On one hand I feel really sorry for the guy. He didn't exactly get the whole book thrown at him, but being that young and knowing that something bad is going to happen to you for months and not being able to do anything except wait and see what the Judge says has got to be pure torture. On the other hand, using a flaw in somebody else's code to do something that benefits you (however hilarious and non physically damaging it is) is just ludicrous. If he stopped to think about it for just one minute he would have realized that he could never get away with it. A company that big would never sit back and let it slide when they got their butts handed to them by one guy working alone. That said, I hope he can appeal the Internet usage ban after his community service and restitution payback is finished. That's just inhumane punishment for a computer nerd like most of the people reading/. If he has no other recorded history of doing anything similar that the police can dig up, he should hopefully have a good chance at an appeal. One strike and you're out when the damage was not physical, trade secrets, or military secrets does not seem fair.
I couldn't agree more. The 'slant' on this story is completely ludicrous. He never intended to disclose a security vulnerability. The completely ethical crackers that disclose their work send the information to the company who owns the product and tell them that if it is not patched in a reasonable amount of time that they will release the information. The quasi-ethical crackers that disclose their work send it to the mailing lists as a 0-day often with working exploit code as a proof of concept. This guy did neither. He discovered a flaw, and used that flaw to his advantage. Yes, it was pretty funny, and it didn't actually harm anything specifically. But it did take up system resources, and it did take many hours to clean up the 'damage'. Nothing he did at that point was altruistic in nature, as the poster would like us to believe. You are not free to do anything you want on the internet. You are, for the most part, free to do anything you want to your own server running your own software on the internet. This guy did neither (he doesn't own the servers, nor the software).
Yeah - that is already being worked on. That is the current top priority for the senior executive management. We expect it to be finished by late 2008.
I'm not following you here. Yes, I am one of those who responded with some rough stats about the datacenter I work at. I also stated that I didn't even think mine was that great (big was the word I used). Because it's not. But it beats the crap out of the Lucas one, which is the story, so when you can relate to it and build on the topic, then it is an ontopic post and adds to the topic of conversation.
How can you state that other companies datacenters are too big and extremely wasteful when you have no idea what those companies do, what their legal departments say they need to keep (storage), what types/brands of bigiron they use which require massive amounts of space/cooling/power/storage, etc? How about executive level policies that dictate that servers should not run multiple apps? Now that one surprises many of my friends at other companies, but when they think about it, they wish that their company had a policy like that so that an app crashing does not take down another app. When a single hour of downtime in your datacenter costs your company over $4,000,000 not to mention loss of brand name status, competitive edge in mergers and acquistions, and other non-tangible costs, you tend not to sweat the 'small stuff' - like a $100M datacenter. It's definitely not overkill in the least bit with large companies. It pays for itself in 25 hours of downtime. A large company who dramatically cuts their IT budget and fires people is either one who is quickly going out of business, or one that is prepping themselves to be taken over by a larger company.
Yeah - that datacenter is nothing. I don't consider ours that big either, but the company I work for (non profit in the healthcare insurance industry) would be ranked around #40 on the global fortune 500 list if we were for profit.
We have a couple PB in online storage just for our mainframe, much less online storage for Lotus Notes, a few thousand servers of varying OS's, speeds, and feeds, a large SAN that contains online backups for all of those servers, much less our tens of thousands of high density tapes stored in silos with psuedo-online storage.
I'm not good with the actual numbers, but I know ours would blow this away without even blinking, and we're out of space and have already broken ground to double our size.
Where did you get your numbers from? Have you priced the components and come to the conclusion that you can get everything you need for $7,300? How many kWh is that? From the article, one couple spent $40,000 on a 15KW system, and one spent $15,000 on a 3kWh system that's for a guest house. I'm pretty sure I consume more than 3 myself with kids toys, complete entertainment center that's on most evenings, half a dozen computers, various switches and routers that I play with on occasion (huge power hogs, so I don't leave them powered up), etc. However, lets just assume I can get by on a 3 kWw system. Lets say for the sake of argument that my bill is $100/month - that might be close to the average over a 12 month span. So it's going to be 12.5 years before I even break even, much less make money on the deal. I suppose if I was buying a house out in the country and planned to live there for the rest of my life it might be a consideration. But I doubt I'll ever stay in a house more than 12.5 years until I'm retired.
I'm with you on this one - it absolutely does not make fiscal sense to invest in solar power. Maybe things will change within 10 years, but I'm not going to hold my breath.
I don't get it. The techie link does not explain in the least bit how it actually works. Does the data transfer happen directly between the users? Does it go through a server first where everything has the potential of being logged? In the case of multiple recipients is it unicast or multicast? What level of security have you done (I assume that the file transfers are encrypted). The email looked like a custom app to me, not any old email client, does that go through a centralized server before it is sent out as 'real' smtp email? What ports do you use for transfer, and does it work through a NAT?
All right - going through their website quickly before I hit submit I got most of my answers. It's TCP 80 and 443, it appears to use a centralized server (thereby having a 2GB limit, and logging all access), and does not work through NAT yet.
But this information should definitely have been available in the techies video. There was no technical information in that video at all.
Ditto - I've got 8 maha powerex AA - 2500's from thomas distributing with this same charger and couldn't be happier about them. The larger AA size was available from thomas months before the stores started carrying them (energizer mostly around me). My wife picked up a pack of Energizer NiMH with 8 or 12 AA's and 4 AAA's with a 1 hour charger from Sam's club to use at school a few months later. The energizer set was much cheaper, but it also doesn't seem to perform as well. I'm about to buy the Maha 8 bay charger so I can charge the C's and D's I've picked up as well. Right now they're pretty useless because I don't own a charger:( The cost does seem a bit high, but considering the outstanding ratings that are available all over the web for Maha/powerex, you definitely get what you pay for. It all depends on how often you want to purchase new NiMH batteries.
So, how long was this active, does anybody know? The netcraft article is from the 27th, and today is the 29th. I believe it's down now, but how long has it been down since Netcraft notified myspace about it? It seems very trivial for myspace web admins to verify that the code includes the specific suspect URL and to take immediate action against it. In my industry (healthcare insurance), if any leak of information or incorrect data is suspected, the websites in question are immediately taken down until we can verify if there was or was not a problem, and get it fixed before bringing the sites back up if there was a problem. This is basically dictated by law for the insurance industry (various HIPPA, PHI, etc laws exist surrounding access to data). Not that there is actually a law against myspace leaving a hacked link active - I'm sure there isn't. But is there any reason why they would leave the profile section active while they investigated and fixed their code? The simple reason that their site is so popular and millions of people use it and would be pissed if it was offline for a period of time is the very reason why they should take it down and fix it before it affects their users - they don't want to alienate or piss them off, and they don't want their users to be able to prove that damage done to their credit was the direct result of inaction on the part of myspace's web admins, thereby opening up possible class action suits.
I definitely agree. If they're going to try backhanded tricks to get us to buy extra stuff, then we should be able to use backhanded tricks to bypass any purchase related to them, including the original purchase.
Anyone who watches the TV show Numbers knows that they did this exact same thing a week or two ago, and it worked flawlessly on TV, so why wouldn't it work in real life? Actually, kidding aside and while I'm still only partially ot, I'm pretty impressed with this particular TV show. It seems like all the equations used to solve the mysteries would actually work. Now how you use the right one versus all the other ones that would yield similar yet invalid results, I'm not sure. Anyone else here that watches this?
There's been some real progress in copy protection, but nothing made by any of the big studios. I remember one program, it must have been 7 years ago or so, and I can't remember what the program was called or what it did. But I bet somebody here will remember by my description. It was popular and everybody wanted it, but nobody could figure out how to get an ISO image of the cd. Then a couple months later some group came out with one - it turned out the lead programmer had embedded a couple dozen tiny tracks on the cd that would mess up all 1:1 copiers because the tracks were invalid until somebody out there figured it out and reversed it. Anything that lasts more than two days against the cracking groups is genius programming, and this was the first of its kind that took that long. Now, this was back somewhere around 98 or 99. If people cared to spend time ensuring the copy protection of their cds now, I think it could probably be accomplished to an extent that it's not worth the effort required by the cracking groups so they skip it for a while. My feeling is that the people who are actually smart enough and have unique ideas about how to protect data to get something that will last a while have decided that it is not worth their effort to do so, or they are working for one of the agencies and already have 'real' copy protection with some form of advanced crypto embedded into it and will not share it with the rest of the world.
Nice! That pretty well sums up the last 9 (10?) years of/. The only repetitious themes you left off are trolls and hot grits with a side of natalie portman, and an occasional vi/emacs/joe conversation capped off with a base joke.
You realize two of the countries you listed are also islands unto themselves, right? Yes, we all know that England (GB, whatever) has settled numerous parts of the globe, but who cares at this point (hundreds of years later)? Correcting the gp post is as irrelevant as me correcting you.
I am thinking about purchasing some of these for my team members at work, but I couldn't figure out what the differences are between U3 and Migo. I also can't find any 4GB U3 thumbdrives - the largest I could find was 2. Anyone know what the pros and cons of the two formats are?
That's why you have to do monthly generator tests and annual complete facilities checks. I work for a multi-billion dollar company. We currently only have one datacenter, but building a second (redundant) one is our top priority right now. However, our datacenter is extremely redundant. Every server that can be redundant/clustered/HA is. We have dual power feeds from the electric company from multiple substations, dual water feeds, dual this, dual that. There are three generators with 40,000 gallons of diesel fuel stored onsite - any one of the generators can fail and the building would still be operational. I could go on and on - the building has won multiple awards in the facilities arena. Anyway, the generators are tested monthly. Annually, they bring in a third party contractor to test all connections to everything (batteries, UPS's, generators, electrical thingamajig's). They come in with infrared and heat sensors (so I've been told) and take all the panels off and look at everything. Anything that glows or gives off any heat, they replace. We routinely switch on the generators during the summer months to take ourselves off the grid and the electric company gives us back a decent chunk of change on our bills as well. Because of all the testing, we've never had an equipment failure, although of course we have had outages due to user error.
I was wondering where they came up with New Jersey. Never even heard of that one. I've got some friends that are teachers out that way. Plainfield was a booming school district a couple years ago - hiring more new teachers than any other subarb of Chicago due to growth. I'm going to have to check around and see if there were any memo's sent out by the school to the teachers about this. They must have told the teachers something.
Hmmmm... I own an Accord and a Civic, so what does that make me? Am I 160% likely to be a mass murderer? I'm confused. Maybe this blood shake has gotten to my brain.
All I want to know is how much does a professional gamer expect to make in a year? One that does not 'work' for a specific gaming company. Sponserships and whatnot are different, but I wouldn't count the people who actually play games (normally by testing them) for a company on an annual salary basis. Anybody have any ideas? I'm sure the top three in the country make $500k or so a year, but is there actually a pseudo job market?
It hasn't gone away from the standpoint that I believe he is talking about. When you build a new windows computer, you either have to boot off a windows cd and use their builtin fdisk utility (which doesn't give you many options about what file system you want to create), or you still have to use the dos based app from a windows 98 bootdisk. This is still the most common form of drive partitioning that I use (and most of my friends as well). Create a boot and an extended partition in there, and there's no need to ever go into Disk Administrator once you boot into Windows unless you add an extra harddrive that wasn't there originally. So yes, fdisk is still broken, it still scans the entire drive, etc. But I actually like that it scans it, at least once. I prefer to know if I have any bad sectors before I build an OS on a box than just to have it crash later on. It does seem to take forever though.
Yeah, I agree. I was a bit underwhelmed at the specs they gave of the machine. I assume it's actually quite a bit faster than what they're telling us in the article. For example, my company uses Sniffers. We have a few of their high end infinistream platforms which are gigabit speed and basically write directly to the harddrive with a couple terabyte disk array. I'm positive they are working on 10Gb devices already, and probably have a functional test unit already built as the 10G platforms have been around for 3-4 years. I'm sure they have a competitor that already has one on the market, just so they can say that they are on step ahead of sniffer. So basically take an off the shelf infinistream, attach it to a much larger backend diskarray which would be incredibly easy as it uses SATA drives, and then use some other off the shelf but highly customizable database and db management software to create fast searchable databases with everything linked together. We use a product from a company called NCR/Teradata that can do this. It is extremely fast, and we currently have close to 50TB of online storage fully backed up on raid5. We are also in the process of putting in an OC-192 sonet ring between our main site and our datacenter. So if a single company can have a network running at OC-192, I'm sure that this device that they're using for monitoring is not dedicated to a single sonet ring, so it must be much faster than what is actually being reported. Otherwise they would have to have literally thousands in various places all over the country (just think of the bandwidth flowing in and out of mae east and west alone!) Combine the off the shelf hardware with the governments budget, and it would be very easy to build something that would equal this devices processing power with pretty much off the shelf components - nothing secretive about it. The existence of this device doesn't surprise me one bit. What does surprise me is that AT&T was able to keep it secret for five years.
Good luck with that. Not to be a party pooper as this is/. and everybody here loves a good conspiracy theory and hates 'the man', but there are only a few huge global data telecom carriers in the world. AT&T happens to be among the big ones. So regardless of who gets your money, some of that money will get to AT&T regardless through backend peer agreements, leasing of lines and/or space from AT&T CO's, etc. It is naive to think that you can take all of your companies money away from AT&T. As you stated, you use a downstream provider of theirs, so AT&T wasn't getting all the money to begin with, and your provider probably (hopefully) has agreements with other upstream providers in addition to AT&T. All ISP's do this. It is incredibly stupid from an ISP's standpoint to only have a single upstream provider, so again, good luck with finding a provider in the US that does not peer with AT&T either directly or as a secondary.
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On one hand I feel really sorry for the guy. He didn't exactly get the whole book thrown at him, but being that young and knowing that something bad is going to happen to you for months and not being able to do anything except wait and see what the Judge says has got to be pure torture. On the other hand, using a flaw in somebody else's code to do something that benefits you (however hilarious and non physically damaging it is) is just ludicrous. If he stopped to think about it for just one minute he would have realized that he could never get away with it. A company that big would never sit back and let it slide when they got their butts handed to them by one guy working alone. That said, I hope he can appeal the Internet usage ban after his community service and restitution payback is finished. That's just inhumane punishment for a computer nerd like most of the people reading /. If he has no other recorded history of doing anything similar that the police can dig up, he should hopefully have a good chance at an appeal. One strike and you're out when the damage was not physical, trade secrets, or military secrets does not seem fair.
Best of luck to him!
I couldn't agree more. The 'slant' on this story is completely ludicrous. He never intended to disclose a security vulnerability. The completely ethical crackers that disclose their work send the information to the company who owns the product and tell them that if it is not patched in a reasonable amount of time that they will release the information. The quasi-ethical crackers that disclose their work send it to the mailing lists as a 0-day often with working exploit code as a proof of concept. This guy did neither. He discovered a flaw, and used that flaw to his advantage. Yes, it was pretty funny, and it didn't actually harm anything specifically. But it did take up system resources, and it did take many hours to clean up the 'damage'. Nothing he did at that point was altruistic in nature, as the poster would like us to believe. You are not free to do anything you want on the internet. You are, for the most part, free to do anything you want to your own server running your own software on the internet. This guy did neither (he doesn't own the servers, nor the software).
Yeah - that is already being worked on. That is the current top priority for the senior executive management. We expect it to be finished by late 2008.
I'm not following you here. Yes, I am one of those who responded with some rough stats about the datacenter I work at. I also stated that I didn't even think mine was that great (big was the word I used). Because it's not. But it beats the crap out of the Lucas one, which is the story, so when you can relate to it and build on the topic, then it is an ontopic post and adds to the topic of conversation.
How can you state that other companies datacenters are too big and extremely wasteful when you have no idea what those companies do, what their legal departments say they need to keep (storage), what types/brands of bigiron they use which require massive amounts of space/cooling/power/storage, etc? How about executive level policies that dictate that servers should not run multiple apps? Now that one surprises many of my friends at other companies, but when they think about it, they wish that their company had a policy like that so that an app crashing does not take down another app. When a single hour of downtime in your datacenter costs your company over $4,000,000 not to mention loss of brand name status, competitive edge in mergers and acquistions, and other non-tangible costs, you tend not to sweat the 'small stuff' - like a $100M datacenter. It's definitely not overkill in the least bit with large companies. It pays for itself in 25 hours of downtime. A large company who dramatically cuts their IT budget and fires people is either one who is quickly going out of business, or one that is prepping themselves to be taken over by a larger company.
Yeah - that datacenter is nothing. I don't consider ours that big either, but the company I work for (non profit in the healthcare insurance industry) would be ranked around #40 on the global fortune 500 list if we were for profit.
We have a couple PB in online storage just for our mainframe, much less online storage for Lotus Notes, a few thousand servers of varying OS's, speeds, and feeds, a large SAN that contains online backups for all of those servers, much less our tens of thousands of high density tapes stored in silos with psuedo-online storage.
I'm not good with the actual numbers, but I know ours would blow this away without even blinking, and we're out of space and have already broken ground to double our size.
Where did you get your numbers from? Have you priced the components and come to the conclusion that you can get everything you need for $7,300? How many kWh is that? From the article, one couple spent $40,000 on a 15KW system, and one spent $15,000 on a 3kWh system that's for a guest house. I'm pretty sure I consume more than 3 myself with kids toys, complete entertainment center that's on most evenings, half a dozen computers, various switches and routers that I play with on occasion (huge power hogs, so I don't leave them powered up), etc. However, lets just assume I can get by on a 3 kWw system. Lets say for the sake of argument that my bill is $100/month - that might be close to the average over a 12 month span. So it's going to be 12.5 years before I even break even, much less make money on the deal. I suppose if I was buying a house out in the country and planned to live there for the rest of my life it might be a consideration. But I doubt I'll ever stay in a house more than 12.5 years until I'm retired.
I'm with you on this one - it absolutely does not make fiscal sense to invest in solar power. Maybe things will change within 10 years, but I'm not going to hold my breath.
I don't get it. The techie link does not explain in the least bit how it actually works. Does the data transfer happen directly between the users? Does it go through a server first where everything has the potential of being logged? In the case of multiple recipients is it unicast or multicast? What level of security have you done (I assume that the file transfers are encrypted). The email looked like a custom app to me, not any old email client, does that go through a centralized server before it is sent out as 'real' smtp email? What ports do you use for transfer, and does it work through a NAT?
All right - going through their website quickly before I hit submit I got most of my answers. It's TCP 80 and 443, it appears to use a centralized server (thereby having a 2GB limit, and logging all access), and does not work through NAT yet.
But this information should definitely have been available in the techies video. There was no technical information in that video at all.
Ditto - I've got 8 maha powerex AA - 2500's from thomas distributing with this same charger and couldn't be happier about them. The larger AA size was available from thomas months before the stores started carrying them (energizer mostly around me). My wife picked up a pack of Energizer NiMH with 8 or 12 AA's and 4 AAA's with a 1 hour charger from Sam's club to use at school a few months later. The energizer set was much cheaper, but it also doesn't seem to perform as well. I'm about to buy the Maha 8 bay charger so I can charge the C's and D's I've picked up as well. Right now they're pretty useless because I don't own a charger :(
The cost does seem a bit high, but considering the outstanding ratings that are available all over the web for Maha/powerex, you definitely get what you pay for. It all depends on how often you want to purchase new NiMH batteries.
Nah, wrong genre. It was music, and it was "Black Horse and the Cherry Tree" (KT Tunstall)
So, how long was this active, does anybody know? The netcraft article is from the 27th, and today is the 29th. I believe it's down now, but how long has it been down since Netcraft notified myspace about it? It seems very trivial for myspace web admins to verify that the code includes the specific suspect URL and to take immediate action against it. In my industry (healthcare insurance), if any leak of information or incorrect data is suspected, the websites in question are immediately taken down until we can verify if there was or was not a problem, and get it fixed before bringing the sites back up if there was a problem. This is basically dictated by law for the insurance industry (various HIPPA, PHI, etc laws exist surrounding access to data). Not that there is actually a law against myspace leaving a hacked link active - I'm sure there isn't. But is there any reason why they would leave the profile section active while they investigated and fixed their code? The simple reason that their site is so popular and millions of people use it and would be pissed if it was offline for a period of time is the very reason why they should take it down and fix it before it affects their users - they don't want to alienate or piss them off, and they don't want their users to be able to prove that damage done to their credit was the direct result of inaction on the part of myspace's web admins, thereby opening up possible class action suits.
I definitely agree. If they're going to try backhanded tricks to get us to buy extra stuff, then we should be able to use backhanded tricks to bypass any purchase related to them, including the original purchase.
Anyone who watches the TV show Numbers knows that they did this exact same thing a week or two ago, and it worked flawlessly on TV, so why wouldn't it work in real life? Actually, kidding aside and while I'm still only partially ot, I'm pretty impressed with this particular TV show. It seems like all the equations used to solve the mysteries would actually work. Now how you use the right one versus all the other ones that would yield similar yet invalid results, I'm not sure. Anyone else here that watches this?
There's been some real progress in copy protection, but nothing made by any of the big studios. I remember one program, it must have been 7 years ago or so, and I can't remember what the program was called or what it did. But I bet somebody here will remember by my description. It was popular and everybody wanted it, but nobody could figure out how to get an ISO image of the cd. Then a couple months later some group came out with one - it turned out the lead programmer had embedded a couple dozen tiny tracks on the cd that would mess up all 1:1 copiers because the tracks were invalid until somebody out there figured it out and reversed it. Anything that lasts more than two days against the cracking groups is genius programming, and this was the first of its kind that took that long. Now, this was back somewhere around 98 or 99. If people cared to spend time ensuring the copy protection of their cds now, I think it could probably be accomplished to an extent that it's not worth the effort required by the cracking groups so they skip it for a while. My feeling is that the people who are actually smart enough and have unique ideas about how to protect data to get something that will last a while have decided that it is not worth their effort to do so, or they are working for one of the agencies and already have 'real' copy protection with some form of advanced crypto embedded into it and will not share it with the rest of the world.
Nice! That pretty well sums up the last 9 (10?) years of /. The only repetitious themes you left off are trolls and hot grits with a side of natalie portman, and an occasional vi/emacs/joe conversation capped off with a base joke.
You realize two of the countries you listed are also islands unto themselves, right? Yes, we all know that England (GB, whatever) has settled numerous parts of the globe, but who cares at this point (hundreds of years later)? Correcting the gp post is as irrelevant as me correcting you.
I am thinking about purchasing some of these for my team members at work, but I couldn't figure out what the differences are between U3 and Migo. I also can't find any 4GB U3 thumbdrives - the largest I could find was 2. Anyone know what the pros and cons of the two formats are?
That's why you have to do monthly generator tests and annual complete facilities checks. I work for a multi-billion dollar company. We currently only have one datacenter, but building a second (redundant) one is our top priority right now. However, our datacenter is extremely redundant. Every server that can be redundant/clustered/HA is. We have dual power feeds from the electric company from multiple substations, dual water feeds, dual this, dual that. There are three generators with 40,000 gallons of diesel fuel stored onsite - any one of the generators can fail and the building would still be operational. I could go on and on - the building has won multiple awards in the facilities arena. Anyway, the generators are tested monthly. Annually, they bring in a third party contractor to test all connections to everything (batteries, UPS's, generators, electrical thingamajig's). They come in with infrared and heat sensors (so I've been told) and take all the panels off and look at everything. Anything that glows or gives off any heat, they replace. We routinely switch on the generators during the summer months to take ourselves off the grid and the electric company gives us back a decent chunk of change on our bills as well. Because of all the testing, we've never had an equipment failure, although of course we have had outages due to user error.
I was wondering where they came up with New Jersey. Never even heard of that one. I've got some friends that are teachers out that way. Plainfield was a booming school district a couple years ago - hiring more new teachers than any other subarb of Chicago due to growth. I'm going to have to check around and see if there were any memo's sent out by the school to the teachers about this. They must have told the teachers something.
Ever heard of satellite communications?
Was anybody else besides me wondering why Google was using a Novell system when they read the headline?
Hmmmm... I own an Accord and a Civic, so what does that make me? Am I 160% likely to be a mass murderer? I'm confused. Maybe this blood shake has gotten to my brain.
All I want to know is how much does a professional gamer expect to make in a year? One that does not 'work' for a specific gaming company. Sponserships and whatnot are different, but I wouldn't count the people who actually play games (normally by testing them) for a company on an annual salary basis. Anybody have any ideas? I'm sure the top three in the country make $500k or so a year, but is there actually a pseudo job market?
It hasn't gone away from the standpoint that I believe he is talking about. When you build a new windows computer, you either have to boot off a windows cd and use their builtin fdisk utility (which doesn't give you many options about what file system you want to create), or you still have to use the dos based app from a windows 98 bootdisk. This is still the most common form of drive partitioning that I use (and most of my friends as well). Create a boot and an extended partition in there, and there's no need to ever go into Disk Administrator once you boot into Windows unless you add an extra harddrive that wasn't there originally. So yes, fdisk is still broken, it still scans the entire drive, etc. But I actually like that it scans it, at least once. I prefer to know if I have any bad sectors before I build an OS on a box than just to have it crash later on. It does seem to take forever though.
Yeah, I agree. I was a bit underwhelmed at the specs they gave of the machine. I assume it's actually quite a bit faster than what they're telling us in the article. For example, my company uses Sniffers. We have a few of their high end infinistream platforms which are gigabit speed and basically write directly to the harddrive with a couple terabyte disk array. I'm positive they are working on 10Gb devices already, and probably have a functional test unit already built as the 10G platforms have been around for 3-4 years. I'm sure they have a competitor that already has one on the market, just so they can say that they are on step ahead of sniffer. So basically take an off the shelf infinistream, attach it to a much larger backend diskarray which would be incredibly easy as it uses SATA drives, and then use some other off the shelf but highly customizable database and db management software to create fast searchable databases with everything linked together. We use a product from a company called NCR/Teradata that can do this. It is extremely fast, and we currently have close to 50TB of online storage fully backed up on raid5. We are also in the process of putting in an OC-192 sonet ring between our main site and our datacenter. So if a single company can have a network running at OC-192, I'm sure that this device that they're using for monitoring is not dedicated to a single sonet ring, so it must be much faster than what is actually being reported. Otherwise they would have to have literally thousands in various places all over the country (just think of the bandwidth flowing in and out of mae east and west alone!) Combine the off the shelf hardware with the governments budget, and it would be very easy to build something that would equal this devices processing power with pretty much off the shelf components - nothing secretive about it. The existence of this device doesn't surprise me one bit. What does surprise me is that AT&T was able to keep it secret for five years.
Good luck with that. Not to be a party pooper as this is /. and everybody here loves a good conspiracy theory and hates 'the man', but there are only a few huge global data telecom carriers in the world. AT&T happens to be among the big ones. So regardless of who gets your money, some of that money will get to AT&T regardless through backend peer agreements, leasing of lines and/or space from AT&T CO's, etc. It is naive to think that you can take all of your companies money away from AT&T. As you stated, you use a downstream provider of theirs, so AT&T wasn't getting all the money to begin with, and your provider probably (hopefully) has agreements with other upstream providers in addition to AT&T. All ISP's do this. It is incredibly stupid from an ISP's standpoint to only have a single upstream provider, so again, good luck with finding a provider in the US that does not peer with AT&T either directly or as a secondary.