So before you consider yourself immune, be certain you turn off any writable shares on your system.
Other than its behavior of introducing all of a person's contacts to each other (as I recall, it also looks for Eudora contact lists), Klez is relatively harmless. The Chernobyl variant, Elkern, on the network I helped disinfect was the major cause of damage and spread far beyond machines infected with the Klez worm.
Taco, how did you beat out Katz to do a review?
on
Review: Spiderman
·
· Score: 1
Does this bode well for future reviews -- will you do another one?
Has Katz finally been put in his rightful place by assigning him only b-list not-quite-direct-to-video soft-core pr0n teen exploitation flick reviews?
Hey Johnny, want a neat project for science fair? Here's how you trash mom's microwave, make toxic gases, and endanger your reproductive future all in one simple experiment.
This same page was posted a year or so ago. It's neat, it's fun, it has geek-appeal, and it's mildly dangerous in an MTV "Jackass" sort of way.:)
We know that interstellar travel will require tremendous planning, incredible resources, and prodigious amounts of energy. I love the concept of "visiting."
I think even if we knew that Tau Ceti was bustling with humanoid life who drive air cars on platinum roadways and the ladies all look like lavender-colored Pam Andersons, a "visit" to Tau Ceti would be hundreds of years away. "Let's go there" is easy enough to say until you realize that the effort to produce a crew-carrying starship would involve hundreds of launches, creation and support of a large assembly complex in Earth orbit, heavy construction of complex machinery in Earth orbit, trillions of dollars, hundreds of thousands of workers, massive Earthside industrial support, and a level of political, social, and economic unity that doesn't exist anywhere -- all spread over decades.
This is a lot of work to shake hands with the Lavender Andersons.
We're also not likely to be able to justify such an undertaking for trade. We can get there, but getting material back will be quite a proposition when you've got a crew that also needs to return. Every ounce of platinum, every lavender Anderson is less food, less fuel, or even one less astronaut able to return home.
Even if they think that Baywatch is the best thing since sliced !grnrr'zPCH!, why would aliens want to pay us a visit, again?:)
The point is not three-boobed blue slave girls dancing in front of a laughing slug. The point is continuing life, which is probably the most important point of all. A pan-galactic civilization all marching in sync with one another is impossible. Star Wars? Star Trek? Babylon 5? These scenarios are not possible with what we currently know of physics.
Assuming such a seeding takes place, the new worlds will evolve separately. They will be different. Some will succeed and some will fail -- but life will continue. As far as we know, the life here on Earth is all there is. If our science doesn't find more life within a 100 years or so we'd best do everything we can to make certain that life continues somewhere else in spite of cosmic disasters, or one asteroid impact/poorly-timed nova could make the universe a very, very lonely place.
If we want to see our particular brand of intelligence survive we'd probably best send humans along for the ride too, but I think the most important thing is that the potential for intelligent life can survive the death of Earth's sun. Even if all we leave behind are a few warm worlds with mats of bacteria, that's a start.
If current physics holds true and we decide to begin seeding space with human colonies, a million years from now when many worlds have been colonized we will start to meet aliens. They'll look somewhat different than us, have completely different languages and
customs, but they'll be children of various seedings that have been scattered into the stars, and ultimately they will share a common genetic structure.
This story hit the presses just a few days ago regarding the development of working artificial wombs.
In Clarke's book "Songs of a Distant Earth" ships were sent out that contained only zygotes and artificial wombs. There are several advantages:
The ships can be made small (which leaves more room for fuel/supplies).
There's no need to plan for generations of occupation -- with any luck the first generations of animals will be born in robotically-deployed buildings on the surface of their new home.
You're not wasting the current generation of talent by sending them off on missions that won't be completed until after their lives end.
It is considerably easier to build these smaller vessels, so larger quantities of them can be made and sent out relatively quickly.
We'll probably not be facing the kind of time constraint faced by the unfortunate Earthlings in Clarke's book, but the farther we can spread Earth life the less vulnerable it will be to stellar disasters like novae and supernovae. I think a decent future goal would be to have settlements 300 light years apart, with Earth in the middle.
Even without a way to sidestep Einstein, maybe not by 3001 AD but certainly no later than 4001 AD the new millenium will most likely be welcomed on several worlds many light years away from one another.
Before anyone criticizes the patches below for including apps like telnet and IIS, many of the bugs that are cited by Bugtraq in Linux distributions also have nothing to do with the OS itself, and everything to do with installed packages that are included with the distribution.
Q252795 MS01-046: Windows 2000 Does Not Support Mapping Virtual COM Ports to Infrared Ports
Q273854 MS00-077: Denial of Service Can Occur with Microsoft NetMeeting
Q276471 MS00-079: Patch for "HyperTerminal Buffer Overflow" Vulnerability In Windows 2000
Q282806 MS01-031: Telnet Service Prevents an Idle Telnet Session from Timing Out
Q285156 MS01-013: Windows 2000 Event Viewer Contains an Unchecked Buffer
Q285851 MS01-007: Patch Available for Network DDE Agent Request Vulnerability
Q285985 MS01-004: Patch Available for New Variant of File Fragment Reading via.HTR Vulnerability
Q286043 MS01-051: Patch Available for Telnet Logging Vulnerability
Q287397 MS01-011: Patch Available for Malformed Domain Controller Service Request Vulnerability
Q287912 MS01-031: Predictable Named Pipes Could Enable Privilege Elevation with Telnet
Q288855 MS01-026: FTP Service Allows Login to Domain Guest Account
Q289243 MS02-001: Forged SID Could Result in Elevated Privileges in Windows 2000
Q289782 INFO: Post Windows 2000 Service Pack 2 COM+ Rollup Hotfix 8 Is Available
Q292435 MS01-040: Invalid RDP Data Can Cause Memory Leak in Terminal Services
Q293826 MS01-026: Pattern-Matching Function Can Cause Access Violation on FTP Server
Q294370 MS01-026: Updated Patch for Microsoft Security Bulletin MS00-060
Q294379 Addressees Appear in Body of SMTP Message Instead of the Header If You Specify Many Addressees
Q294391 MS01-024: Malformed Request to Domain Controller Can Cause Memory Exhaustion
Q294774 MS01-044: IIS Loads ISAPI Extension In-Process Even When Application Is Marked for High Isolation
Q295534 MS01-026: Superfluous Decoding Operation Can Allow Command Execution Through IIS
Q296185 MS01-025: Patch Available for New Variant of the "Malformed Hit-Highlighting" Vulnerability
Q297860 MS01-044: IIS 5.0 Security and Post-Windows NT 4.0 SP5 IIS 4.0 Patch Rollup
Q298009 Cipher.exe Security Tool for the Encrypting File System
Q298012 MS01-041: Malformed RPC Request Can Cause Service Problems
Q298340 MS01-044: Patch Available for WebDAV Denial of Service
Q299553 MS01-031: Logon Command That Contains a Particular Malformation Causes an Access Violation in the Telnet Service
Q299687 MS01-036: Function Exposed By Using LDAP over SSL Could Enable Passwords to Be Changed
Q299796 MS00-077: Denial-of-Service Attack on Port 1720 May Cause a Memory Leak in Conf.exe
Q300477 MS01-035: FPSE: Potential Buffer Overrun Vulnerability in Visual Studio RAD (Remote Application Deployment)
Q300855 MS01-031: Windows 2000 Telnet Security Rollup
Q300901 MS01-031: Telnet Service Allows Logging On to Domain Guest Account
Q300905 MS01-031: Handle Leak in Telnet Service Causes a Denial-of-Service Vulnerability
Q300908 MS01-031: Program Running with Normal Privileges Can Terminate a Telnet Session
Q300972 MS01-033: Unchecked Buffer in Index Server ISAPI Extension Can Enable Web Server Compromise
Q301625 MS01-044: Patch Available for SSI Privilege Elevation Vulnerability
Q302755 MS01-037: Authentication Error in SMTP Service Could Allow Mail Relaying
Q303984 MS01-043: NNTP Service in Windows 2000 Contains a Memory Leak
Q304867 MS01-044: Patch Available for MIME Header Denial of Service Vulnerability
Q305601 MS01-060: FIX: CRT String Format Functions May Underwrite Buffer
Q306118 FPSE2000: List of Issues Fixed in FrontPage Server Extensions Service Release 1.3
Q306121 MS01-051: Malformed "Dotless" IP Address Can Cause a Web Page to Be Handled in the Intranet Zone
Q307454 MS01-052: Invalid RDP Data Can Cause Terminal Services Failure
Q308268.IDA and.IDQ Mappings Restored After You Install Service Pack or Add/Remove a Windows Component
Q308414 MS01-051: Patch Available for HTTP Request Encoding Vulnerability
Q311355 MS01-041: The Danish Version of Security Hotfix MS01-041 Is Not Installed
Q311371 Terminal Services Sessions Are Disconnected Because of a Decryption Error
Q315404 MS01-052: Clients with an Expired Temporary License May Be Unable to Connect to Terminal Services
"These vulnerability statistics have not been calculated since August due to a site migration issue. We are working on the issue and as soon as it is fixed, this message will disappear. Thank you for your understanding."
Since August we have had these recent problems. The universal plug n play bug was even on/.'s front page. Partial numbers for a year don't tell the whole story.
I subscribe to both bugtraq and ntbugtraq, and I must say the general quality and quantity of ntbugtraq submissions has decreased considerably in the past year. Most bug-related Windows traffic seems to be appearing over on bugtraq. While I certainly admire Russ Cooper's knowledge, I am not certain that his list is any longer a completely accurate source for information regarding Windows-related security issues, and I question any numbers based on ntbugtraq submissions.
Some security issues must be significant enough for Microsoft to release a 17 MB "security rollup package" for Windows 2000 on January 30th, 2002.
I remember a little piece from Dennis Miller's Washington D.C. standup special, regarding in-room hotel pay-per-view, and how when you check out the movies you ordered are itemized on your bill.
"Teenage Tit Freaks -- 9 times."
I note that if the movie requires a mind and/or a non-teen viewer Katz almost always hates it. On the other hand, if it is plotless but has buxom, lithe young starlets then it usually passes his muster. To put it another way, I would trust Katz' taste in porn movies.:)
Basically the DOJ has just rolled over and gone to sleep. The "penalties" are worse than a joke, they actually benefit MS.:/
I am certain that people in Redmond have already begun thumbing through their Manual of Dirty Trick (tm) rubbing their hands in anticipation about the thought of crushing another impudent startup.
Sadly the current Justice Department will probably let it happen. Hey, where are the EU's antitrust investigations? I wonder why we haven't heard anything else about them lately?
... to have catchy theme music, and pretty flash intros? That's how *I* can tell they doing something real in the academic community.:)
If their technology is so earthshatteringly different and revolutionary but can use existing connections, why didn't their site download instantly? If it's only software and they already have a patent one would think the easiest route to gain investors would be a small download and a mindblowing demo away...
So if the packet it sent via tachyons (or sent in an alternate universe) and arrives at the exact moment it is sent, transmission time = 0, therefore the packet has been "compressed losslessly." Cool. I understand.:)
This kind of thing is trivial, unfortunately ...
on
Gift Card Hacking
·
· Score: 1
I knew someone (who has now gone into hiding, imagine that) who used the equipment he had purchased for making "test" DSS cards to alter dollar values of BP gas cards. He could alter any "smart" card with a DSS-like interface, and in this case he wasn't hijacking money, he was actually creating it.
These people are getting the ID numbers from gift cards and re-using them. That's really no different from the old dumpster-diving-for-credit-card-carbons scheme, it just uses a new medium. I suspect if you could figure out how these numbers are generated it would be easy to create a program that spared you the effort of opening up trash bags full of store receipts and old Starbucks coffee cups.
You can't get ahead of the bad guys, you can only hope to keep up with them. The thing is, if you're not constantly working to keep up with them, you've already fallen behind.
Get a good 19" or 21" monitor. Get the RCA DSS/HDTV tuner (lists at USD $699.00, but you can find it cheaper.) Get a video switch that can handle SVGA.
Enjoy your nice new monitor when using your PC, flip a switch and watch HDTV 1080i or 1080p on the monitor. It all costs less than a thousand dollars.
I agree, this is some of the best hard sci-fi ever written. On an aside do you know what happened to Fox's purchase of the film rights of the trilogy? I had heard it was being adapted as a miniseries for TV, and then the buzz died down and I haven't heard anything else about the project.
... of current launch systems. Do we want and can we really afford to build redundant anchors, redundant cable spinners, etc.?
We cannot even guarantee that a shuttle, or an Arianne, or an Energia will launch on a given date, or even that once it launches its payload will arrive at its intended destination. We have the technology to boost this kind of mass to orbit, but I suspect we do not have the reliability to construct this as inexpensively as the PDF's author supposes.
With the risks entailed by a catastrophic failure of this cable I certainly want a spacecraft more reliable than anything we have sitting on launchpads today to maintain this beast. I want a better answer than "duck" if Dan Rather cuts into my evening TV to announce the cable has been cut by terrorists.
I am afraid that if NASA were to bite on this idea (today) it would be one more megaproject fraught with massive cost overruns.
I suppose you will want to be the one to be under the cable when it snaps and whips around the world 4 times releasing hydrogen bomb amounts of kinetic energy?
On top of the Galapagos Islands, to boot. Not very eco-friendly.:)
Slashdot Mirror
So before you consider yourself immune, be certain you turn off any writable shares on your system.
Other than its behavior of introducing all of a person's contacts to each other (as I recall, it also looks for Eudora contact lists), Klez is relatively harmless. The Chernobyl variant, Elkern, on the network I helped disinfect was the major cause of damage and spread far beyond machines infected with the Klez worm.
Does this bode well for future reviews -- will you do another one?
Has Katz finally been put in his rightful place by assigning him only b-list not-quite-direct-to-video soft-core pr0n teen exploitation flick reviews?
The man who called Not Another Teen Movie "a delicious bit of film criticism, hilarious, outrageous and on target" criticizes a film for plot. :)
Hey Johnny, want a neat project for science fair? Here's how you trash mom's microwave, make toxic gases, and endanger your reproductive future all in one simple experiment.
:)
This same page was posted a year or so ago. It's neat, it's fun, it has geek-appeal, and it's mildly dangerous in an MTV "Jackass" sort of way.
I agree with your previous comment, btw.
:)
We know that interstellar travel will require tremendous planning, incredible resources, and prodigious amounts of energy. I love the concept of "visiting."
I think even if we knew that Tau Ceti was bustling with humanoid life who drive air cars on platinum roadways and the ladies all look like lavender-colored Pam Andersons, a "visit" to Tau Ceti would be hundreds of years away. "Let's go there" is easy enough to say until you realize that the effort to produce a crew-carrying starship would involve hundreds of launches, creation and support of a large assembly complex in Earth orbit, heavy construction of complex machinery in Earth orbit, trillions of dollars, hundreds of thousands of workers, massive Earthside industrial support, and a level of political, social, and economic unity that doesn't exist anywhere -- all spread over decades.
This is a lot of work to shake hands with the Lavender Andersons.
We're also not likely to be able to justify such an undertaking for trade. We can get there, but getting material back will be quite a proposition when you've got a crew that also needs to return. Every ounce of platinum, every lavender Anderson is less food, less fuel, or even one less astronaut able to return home.
Even if they think that Baywatch is the best thing since sliced !grnrr'zPCH!, why would aliens want to pay us a visit, again?
The point is not three-boobed blue slave girls dancing in front of a laughing slug. The point is continuing life, which is probably the most important point of all. A pan-galactic civilization all marching in sync with one another is impossible. Star Wars? Star Trek? Babylon 5? These scenarios are not possible with what we currently know of physics.
Assuming such a seeding takes place, the new worlds will evolve separately. They will be different. Some will succeed and some will fail -- but life will continue. As far as we know, the life here on Earth is all there is. If our science doesn't find more life within a 100 years or so we'd best do everything we can to make certain that life continues somewhere else in spite of cosmic disasters, or one asteroid impact/poorly-timed nova could make the universe a very, very lonely place.
If we want to see our particular brand of intelligence survive we'd probably best send humans along for the ride too, but I think the most important thing is that the potential for intelligent life can survive the death of Earth's sun. Even if all we leave behind are a few warm worlds with mats of bacteria, that's a start.
If current physics holds true and we decide to begin seeding space with human colonies, a million years from now when many worlds have been colonized we will start to meet aliens. They'll look somewhat different than us, have completely different languages and
customs, but they'll be children of various seedings that have been scattered into the stars, and ultimately they will share a common genetic structure.
In Clarke's book "Songs of a Distant Earth" ships were sent out that contained only zygotes and artificial wombs. There are several advantages:
We'll probably not be facing the kind of time constraint faced by the unfortunate Earthlings in Clarke's book, but the farther we can spread Earth life the less vulnerable it will be to stellar disasters like novae and supernovae. I think a decent future goal would be to have settlements 300 light years apart, with Earth in the middle.
Even without a way to sidestep Einstein, maybe not by 3001 AD but certainly no later than 4001 AD the new millenium will most likely be welcomed on several worlds many light years away from one another.
Unless something gets us beforehand.
On an aside, the voice just changed for me to some synthetic woman. Is Ananova moonlighting?
For those who are curious I listed the information below from Microsoft's own site. You'll note that Windows 2000 alone had considerably more than one bug that required a patch.
.HTR Vulnerability
.IDA and .IDQ Mappings Restored After You Install Service Pack or Add/Remove a Windows Component
Before anyone criticizes the patches below for including apps like telnet and IIS, many of the bugs that are cited by Bugtraq in Linux distributions also have nothing to do with the OS itself, and everything to do with installed packages that are included with the distribution.
Q252795 MS01-046: Windows 2000 Does Not Support Mapping Virtual COM Ports to Infrared Ports
Q273854 MS00-077: Denial of Service Can Occur with Microsoft NetMeeting
Q276471 MS00-079: Patch for "HyperTerminal Buffer Overflow" Vulnerability In Windows 2000
Q282806 MS01-031: Telnet Service Prevents an Idle Telnet Session from Timing Out
Q285156 MS01-013: Windows 2000 Event Viewer Contains an Unchecked Buffer
Q285851 MS01-007: Patch Available for Network DDE Agent Request Vulnerability
Q285985 MS01-004: Patch Available for New Variant of File Fragment Reading via
Q286043 MS01-051: Patch Available for Telnet Logging Vulnerability
Q287397 MS01-011: Patch Available for Malformed Domain Controller Service Request Vulnerability
Q287912 MS01-031: Predictable Named Pipes Could Enable Privilege Elevation with Telnet
Q288855 MS01-026: FTP Service Allows Login to Domain Guest Account
Q289243 MS02-001: Forged SID Could Result in Elevated Privileges in Windows 2000
Q289782 INFO: Post Windows 2000 Service Pack 2 COM+ Rollup Hotfix 8 Is Available
Q292435 MS01-040: Invalid RDP Data Can Cause Memory Leak in Terminal Services
Q293826 MS01-026: Pattern-Matching Function Can Cause Access Violation on FTP Server
Q294370 MS01-026: Updated Patch for Microsoft Security Bulletin MS00-060
Q294379 Addressees Appear in Body of SMTP Message Instead of the Header If You Specify Many Addressees
Q294391 MS01-024: Malformed Request to Domain Controller Can Cause Memory Exhaustion
Q294774 MS01-044: IIS Loads ISAPI Extension In-Process Even When Application Is Marked for High Isolation
Q295534 MS01-026: Superfluous Decoding Operation Can Allow Command Execution Through IIS
Q296185 MS01-025: Patch Available for New Variant of the "Malformed Hit-Highlighting" Vulnerability
Q297860 MS01-044: IIS 5.0 Security and Post-Windows NT 4.0 SP5 IIS 4.0 Patch Rollup
Q298009 Cipher.exe Security Tool for the Encrypting File System
Q298012 MS01-041: Malformed RPC Request Can Cause Service Problems
Q298340 MS01-044: Patch Available for WebDAV Denial of Service
Q299553 MS01-031: Logon Command That Contains a Particular Malformation Causes an Access Violation in the Telnet Service
Q299687 MS01-036: Function Exposed By Using LDAP over SSL Could Enable Passwords to Be Changed
Q299796 MS00-077: Denial-of-Service Attack on Port 1720 May Cause a Memory Leak in Conf.exe
Q300477 MS01-035: FPSE: Potential Buffer Overrun Vulnerability in Visual Studio RAD (Remote Application Deployment)
Q300855 MS01-031: Windows 2000 Telnet Security Rollup
Q300901 MS01-031: Telnet Service Allows Logging On to Domain Guest Account
Q300905 MS01-031: Handle Leak in Telnet Service Causes a Denial-of-Service Vulnerability
Q300908 MS01-031: Program Running with Normal Privileges Can Terminate a Telnet Session
Q300972 MS01-033: Unchecked Buffer in Index Server ISAPI Extension Can Enable Web Server Compromise
Q301625 MS01-044: Patch Available for SSI Privilege Elevation Vulnerability
Q302755 MS01-037: Authentication Error in SMTP Service Could Allow Mail Relaying
Q303984 MS01-043: NNTP Service in Windows 2000 Contains a Memory Leak
Q304867 MS01-044: Patch Available for MIME Header Denial of Service Vulnerability
Q305601 MS01-060: FIX: CRT String Format Functions May Underwrite Buffer
Q306118 FPSE2000: List of Issues Fixed in FrontPage Server Extensions Service Release 1.3
Q306121 MS01-051: Malformed "Dotless" IP Address Can Cause a Web Page to Be Handled in the Intranet Zone
Q307454 MS01-052: Invalid RDP Data Can Cause Terminal Services Failure
Q308268
Q308414 MS01-051: Patch Available for HTTP Request Encoding Vulnerability
Q311355 MS01-041: The Danish Version of Security Hotfix MS01-041 Is Not Installed
Q311371 Terminal Services Sessions Are Disconnected Because of a Decryption Error
Q315404 MS01-052: Clients with an Expired Temporary License May Be Unable to Connect to Terminal Services
-1 offtopic. Beware of criticizing the critics? :)
Yeppers. %) They'd be disappointed, but in rereading that comment, well ... Thanks for the laugh. :)
I remember a little piece from Dennis Miller's Washington D.C. standup special, regarding in-room hotel pay-per-view, and how when you check out the movies you ordered are itemized on your bill.
:)
"Teenage Tit Freaks -- 9 times."
I note that if the movie requires a mind and/or a non-teen viewer Katz almost always hates it. On the other hand, if it is plotless but has buxom, lithe young starlets then it usually passes his muster. To put it another way, I would trust Katz' taste in porn movies.
Basically the DOJ has just rolled over and gone to sleep. The "penalties" are worse than a joke, they actually benefit MS. :/
I am certain that people in Redmond have already begun thumbing through their Manual of Dirty Trick (tm) rubbing their hands in anticipation about the thought of crushing another impudent startup.
Sadly the current Justice Department will probably let it happen. Hey, where are the EU's antitrust investigations? I wonder why we haven't heard anything else about them lately?
.. the next version of Office won't run on it.
... to have catchy theme music, and pretty flash intros? That's how *I* can tell they doing something real in the academic community. :)
...
If their technology is so earthshatteringly different and revolutionary but can use existing connections, why didn't their site download instantly? If it's only software and they already have a patent one would think the easiest route to gain investors would be a small download and a mindblowing demo away
So if the packet it sent via tachyons (or sent in an alternate universe) and arrives at the exact moment it is sent, transmission time = 0, therefore the packet has been "compressed losslessly." Cool. I understand. :)
Look at the second and third generation space telescopes from the "Origins" program.
I knew someone (who has now gone into hiding, imagine that) who used the equipment he had purchased for making "test" DSS cards to alter dollar values of BP gas cards. He could alter any "smart" card with a DSS-like interface, and in this case he wasn't hijacking money, he was actually creating it.
These people are getting the ID numbers from gift cards and re-using them. That's really no different from the old dumpster-diving-for-credit-card-carbons scheme, it just uses a new medium. I suspect if you could figure out how these numbers are generated it would be easy to create a program that spared you the effort of opening up trash bags full of store receipts and old Starbucks coffee cups.
You can't get ahead of the bad guys, you can only hope to keep up with them. The thing is, if you're not constantly working to keep up with them, you've already fallen behind.
I want to come over and watch TV at your place. I'd wager your place is pretty popular all of the sudden. :)
As I recall Enterprise is shot in HD. As far as I know it is not broadcast here in the US as an HD signal.
Get a good 19" or 21" monitor. Get the RCA DSS/HDTV tuner (lists at USD $699.00, but you can find it cheaper.) Get a video switch that can handle SVGA.
Enjoy your nice new monitor when using your PC, flip a switch and watch HDTV 1080i or 1080p on the monitor. It all costs less than a thousand dollars.
I agree, this is some of the best hard sci-fi ever written. On an aside do you know what happened to Fox's purchase of the film rights of the trilogy? I had heard it was being adapted as a miniseries for TV, and then the buzz died down and I haven't heard anything else about the project.
... of current launch systems. Do we want and can we really afford to build redundant anchors, redundant cable spinners, etc.?
We cannot even guarantee that a shuttle, or an Arianne, or an Energia will launch on a given date, or even that once it launches its payload will arrive at its intended destination. We have the technology to boost this kind of mass to orbit, but I suspect we do not have the reliability to construct this as inexpensively as the PDF's author supposes.
With the risks entailed by a catastrophic failure of this cable I certainly want a spacecraft more reliable than anything we have sitting on launchpads today to maintain this beast. I want a better answer than "duck" if Dan Rather cuts into my evening TV to announce the cable has been cut by terrorists.
I am afraid that if NASA were to bite on this idea (today) it would be one more megaproject fraught with massive cost overruns.
I suppose you will want to be the one to be under the cable when it snaps and whips around the world 4 times releasing hydrogen bomb amounts of kinetic energy?
:)
On top of the Galapagos Islands, to boot. Not very eco-friendly.