sex: F(neutered) Occupation: self-employed Income: She hasn't been back, and she dropped her Juno account when it started charging money.
How do they deal with snow load? I've seen inflatable tennis courts in cold country, but I'm pretty sure they required fans to keep them inflated, which is fine if you've got consistent electricity, which disaster areas usually don't.
If you've got a door, bugs and thieves can still get in. It's not clear from the article whether this thing has a cement floor or not, though it's still probably more sturdy than a tent.
Humans can do good work building prefab housing components also - working in a factory, it's dry, with consistent temperatures, you've got more control over your materials and less waste, you can use better tools because they don't have to be as portable, you can do more of the work standing on the ground, and the workers are doing more consistent tasks (which is useful for skill development and product consistency, though that also means that you can hire lower-skilled workers and it can be boring.)
Also, robots are much better at working with predictable consistent materials than they are at working with things that require adaptability and judgement. Steel pretty much does what you expect, and sheetrock does if you're careful. Wood isn't always that consistent, depending on the aging process, twistiness, dampness, etc. It's really interesting to work on a construction project with Old Guys - they'll say things like "Hmm, that wood's still a bit green and it's got a bit of a twist to it, so push it over a bit this way while I drive a nail in from this direction, and as it dries it'll be less likely to split." Robots aren't likely to do that.
Then of course, you have to compare the risks of giant mecha robots going berserk vs. bored construction workers with power tools.
People who live in different areas seem to have different prejudices about housing construction types. Almost any construction type can be done well or shoddily, and how long an adequately built house lasts often depends more on maintenance than on construction materials. A decently-maintained woodframe house can last centuries in the appalling weather of New England, as long as fire and termites don't get it (which can be a problem, since termites had a long head-start over modern pesticides and modern barrier techniques.) I've done reconstruction on 150-year-old houses where the termites were winning (e.g. a 20cm x 10cm beam was about 3/4 chewed away.) The outer sheeting's important - my clapboard cedar house didn't strictly need paint, though it helped a bit, and too much modern construction uses materials than may not last. But the inner sheetrock is more cosmetic - it's easier to replace or repair than plaster, but I've lived in apartments where the sheetrock was coming off ten years after they were built.
I grew up in an area of the US Middle Atlantic East Coast where most houses were brick or stone - they last a long time unless they get foundation problems, but they're often hard to insulate and if water ever starts leaking into the basement, the basement becomes unfixable. Here in California, you can't safely build with those materials because of earthquakes - adobe houses worked ok, but wood-frame is a really good technology, as long as you do a few things correctly.
I've also lived in well-built wood-frame houses, and in badly-built wood-frame houses. In many coastal areas, where hurricanes and floods are a problem, the standard construction is to drive a bunch of piles into the ground and build the house on them, elevated however high you need to for average floods. In a really bad hurricane, yeah, they'll blow away, but the sandy ground can't support a brick/stone house, and it's much easier to replace the damaged parts than to repair a stone house that's been filled with seawater and had the foundation undermined.
I grew up in a brick house on the US East Coast, and brick and stone were fairly popular building materials - or woodframe with brick facing. But out here in California, it's not a useful material, because it doesn't behave well in earthquakes. Too many parts of the world do use brick or stone houses in earthquake country - leading to tens of thousands of deaths when there's a big quake in places like Iran or Armenia. Cement works ok, because you can put lots of rebar in it.
The Honeynet Project is a research project - cleaning up infected users and squashing evildoers is more of an ISP problem. Research Projects aren't out of a job unless they run out of funding (or unless they solve all computer security problems and greedy/malicious people stop exploiting the net, but that ain't happening.)
Letting the ISPs of the infected users know is a worthwhile activity; running a public blacklist of them might also be. It sounds like they complained to some of the IRC net operators, with little success, and if you let anybody who claims to be a "university research project" crack into your net and start killing off users, you've got far worse things to worry about than a few little million-machine botnets. Also, if the researchers start cracking botnets aggressively, they may be violating computer security laws if they're not very very careful. Better to get the ISPs to help do that job if you can, or find some other organized method for doing it.
If you're a university research project, it's fun to just look at all the action, but the obvious next step is to find something constructive to *do* with the information. One problem is LARTing the infected boxes, and a separate problem is tracking the zombie masters, and somewhere in between is tracking the IRC networks (which may be owned by the zombie masters or may be innocent.) Tracking the zombie masters, while important, is highly non-trivial for a competently run botnet, because the master hopefully has the sense to relay any bot commands through a couple of compromised machines that you need to backtrack through to find where he really is (if you can), though a botnet run by a script k1dd13 may be easier to track down.
But doing something about known infected machines is a problem with a different scale, and it's a public hygiene problem rather than a criminal detective problem. Obviously you want to notify the ISPs of the infected boxes, but what should they do about it?
With some architectures, if you're willing to do the administrative work, you can either shut down the infected machines entirely (gets their attention, but not always their cooperation, because they don't always know what to do to fix their machines),
or you could put them in a separate address space (e.g. 10.*.*.*) where they're NATted and Proxied and have dangerous ports filtered out, so they're able to read some web pages and get some email, but aren't able to attack other boxes or send spam directly, and their web pages seem to all have nagging banners on them. That will still annoy some kinds of gamers, and if it's not safe to proxy them, that at least puts pressure on them to clean up (and if the gamers are kids, it gets them to whine to their parents, which can be useful, at least if the parents know more than the kids.:-)
It's easiest to do this with a dial infrastructure, since you've typically got good records of who had what IP address when, and the users need to authenticate to the network every time they dial in (typically daily), rather than waiting for a DHCP timeout or something.
DSL's not too hard, since users are typically on a PVC that you could reroute to a danger-zone router instead of the router they're normally on.
Cable modem's a bit tougher - depends a lot on the infrastructure you've got. If you're forcing them to use the Evil PPPoE protocol, it's probably a lot easier, and otherwise it depends on how flexible your head-end gear is.
Most of the newer BitTorrent clients let you adjust your upload speed, not just turn it on/off. If you limit your upload rate to, say, 80-90%, TCP applications will work fine, and BitTorrent will still get most of the bandwidth so people will still give you reasonable download speeds.
BitTorrent 4.0 introduces new features to give BT packets lower priority than regular IP traffic, so if you only have a single computer, or if your router pays attention to packet markings (less likely), real traffic can always get priority over the BT traffic and you'll pretty much maximize the speed of both.
Unfortunately, while some spammers, like Avtech, can be sued, it doesn't work on the Nigerian 419 scammers. After all, they're not from your country, and they're outright criminals, and their government largely doesn't mind them ripping off foreigners in return for a fair bribe, much less spamming, and in many cases the scam is asking the victim to participate in a crime, so the victim's in no position to complain if he does bite the hook.
Even for American spammers, if they've got any sense, which most of them don't, all they need to do is spend $100 to set up a Delaware or Nevada corporation, and have the corporation do the spamming. If they get caught and sued, and their corporation gets all of its non-existent assets seized, all they need to do is spend another $100 for another corporation and $6 for another domain name and they're back in business.
I've been spammed by those sleazeballs, though it's been a while. They were a major motivation for me to take a small social mailing list and have to more the thing to a majordomo environment (the previous maintainer just used sendmail aliases and by-hand subscription, which worked well until spammers got the address.) (That wasn't totally bad - some much more aggressive spammers or bank-fraud-virus or something started pounding the list about the time we moved it, so in one sense those scammers did us a favor:-)
For most old hardware, new X86 is much more cost-effective, and new Macs are much friendlier, so the best reason to keep them around is because of the unique personalities of the environments they were designed for.
If you've got a NeXT, run NeXT on it, or Plan9; otherwise it's just a cool-looking slow black box.
If you've got a Sun, run Solaris, or SunOS, and maybe run something like NeWS on it (:-).
That HP-PA machine could be running HP-UX, though that was always pretty kinky stuff.
Firewall boxes occasionally benefit from running on non-X86 hardware, just because crackers and viruses won't expect it, but you should probably be running OpenBSD on them. Little ARM appliances are the one main architecture it looks like they've left out support for, though.
I'm not sure how fast a Dec Alpha is, but they were blazingly fast for their day so perhaps they can still outperform a $200 Pentium system on some applications, as long as you don't need more RAM than you've already bought for the thing. If so, most of those applications will run just about as well on some Debian Stable-as-death version, or *BSD, and you're not going to be adding any new hardware boards that need new drivers.
Most of the smaller distros out there are really Debian with a bunch of stuff stripped out and replaced with Busybox and whatever tools make sense for the target environment (security, system repair, media players, etc.) A few of them are more minimal roll-your-owns, and the embedded world also has the uCLinux crowd and vendors like MonteVista, but there's a huge amount of Debian usage in the small/medium appliance world.
Kernel vs. Userland compatibility problems
on
GCC 4.0 Preview
·
· Score: 1
I'm really tired of seeing Linux releases coming out saying "You have to build the kernel with GCC version x.y.z and Gnome/KDE with version x.w.q and be sure to only build GlibC using GCC version x.f.m." Scary-looking stuff - how much code do people write that should be significantly different for different compiler versions?
I've been using C longer than you have (1978:-), though you've probably been using C++ longer than I have, and you've definitely been doing real programming more recently.
Writing safe code in C is easy - you just have to sit down and do it, and not get lazy. C++ has some more convenient tools for writing safe code, but C is really just fine. The real problem is that both of them let you write unsafe code, so a random chunk of C++ from some careless slacker is just as dangerous as a random chunk of C code. C++ was useful precisely because it retained relatively good backwards compatibility with C, which means you can still shoot yourself in the foot with the same precision, simplicity, and beauty that you always could, as well as introducing newer and more baroque ways to do it.
Some of my friends rave about Python, or about Objective-C; I haven't tried them enough to comment usefully. There are still a few problems which benefit from down-to-the-virtual-metal programming - device drivers and occasional numerical hackery - but most of the real performance problems aren't language overhead, they're environmental baggage or memory bloat or overuse of ill-matched packages. The obsolete laptop I'm typing on right now has a CPU 1500 times faster than the ones I learned to program C on, with about 1000 times as much RAM. The machines I learned to do graphics on mostly had about 10 MIPS and 8 MB of RAM. Some of the bloating is an economic tradeoff - programmers are still expensive, while hardware just isn't (the desktop sitting next to me costs 1/1000 of what my first VAX cost, with 2500 times the CPU and 150 times the RAM - I'm using it to download music.) Wasting a bit of CPU horsepower to check boundaries decently is definitely cheaper than wasting user time debugging or cleaning up viruses.
Usenet..... while waiting for compiles
on
GCC 4.0 Preview
·
· Score: 1
OK, I did read the LOTD for a while, but it didn't waste any significant time compared to Usenet. After all, by the time Dilbert came out, it wasn't possible to read all of Usenet any more, even by printing it out 4-up double sided on the gimongous Xerox printer in the basement. (Though by about the time we had that printer, it was possible to use the mainframe in the basement to do compiles on, running some ersatz Unix version on Amdahls at a blazing 10 MIPS, with far more RAM and I/O horsepower than our Vaxen had...)
tmpfs accomplishes similar things
on
GCC 4.0 Preview
·
· Score: 1
tmpfs is a file system type that keeps files in memory if available, or in swap space if the VM system feels like paging them out. It's been a number of years since I've actually used it (ok, over a decade ago on SunOS:-), but the principles still hold - it's especially useful for files that you don't plan to keep around once you've used them, like typical compiler temp files - often they're written, updated, read, and deleted without ever bothering to write them to a disk drive.
It's such an obvious product, given the kinds of people who buy such things, that it has to exist, so it does. Victorinox Swiss Army Knife with USB. Also available from ThinkGeek.
If you need more than 1GB of disk, your main choices are either a clunky external drive that needs a separate power cord and is a pain to carry around, or else a disk-based iPod or something like it which can run on USB power. And once you become addicted to the iPod, you're going to have it with you anyway:-)
If you don't need to carry it around all the time, definitely, get yourself a 200GB portable - it'll give you a few more choices, because the disk is bigger than your laptop's. But that doesn't mean that you can't spare a couple hundred meg of space on your iPod as well.
Sure, you can get a USB drive cheaper, but the shuffle's pretty nice, and it takes up entirely no space in your pocket. You can't keep quite everything on it, but the 1GB version leaves you lots of room for tunes as well as a bootable Linux configuration. (I haven't installed the Linux yet, though:-)
Slashdot Mirror
There's certainly no excuse for implementing it as a worm when it could have just as well been a scanner program that operated at a controlled rate from an identifiable site. But one of the biggest problems with Nachi was that it generated too much internet traffic. It did lots of pings deciding what to infect, and worked fast enough that it generally made a bigger mess of any networks it was on than the original Blaster had.
My home PC runs WinXP most of the time, behind a hardware firewall of course, and security updates are relatively painless. I have them set to download automatically, and only update when I want them to (it's not the default, but I don't like the machine rebooting itself when I'm not around or don't want to be interrupted), but the nag balloon pops up any time there are updates ready. I think their default is to update automatically as well. It's a big change for MS, but it's a lot safer than it used to be.
When my uncle was living in Italy, there was one day that he was driving through the mountains and one of his wheels came off. He avoided falling off the cliff, and to hold his spare tire on, he decided to take one nut from each of the other wheels. He put the wrench on the first one to remove it, and it was loose, and so were the others. After checking that nobody he knew was trying to kill him, he decided that it was probably just thieves trying to steal his fancy wheels who'd been interrupted before they'd gotten them off.
(Monty Python Argument Clinic Sketch.) The joke he was doing was a reference to the "Night of the Living Dead" series of zombie movies.
All these people filling out forms with bogus information - really now. My cat provided perfectly true information when she got her hotmail account, and when the Child Online Protection Act came in, the bums dropped her because she was under 13 years old. (Age: 3 Sex: F(neutered) Occupation: self-employed Income: She hasn't been back, and she dropped her Juno account when it started charging money.
How do they deal with snow load?
I've seen inflatable tennis courts in cold country, but I'm pretty sure they required fans to keep them inflated, which is fine if you've got consistent electricity, which disaster areas usually don't.
If you've got a door, bugs and thieves can still get in. It's not clear from the article whether this thing has a cement floor or not, though it's still probably more sturdy than a tent.
Also, robots are much better at working with predictable consistent materials than they are at working with things that require adaptability and judgement. Steel pretty much does what you expect, and sheetrock does if you're careful. Wood isn't always that consistent, depending on the aging process, twistiness, dampness, etc. It's really interesting to work on a construction project with Old Guys - they'll say things like "Hmm, that wood's still a bit green and it's got a bit of a twist to it, so push it over a bit this way while I drive a nail in from this direction, and as it dries it'll be less likely to split." Robots aren't likely to do that.
Then of course, you have to compare the risks of giant mecha robots going berserk vs. bored construction workers with power tools.
I grew up in an area of the US Middle Atlantic East Coast where most houses were brick or stone - they last a long time unless they get foundation problems, but they're often hard to insulate and if water ever starts leaking into the basement, the basement becomes unfixable. Here in California, you can't safely build with those materials because of earthquakes - adobe houses worked ok, but wood-frame is a really good technology, as long as you do a few things correctly.
I've also lived in well-built wood-frame houses, and in badly-built wood-frame houses. In many coastal areas, where hurricanes and floods are a problem, the standard construction is to drive a bunch of piles into the ground and build the house on them, elevated however high you need to for average floods. In a really bad hurricane, yeah, they'll blow away, but the sandy ground can't support a brick/stone house, and it's much easier to replace the damaged parts than to repair a stone house that's been filled with seawater and had the foundation undermined.
I grew up in a brick house on the US East Coast, and brick and stone were fairly popular building materials - or woodframe with brick facing. But out here in California, it's not a useful material, because it doesn't behave well in earthquakes. Too many parts of the world do use brick or stone houses in earthquake country - leading to tens of thousands of deaths when there's a big quake in places like Iran or Armenia. Cement works ok, because you can put lots of rebar in it.
Letting the ISPs of the infected users know is a worthwhile activity; running a public blacklist of them might also be. It sounds like they complained to some of the IRC net operators, with little success, and if you let anybody who claims to be a "university research project" crack into your net and start killing off users, you've got far worse things to worry about than a few little million-machine botnets. Also, if the researchers start cracking botnets aggressively, they may be violating computer security laws if they're not very very careful. Better to get the ISPs to help do that job if you can, or find some other organized method for doing it.
But doing something about known infected machines is a problem with a different scale, and it's a public hygiene problem rather than a criminal detective problem. Obviously you want to notify the ISPs of the infected boxes, but what should they do about it?
BitTorrent 4.0 introduces new features to give BT packets lower priority than regular IP traffic, so if you only have a single computer, or if your router pays attention to packet markings (less likely), real traffic can always get priority over the BT traffic and you'll pretty much maximize the speed of both.
Even for American spammers, if they've got any sense, which most of them don't, all they need to do is spend $100 to set up a Delaware or Nevada corporation, and have the corporation do the spamming. If they get caught and sued, and their corporation gets all of its non-existent assets seized, all they need to do is spend another $100 for another corporation and $6 for another domain name and they're back in business.
I've been spammed by those sleazeballs, though it's been a while. They were a major motivation for me to take a small social mailing list and have to more the thing to a majordomo environment (the previous maintainer just used sendmail aliases and by-hand subscription, which worked well until spammers got the address.) (That wasn't totally bad - some much more aggressive spammers or bank-fraud-virus or something started pounding the list about the time we moved it, so in one sense those scammers did us a favor :-)
Most of the smaller distros out there are really Debian with a bunch of stuff stripped out and replaced with Busybox and whatever tools make sense for the target environment (security, system repair, media players, etc.) A few of them are more minimal roll-your-owns, and the embedded world also has the uCLinux crowd and vendors like MonteVista, but there's a huge amount of Debian usage in the small/medium appliance world.
I'm really tired of seeing Linux releases coming out saying "You have to build the kernel with GCC version x.y.z and Gnome/KDE with version x.w.q and be sure to only build GlibC using GCC version x.f.m." Scary-looking stuff - how much code do people write that should be significantly different for different compiler versions?
Writing safe code in C is easy - you just have to sit down and do it, and not get lazy. C++ has some more convenient tools for writing safe code, but C is really just fine. The real problem is that both of them let you write unsafe code, so a random chunk of C++ from some careless slacker is just as dangerous as a random chunk of C code. C++ was useful precisely because it retained relatively good backwards compatibility with C, which means you can still shoot yourself in the foot with the same precision, simplicity, and beauty that you always could, as well as introducing newer and more baroque ways to do it.
Some of my friends rave about Python, or about Objective-C; I haven't tried them enough to comment usefully. There are still a few problems which benefit from down-to-the-virtual-metal programming - device drivers and occasional numerical hackery - but most of the real performance problems aren't language overhead, they're environmental baggage or memory bloat or overuse of ill-matched packages. The obsolete laptop I'm typing on right now has a CPU 1500 times faster than the ones I learned to program C on, with about 1000 times as much RAM. The machines I learned to do graphics on mostly had about 10 MIPS and 8 MB of RAM. Some of the bloating is an economic tradeoff - programmers are still expensive, while hardware just isn't (the desktop sitting next to me costs 1/1000 of what my first VAX cost, with 2500 times the CPU and 150 times the RAM - I'm using it to download music.) Wasting a bit of CPU horsepower to check boundaries decently is definitely cheaper than wasting user time debugging or cleaning up viruses.
OK, I did read the LOTD for a while, but it didn't waste any significant time compared to Usenet. After all, by the time Dilbert came out, it wasn't possible to read all of Usenet any more, even by printing it out 4-up double sided on the gimongous Xerox printer in the basement. (Though by about the time we had that printer, it was possible to use the mainframe in the basement to do compiles on, running some ersatz Unix version on Amdahls at a blazing 10 MIPS, with far more RAM and I/O horsepower than our Vaxen had...)
And RAM is cheap. Go buy some more of it.
It's such an obvious product, given the kinds of people who buy such things, that it has to exist, so it does. Victorinox Swiss Army Knife with USB. Also available from ThinkGeek.
If you don't need to carry it around all the time, definitely, get yourself a 200GB portable - it'll give you a few more choices, because the disk is bigger than your laptop's. But that doesn't mean that you can't spare a couple hundred meg of space on your iPod as well.
Sure, you can get a USB drive cheaper, but the shuffle's pretty nice, and it takes up entirely no space in your pocket. You can't keep quite everything on it, but the 1GB version leaves you lots of room for tunes as well as a bootable Linux configuration. (I haven't installed the Linux yet, though :-)