In any case, with his skills he was certainly able to do things the kids did not expect, including infiltrating them at their most "secure" locations. He accomplished things that were beyond what they believed were possible.
Where there's a will there's a way.:)
In addition although the IRC RFC may seem trivial in comparison to other such documents, I'd bet it's one of the last places these kids would have thought to look for information.
I believe Gibson was on his toes, and I suspect his article documenting his work demonstrates a hacker it his finest.
A few years back I had a few kiddiez harrassing me on IRC. They were really "37337."
I did a traceroute to them and noticed a router of some sort sitting right in front of them -- it just looked wierd. I opened a telnet session and found myself at:
zimmylan>
A Cisco ISDN router, with no password set.:) I told them "I can wave my hand and make you go away."
I thought Mr. Gibson's article was well-written. That having been said it is amusing to see kiddiez like "wicked" get their comeuppance by someone from the old school who can actually craft their own code.
My favorite line was:
So I downloaded a copy of the Internet RFC 1459 for Internet Relay Chat (IRC) Protocol and figured out how IRC works.
Before you question Gibson's skill, or his "inside information" (as one poster suggested "he must have had the Windows source code") consider that this man downloaded and learned the RFC for IRC. That might seem alien to someone who relies on the work of others, or reading script FAQ's, but this fellow knows how to make proper use of the tools before him and relies on his own knowledge to craft solutions.
He did not have any help from Microsoft. He knows his tools and he knows his craft. By his own words he's not a magician, he's a scientist.
Be humbled kiddiez, for every dozen of you who "hax0rz" on IRC there's someone like Gibson who actually can hack and run circles around you. Notice that ^boss^ gave this guy respect?
Ask him/her what kind of chair he recommends, what posture is best, what supports produce the most natual movement, what are the proper placements for keyboard, monitor, mouse, desk, and chair height.
An orthopedic specialist will probably tell you to keep a good posture while working. If you have to arch your neck your monitor is too high. If you have to hunch over, your keyboard is too low.
If you're in your twenties or thirties consider this preventative maintenance to keep yourself from having the posture of Quasimodo thirty years from now. If you have back pain now, this will help more than all the homeopathic herbal feng shui stuff can ever accomplish.:)
Re:Clathrates in general ...
on
Fire and Ice
·
· Score: 1
Isn't that a happy thought? Although supposedly according to 60 million year old air samples trapped in amber the amount of carbon in our atmosphere is approximate to that at the time of the dinosaurs. As I recall the theory is that this would mean the approximate level of warmth we could expect would equate to that of the mid Triassic.
On the other hand, as has been pointed out methane is 250 times better than CO2 at trapping warmth. I wonder if scrubbing large quantities of CO2 from the atmosphere (iron sulphate in the Antarctic oceans) would be able to balance warming, or would the release of all the methane clathrates put us over the top irregardless of CO2 PPM?
I had C Band back in 1985, just as programmers were clueing in to the several hundred thousand people who had purchased the big dishes as alternatives to cable. The programmers' answer was the VideoCypher II system, which took an NTSC video signal, flipped the color and brightness values, removed the 60 hz timing signal, and encrypted the audio.
CBS and ABC started using VideoCypher technology (not VC-II, VC-I I think, if memory serves me) to encrypt their direct feeds, but wild feeds from affiliates were too infrequent and the scrambling technology was too expensive to worry about them.
The things I have seen:
Sam Donaldson eating a sandwich and swearing at his director during news stories when anchoring a report from Amsterdam.
Dan Rather's (rather heroic) struggle to stay on the air from China during the Tiananmen Square uprising.
Mary Alice Williams (used to co-anchor on CNN) dancing on her desk during a Christmas party.
Live cameras from MTV's Spring Break, and various VJ's in unglamorous moments.
What Larry King does during commercials.
The programs that were available were all randomly scheduled, and none of the high dollar advertizing supported big network programs were broadcast using unencrypted C band.
I used to catch next week's Star Trek episodes on Telstar 1 at 3:00 PM on Sundays.
You could watch all of the weekly episodes of a game show, all at once. Anyone for two and a half hours of Wheel of Fortune?
Infomercials have always been transmitted in the clear... Joy.
Locker room sports broadcasts could be a riot if the cameras were left live.
NBC went to Ku band to prevent its feeds from being intercepted (so C banders added dual feedhorns to grab signals from Ku birds.)
If a studio is transmitting Frasier or Friends in the clear I would have to ask what happened to the networks' glorious encryption technology and covert transmission practices? As they realized twenty years ago, the airwaves are public. Do they need reminded that if they want to keep something private then they had better use encryption?
Clathrates in general ...
on
Fire and Ice
·
· Score: 2
Yes, the methane is trapped within ice crystals -- it is not itself in ice form. Along the sea floor it is estimated that several hundred years' worth of methane fuel is trapped in clathrates, there is a real tricky question:
How stable are the formations? If our mining practices introduce warmer water into the vicinity of the clathrates we could trigger a gas release, which would dump lots of methane into the atmosphere.
Even if we don't mine them, proponents of global warming believe that even a slight warming of the ocean depths could release large quantities of methane, which would further increase warming.
Because the Canadian clathrates are land-bound it may be possible to extract the gas they contain without causing a catastrophic release, but maybe we should just leave clathrates alone and dump some of the money we would spend on researching their exploitation on creating affordable, efficient solar-powered hydrogen-separation stations, an effective distribution system for liquid hydrogen, and engines that burn hydrogen safely and efficiently?
I realize the technologies for exploiting methane are much more evolved, but to me increasing our reliance on any carbon-based fuel seems short-sighted.
If the sequence used by these cards is not completely random then observing the stream of packets from either of the two connected computers will allow one to extrapolate the formula used to sequence the address progress.
If I have the formula I need only a small ordered list of the IP addresses being used and I can predict what the next IP address will be. With that, I am in the loop.
This sounds like a glorified network card to me. This might confuse the kiddiez, but I suspect persons who use this company's products would be much better relying on very strong encryption and rigid security practices.
A week locked in an outhouse in the middle of the Kazakhstan desert. Decisions, decisions.
A Soyuz capsule is basically a three person transportation vehicle with about as much space as your average econobox car, correct? So no flips, no rolls, just a feeling of weightlessness, pooping in diapers, eating Russian MRE's, and not being able to stretch for seven days.
I suspect if they want repeat business the Russians had better shorten the length of the tourist-cosmonauts' journey. The ISS is by no means a five star hotel, but at least you could straighten your legs without kicking your crewmates and you didn't have to take a dump in industrial-strength Depends.
One other comment to mangu though, I noticed you mention similarity of proteins. The prion that causes BSE spreads exactly because the scenario you mention is, unfortunately, not true.
Evolution is lazy. There is an economy of simplicity -- if it works it tends to not change. That's why we and yeast are still remarkably similar on the molecular level.
When you throw a "different" folded protein into the mix you get cross-species diseases like Scrapie and BSE, specifically because most of the proteins used for similar purposes by living organisms are identical. On the molecular level the wheel is seldom reinvented. The hemoglobin used by an earthworm is the virtually the same hemoglobin used by a lemur used by a human used by a parakeet.
Yes lipids and proteins are natural, but certain proteins do not occur within certain species, so for example a feline rhinovirus with an altered protein coat designed to infect human cells and insert the gene for, say, botilinus toxin would have no natural human defense, because such a thing had never before occured.
The human species did not evolve being infected by feline rhinoviruses, the feline rhinovirus infecting a human is not a natural occurance, and the human organism has no tolerance for large quantities of botulinus toxin being pumped into the body. The human host dies from a supercold against which he or she has no natural defense.
This is what I mean by an unnatural disease.
Remember that the mortality rate among some indigenous American people when confronted by common Old World diseases was also 100%, and these were not "new" diseases to the species.
I agree with fleener. If a disease is a un-natural, it stands to reason that the only defense against it will also be un-natural. There are areas in any genome/proteome that can be targeted that would easily cause 100% mortality in the target species.
Barring the luck of having a completely isolated pocket of population, assuming such a disease is engineered to be easily transmissable I can foresee something being created that has a 100% mortality rate.
Where is the logic? Hopefully the superweeds are edible, or should everyone starve to placate the ELF?
Re: lifestyle diseases -- yes A.I.D.S. indeed attacks impoverished people, promiscuous people, and IV drug users. If you think it's a disease that somehow judiciously infects deviants, the majority of cases of AIDS worldwide occurs among heterosexuals. Shame on all of them.:>
Way back when A.I.D.S. was called G.R.I.D. (Gay Related Immune Deficiency) it was obvious that the hemophiliacs and transplant patients who were dying kinda missed out on the G.R. part.
New or crossover organisms thrive when they are able to successfully exploit available niches with no predation or controls. Disease organisms profit from the same mechanism that makes the zebra mussel the scourge of the American Great Lakes, and the American south a big blanket of kudzu.
Maybe kudzu and its effect on native species is something those who promote the release of any GM crop/weed should keep in mind. Perhaps when we engineer a new plant we should also have in the wings an effective control to prevent a designer SuperWheat(tm) from becoming the new American wild grass.
Thank God I've got a big dick -- God found a way to be kind to me in spite of the shortcomings you noticed. The sad irony is that since I am no longer a member of the gene pool little-dicked individuals like yourself will be the norm.:)
All we need to do is look the way the universe is expanding to realize that something is amiss in our understanding of the forces that interact with gravity.
It's not a major shock to see that we do not have a perfect grasp of our outer solar system. For all of our cleverness the past century we are still a young species, and there are quite a lot of things that we just don't know. Something in the outer solar system has to be disturbing the Oort cloud every once in a while or we would exhausted our supply of new comets a few billion years ago.
Perhaps negative energy somehow interacts with gravity wells to clump matter, like drops of water on an oil slick? Maybe if the politicians ever get their heads out of their rear ends and start investing in further development of space we can scrape together enough money to send a probe to find out what's going on.
As I recall the dictum in the series Roddenberry oversaw, the original Trek, as well as NexGen was "no nonhumanoid regulars". This may have been due to budgetary concerns, but as I recall Roddenberry made this decision so that his viewing audience would not find aliens "too alien." In any case, the regular races are all bilaterally symmetrical bipeds.
Xelatians might be an exception, but we never see them out of their environment suits. The acidic carpet, the Horta from "Devil in the Dark", like the Tholians, was a one-shot. We seldom saw Odo in his non-solid guise, and the Chameloid from the "Undiscovered Country" was remarkably humanoid in every form it took.
My point is that we cannot make the assumption that the Star Trek panoply of aliens is what awaits us in space. If we run into bilaterally symmetric bipeds with the frequency of the denizens of the Trek universe, then something about our universe is really wierd.
Even within our own biosphere two rear or lower appendages, two upper or forward appendages, ten fingers, ten toes, a distinct head, two eyes, two nostrils, and a horizontally-opening mouth is not the most common configuration.
By sheer volume of biomass -- or even of species -- six-legged multi-eyed endothermic animals with exoskeletons are much more common than vertibrates with human-like features.
"Now that they have the quantum computer that can crack all all communications, and the quantum disk drives that they use to store every packet ever..."
This is obviously sarcasm.:) While I realize the "X Files" is a favorite show of many Slashdot readers (myself included), as far as I know the existance of an advanced multiple qubit übercomputer capable of cracking every computer code is still only a fiction worthy of a Chris Carter subplot.
According to the most bleeding edge articles I have seen mentioned here, and elsewhere, functional quantum machines are still several years away.:)
And I wonder what a quantum disk drive would look like? Would this be a Schroedinger drive? I think Microsoft has already implemented quantum storage à la Schroedinger. It's called "backup." You write information to tape or CD-R, and you do not know if it's there or not until you look for it (it exists as both states simultaneously until observed.):)
The chipset is called KN133 (basically a mobile KT133), and offers PowerNow support as well as integrated Savage4 graphics, but no DDR-DRAM. DDR-DRAM is offered only by the mobile ALi MaGiK1 chipset, which so far seems to offer underwhelming performance, and has not been included in any of the current release of Athlon 4-powered notebooks.
Slashdot Mirror
In any case, with his skills he was certainly able to do things the kids did not expect, including infiltrating them at their most "secure" locations. He accomplished things that were beyond what they believed were possible.
:)
Where there's a will there's a way.
In addition although the IRC RFC may seem trivial in comparison to other such documents, I'd bet it's one of the last places these kids would have thought to look for information.
I believe Gibson was on his toes, and I suspect his article documenting his work demonstrates a hacker it his finest.
HAHAHAHAHAHA :)
:) Nice of someone to set up a couple hundred bots just for you, wasn't it? :P
/.'d? :)
Um. Yah.
I wonder if floodnets can be
It was brilliant. :)
:) I told them "I can wave my hand and make you go away."
:P
A few years back I had a few kiddiez harrassing me on IRC. They were really "37337."
I did a traceroute to them and noticed a router of some sort sitting right in front of them -- it just looked wierd. I opened a telnet session and found myself at:
zimmylan>
A Cisco ISDN router, with no password set.
They replied "0h y4H, d0 1t."
I rebooted their router.
They thought I was God.
My favorite line was: Before you question Gibson's skill, or his "inside information" (as one poster suggested "he must have had the Windows source code") consider that this man downloaded and learned the RFC for IRC. That might seem alien to someone who relies on the work of others, or reading script FAQ's, but this fellow knows how to make proper use of the tools before him and relies on his own knowledge to craft solutions.
He did not have any help from Microsoft. He knows his tools and he knows his craft. By his own words he's not a magician, he's a scientist.
Be humbled kiddiez, for every dozen of you who "hax0rz" on IRC there's someone like Gibson who actually can hack and run circles around you. Notice that ^boss^ gave this guy respect?
That's very wise.
Ask him/her what kind of chair he recommends, what posture is best, what supports produce the most natual movement, what are the proper placements for keyboard, monitor, mouse, desk, and chair height.
:)
An orthopedic specialist will probably tell you to keep a good posture while working. If you have to arch your neck your monitor is too high. If you have to hunch over, your keyboard is too low.
If you're in your twenties or thirties consider this preventative maintenance to keep yourself from having the posture of Quasimodo thirty years from now. If you have back pain now, this will help more than all the homeopathic herbal feng shui stuff can ever accomplish.
Isn't that a happy thought? Although supposedly according to 60 million year old air samples trapped in amber the amount of carbon in our atmosphere is approximate to that at the time of the dinosaurs. As I recall the theory is that this would mean the approximate level of warmth we could expect would equate to that of the mid Triassic.
... :/
On the other hand, as has been pointed out methane is 250 times better than CO2 at trapping warmth. I wonder if scrubbing large quantities of CO2 from the atmosphere (iron sulphate in the Antarctic oceans) would be able to balance warming, or would the release of all the methane clathrates put us over the top irregardless of CO2 PPM?
What a gamble to make with an entire world
CBS and ABC started using VideoCypher technology (not VC-II, VC-I I think, if memory serves me) to encrypt their direct feeds, but wild feeds from affiliates were too infrequent and the scrambling technology was too expensive to worry about them.
The things I have seen:
-
Sam Donaldson eating a sandwich and swearing at his director during news stories when anchoring a report from Amsterdam.
-
Dan Rather's (rather heroic) struggle to stay on the air from China during the Tiananmen Square uprising.
-
Mary Alice Williams (used to co-anchor on CNN) dancing on her desk during a Christmas party.
-
Live cameras from MTV's Spring Break, and various VJ's in unglamorous moments.
-
What Larry King does during commercials.
The programs that were available were all randomly scheduled, and none of the high dollar advertizing supported big network programs were broadcast using unencrypted C band.-
I used to catch next week's Star Trek episodes on Telstar 1 at 3:00 PM on Sundays.
-
You could watch all of the weekly episodes of a game show, all at once. Anyone for two and a half hours of Wheel of Fortune?
-
Infomercials have always been transmitted in the clear
... Joy.
-
Locker room sports broadcasts could be a riot if the cameras were left live.
NBC went to Ku band to prevent its feeds from being intercepted (so C banders added dual feedhorns to grab signals from Ku birds.)If a studio is transmitting Frasier or Friends in the clear I would have to ask what happened to the networks' glorious encryption technology and covert transmission practices? As they realized twenty years ago, the airwaves are public. Do they need reminded that if they want to keep something private then they had better use encryption?
Yes, the methane is trapped within ice crystals -- it is not itself in ice form. Along the sea floor it is estimated that several hundred years' worth of methane fuel is trapped in clathrates, there is a real tricky question:
How stable are the formations? If our mining practices introduce warmer water into the vicinity of the clathrates we could trigger a gas release, which would dump lots of methane into the atmosphere.
Even if we don't mine them, proponents of global warming believe that even a slight warming of the ocean depths could release large quantities of methane, which would further increase warming.
Because the Canadian clathrates are land-bound it may be possible to extract the gas they contain without causing a catastrophic release, but maybe we should just leave clathrates alone and dump some of the money we would spend on researching their exploitation on creating affordable, efficient solar-powered hydrogen-separation stations, an effective distribution system for liquid hydrogen, and engines that burn hydrogen safely and efficiently?
I realize the technologies for exploiting methane are much more evolved, but to me increasing our reliance on any carbon-based fuel seems short-sighted.
Or charity work for unemployed Russian tech workers ...
If the sequence used by these cards is not completely random then observing the stream of packets from either of the two connected computers will allow one to extrapolate the formula used to sequence the address progress.
If I have the formula I need only a small ordered list of the IP addresses being used and I can predict what the next IP address will be. With that, I am in the loop.
This sounds like a glorified network card to me. This might confuse the kiddiez, but I suspect persons who use this company's products would be much better relying on very strong encryption and rigid security practices.
A week locked in an outhouse in the middle of the Kazakhstan desert. Decisions, decisions.
A Soyuz capsule is basically a three person transportation vehicle with about as much space as your average econobox car, correct? So no flips, no rolls, just a feeling of weightlessness, pooping in diapers, eating Russian MRE's, and not being able to stretch for seven days.
I suspect if they want repeat business the Russians had better shorten the length of the tourist-cosmonauts' journey. The ISS is by no means a five star hotel, but at least you could straighten your legs without kicking your crewmates and you didn't have to take a dump in industrial-strength Depends.
One other comment to mangu though, I noticed you mention similarity of proteins. The prion that causes BSE spreads exactly because the scenario you mention is, unfortunately, not true.
Evolution is lazy. There is an economy of simplicity -- if it works it tends to not change. That's why we and yeast are still remarkably similar on the molecular level.
When you throw a "different" folded protein into the mix you get cross-species diseases like Scrapie and BSE, specifically because most of the proteins used for similar purposes by living organisms are identical. On the molecular level the wheel is seldom reinvented. The hemoglobin used by an earthworm is the virtually the same hemoglobin used by a lemur used by a human used by a parakeet.
This is your metamoderator. This is your metamoderator on drugs. Flamebait??? No ... Mangu's comment is a good comment. Think before you click.
:)
Unless of course the moderation itself was flamebait, in which case the metamoderator succeeded.
You're very right. I am sorry for answering ignorance with misinformation.
I would still like to see failsafes built into GM products released into the environment. Maybe that would quiet its worst critics.
Yes lipids and proteins are natural, but certain proteins do not occur within certain species, so for example a feline rhinovirus with an altered protein coat designed to infect human cells and insert the gene for, say, botilinus toxin would have no natural human defense, because such a thing had never before occured.
The human species did not evolve being infected by feline rhinoviruses, the feline rhinovirus infecting a human is not a natural occurance, and the human organism has no tolerance for large quantities of botulinus toxin being pumped into the body. The human host dies from a supercold against which he or she has no natural defense.
This is what I mean by an unnatural disease.
Remember that the mortality rate among some indigenous American people when confronted by common Old World diseases was also 100%, and these were not "new" diseases to the species.
I agree with fleener. If a disease is a un-natural, it stands to reason that the only defense against it will also be un-natural. There are areas in any genome/proteome that can be targeted that would easily cause 100% mortality in the target species.
Barring the luck of having a completely isolated pocket of population, assuming such a disease is engineered to be easily transmissable I can foresee something being created that has a 100% mortality rate.
Kill the people!
:>
Where is the logic? Hopefully the superweeds are edible, or should everyone starve to placate the ELF?
Re: lifestyle diseases -- yes A.I.D.S. indeed attacks impoverished people, promiscuous people, and IV drug users. If you think it's a disease that somehow judiciously infects deviants, the majority of cases of AIDS worldwide occurs among heterosexuals. Shame on all of them.
Way back when A.I.D.S. was called G.R.I.D. (Gay Related Immune Deficiency) it was obvious that the hemophiliacs and transplant patients who were dying kinda missed out on the G.R. part.
New or crossover organisms thrive when they are able to successfully exploit available niches with no predation or controls. Disease organisms profit from the same mechanism that makes the zebra mussel the scourge of the American Great Lakes, and the American south a big blanket of kudzu.
Maybe kudzu and its effect on native species is something those who promote the release of any GM crop/weed should keep in mind. Perhaps when we engineer a new plant we should also have in the wings an effective control to prevent a designer SuperWheat(tm) from becoming the new American wild grass.
Good thoughts they are. Thank you. :)
Heh.
/. is a diversion for me when I have exhausted all other means of creatively procrastinating.
Thank God I've got a big dick -- God found a way to be kind to me in spite of the shortcomings you noticed. The sad irony is that since I am no longer a member of the gene pool little-dicked individuals like yourself will be the norm. :)
All we need to do is look the way the universe is expanding to realize that something is amiss in our understanding of the forces that interact with gravity.
It's not a major shock to see that we do not have a perfect grasp of our outer solar system. For all of our cleverness the past century we are still a young species, and there are quite a lot of things that we just don't know. Something in the outer solar system has to be disturbing the Oort cloud every once in a while or we would exhausted our supply of new comets a few billion years ago.
Perhaps negative energy somehow interacts with gravity wells to clump matter, like drops of water on an oil slick? Maybe if the politicians ever get their heads out of their rear ends and start investing in further development of space we can scrape together enough money to send a probe to find out what's going on.
We might even learn something in the process.
But at least I can use my real identity and not hide as an AC. :)
As I recall the dictum in the series Roddenberry oversaw, the original Trek, as well as NexGen was "no nonhumanoid regulars". This may have been due to budgetary concerns, but as I recall Roddenberry made this decision so that his viewing audience would not find aliens "too alien." In any case, the regular races are all bilaterally symmetrical bipeds.
Xelatians might be an exception, but we never see them out of their environment suits. The acidic carpet, the Horta from "Devil in the Dark", like the Tholians, was a one-shot. We seldom saw Odo in his non-solid guise, and the Chameloid from the "Undiscovered Country" was remarkably humanoid in every form it took.
My point is that we cannot make the assumption that the Star Trek panoply of aliens is what awaits us in space. If we run into bilaterally symmetric bipeds with the frequency of the denizens of the Trek universe, then something about our universe is really wierd.
Even within our own biosphere two rear or lower appendages, two upper or forward appendages, ten fingers, ten toes, a distinct head, two eyes, two nostrils, and a horizontally-opening mouth is not the most common configuration.
By sheer volume of biomass -- or even of species -- six-legged multi-eyed endothermic animals with exoskeletons are much more common than vertibrates with human-like features.
"Now that they have the quantum computer that can crack all all communications, and the quantum disk drives that they use to store every packet ever ..."
:) While I realize the "X Files" is a favorite show of many Slashdot readers (myself included), as far as I know the existance of an advanced multiple qubit übercomputer capable of cracking every computer code is still only a fiction worthy of a Chris Carter subplot.
:)
:)
This is obviously sarcasm.
According to the most bleeding edge articles I have seen mentioned here, and elsewhere, functional quantum machines are still several years away.
And I wonder what a quantum disk drive would look like? Would this be a Schroedinger drive? I think Microsoft has already implemented quantum storage à la Schroedinger. It's called "backup." You write information to tape or CD-R, and you do not know if it's there or not until you look for it (it exists as both states simultaneously until observed.)
Courtesy of ViaHardware, comes this link: http://www.viatech.com/products/KN133.htm.
The chipset is called KN133 (basically a mobile KT133), and offers PowerNow support as well as integrated Savage4 graphics, but no DDR-DRAM. DDR-DRAM is offered only by the mobile ALi MaGiK1 chipset, which so far seems to offer underwhelming performance, and has not been included in any of the current release of Athlon 4-powered notebooks.