We have to learn a new vocabluary in this country, or we will never be able to talk about fairness and accuracy properly.
What appears to be evolving in the crucible of American politics is a startling robust form of doublethink. Conservatives have unquestionably mastered it; it's not clear if other political groups are for the moment less able or less willing.
Fox News is a propaganda organization; it is so biased as to basically redefine the concept of bias in the U.S. media. But how does it defend itself? By exclaiming that it is the most fair, and the most balanced. In fact, by going even further accusing everyone else of bias.
This kind of audacity is more associated with religious figureheads and communist states. But regardless of who is using it most effectively this week (and believe me, I am cynical about all American professional politicians, regardless of professed ideology), the problem is that the approach is sound, and based on good cognitive psych. It exploits a weakness in the way people think and reason. In layman's terms, it short-circuits the brain. Sadly, vehemence and a threatening posture do figure deeply into the calculus of our decision-making.
When you see through it, you realize it's an extraordinarily cynical trick. The problem is that many, many people are confused by it. In fact, much as Orwell observed, the lie is embraced especially well by people who know it is a lie. These are the people who, for instance, engage in revert wars in Wikipedia over the Fox News entry.
It is the human's great strenght and weakness: we are fully capable of lively psychological engagement with paradoxes and contradictions.
In order to prevent societal free-fall, it will be necessary for each of us to learn to see through this kind of technique, call a spade a spade. To not be confused or intimidated by hypocrisy, in other words.
Mondo/Mindi sounds interesting, I hadn't heard of them before. But, do I read the website correctly? Are they really suggesting CD/DVD backups? Even with 9.4GB DVDs, that is 50 disks for me...
Given the absurdity of tape storage at the moment HDs in trays are really the only option for me (and many others, I suspect).
KDAR is BS as well, of course. I studied it quite a bit. It's promising but basically a toy. Can't even do proper incremental backups. The endless search continues...
"please note that harassing the receptionist at these places is unlikely to cause any change in their investment policies."
Don't know about that. Harassing us on an inhuman scale appears to be working for them. Frankly, harassing them back, within the limits of the law of course, probably would be quite helpful. Many lobbysts and activists do far more about much less, and achieve considerable success.
I am speaking of totalitarianism, which I don't believe presupposes any particular flavor of autocratic power. It could remind you of Hitler or Stalin, or any number of other sad nations equally. Personally I was thinking of post-war Hungary, in the 1940's and 50's.
I think you are already starting to see what I am saying. "Intellectual Property Rights" cranked up several orders of magnitude are a central vehicle by which corporate interests can subvert the democratic process. Or rather, by which a group of aristocrats could finalize such a takeover and truly begin to suppress dissent.
If you really think the Internet is immune to control, you have been reading too much Wired. But I don't really think that of you. What you have to ask yourself is, hypothetically, if someone were laying the groundwork to control, perhaps ultimately prevent, democratized mass media, what would it look like?
Functionally, it looks a lot like DRM/trusted computing/etc etc.
This could be a conspiracy theory, but this is the government that passed PATRIOT, considered INDUCE on the floor of Congress, and has openly advocated outlawing non-escrowed cryptography, and the list goes on, and on...
Funny quip. But seriously, control over the mass media is of dire, even mortal importance in our society. When you hear "IP Rights," you should be hearing "Centralized Control."
People like you will say, "you can't draw the parallel between a mass murderer like Stalin or Hitler and an IP issue." You will try to smear me as triviailizing Soviet genocide. But what will eventually dawn on you (after it happens, probably) is that control over the distribution and behavior of information is exactly how mass murderers gain their throne.
Working democracies and free-flowing, unregulated channels information are vital, and any threat to them is, in a way, as grave a threat as the Red Army. Whether we have a collectivist oligarchy or a capitalist one, we are talking about jailing people for the unregulated exchange information. Whether the short term goal is to soothe the insecurities of a dictator or feed the maw of a content trust, it should recognizably absurd (and futile) to attempt to regulate computers and networks in the ways proposed, just to ostensibly secure royalties for artists... Think about it.
As an aside, let's take a brief tour through the often entirely subtle transition from an ostensible democracy to a totalitarian state.
1) A new breed of especially successful politician arises. They are marked by:
- Unusual sophistication in managing propaganda and doublethink - Unusually fervent supporters, especially among the poorly educated, reactionary, xenophobic - Unusually ruthless and systematic behavior in eliminating political rivals - Vaguely-defined populist ideologies, that are subject to new interpretations and even reversals at every convenience, yet are fervently venerated and admired
2) The movement achieves political dominance. Surprisingly, this only further reduces their tolerance for opposition and dissent
3) News of the first few questionable jail sentences spreads, haltingly (many sources of news gloss it over or don't even cover it, leaving you wondering if it is even "real" news). Most people blindly accept it, even celebrate it, unable to recognize what's happening. Others are concerned, but have no trustworthy journalism on which to motivate action. Most of the people who do realize what's happening are suddenly too scared to speak out.
4) Everyone who didn't keep their mouth shut is next in line. It hardly matters what the charge is - the point is to make sure there's always something for which you can be charged and successfully prosecuted.
5) The scarier the developments get, the higher the machine ratchets up the propaganda. Citizens are, amazingly, pacified by the news, even as they watch friends and neighbors disappear. Most amazingly, fear and credulity can even pacify those who should know better. "Well, this is horrible, and they're scary people, but they promised they at least wouldn't go as far as X or Y. This is just a temporary aberration, necessary to keep order, stop terrorsts, protect children and starving artists..." It's called boiling the frog. You can't turn up the heat too fast. But the temperature is always rising...
6) They do X, then Y, followed by Z. Then they invent several new letters of the alphabet and do those too. What's to stop them. Certainly not you.
And then you can't read this post, because anonymity is now both nearly impossible and a capital crime, so no one will give their honest opinion. And hobby sites like Slashdot never exist, because cheap "peer to peer" information transfer is illegal, and only licensed, bonded broadcast servers will work with new secure, trusted web browsers (and those are expensive, you know).
Too bad, the old internet was interesting but it was the "wild west," too many hackers and terrorsts and viruses, full of communists and child molesters. It had to be reengineered in order to make it safe, to "stop the insurgents/crush the counterrevolutionaries/stop the thieving hackers." You knew all along big brother couldn't just let his little brother run free.
Rich people get the government to do it for them - whether it's clean up their messes, defend their economic, political, or religious interests, or prosecute their enemies.
Poor people have to do it themselves. I would sure love it if the government put more effort into prosecution for criminal fraud. But hey, if you're not a billionare, "that's a civil matter, son."
For all the people who haven't thought this through yet:
When they come to lock you up, no one is going to stand up for you. Maybe the EFF will send you a Christmas card in prison.
The propaganda has worked. No one in the public at large has any notion of the rights and freedoms they are in the process of losing, let alone what they mean.
Society is 100% ready to accept zero-privacy, expensive, addled DRM solutions. They will have no sympathy for anyone doing a 4-8 stretch for "downloading." With one deft push from Comrade Gonzales, they will all line up to throw tomatoes at "developers of illegal software."
My advice for you all is to read early accounts of the rise of the Soviet state, and/or especially the transition years in Eastern Europe. Totalitarianism has a very recognizable feel, even in the very beginning, before you can barely feel its grip, you can smell it's breath long before it starts to squeeze.
If you examine the madwifi driver FAQ it makes reference to regulations explicitly permitting "open" code controlling hardware that can receive/transmit many frequencies.
5.3. Why is the HAL closed source?
The Atheros chipset can tune to frequencies that are out of the ISM band(s). These frequencies are licensed by various regulatory agencies, and radar systems thus an open HAL is disallowed by just about every regulatory institution in existence (i.e. FCC etc). On a practical/usability note: Were it not for the binary nature of the HAL, then the same nerds who deploy the "power hack" for the WET11 could be generating emissions all over the restricted bands using madwifi hardware. Ask yourself, which would you rather have, more power, or less interference?
I expect just receivers will bear less of a burden, but I would not be surprised if Gnu Radio was already illegal with massive criminal penalties associated.
Which is an atrocity, frankly. Please correct me. Please.
This maxim refers to life, more than science, unfortunately. In real life, we do not, and should not, spend the same resources to validate every single assertion we encounter; this would be a gross waste of resources.
This is an extraordinary claim. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. Who is Clint Curtis? What is his background? Criminal history? Most importantly, what evidence does he bring to the table? Is it his word against someone else's?
Can he produce call logs? Appointment books? Witnesses? Tapes or memos? Can he demonstrate an extraordinary knowledge of voting systems in the state of Florida?
There is a troubling taint of money on this: a "$200,000 award being offered by the nonprofit group Justice through Music for proof of voting fraud..." He is claiming he doesn't want the reward; money may have nothing to do with it. But we may have a grifter going after a score, directly or indirectly, by telling people what they want to hear. I am not saying either one: we simply don't know until more facts come out.
I fully believe we have arrived at a stage in american politics where a politician (yes, sure, a Republican politician) would tamper with an election. There is already plenty of documented funny business. I'm speaking of the felon purging in FL, stop-and-search roadblocks in OH, for instance.
Let's not forget the real moral of this story, illustrated by one thing Clint says certainly rings true regardless of the rest of his claims:
"I can't believe the Democrats were stupid enough to allow [this]," he says. "I can't imagine anyone going to a bank and not getting a receipt. But yet we have our voting machines that way. It strikes me as really odd that machines like that could even exist."
Re:Combat it or deny responsibility you mean...
on
Gone Phishing?
·
· Score: 1
Tough love is fine. But if we can't make banking B2C operations suitably safe on the internet, how about simply shutting them down until we can?
Custom clients, new security techniques, whatever. The current system is shitty, and it's being exploited like gangbusters. The blame for this does not exactly rest squarely on the consumer.
10.2 Billion is a stunning number.
on
Gone Phishing?
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
If anyone believes this, it justifies fairly extraordinary investment to combat it. When you are talking billions then enormous infrastructure projects are possible. For instance, imagine the kind of systematic surveillance activity that could be mounted on the internet with a multi-billion dollar budget.
Videodrome was a crazy Cronenberg movie (1983) about a guy (played by James Woods) who ran a cable company. The show opens with him sitting in a chair defending his network's hilariously sleazy content. "It gives our viewers a harmless outlet for their frustrations and fantasies." His character is so shady, even if you're desperate to believe him, you can't.
But then the movie turns dark. Woods uncovers a conspiracy to control people's minds using television. The videodrome is a metaphor for the combat of ideas in the media. The idea is, we only half-admit to ourselves that the media controls us. We hop up and down to censor it from violent or sexual content. This shows we kind of realize what appears on hundreds of millions of screens has consequences. But we haven't confronted the philosophical, or political dimensions of the fact.
We have a collective hissy fit when Janet Jackson shows a nipple. Meanwhile Fox News is on the air for years and we can't muster a coherent notion for fining them a dollar.
Great quote: "You know, in some countries, like Argentina, making subversive video is considered a criminal act. They execute people for it. In Pittsburgh... who knows?"
Most firewalls in home use are NAT firewall routers or software firewalls. Software firewalls are easy to configure to allow particular applications whatever network access they want, so let's assume we're talking about the former.
The NAT firewall wants to allow outbound traffic and deny any incoming traffic. But obviously all traffic requires packets to move in both directions, so it accomplishes this goal by allowing incoming hosts to initiate TCP connections to any external hosts they want, and then it maintains state about each connection, so that when response packets arrive, they can be routed to the right host inside the firewall. That's why we call the NAT a "stateful firewall."
I honestly don't remember and am too lazy to look it up; I'd guess NATs just note the source and destination ports in the TCP SYN and then associate return packets by using the source port. Maybe it uses some other tricks instead. But I digress.
So already you have problems with this scenario; what about FTP? This is a bummer because FTP (which predates most firewall designs by a bit) wants to have the destination open connections back to the source, on ports the source specifies. No reason to comment on that; they modified the protocol so that it wasn't necessary anymore (PASV mode) but also we note that many firewalls (including Linux I think) can actively watch the FTP control stream and thus anticipate and handle the new data streams properly. But now I digress even more.
The smart folks will by now be asking, "what about UDP?" And that's the question, isn't it. How do you think a stateful firewall like this has to handle UDP connections?
Remember, UDP has no built in "SYN/SYNACK/etc" semantics. There's no standard way to know what's going on when you see a particular UDP packet. It could be initiating some kind of connection, or closing it down, or carrying data; the bits inside the UDP packet are opaque to a firewall, because their meaning is up to whatever random software is using them.
I'm just guessing here, but it sounds like the standard NAT solution is to block all incoming UDP traffic, but whenever a firewalled host sends a UDP packet, then a "hole" is "punched" so that any UDP packets received from the destination host will be routed back inside to the firewalled source host. That would allow all your games and streaming media to work... And it makes a quick way to have two NAT firewalled hosts speak directly, as long as they both can coordinate their activities (which they can, with the help of a third peer, some anonymous P2P node).
Actually using UDP is a pretty good idea to begin with, because you can really optimize your wire protocol and gain a lot of speed (both better throughput and reduced latency). Also it will scale better and probably be easier on the internet (because UDP packets are often dropped by various routers in times of stress)... Perhaps we really should have been using UDP for P2P all along. But of course TCP is so much easier at the outset...
Interviewer: So, Mr. Callah, let's start with the most important question on everyone's mind. Will there be lava? And, perhaps more importantly, will there be crates?
Callahan: I want to put everyone's mind to rest on this point. The studio has the best lava people in the business, and they've specifically assured me I will have a free hand.
Interviewer: Phew. Also, before I forget. we're all dying to know. Will the hero at any point successfully outrun a fireball? This is something that is so important, not only to me, but I think I can speak for all moviegoers out there. It's an image that really really gets better every time I see it.
Callahan: Well, Ed, I don't want to give too much away, but we briefly considered having the hero run from a nuclear explosion! Don't worry, there'll be plenty of what we know the audience loves most.
Interviewer: So, let's talk about the plot. Which of the hero's family members will be killed? Mother? Father? Both parents? Or will it be a hero-parent who loses his kids?
Callahan: Actually, what I'm allowed to say is that we're going a bit unconventional on this. We're going to have a brother and a sister, and each one will lose a parent. I know this is pushing the envelope a bit, but the producers are behind me and I believe the studio will hold off and allow us some of the artistic integerity which we all know is so rare in this business.
Slashdot Mirror
We have to learn a new vocabluary in this country, or we will never be able to talk about fairness and accuracy properly.
What appears to be evolving in the crucible of American politics is a startling robust form of doublethink. Conservatives have unquestionably mastered it; it's not clear if other political groups are for the moment less able or less willing.
Fox News is a propaganda organization; it is so biased as to basically redefine the concept of bias in the U.S. media. But how does it defend itself? By exclaiming that it is the most fair, and the most balanced. In fact, by going even further accusing everyone else of bias.
This kind of audacity is more associated with religious figureheads and communist states. But regardless of who is using it most effectively this week (and believe me, I am cynical about all American professional politicians, regardless of professed ideology), the problem is that the approach is sound, and based on good cognitive psych. It exploits a weakness in the way people think and reason. In layman's terms, it short-circuits the brain. Sadly, vehemence and a threatening posture do figure deeply into the calculus of our decision-making.
When you see through it, you realize it's an extraordinarily cynical trick. The problem is that many, many people are confused by it. In fact, much as Orwell observed, the lie is embraced especially well by people who know it is a lie. These are the people who, for instance, engage in revert wars in Wikipedia over the Fox News entry.
It is the human's great strenght and weakness: we are fully capable of lively psychological engagement with paradoxes and contradictions.
In order to prevent societal free-fall, it will be necessary for each of us to learn to see through this kind of technique, call a spade a spade. To not be confused or intimidated by hypocrisy, in other words.
Mondo/Mindi sounds interesting, I hadn't heard of them before. But, do I read the website correctly? Are they really suggesting CD/DVD backups? Even with 9.4GB DVDs, that is 50 disks for me...
Given the absurdity of tape storage at the moment HDs in trays are really the only option for me (and many others, I suspect).
KDAR is BS as well, of course. I studied it quite a bit. It's promising but basically a toy. Can't even do proper incremental backups. The endless search continues...
"please note that harassing the receptionist at these places is unlikely to cause any change in their investment policies."
Don't know about that. Harassing us on an inhuman scale appears to be working for them. Frankly, harassing them back, within the limits of the law of course, probably would be quite helpful. Many lobbysts and activists do far more about much less, and achieve considerable success.
I am speaking of totalitarianism, which I don't believe presupposes any particular flavor of autocratic power. It could remind you of Hitler or Stalin, or any number of other sad nations equally. Personally I was thinking of post-war Hungary, in the 1940's and 50's.
I think you are already starting to see what I am saying. "Intellectual Property Rights" cranked up several orders of magnitude are a central vehicle by which corporate interests can subvert the democratic process. Or rather, by which a group of aristocrats could finalize such a takeover and truly begin to suppress dissent.
If you really think the Internet is immune to control, you have been reading too much Wired. But I don't really think that of you. What you have to ask yourself is, hypothetically, if someone were laying the groundwork to control, perhaps ultimately prevent, democratized mass media, what would it look like?
Functionally, it looks a lot like DRM/trusted computing/etc etc.
This could be a conspiracy theory, but this is the government that passed PATRIOT, considered INDUCE on the floor of Congress, and has openly advocated outlawing non-escrowed cryptography, and the list goes on, and on...
Funny quip. But seriously, control over the mass media is of dire, even mortal importance in our society. When you hear "IP Rights," you should be hearing "Centralized Control."
People like you will say, "you can't draw the parallel between a mass murderer like Stalin or Hitler and an IP issue." You will try to smear me as triviailizing Soviet genocide. But what will eventually dawn on you (after it happens, probably) is that control over the distribution and behavior of information is exactly how mass murderers gain their throne.
Working democracies and free-flowing, unregulated channels information are vital, and any threat to them is, in a way, as grave a threat as the Red Army. Whether we have a collectivist oligarchy or a capitalist one, we are talking about jailing people for the unregulated exchange information. Whether the short term goal is to soothe the insecurities of a dictator or feed the maw of a content trust, it should recognizably absurd (and futile) to attempt to regulate computers and networks in the ways proposed, just to ostensibly secure royalties for artists... Think about it.
As an aside, let's take a brief tour through the often entirely subtle transition from an ostensible democracy to a totalitarian state.
1) A new breed of especially successful politician arises. They are marked by:
- Unusual sophistication in managing propaganda and doublethink
- Unusually fervent supporters, especially among the poorly educated, reactionary, xenophobic
- Unusually ruthless and systematic behavior in eliminating political rivals
- Vaguely-defined populist ideologies, that are subject to new interpretations and even reversals at every convenience, yet are fervently venerated and admired
2) The movement achieves political dominance. Surprisingly, this only further reduces their tolerance for opposition and dissent
3) News of the first few questionable jail sentences spreads, haltingly (many sources of news gloss it over or don't even cover it, leaving you wondering if it is even "real" news). Most people blindly accept it, even celebrate it, unable to recognize what's happening. Others are concerned, but have no trustworthy journalism on which to motivate action. Most of the people who do realize what's happening are suddenly too scared to speak out.
4) Everyone who didn't keep their mouth shut is next in line. It hardly matters what the charge is - the point is to make sure there's always something for which you can be charged and successfully prosecuted.
5) The scarier the developments get, the higher the machine ratchets up the propaganda. Citizens are, amazingly, pacified by the news, even as they watch friends and neighbors disappear. Most amazingly, fear and credulity can even pacify those who should know better. "Well, this is horrible, and they're scary people, but they promised they at least wouldn't go as far as X or Y. This is just a temporary aberration, necessary to keep order, stop terrorsts, protect children and starving artists..." It's called boiling the frog. You can't turn up the heat too fast. But the temperature is always rising...
6) They do X, then Y, followed by Z. Then they invent several new letters of the alphabet and do those too. What's to stop them. Certainly not you.
And then you can't read this post, because anonymity is now both nearly impossible and a capital crime, so no one will give their honest opinion. And hobby sites like Slashdot never exist, because cheap "peer to peer" information transfer is illegal, and only licensed, bonded broadcast servers will work with new secure, trusted web browsers (and those are expensive, you know).
Too bad, the old internet was interesting but it was the "wild west," too many hackers and terrorsts and viruses, full of communists and child molesters. It had to be reengineered in order to make it safe, to "stop the insurgents/crush the counterrevolutionaries/stop the thieving hackers." You knew all along big brother couldn't just let his little brother run free.
C) All of the above.
Rich people get the government to do it for them - whether it's clean up their messes, defend their economic, political, or religious interests, or prosecute their enemies.
Poor people have to do it themselves. I would sure love it if the government put more effort into prosecution for criminal fraud. But hey, if you're not a billionare, "that's a civil matter, son."
For all the people who haven't thought this through yet:
When they come to lock you up, no one is going to stand up for you. Maybe the EFF will send you a Christmas card in prison.
The propaganda has worked. No one in the public at large has any notion of the rights and freedoms they are in the process of losing, let alone what they mean.
Society is 100% ready to accept zero-privacy, expensive, addled DRM solutions. They will have no sympathy for anyone doing a 4-8 stretch for "downloading." With one deft push from Comrade Gonzales, they will all line up to throw tomatoes at "developers of illegal software."
My advice for you all is to read early accounts of the rise of the Soviet state, and/or especially the transition years in Eastern Europe. Totalitarianism has a very recognizable feel, even in the very beginning, before you can barely feel its grip, you can smell it's breath long before it starts to squeeze.
Oh my god, they had a Kaufman script and they passed on it?
How bizarre.
If you examine the madwifi driver FAQ it makes reference to regulations explicitly permitting "open" code controlling hardware that can receive/transmit many frequencies.
5.3. Why is the HAL closed source?
The Atheros chipset can tune to frequencies that are out of the ISM band(s). These frequencies are licensed by various regulatory agencies, and radar systems thus an open HAL is disallowed by just about every regulatory institution in existence (i.e. FCC etc). On a practical/usability note: Were it not for the binary nature of the HAL, then the same nerds who deploy the "power hack" for the WET11 could be generating emissions all over the restricted bands using madwifi hardware. Ask yourself, which would you rather have, more power, or less interference?
I expect just receivers will bear less of a burden, but I would not be surprised if Gnu Radio was already illegal with massive criminal penalties associated.
Which is an atrocity, frankly. Please correct me. Please.
That depends. Is England's legal system a joke? Or can the U.K. bench recognize a ludicrous American con when they see it?
This maxim refers to life, more than science, unfortunately. In real life, we do not, and should not, spend the same resources to validate every single assertion we encounter; this would be a gross waste of resources.
This is an extraordinary claim. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. Who is Clint Curtis? What is his background? Criminal history? Most importantly, what evidence does he bring to the table? Is it his word against someone else's?
Can he produce call logs? Appointment books? Witnesses? Tapes or memos? Can he demonstrate an extraordinary knowledge of voting systems in the state of Florida?
There is a troubling taint of money on this: a "$200,000 award being offered by the nonprofit group Justice through Music for proof of voting fraud..." He is claiming he doesn't want the reward; money may have nothing to do with it. But we may have a grifter going after a score, directly or indirectly, by telling people what they want to hear. I am not saying either one: we simply don't know until more facts come out.
I fully believe we have arrived at a stage in american politics where a politician (yes, sure, a Republican politician) would tamper with an election. There is already plenty of documented funny business. I'm speaking of the felon purging in FL, stop-and-search roadblocks in OH, for instance.
Let's not forget the real moral of this story, illustrated by one thing Clint says certainly rings true regardless of the rest of his claims:
"I can't believe the Democrats were stupid enough to allow [this]," he says. "I can't imagine anyone going to a bank and not getting a receipt. But yet we have our voting machines that way. It strikes me as really odd that machines like that could even exist."
Tough love is fine. But if we can't make banking B2C operations suitably safe on the internet, how about simply shutting them down until we can?
Custom clients, new security techniques, whatever. The current system is shitty, and it's being exploited like gangbusters. The blame for this does not exactly rest squarely on the consumer.
If anyone believes this, it justifies fairly extraordinary investment to combat it. When you are talking billions then enormous infrastructure projects are possible. For instance, imagine the kind of systematic surveillance activity that could be mounted on the internet with a multi-billion dollar budget.
Videodrome was a crazy Cronenberg movie (1983) about a guy (played by James Woods) who ran a cable company. The show opens with him sitting in a chair defending his network's hilariously sleazy content. "It gives our viewers a harmless outlet for their frustrations and fantasies." His character is so shady, even if you're desperate to believe him, you can't.
But then the movie turns dark. Woods uncovers a conspiracy to control people's minds using television. The videodrome is a metaphor for the combat of ideas in the media. The idea is, we only half-admit to ourselves that the media controls us. We hop up and down to censor it from violent or sexual content. This shows we kind of realize what appears on hundreds of millions of screens has consequences. But we haven't confronted the philosophical, or political dimensions of the fact.
We have a collective hissy fit when Janet Jackson shows a nipple. Meanwhile Fox News is on the air for years and we can't muster a coherent notion for fining them a dollar.
Great quote: "You know, in some countries, like Argentina, making subversive video is considered a criminal act. They execute people for it. In Pittsburgh... who knows?"
Most firewalls in home use are NAT firewall routers or software firewalls. Software firewalls are easy to configure to allow particular applications whatever network access they want, so let's assume we're talking about the former.
The NAT firewall wants to allow outbound traffic and deny any incoming traffic. But obviously all traffic requires packets to move in both directions, so it accomplishes this goal by allowing incoming hosts to initiate TCP connections to any external hosts they want, and then it maintains state about each connection, so that when response packets arrive, they can be routed to the right host inside the firewall. That's why we call the NAT a "stateful firewall."
I honestly don't remember and am too lazy to look it up; I'd guess NATs just note the source and destination ports in the TCP SYN and then associate return packets by using the source port. Maybe it uses some other tricks instead. But I digress.
So already you have problems with this scenario; what about FTP? This is a bummer because FTP (which predates most firewall designs by a bit) wants to have the destination open connections back to the source, on ports the source specifies. No reason to comment on that; they modified the protocol so that it wasn't necessary anymore (PASV mode) but also we note that many firewalls (including Linux I think) can actively watch the FTP control stream and thus anticipate and handle the new data streams properly. But now I digress even more.
The smart folks will by now be asking, "what about UDP?" And that's the question, isn't it. How do you think a stateful firewall like this has to handle UDP connections?
Remember, UDP has no built in "SYN/SYNACK/etc" semantics. There's no standard way to know what's going on when you see a particular UDP packet. It could be initiating some kind of connection, or closing it down, or carrying data; the bits inside the UDP packet are opaque to a firewall, because their meaning is up to whatever random software is using them.
I'm just guessing here, but it sounds like the standard NAT solution is to block all incoming UDP traffic, but whenever a firewalled host sends a UDP packet, then a "hole" is "punched" so that any UDP packets received from the destination host will be routed back inside to the firewalled source host. That would allow all your games and streaming media to work... And it makes a quick way to have two NAT firewalled hosts speak directly, as long as they both can coordinate their activities (which they can, with the help of a third peer, some anonymous P2P node).
Actually using UDP is a pretty good idea to begin with, because you can really optimize your wire protocol and gain a lot of speed (both better throughput and reduced latency). Also it will scale better and probably be easier on the internet (because UDP packets are often dropped by various routers in times of stress)... Perhaps we really should have been using UDP for P2P all along. But of course TCP is so much easier at the outset...
[myg0t]S4t4N: Yeah, that's right. We do go to hell. U g0t h4x0r3d by l33t s4t4n1c ch33t0r b1y4tch!
John: Gay.
I don't know, that' might be a problem. We're still trying for a PG-13 rating.
Interviewer: So, Mr. Callah, let's start with the most important question on everyone's mind. Will there be lava? And, perhaps more importantly, will there be crates?
Callahan: I want to put everyone's mind to rest on this point. The studio has the best lava people in the business, and they've specifically assured me I will have a free hand.
Interviewer: Phew. Also, before I forget. we're all dying to know. Will the hero at any point successfully outrun a fireball? This is something that is so important, not only to me, but I think I can speak for all moviegoers out there. It's an image that really really gets better every time I see it.
Callahan: Well, Ed, I don't want to give too much away, but we briefly considered having the hero run from a nuclear explosion! Don't worry, there'll be plenty of what we know the audience loves most.
Interviewer: So, let's talk about the plot. Which of the hero's family members will be killed? Mother? Father? Both parents? Or will it be a hero-parent who loses his kids?
Callahan: Actually, what I'm allowed to say is that we're going a bit unconventional on this. We're going to have a brother and a sister, and each one will lose a parent. I know this is pushing the envelope a bit, but the producers are behind me and I believe the studio will hold off and allow us some of the artistic integerity which we all know is so rare in this business.