I'm sure that most of the work that'll be done with this project is defensive, but is some of it really going to be offensive as well? Most of the time it's going to be modelling different methods of attacking network interconnection and different methods of defending against it, but when you've got a thousand machines with heavy-duty cracker tools located a few dark-fiber meters away from several Internet2 routers and just down the road from the San Francisco and DC area internet junction points, it's got to be real tempting to not only mail out CDs of crackerware to the military's cyberwarriers, but also to occasionally jack in to the real Internet and go pound some target, or upload a few hundred thousand copies of Zombieware N.2 to their public-side counterparts.
A huge fraction of the activity in the "anti-terrorism" and "critical infrastructure protection" space is somewhere between bogus, naive, cynical, greedy, and/or a malicious attack on the civil rights of our society by Big Brother, Prohibitionists, and the Military-Industrial Complex. The war on terror isn't primarily about whether they think there _are_ terrorist groups doing these things, but instead about whether they can get the public to believe that there are, and so far they've been quite successful, and since there aren't Commies around to be afraid of any more, they're happy to look for a variety of other targets to justify their existence.
But suppose you go beyond that and look at what the problems are like if you take them seriously and if it's your job to protect the US government's infrastructure and perhaps society's as well. We played a game at CFP a few years ago looking at "suppose you had a hundred suitcase bombs - where would you put them to cause maximum disruption to US society?". While there were a wide variety of answers, all of them pretty much came down to "unfortunately, it's way too easy to do this." Question 2 - suppose it was your job to _stop_ these sorts of attacks, what would you do. [expletive deleted]! It's really really [expletive-deleted] hard. (And the important answers "Be thankful that most people aren't evil" and "Get the government to stop encouraging people to hate us" are both out of scope....)
They might be paranoid, but people really _are_ out to get them. The Internet is a place where people apparently routinely acquire an army of half a million zombies just to send out ads for Viagra, and have fun using them to take down anti-spammer sites and teenage boys can do billions of dollars of damage just having fun impressing their friends with what an 31337 h4xx0r they are. The commercial and volunteer world works on problems of how to protect the Internet in free society, but the government also has legitimate concerns about people attacking them, and the attackers may have more skill, more resources, stronger motivations, and more focus than the attacks on the public. It's not surprising they'd want to work on how to protect themselves.
It's not just a problem of not saturating the real net - there are some things that are just too nasty to risk having them escape, so you need somewhere isolated to run them. That doesn't mean that you can't build observation ports in from the outside, but you have to be really careful about firewalling them so they don't leak whatever viruses you're playing with this week onto the real net.
If they build a shub-Internet it won't have the same scaling as the real thing, but they can at least model lots of real-world misbehaviour, and use virtual operating systems to fake out large numbers of lower-speed attackers as well. (More fun than a barrel full of zombies!)
Don't know - he really isn't me, and he wasn't somebody I saw very often when I lived back East. Sure, I'm an occasional caffeine addict, but his story really didn't inspire me to try it. And usually when he wanted to snort things, he had more interesting stuff than Pixie Stix...
Bandwidth and processing power are a barrier to entry for little guys, but they're not rocket science, and if you can throw money at those problems, they'll go away. That leaves you with a high-powered useless search engine, which can respond to any queries it gets by showing you the 100,000 hits it found in no particularly useful order. You also left out a third major component to a search engine service, which is a business model.
The reason Google rocks is that Pagerank does a half-decent job of understanding what pages to show people in what order based on their queries, and that's because of a lot of Deep Thought and Experimentation by the Google folks. Another reason they're pleasant to use is that Google doesn't waste page space on clutter - other than a friendly low-res non-animated logo at the top, it's basically just a box for your query, a few links to extra features, and your answers when they come back. (Remember Hotbot, the Wired MegaCluttery Singing Dancing Search Engine?) The initial core of the PageRank algorithm was pretty simple - the concept was that if people build links to a page, it's probably interesting to them, and if lots of people build links to a page, it's more likely to be very interesting than a page that not many people bother linking to. Getting much beyond that is where the Rocket Science happens, and also where they run into occasional algorithm clashes (e.g. Blogger as an edge case), and into conflicts with site promoters who take sites that aren't inherently interesting and try to get Google to rank it higher by trying to put in features Google's robots look for rather than by putting in content that actual people find interesting. (Remember that Search King guy with the link farms?)
The MAPS rules are just because it's a commercial product and they don't want you to use it without paying them. If they wanted to distribute it using P2P, they could distribute it encrypted and provide the keys to their customers. (Or they could get fancy and build an customers-only P2P network, but that's a lot more work.)
DNS was never particularly necessary. It was useful for the blocking lists because it's a lightweight query-response tool that everybody has and it was easy to add a DNS-based check to sendmail.cf. But sendmail is Turing-complete, so you can use whatever you want:-) And you certainly don't need to use zone transfers to distribute the data, though again, that's convenient, but you could just as well use something else to distribute it.
So an acquaintance of mine and his druggie friends decided that, since other drugs like opium and coca have rather different effects between eating or drinking the raw plant form, using the refined active ingredient powder, or smoking it, it might be interesting to try crunching up some caffeine pills and smoking them.
Do Not Try This At Home. You Don't Want To Do This. So he says that basically all the mean nasty things that caffeine abuse does to you happen all at once - headaches, nausea, jitters... This is one of those things that, when your high school teachers were telling you "Don't experiment with Drugs", may not have been quite what they were thinking about but was in fact good advice. Stick to drugs that are known to be safe and effective, like marijuana:-)
Yes, it's a grain. You're not eating the stems or cobs, you're eating a seed with a bunch of seed-growing food attached. Depending on what condition it's in when you eat it, the seed-growing food may be mostly sugars (when it's still young and growing) or starches (after it's either been picked for a while or matured enough on the cob.) So if you want that sweet corn in perfect condition, start the water boiling right when you walk out into the back yard to pick it, and run back inside.
The reason Kansas Ditchweed is so weak is that it wasn't originally bred for tastiness, it was grown for rope, so it was bred for big tough stems. During World War 2, when the Japanese had conquered the Philippines and the US could no longer get Manila rope for the Navy, and the Prohibitionists had only gotten hemp made illegal a couple of years before, you could get an exemption for hemp prohibition _and_ from the draft by growing a certain number of acres of hemp. (A friend of mine's grandfather, who'd grown tobacco in Kentucky before the war, switched to hemp, and after the war switched back to tobacco.) Unfortunately, this was no longer true during Vietnam...
Meanwhile, across the Border in Canada, where they grow tobacco, but AFAIK aren't plagued by kudzu, the Americans talked them into making marijuana illegal, but hemp seeds don't contain significant quantities of THC, so they're not illegal. A couple of years ago, the hemp stores up there figured that they had sold enough seed to grow about 12 million pounds of pot, while their Federal government claimed that police had confiscated about 10 million pounds that year. So the good guys were _winning_, and the amount that was left was about an ounce for everybody.:-)
Hi! I get to metamoderate somebody's moderation rating that this article was flamebait. While I don't think it was insightful, and in fact I think it was wrong-headed but don't plan to get into the argument here, I also don't think it's fair to call it flamebait. So I'm metamoderating the "flamebait" rating as "Unfair".
Sendmail isn't really made for this, but somebody could build a mail filter that checks the DATA part headers for obvious spaminess and fork/execs a teergrube on suspicious mail. That would cut down the bandwidth problem (instead of receiving the message in a fraction of a second, it takes minutes or hours), and depending on how suspicious you want to be, either eventually hands the message over to spamassassin or else pretends to accept it while actually discarding it.
Re:Vegetarians and Vegans and travel
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Germany was easy, and I found I lost weight on vacation there, even though I was at a conference half the time. Part of it was more exercise, but if you take the basic German diet and leave out the large amounts of meat, the rest wasn't all that heavy:-) Also, train-station food there and Scandinavia varies a lot in quality and quantity, but bread and cheese are always available and extremely portable, and I guess if you're a vegan you carry a few jars of peanut butter for when there's nothing better available.
I've used this basic technique to migrate machines using various remote file sharing protocols - NFS for Suns, Microsoft file server file sharing for DOS and Windows, probably even FTP sometimes. It's an obvious thing to do. Using HTTP as the protocol instead of other file transfer or file sharing protocols is also obvious to anyone skilled in the art. About the only wrinkle is files that Windows deliberately makes hard to copy, i.e. the Registry, and there's plenty of commerical and probably free prior art for things that make copying the Registry less annoying.
It's been tried - a couple of years ago, the gym I went to had four exercise bikes with computers and touchscreens mounted on them, and if you wanted to sign up with the dotcom-boom service provider, you could have the bike track your exercise activity for you. It was mechanically impractical to use the touchscreen for much more than clicking on links while pedaling, so things like logging into Slashdot were difficult (and the screen resolution was low enough, I think 640x480 but maybe 800x600, that you really needed to have a login configured for low clutter.) Unfortunately, they also had the timing set so that if you stopped pedalling for too long, it would pop up a screen to nag you to pedal faster and ask if you wanted to continue or log in to their service or see music videos instead, and "too long" wasn't long enough to do much typing. Also, you had to lean forward too far to type on the thing, which interfered too much with comfort as well as pedalling.
There apparently wasn't enough revenue in it to pay for the expensive bikes and DSL connection. My guess was that the business model needed enough people to sign up for their pay site that tracked your usage, or else wanted lots of money from the gym. The gym dumped them after a few months, and they joined the great dot-bomb death list pretty quickly.
Now, a set of I-Glasses and a handheld video-game console could work for that sort of system, which either means a working business model (unlikely) or bringing your own.
A lot of my friends are 30-50-year-old hackers who are doing the Atkins thing to get rid of or manage the weight they built up in their 20s and 30s. It's made really odd changes in the food people bring to parties. 20 years ago, we would have brought healthy hippie type foods - things like tabouli and hummus and rice dishes and Mexican food and such. But with the Atkins thing, it's mostly different kinds of meat and fish.
A friend of mine has her annual crushed-ice and Torani Syrup collection snow-cone party, and almost the entire set of food there was Meat and Sugar...
I'm a lacto-ovo vegetarian, so the Atkins diet is pretty much limited to eggs and cheese and isn't particularly sustainable, though I suppose you could do it for a few weeks before going bonkers. For a vegan, it's obviously not an option - are there any plant protein sources that aren't also carbohydrate-rich, other than heavily-overprocessed extracts from soybeans or whatever?
I'm a vegetarian for ethical reasons, not health reasons, so while it took a few months to adjust to it after I'd made the decision, it wasn't really that hard, and if you eat eggs and dairy products it's possible to find food while travelling; vegans have a much tougher time with that, especially since they have to pay more attention to balancing their diets to get adequate nutrition. It's amazing how much food is tied in with culture, including the emotional associations with the cultural context, and also the frustration at the lack of convenience you have to put up with sometimes when adjusting diets.
*Tolerable* low calorie diets are fine
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Hackers On Atkins
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A low calorie diet that you don't stick to because it's too annoying and you feel hungry all the time isn't successful and stop doing it. On the other hand, the friends of mine who've tried Atkins and liked it say that it's a diet they can stick to for long enough to lose weight. So even if the primary reason for the weight loss is the lower calories, the ketosis or insulin effects may be helping reduce the feeling of hunger.
Many of my friends have tried the Atkins diet, and have had good results with weight loss, and excellent results with overall energy levels. It doesn't work for everybody, but the people who like it seem to really really like it.
I'm a vegetarian, and a diet of eggs and cheese is MUCH more annoying than a diet of meat, eggs, and cheese:-) OK, you can have some vegetables, so that lets you vary the diet between cheese&broccoli omelettes, crustless broccoli quiche, and broccoli with hollandaise sauce, so you can actually last 2-3 days before going stark raving bonkers, but basically the concept just doesn't work.
The gym I go to has treadmills, stairmashers, oval running things, etc. in a big room with four big televisions (sound off, broadcasts on different FM radio channels, captions on), so if you want to watch TV to keep your mind off how boring running is or distract the internal monkey-chatter with external monkey-chatter, you can. It also has Muzak playing the whole time, usually whatever variant on bouncy Brittany Spears pop is current this 15 minutes. I find that if I want to let the music drive my timing, it's close enough, and if I want to ignore it, I can. Exercise bikes are much more mindnumbing for me than running, because I have to bike 2-3 times as long to get the equivalent calorie load (one advantage to being heavy is that you burn calories faster when running:-). On the other hand, weightlifting is never boring.
The gym is also always close to the right temperature, not dark, and not raining. It doesn't have the reality level of going out running, but it works. Back when I commuted by train, I picked a gym that was next to the train station, so it was easy to make a habit of stopping in there 3-4 days a week. Now that I'm usually telecommuting or going to a closer office, I unfortunately didn't get back in the habit after the last time I messed up my knee.
The advocates of the term "GNU/Linux" mainly take the position that "GNU" is the whole system, and that "Linux" is just the kernel, and SCO's case is primarily about the kernel. Yes, they've obfuscated and put up Greek-font copies of malloc and such, but to the extent that they've got an actual case, it seems to be about IBM using some of the SVR4(etc.) code for multiple processor support, NUMA, LVM, hot-swap stuff, and Journaling File Systems when they were developing the AIX features that they ported into Linux and gave to the Linux community. That's the part that Stallman doesn't usually complain about when you call it "Linux".
It's never a good idea to sue somebody if you don't have the resources to win and a slam-dunk kick-their-ass case. It's a much worse idea to do that in something that's politically significant which may impact lots of other people who have cases, because if you attack and lose, you set precedent that weakens all their positions. If 1000 random people sue SCO, they're in really good position to find the weakest and worst-funded cases, delay on all the others (especially the strongest ones), go in and beat the incompetent random who sued them, use that to leverage some more weak and badly-funded cases, and use the precedent in the cases where they should have lost. If they do a class action, with some funding and competence, that can work well, but it doesn't have the harassment value of 1000 people suing SCO.
There are a couple of interesting large players here. IBM is obviously one of them, though their case is special because they had a Unix license from SCO so it's possible that their position is weaker than somebody who doesn't have a license, and they've also got the deepest pockets. The FSF are obvious strong players, and SCO's case is sufficiently bogus that it's not too bad an opportunity for them to set a precedent, because they can attack SCO for what they're doing to the NON-IBM-related parts of the Linux kernel which SCO is misbehaving with (at least to the extent that FSF helped with the kernel as opposed to user-space, since SCO's mostly causing trouble about the kernel and at least some of their distributions have been kernel-only or kernel-mostly.) Linux is in an intermediate position between SCO and IBM - he or his kernel henchpersons accepted the disputed IBM code.
I haven't bought a SCO run-time product from the current corporate entity named SCO, but I didn't see a violation here - what I saw was that IF you have one of their binary products, they'll let you onto the download pages, and IF YOU DON'T have one of their binary products, they won't. But the GPL doesn't require you to freely distribute source code to people that you've never given binaries or source code to; it only requires that IF you give people binaries of GPL'd stuff, you also have to give them either the source code (without restrictions and without more than a distribution/media charge) or a pointer to somewhere that they can get it.
Since I didn't see how the pages the Register pointed to let me get a binary, I don't see that any violation occurred.
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I'm sure that most of the work that'll be done with this project is defensive, but is some of it really going to be offensive as well? Most of the time it's going to be modelling different methods of attacking network interconnection and different methods of defending against it, but when you've got a thousand machines with heavy-duty cracker tools located a few dark-fiber meters away from several Internet2 routers and just down the road from the San Francisco and DC area internet junction points, it's got to be real tempting to not only mail out CDs of crackerware to the military's cyberwarriers, but also to occasionally jack in to the real Internet and go pound some target, or upload a few hundred thousand copies of Zombieware N.2 to their public-side counterparts.
But suppose you go beyond that and look at what the problems are like if you take them seriously and if it's your job to protect the US government's infrastructure and perhaps society's as well. We played a game at CFP a few years ago looking at "suppose you had a hundred suitcase bombs - where would you put them to cause maximum disruption to US society?". While there were a wide variety of answers, all of them pretty much came down to "unfortunately, it's way too easy to do this." Question 2 - suppose it was your job to _stop_ these sorts of attacks, what would you do. [expletive deleted]! It's really really [expletive-deleted] hard. (And the important answers "Be thankful that most people aren't evil" and "Get the government to stop encouraging people to hate us" are both out of scope....)
They might be paranoid, but people really _are_ out to get them. The Internet is a place where people apparently routinely acquire an army of half a million zombies just to send out ads for Viagra, and have fun using them to take down anti-spammer sites and teenage boys can do billions of dollars of damage just having fun impressing their friends with what an 31337 h4xx0r they are. The commercial and volunteer world works on problems of how to protect the Internet in free society, but the government also has legitimate concerns about people attacking them, and the attackers may have more skill, more resources, stronger motivations, and more focus than the attacks on the public. It's not surprising they'd want to work on how to protect themselves.
If they build a shub-Internet it won't have the same scaling as the real thing, but they can at least model lots of real-world misbehaviour, and use virtual operating systems to fake out large numbers of lower-speed attackers as well. (More fun than a barrel full of zombies!)
They have a pointer to http://www.isi.edu/stories/70.html article at USC ISI.
Don't know - he really isn't me, and he wasn't somebody I saw very often when I lived back East. Sure, I'm an occasional caffeine addict, but his story really didn't inspire me to try it. And usually when he wanted to snort things, he had more interesting stuff than Pixie Stix...
The reason Google rocks is that Pagerank does a half-decent job of understanding what pages to show people in what order based on their queries, and that's because of a lot of Deep Thought and Experimentation by the Google folks. Another reason they're pleasant to use is that Google doesn't waste page space on clutter - other than a friendly low-res non-animated logo at the top, it's basically just a box for your query, a few links to extra features, and your answers when they come back. (Remember Hotbot, the Wired MegaCluttery Singing Dancing Search Engine?) The initial core of the PageRank algorithm was pretty simple - the concept was that if people build links to a page, it's probably interesting to them, and if lots of people build links to a page, it's more likely to be very interesting than a page that not many people bother linking to. Getting much beyond that is where the Rocket Science happens, and also where they run into occasional algorithm clashes (e.g. Blogger as an edge case), and into conflicts with site promoters who take sites that aren't inherently interesting and try to get Google to rank it higher by trying to put in features Google's robots look for rather than by putting in content that actual people find interesting. (Remember that Search King guy with the link farms?)
DNS was never particularly necessary. It was useful for the blocking lists because it's a lightweight query-response tool that everybody has and it was easy to add a DNS-based check to sendmail.cf. But sendmail is Turing-complete, so you can use whatever you want :-) And you certainly don't need to use zone transfers to distribute the data, though again, that's convenient, but you could just as well use something else to distribute it.
Do Not Try This At Home. You Don't Want To Do This. So he says that basically all the mean nasty things that caffeine abuse does to you happen all at once - headaches, nausea, jitters... This is one of those things that, when your high school teachers were telling you "Don't experiment with Drugs", may not have been quite what they were thinking about but was in fact good advice. Stick to drugs that are known to be safe and effective, like marijuana :-)
Yes, it's a grain. You're not eating the stems or cobs, you're eating a seed with a bunch of seed-growing food attached. Depending on what condition it's in when you eat it, the seed-growing food may be mostly sugars (when it's still young and growing) or starches (after it's either been picked for a while or matured enough on the cob.) So if you want that sweet corn in perfect condition, start the water boiling right when you walk out into the back yard to pick it, and run back inside.
If you're trying to behave yourself and not slather the corn with butter and salt, lime juice is pretty nice.
Meanwhile, across the Border in Canada, where they grow tobacco, but AFAIK aren't plagued by kudzu, the Americans talked them into making marijuana illegal, but hemp seeds don't contain significant quantities of THC, so they're not illegal. A couple of years ago, the hemp stores up there figured that they had sold enough seed to grow about 12 million pounds of pot, while their Federal government claimed that police had confiscated about 10 million pounds that year. So the good guys were _winning_, and the amount that was left was about an ounce for everybody. :-)
Hi! I get to metamoderate somebody's moderation rating that this article was flamebait. While I don't think it was insightful, and in fact I think it was wrong-headed but don't plan to get into the argument here, I also don't think it's fair to call it flamebait. So I'm metamoderating the "flamebait" rating as "Unfair".
Sendmail isn't really made for this, but somebody could build a mail filter that checks the DATA part headers for obvious spaminess and fork/execs a teergrube on suspicious mail. That would cut down the bandwidth problem (instead of receiving the message in a fraction of a second, it takes minutes or hours), and depending on how suspicious you want to be, either eventually hands the message over to spamassassin or else pretends to accept it while actually discarding it.
Germany was easy, and I found I lost weight on vacation there, even though I was at a conference half the time. Part of it was more exercise, but if you take the basic German diet and leave out the large amounts of meat, the rest wasn't all that heavy :-) Also, train-station food there and Scandinavia varies a lot in quality and quantity, but bread and cheese are always available and extremely portable, and I guess if you're a vegan you carry a few jars of peanut butter for when there's nothing better available.
I've used this basic technique to migrate machines using various remote file sharing protocols - NFS for Suns, Microsoft file server file sharing for DOS and Windows, probably even FTP sometimes. It's an obvious thing to do. Using HTTP as the protocol instead of other file transfer or file sharing protocols is also obvious to anyone skilled in the art. About the only wrinkle is files that Windows deliberately makes hard to copy, i.e. the Registry, and there's plenty of commerical and probably free prior art for things that make copying the Registry less annoying.
Oh, cool. She had some artificially-sweetened Torani, but it was evil, like other aspartame products. Splenda would probably do ok...
There apparently wasn't enough revenue in it to pay for the expensive bikes and DSL connection. My guess was that the business model needed enough people to sign up for their pay site that tracked your usage, or else wanted lots of money from the gym. The gym dumped them after a few months, and they joined the great dot-bomb death list pretty quickly.
Now, a set of I-Glasses and a handheld video-game console could work for that sort of system, which either means a working business model (unlikely) or bringing your own.
A friend of mine has her annual crushed-ice and Torani Syrup collection snow-cone party, and almost the entire set of food there was Meat and Sugar...
I'm a vegetarian for ethical reasons, not health reasons, so while it took a few months to adjust to it after I'd made the decision, it wasn't really that hard, and if you eat eggs and dairy products it's possible to find food while travelling; vegans have a much tougher time with that, especially since they have to pay more attention to balancing their diets to get adequate nutrition. It's amazing how much food is tied in with culture, including the emotional associations with the cultural context, and also the frustration at the lack of convenience you have to put up with sometimes when adjusting diets.
I'm a vegetarian, and a diet of eggs and cheese is MUCH more annoying than a diet of meat, eggs, and cheese :-) OK, you can have some vegetables, so that lets you vary the diet between cheese&broccoli omelettes, crustless broccoli quiche, and broccoli with hollandaise sauce, so you can actually last 2-3 days before going stark raving bonkers, but basically the concept just doesn't work.
The gym is also always close to the right temperature, not dark, and not raining. It doesn't have the reality level of going out running, but it works. Back when I commuted by train, I picked a gym that was next to the train station, so it was easy to make a habit of stopping in there 3-4 days a week. Now that I'm usually telecommuting or going to a closer office, I unfortunately didn't get back in the habit after the last time I messed up my knee.
The advocates of the term "GNU/Linux" mainly take the position that "GNU" is the whole system, and that "Linux" is just the kernel, and SCO's case is primarily about the kernel. Yes, they've obfuscated and put up Greek-font copies of malloc and such, but to the extent that they've got an actual case, it seems to be about IBM using some of the SVR4(etc.) code for multiple processor support, NUMA, LVM, hot-swap stuff, and Journaling File Systems when they were developing the AIX features that they ported into Linux and gave to the Linux community.
That's the part that Stallman doesn't usually complain about when you call it "Linux".
There are a couple of interesting large players here. IBM is obviously one of them, though their case is special because they had a Unix license from SCO so it's possible that their position is weaker than somebody who doesn't have a license, and they've also got the deepest pockets. The FSF are obvious strong players, and SCO's case is sufficiently bogus that it's not too bad an opportunity for them to set a precedent, because they can attack SCO for what they're doing to the NON-IBM-related parts of the Linux kernel which SCO is misbehaving with (at least to the extent that FSF helped with the kernel as opposed to user-space, since SCO's mostly causing trouble about the kernel and at least some of their distributions have been kernel-only or kernel-mostly.) Linux is in an intermediate position between SCO and IBM - he or his kernel henchpersons accepted the disputed IBM code.
Since I didn't see how the pages the Register pointed to let me get a binary, I don't see that any violation occurred.