The question that comes out of this, though, is why is the anger directed at the US, rather than at the local government that is doing the repressing? Are the local governments being seen as sock-puppets for the US as the US drains the middle east of oil?
Think about it. You've been raised from the time you were a baby to believe that your people have the blessing of a magical sky-daddy, and that all those who do not believe as you are heathens whom He shuns and abhors. Yet when you turn on your 29" CRT television (the talk of the town!), you see heathens overseas living it up in comfort and style, while doing less work in a year than you do in a month. How do you explain that?
Well, either your religion is wrong when they tell you that a strong belief in Allah is all you need to succeed.... or those evil Foreign PigDogs are stealing all the money from your nation in order to keep you poor.
Which one of those explanations do you think would be more palatable to your average fundamentalist?
Of course, the existence of organizations in the west which make essentially the same claims only adds fuel to the fire, but the inherent attractiveness of conspiracy-theories would guarantee similar results anyway.
It doesn't have to be religious views - political views work almost as well. Look at the track record of communism and you'll see a similar pattern. Or look at Nazism/Aryanism. The key is that you need an irrational belief system based on dogma views which your followers are constantly subjected to and are never allowed to question. Other than that, you can replace $DEITY with "the greater good", or "racial purity", or "moral righteousness", and get people worked up to the same level of fanaticism.
The only reason religion is worse is because we tend to give it a free pass. If you voice radical Nazi views, people will call you an idiot and society will shun you. If you voice radical Christian or Islamic views, people turn a blind eye, or even defend you and praise your "strong convictions". It'd be nice if we could start treating religions the way we do any other political ideology, and stop giving them tax-free status as well as automatically granting them the moral high-ground.
Individuals like bin Laden and the Nigerian who attempted to bomb a Delta airlines plane on Christmas day are actually the exception, being from well off families, while most of those involved in terrorist acts come from poor backgrounds.
Really? You've got some figures to back up that assertion, right? Because, IIRC, ALL of the 9/11 terrorists were well educated "worldly" men from well-off families. This myth of terrorists as dirt-poor sand-farmers from some remote corner of Buttfuckistan seems to have been made up out of thin air.
The first thing you should know, oh brave Armchair Warrior, is that no good battle plan survives contact with the enemy. Yeah, you can come up with plans that are FAR more whatever-the-fuck, but when you go to put them into play you'll probably end up looking like even more of a goof than the UndieBomber. Despite what Hollywood may have lead you to believe, the real world has a tendency to be somewhat unpredictable. As for the marital-law bit, that's almost as silly as all the horror stories people were making up about the patriot act.
Well then you shouldn't have a problem linking to it, right?
.... HUH??
A link to... ???? What? YOUR ENTIRE FUCKING ARGUMENT???
Sure, here's your link. I hope you find it highly informative. In the meantime, if you have any idea what you're talking about you should have no problem providing a purple monkey dishwasher, right?
Well?
Oh you can't.
Is it because you don't know how to think?
Is that it?
Do you want me to tell you how to do that? I can.
So you are saying that I do not control the routing in a honey net? Is that it?
No, I'm saying that you're a complete twit, and that I'm done wasting my time. A fucking chimpanzee would have understood this by now, and would have left less shit on the walls. I can cure your ignorance, but not as long as your narcissism is in the way. Seek help.
“We should come up with a name for when someone claims that just because someone is religious they’re comparable to the fanatical idiots who fly planes into buildings on a whim.
We have a name for that - it's called "a comparison".
This thread is sufficient.
You just love handing me more ammo, don't you? Is it your religious background which prevents you from understanding what constitutes good and bad evidence, or is your religiosity just the result of an abnormally low IQ? That's the REAL question. I tend to think that it's a mixture of the two - stupid people are more attracted to the easy "answers" of religion, while the blind acceptance of dogma tends to make people more stupid and closed-minded. It's reminiscent of Ouroboros.
"rejecting data either because of how it's presented or because of how it makes you feel is exactly what leads humans to make idiotic decisions like flying airliners into office buildings because they think their magical sky friend wants them to"
Like. Such as. Comparable. Akin to. Including, but not limited to. Analogous.
Clear as mud?
And apparently being nonreligious means you’re an asshole. Or maybe that only applies to you.
Well, we've already established that you're also an asshole, so your conclusion is baseless. You'd have to show, at the very least, a higher incidence of assholish behavior amongst rational people than amongst the faith-heads.
On the other hand I can safely support my own argument by asking you to present a case where an atheist has flown an aircraft into a building while yelling "LONG LIVE NO-GODS!!!".
In the first place, when contact is initiated by an opposing force, it tends to be at a time and place of their choosing.
It's a lot more complicated than that. What kind of enemy? Who's on the offensive? What's the force distribution? Etc, etc. These days if we're fighting an actual battle, it's rarely because the other guy chose to fight us. They prefer to blow something up and then run away.
This is why when a patrol in Iraq or Afghanistan gets hit by an IED or small arms fire, rather than stopping and waiting for the insurgents' plan to fully execute where and when they want it, the patrol hits the gas to get out of whatever trap may be there.
You're talking about reacting to an ambush, which is completely different than fighting a deliberate attack.
This isn't WWI. Unless you're in a really, really important/secure position, you'll move when conditions dictate it.
You're right, this isn't WW1. In WW1, they moved. Then they promptly got mowed down by machinegun fire, and the survivors learned that it's a bad idea to move.
As I said earlier, it's more complicated than that. Give me a couple days and I can give you a fairly thorough understanding of modern combat tactics. Otherwise, a few good rules of thumb are don't bunch up, don't move without first suppressing the enemy, make VERY short movements, keep aware of everyone elses arks of fire, and if you're in a kill-zone shoot everywhere and get the fuck out.
Strawman. You clearly don't have the balls for something like that, so why would I accuse you of it?
No - being religious means you'll be influenced into believing and doing stupid things, but becoming a pilot isn't necessarily amongst them. You're much more likely to just harm yourself and your family.
No where did I say that. Feel free to re-read and post a link if you can find that.
Your entire argument depends on it, jackass. Without the ability to connect to the botnet, you cannot distribute new IP's to it. At this point it's clear that you don't even know WHAT you're arguing for.
Yep! You might also want to add "honey net" to the list of your failures. That is one of the properties of it.
I don't think that phrase means what you think it means.
You were the one suggesting that scanning 100K IP addresses was viable.
"You might want to add 'reading with comprehension' to the list of things you've failed"
Ah yes. Ok, all my insults were really jokes also, and not even directed at you. Feel better now?
And survival of the fittest was Hitler’s excuse for genocide.
Well you've fulfilled Godwin so the conversation ends, but I should point out that Hitler never mentioned either Darwin nor natural selection, though he did write in Mein Kampf about the jews:
Their very existence is an incarnate denial of the beauty of God's image in His creation.
as well as:
And the Founder of Christianity made no secret indeed of His estimation of the Jewish people. When He found it necessary He drove those enemies of the human race out of the Temple of God; because then, as always, they used religion as a means of advancing their commercial interests. But at that time Christ was nailed to the Cross for his attitude towards the Jews; whereas our modern Christians enter into party politics and when elections are being held they debase themselves to beg for Jewish votes. They even enter into political intrigues with the atheistic Jewish parties against the interests of their own Christian nation.
But I'm sure you'll find a convenient way to dismiss that, too. Religion is all about dismissing inconvenient facts, after all.
What CS did was encourage everybody to camp. It just didn't make sense to move anywhere because you'd be one hit killed by some AWP-wielding camping lamer who would win by being the guy that moved the least.
Yep, you just described real-life combat. You come under contact, you camp out, you call in support. Pound the position until they're either dead or hiding at the bottom of their holes, and then you walk over and clean up what's left. When your life is actually on the line, you don't go bouncing all over the field trying to rack up kills - you keep yourself alive by doing everything possible to make sure the other guy never gets a shot at you.
You're right, it wouldn't make for a very enjoyable game.
"I never said that. It’s a straw man. Did you have fun building it and knocking it down?"
"I’m sorry... you’re complaining about Christians “re-writing history” while defending a belief system whose adherents came along in the mid-1800s and re-wrote history? Are you serious???"
"The invasions of the native American tribes were not without their wrongdoings, but the native tribes were hardly the one-with-nature peace-loving people they’re made out to be"
Really, though, I don't mind that you're an asshole and you go out of your way to insult people. What I mind is that you've constructed a whole different reality for yourself, and won't let any facts get in your way. I've shown you that your conspiracy theory is so much rubbish, and you've chosen to reject the argument because it offends your delicate sensibilities. That's pathetic. I don't give a damn if you're insulted - rejecting data either because of how it's presented or because of how it makes you feel is exactly what leads humans to make idiotic decisions like flying airliners into office buildings because they think their magical sky friend wants them to.
This is idiotic. You've concocted a scenario where:
1. You know exactly which machines are infected. 2. You're able to reverse-engineer the code in order to obtain the required commands and passwords. 3. You're able to isolate the infected machines and feed them whatever data you want. 4. You're able to rotate IP's any time you feel like it, without having to worry about disrupting the service to all of your clients.
In other words, you've taken my earlier offer at face value and literally given your bot-hunters godlike powers. In such a scenario, you're absolutely right - the botnet would have no chance (even if you are completely wrong about WHY). Unfortunately, real life doesn't work that way. Since you clearly don't have an inkling about the issues involved here (or a basic understanding of math and statistics, apparently), and are unwilling to listen, I think we're done.
You lost. If you cannot admit that, that's fine. Right now all you are doing is demonstrating how badly you've lost.
This isn't a competition. I'm giving you information based on work I've done. You can take it as a learning experience, or you can get offended and ignore what I'm telling you - it's your call.
Why wouldn't they be active? They're in a honey net. The machine communicating with the external zombies has already validated them.
You have 2.5 billion virtual machines in your honey net? Boy, you must have access to a hell of a lot more resources than I do!
Anyway, you specifically said you wanted to feed the bots "fake addresses" which, by definition, wouldn't be active. Now, if you want to change your plan that's fine, just don't pretend that you meant something else all along.
So in your mind, having all the zombies validate all of the IP address before accepting them is rational?
Yes.
They'd die just from the traffic of 250,000 connection attempts each.
First, they wouldn't have 250,000 addresses to validate. When you sign on to the Limewire network, your computer doesn't cache 3+ million addresses. If I were designing the botnet, I'd put the limit at maybe 10k, and tweak it as required. If I really wanted extra redundancy I might cache 100k, but only have 10k verified at any given time. Second, validation only needs to occur once in a while, and can be done with just a few packets. Lastly, nobody would design a client to make 10,000 connection attempts simultaneously, so your flood scenario is just silly.
After 4 IP address rotations, they'd EACH be validating a MILLION address.
No, they'd simply drop addresses at the end of the list in favor of new ones which actually work. This isn't rocket science. File sharing clients do the same thing - non-responding addresses get dropped in favor of ones which work.
And with a simple filter at the ISP level, they'd UNLEARN the 2,500 address you claimed would re-start the zombies after the IP swaps.
Sure, if you know which addresses to filter. The same technique could theoretically be used to stop spammers TODAY, but, for some strange reason, nobody seems to have been able to pull it off. Maybe you could go to one of the bigger ISP's and offer them your expertise.
No, I just know how to think, and I don't have your strange emotional attachment to this issue. If you would actually stop for a minute and think about the claims you're making, you yourself could probably come up with ways to get around the supposed problems. Even a script kiddie should have more familiarity with this stuff than you're presently exhibiting.
Of course, if you've never done any communication-oriented programming/scripting, I can understand your confusion. If that's the case, just say so, and I'll be more than happy to answer any questions you may have.
Which makes it even easier because then all you need is a honey net and some virtual machines to be continually "re-infected" and load that file with over a billion fake IP addresses. Or 2 billion.
So, in addition to never having heard of IP lists, and not understanding statistics... you've also never heard of encryption?
Hell, while you're at it, why not just give your botnet-hunters godlike powers, and have them Miracle the botnet out of existence?
Even ignoring the possibility of encrypted communications channels, it's childs-play to code in a simple function which checks all new IP's as they're added and rejects or sets a lower priority on ones which aren't active. Sorting IP's by "last seen" status is the first thing I did back when I was experimenting with making a P2P app. Putting in a limit on how many commands can be received from each connected peer would also be a common-sense measure that any programmer with half a brain would automatically add.
Really, though, it's the encryption which makes or breaks any botnet. I've taken down small botnets in the past; I've only been able to do that with ones that use crappy encryption or no encryption at all. If you're going to assume that we're able to break the encryption on this hypothetical botnet, then the type of communication it employs becomes irrelevant, and all your fancy plans to disrupt it's communication methods become pointless.
Your claim about 2,500 addresses is simply centralized C&C under a different name. And it is defeated in the exact same way.
That's retarded. You may as well claim that the eD2k network is just an FTP server under a different name. You seem to have no concept of how p2p works.
Given that the majority of zombies are on home ISP networks (such as Comcast), all that would take to defeat would be for Comcast and other to rotate the IP addresses by 1 whenever the zombie traffic becomes problematic.
Yuhuh. So since most guns are owned by law-abiding citizens, all it would take to stop murder-by-shooting is to make it illegal, right?
I'm not trying to be a smartass... actually, yeah, I am, but seriously... even if 99% of bots were on Comcast, and even if you could rotate all 99% of addresses all at once... that still leaves 2,500 bots out there whose addresses will remain the same. The botnet could restructure itself in a matter of hours.
What if they got into an accident and wrecked your car on the way to your house? The risk is that any bot removal might have side effects.
That's a legal issue, not an ethical one. If someone t-bones me at an intersection tomorrow I won't think of them as an evil person, but I will hold them legally accountable.
bad science! There is a reason it is extinct and once this has happened nature will not be reversed. Whatever they come up with, will not be the original species. It is gone forever.
Let's use this botnet as an example. 250,000 zombies. What is the likelihood of finding another zombie with random scanning?
Yah, I know! Although we're really going to be in trouble if someone figures out a way to store IP addresses in some sort of file. Why, if that were to happen, they might even be able to pass the IP lists from one computer to another! I hope that nobody ever comes up with something like that....
Legal implications aside, this is an interesting ethics question. Is it more ethical to interfere with another's property, without permission, to solve a larger problem, or is it more ethical to respect private property and privacy? Surely there are cases for both.
I don't really see an ethical issue. If someone stole your car, would you be upset if an anonymous stranger stole it back without your permission and delivered it to your door? Maybe some people would, but they have to be insanely rare. The only issue here is the legal one, and it's not one that can be easily resolved.
Which makes me all the more surprised that no one has tried.
It's been done on a smaller scale. Back when botnets were still mostly communicating via IRC, I took down a few myself. The difference it that I didn't document the process and then blab about it to the media in order to advertise my security products/services.
Then what the hell does a claim about science have to do with rewriting history either?
I hope that's not a serious question.
How exactly do you study, say, Babylonian history, if you believe that the world was created right around the time that they invented Beer?
The Crusades were a response to Muslim aggression.
Irrelevant. The Christians DID start the crusades, which was your original statement. They had to, by definition.
Even if you had originally phrased your argument in a more coherent manner, you'd still be wrong. No serious scholar has ever argued that Muslim provocation didn't play a role in starting the wars. Even wikipedia talks about it. So your world-wide-anti-christian-conspiracy doesn't even seem capable of influencing a few historians, or editing an open encyclopedia.
The invasions of the native American tribes were.. blah blah blah
Again, irrelevant. You suggested that the very idea of "white christians" massacring native populations was a re-writing of history. Now you're making a completely different argument. Not only are you moving the goalposts, but you seem to be presenting the morally repugnant notion that the Natives somehow "had it coming". If that's not the case then please clarify. What exactly do the attitudes and behaviors of the Native populations have to do with whether or not they were massacred?
And Iraq... well, it cost us a fortune, and we didn’t steal any of their oil.
Again, irrelevant. Your statement was that "Bush was a white Christian who invaded Iraq to steal its oil". Three of the four claims in that statement are accurate. The forth is poorly worded and misleading, but it does speak to the fact that Iraq's oil reserves are a big factor in why the US (and the rest of the world) is interested in it.
You never hear anyone criticizing the Muslims for their part in the Crusades.
If that were true, it would be a compliment to your religion. It would mean that people expect Christians to act better than Muslims.
It's not true, though. I've heard plenty of people criticize the Muslims for their part in the crusades, you being the most recent. We do generally expect Christianity to act in a more civilized manner, though, so you can take some solace in the fact that we view your superstition as being somewhat better than that of the the fanatics who killed 3,000 Americans in 2001.
I was partly kidding. Correlation doesn’t imply causation... but all of the examples were illustrations of people trying to re-write history, and in all of them the persons being demonized were primarily white Christians.
You've failed to support your argument, so you don't get to just re-assert your premise. None of the three are examples of rewriting history. None of them are examples of the "demonization of Chrsitians" - your attempts to reword your arguments notwithstanding. Either provide some evidence of this world-wide conspiracy which only you and your fellow faith-fanatics can see, or go away.
Also, stop with the asinine "repeater game". You're presumably above the age of majority - it's time you started acting like an adult.
I’m not complaining about people re-writing history. If so I’d be outraged over those heretics who claimed the earth was round, or the quacks who purported to believe that disease was caused by invisible living creatures.
Neither of those were claims about history. One was a claim about geology and/or astronomy, and the other about medicine.
I’m complaining about people re-writing history when it’s correct, making it instead falsely demonize a certain group of people.
You mean "correct" as defined by you? "Correct" as defined by a literal reading of the Bible? "Correct" as determined by people with your own ideological bias? Which of those were you referring to?
That fact isn’t invalidated by anything that Christians may believe, either truly or falsely.
What fact?
The only valid thing you've said (or, more accurately, attempted to say) is that the many idiotic, despotic, fraudulent, and generally evil acts committed in the name of Christianity do not technically invalidate criticisms made by Christians. To use an analogy, were Hitler to call Mao an evil tyrant, he would be quite correct. The fact that he would also be a hypocrite is irrelevant.
On the other hand, you happen to be both wrong and a hypocrite. My original comment was intended as a joke, albeit one which was also a valid criticism. If you want a more detailed refutation of your claims, here it is:
1. None of the examples you gave were cases of history being rewritten. All of them were either closely representative of the truth, or completely accurate. 2. None of examples given show the demonization of Christianity.
Ergo, you've completely failed to make a cogent argument. You've essentially used Slashdot as your pulpit in order to rant about some global conspiracy to "demonize Christians" which seems to have been created entirely out of your own personal delusions. You've got your panties in a bunch because a small percentage of people dare to question your irrational beliefs, so you're making yourself out to be the besieged victim, bravely standing up to the hordes of Heretics by spreading the truth and challenging their lies. This is the typical behavior exhibited by most conspiracy theorists, but seems to be especially prevalent amongst the Christian and Muslim religions due to the martyrdom complex which they encourage.
Lastly, the behavior of individuals such as yourself makes it completely unnecessary for anyone to "demonize" Christianity; the great thing about most religions is that the degree of religiosity of adherents tends to be directly proportional to how fanatical and out of touch with reality they are. Being able to look at the evils committed throughout history by various religious organizations is nice, but is completely unnecessary when we can look at some of the beliefs and behaviors which are exhibited today by believers in $DEITY. Even a fair-minded examination of modern-day Christianity would lead any rational individual to conclude that the mindless devotion to iron-age dogmas and superstitions is a silly eccentricity at best, and tends to be harmful and regressive in many cases. I got a rather bittersweet sort of amusement out of observing that the highest compliment and the most damning criticism of Christianity can both be summed up in the same phrase: "It's better now than it ever was before".
Also, I still maintain that people who underestimate the age of the earth by almost 6 orders of magnitude have no business complaining about historical revisionism. At the very least, they shouldn't expect to be taken seriously.
Slashdot Mirror
The question that comes out of this, though, is why is the anger directed at the US, rather than at the local government that is doing the repressing? Are the local governments being seen as sock-puppets for the US as the US drains the middle east of oil?
Think about it. You've been raised from the time you were a baby to believe that your people have the blessing of a magical sky-daddy, and that all those who do not believe as you are heathens whom He shuns and abhors. Yet when you turn on your 29" CRT television (the talk of the town!), you see heathens overseas living it up in comfort and style, while doing less work in a year than you do in a month. How do you explain that?
Well, either your religion is wrong when they tell you that a strong belief in Allah is all you need to succeed.... or those evil Foreign PigDogs are stealing all the money from your nation in order to keep you poor.
Which one of those explanations do you think would be more palatable to your average fundamentalist?
Of course, the existence of organizations in the west which make essentially the same claims only adds fuel to the fire, but the inherent attractiveness of conspiracy-theories would guarantee similar results anyway.
It doesn't have to be religious views - political views work almost as well. Look at the track record of communism and you'll see a similar pattern. Or look at Nazism/Aryanism. The key is that you need an irrational belief system based on dogma views which your followers are constantly subjected to and are never allowed to question. Other than that, you can replace $DEITY with "the greater good", or "racial purity", or "moral righteousness", and get people worked up to the same level of fanaticism.
The only reason religion is worse is because we tend to give it a free pass. If you voice radical Nazi views, people will call you an idiot and society will shun you. If you voice radical Christian or Islamic views, people turn a blind eye, or even defend you and praise your "strong convictions". It'd be nice if we could start treating religions the way we do any other political ideology, and stop giving them tax-free status as well as automatically granting them the moral high-ground.
Individuals like bin Laden and the Nigerian who attempted to bomb a Delta airlines plane on Christmas day are actually the exception, being from well off families, while most of those involved in terrorist acts come from poor backgrounds.
Really? You've got some figures to back up that assertion, right? Because, IIRC, ALL of the 9/11 terrorists were well educated "worldly" men from well-off families. This myth of terrorists as dirt-poor sand-farmers from some remote corner of Buttfuckistan seems to have been made up out of thin air.
The first thing you should know, oh brave Armchair Warrior, is that no good battle plan survives contact with the enemy. Yeah, you can come up with plans that are FAR more whatever-the-fuck, but when you go to put them into play you'll probably end up looking like even more of a goof than the UndieBomber. Despite what Hollywood may have lead you to believe, the real world has a tendency to be somewhat unpredictable. As for the marital-law bit, that's almost as silly as all the horror stories people were making up about the patriot act.
Well then you shouldn't have a problem linking to it, right?
.... HUH??
A link to ... ???? What? YOUR ENTIRE FUCKING ARGUMENT???
Sure, here's your link. I hope you find it highly informative. In the meantime, if you have any idea what you're talking about you should have no problem providing a purple monkey dishwasher, right?
Well?
Oh you can't.
Is it because you don't know how to think?
Is that it?
Do you want me to tell you how to do that? I can.
So you are saying that I do not control the routing in a honey net? Is that it?
No, I'm saying that you're a complete twit, and that I'm done wasting my time. A fucking chimpanzee would have understood this by now, and would have left less shit on the walls. I can cure your ignorance, but not as long as your narcissism is in the way. Seek help.
“We should come up with a name for when someone claims that just because someone is religious they’re comparable to the fanatical idiots who fly planes into buildings on a whim.
We have a name for that - it's called "a comparison".
This thread is sufficient.
You just love handing me more ammo, don't you? Is it your religious background which prevents you from understanding what constitutes good and bad evidence, or is your religiosity just the result of an abnormally low IQ? That's the REAL question. I tend to think that it's a mixture of the two - stupid people are more attracted to the easy "answers" of religion, while the blind acceptance of dogma tends to make people more stupid and closed-minded. It's reminiscent of Ouroboros.
"rejecting data either because of how it's presented or because of how it makes you feel is exactly what leads humans to make idiotic decisions like flying airliners into office buildings because they think their magical sky friend wants them to"
Like. Such as. Comparable. Akin to. Including, but not limited to. Analogous.
Clear as mud?
And apparently being nonreligious means you’re an asshole. Or maybe that only applies to you.
Well, we've already established that you're also an asshole, so your conclusion is baseless. You'd have to show, at the very least, a higher incidence of assholish behavior amongst rational people than amongst the faith-heads.
On the other hand I can safely support my own argument by asking you to present a case where an atheist has flown an aircraft into a building while yelling "LONG LIVE NO-GODS!!!".
In the first place, when contact is initiated by an opposing force, it tends to be at a time and place of their choosing.
It's a lot more complicated than that. What kind of enemy? Who's on the offensive? What's the force distribution? Etc, etc. These days if we're fighting an actual battle, it's rarely because the other guy chose to fight us. They prefer to blow something up and then run away.
This is why when a patrol in Iraq or Afghanistan gets hit by an IED or small arms fire, rather than stopping and waiting for the insurgents' plan to fully execute where and when they want it, the patrol hits the gas to get out of whatever trap may be there.
You're talking about reacting to an ambush, which is completely different than fighting a deliberate attack.
This isn't WWI. Unless you're in a really, really important/secure position, you'll move when conditions dictate it.
You're right, this isn't WW1. In WW1, they moved. Then they promptly got mowed down by machinegun fire, and the survivors learned that it's a bad idea to move.
As I said earlier, it's more complicated than that. Give me a couple days and I can give you a fairly thorough understanding of modern combat tactics. Otherwise, a few good rules of thumb are don't bunch up, don't move without first suppressing the enemy, make VERY short movements, keep aware of everyone elses arks of fire, and if you're in a kill-zone shoot everywhere and get the fuck out.
Strawman. You clearly don't have the balls for something like that, so why would I accuse you of it?
No - being religious means you'll be influenced into believing and doing stupid things, but becoming a pilot isn't necessarily amongst them. You're much more likely to just harm yourself and your family.
No where did I say that. Feel free to re-read and post a link if you can find that.
Your entire argument depends on it, jackass. Without the ability to connect to the botnet, you cannot distribute new IP's to it. At this point it's clear that you don't even know WHAT you're arguing for.
Yep! You might also want to add "honey net" to the list of your failures. That is one of the properties of it.
I don't think that phrase means what you think it means.
You were the one suggesting that scanning 100K IP addresses was viable.
"You might want to add 'reading with comprehension' to the list of things you've failed"
That was a joke and not even directed at you.
Ah yes. Ok, all my insults were really jokes also, and not even directed at you. Feel better now?
And survival of the fittest was Hitler’s excuse for genocide.
Well you've fulfilled Godwin so the conversation ends, but I should point out that Hitler never mentioned either Darwin nor natural selection, though he did write in Mein Kampf about the jews:
Their very existence is an incarnate denial of the beauty of God's image in His creation.
as well as:
And the Founder of Christianity made no secret indeed of His estimation of the Jewish people. When He found it necessary He drove those enemies of the human race out of the Temple of God; because then, as always, they used religion as a means of advancing their commercial interests. But at that time Christ was nailed to the Cross for his attitude towards the Jews; whereas our modern Christians enter into party politics and when elections are being held they debase themselves to beg for Jewish votes. They even enter into political intrigues with the atheistic Jewish parties against the interests of their own Christian nation.
But I'm sure you'll find a convenient way to dismiss that, too. Religion is all about dismissing inconvenient facts, after all.
What CS did was encourage everybody to camp. It just didn't make sense to move anywhere because you'd be one hit killed by some AWP-wielding camping lamer who would win by being the guy that moved the least.
Yep, you just described real-life combat. You come under contact, you camp out, you call in support. Pound the position until they're either dead or hiding at the bottom of their holes, and then you walk over and clean up what's left. When your life is actually on the line, you don't go bouncing all over the field trying to rack up kills - you keep yourself alive by doing everything possible to make sure the other guy never gets a shot at you.
You're right, it wouldn't make for a very enjoyable game.
"Shush, don’t reveal the dirty little secret."
"I never said that. It’s a straw man. Did you have fun building it and knocking it down?"
"I’m sorry ... you’re complaining about Christians “re-writing history” while defending a belief system whose adherents came along in the mid-1800s and re-wrote history? Are you serious???"
"The invasions of the native American tribes were not without their wrongdoings, but the native tribes were hardly the one-with-nature peace-loving people they’re made out to be"
Really, though, I don't mind that you're an asshole and you go out of your way to insult people. What I mind is that you've constructed a whole different reality for yourself, and won't let any facts get in your way. I've shown you that your conspiracy theory is so much rubbish, and you've chosen to reject the argument because it offends your delicate sensibilities. That's pathetic. I don't give a damn if you're insulted - rejecting data either because of how it's presented or because of how it makes you feel is exactly what leads humans to make idiotic decisions like flying airliners into office buildings because they think their magical sky friend wants them to.
This is idiotic. You've concocted a scenario where:
1. You know exactly which machines are infected.
2. You're able to reverse-engineer the code in order to obtain the required commands and passwords.
3. You're able to isolate the infected machines and feed them whatever data you want.
4. You're able to rotate IP's any time you feel like it, without having to worry about disrupting the service to all of your clients.
In other words, you've taken my earlier offer at face value and literally given your bot-hunters godlike powers. In such a scenario, you're absolutely right - the botnet would have no chance (even if you are completely wrong about WHY). Unfortunately, real life doesn't work that way. Since you clearly don't have an inkling about the issues involved here (or a basic understanding of math and statistics, apparently), and are unwilling to listen, I think we're done.
Kettle this is pot. Contact, wait out.
You lost. If you cannot admit that, that's fine. Right now all you are doing is demonstrating how badly you've lost.
This isn't a competition. I'm giving you information based on work I've done. You can take it as a learning experience, or you can get offended and ignore what I'm telling you - it's your call.
Why wouldn't they be active? They're in a honey net. The machine communicating with the external zombies has already validated them.
You have 2.5 billion virtual machines in your honey net? Boy, you must have access to a hell of a lot more resources than I do!
Anyway, you specifically said you wanted to feed the bots "fake addresses" which, by definition, wouldn't be active. Now, if you want to change your plan that's fine, just don't pretend that you meant something else all along.
So in your mind, having all the zombies validate all of the IP address before accepting them is rational?
Yes.
They'd die just from the traffic of 250,000 connection attempts each.
First, they wouldn't have 250,000 addresses to validate. When you sign on to the Limewire network, your computer doesn't cache 3+ million addresses. If I were designing the botnet, I'd put the limit at maybe 10k, and tweak it as required. If I really wanted extra redundancy I might cache 100k, but only have 10k verified at any given time. Second, validation only needs to occur once in a while, and can be done with just a few packets. Lastly, nobody would design a client to make 10,000 connection attempts simultaneously, so your flood scenario is just silly.
After 4 IP address rotations, they'd EACH be validating a MILLION address.
No, they'd simply drop addresses at the end of the list in favor of new ones which actually work. This isn't rocket science. File sharing clients do the same thing - non-responding addresses get dropped in favor of ones which work.
And with a simple filter at the ISP level, they'd UNLEARN the 2,500 address you claimed would re-start the zombies after the IP swaps.
Sure, if you know which addresses to filter. The same technique could theoretically be used to stop spammers TODAY, but, for some strange reason, nobody seems to have been able to pull it off. Maybe you could go to one of the bigger ISP's and offer them your expertise.
250,000 machines validating 1,000,000 addresses = 250,000,000,000 connection attempts.
Looks like you failed math big time.
No, I just know how to think, and I don't have your strange emotional attachment to this issue. If you would actually stop for a minute and think about the claims you're making, you yourself could probably come up with ways to get around the supposed problems. Even a script kiddie should have more familiarity with this stuff than you're presently exhibiting.
Of course, if you've never done any communication-oriented programming/scripting, I can understand your confusion. If that's the case, just say so, and I'll be more than happy to answer any questions you may have.
Which makes it even easier because then all you need is a honey net and some virtual machines to be continually "re-infected" and load that file with over a billion fake IP addresses. Or 2 billion.
So, in addition to never having heard of IP lists, and not understanding statistics ... you've also never heard of encryption?
Hell, while you're at it, why not just give your botnet-hunters godlike powers, and have them Miracle the botnet out of existence?
Even ignoring the possibility of encrypted communications channels, it's childs-play to code in a simple function which checks all new IP's as they're added and rejects or sets a lower priority on ones which aren't active. Sorting IP's by "last seen" status is the first thing I did back when I was experimenting with making a P2P app. Putting in a limit on how many commands can be received from each connected peer would also be a common-sense measure that any programmer with half a brain would automatically add.
Really, though, it's the encryption which makes or breaks any botnet. I've taken down small botnets in the past; I've only been able to do that with ones that use crappy encryption or no encryption at all. If you're going to assume that we're able to break the encryption on this hypothetical botnet, then the type of communication it employs becomes irrelevant, and all your fancy plans to disrupt it's communication methods become pointless.
Your claim about 2,500 addresses is simply centralized C&C under a different name. And it is defeated in the exact same way.
That's retarded. You may as well claim that the eD2k network is just an FTP server under a different name. You seem to have no concept of how p2p works.
Given that the majority of zombies are on home ISP networks (such as Comcast), all that would take to defeat would be for Comcast and other to rotate the IP addresses by 1 whenever the zombie traffic becomes problematic.
Yuhuh. So since most guns are owned by law-abiding citizens, all it would take to stop murder-by-shooting is to make it illegal, right?
I'm not trying to be a smartass ... actually, yeah, I am, but seriously ... even if 99% of bots were on Comcast, and even if you could rotate all 99% of addresses all at once ... that still leaves 2,500 bots out there whose addresses will remain the same. The botnet could restructure itself in a matter of hours.
What if they got into an accident and wrecked your car on the way to your house? The risk is that any bot removal might have side effects.
That's a legal issue, not an ethical one. If someone t-bones me at an intersection tomorrow I won't think of them as an evil person, but I will hold them legally accountable.
bad science! There is a reason it is extinct and once this has happened nature will not be reversed. Whatever they come up with, will not be the original species. It is gone forever.
You really are insane.
Or were you joking?
Let's use this botnet as an example. 250,000 zombies. What is the likelihood of finding another zombie with random scanning?
Yah, I know! Although we're really going to be in trouble if someone figures out a way to store IP addresses in some sort of file. Why, if that were to happen, they might even be able to pass the IP lists from one computer to another! I hope that nobody ever comes up with something like that ....
Legal implications aside, this is an interesting ethics question. Is it more ethical to interfere with another's property, without permission, to solve a larger problem, or is it more ethical to respect private property and privacy? Surely there are cases for both.
I don't really see an ethical issue. If someone stole your car, would you be upset if an anonymous stranger stole it back without your permission and delivered it to your door? Maybe some people would, but they have to be insanely rare. The only issue here is the legal one, and it's not one that can be easily resolved.
Which makes me all the more surprised that no one has tried.
It's been done on a smaller scale. Back when botnets were still mostly communicating via IRC, I took down a few myself. The difference it that I didn't document the process and then blab about it to the media in order to advertise my security products/services.
Then what the hell does a claim about science have to do with rewriting history either?
I hope that's not a serious question.
How exactly do you study, say, Babylonian history, if you believe that the world was created right around the time that they invented Beer?
The Crusades were a response to Muslim aggression.
Irrelevant. The Christians DID start the crusades, which was your original statement. They had to, by definition.
Even if you had originally phrased your argument in a more coherent manner, you'd still be wrong. No serious scholar has ever argued that Muslim provocation didn't play a role in starting the wars. Even wikipedia talks about it. So your world-wide-anti-christian-conspiracy doesn't even seem capable of influencing a few historians, or editing an open encyclopedia.
The invasions of the native American tribes were .. blah blah blah
Again, irrelevant. You suggested that the very idea of "white christians" massacring native populations was a re-writing of history. Now you're making a completely different argument. Not only are you moving the goalposts, but you seem to be presenting the morally repugnant notion that the Natives somehow "had it coming". If that's not the case then please clarify. What exactly do the attitudes and behaviors of the Native populations have to do with whether or not they were massacred?
And Iraq... well, it cost us a fortune, and we didn’t steal any of their oil.
Again, irrelevant. Your statement was that "Bush was a white Christian who invaded Iraq to steal its oil". Three of the four claims in that statement are accurate. The forth is poorly worded and misleading, but it does speak to the fact that Iraq's oil reserves are a big factor in why the US (and the rest of the world) is interested in it.
You never hear anyone criticizing the Muslims for their part in the Crusades.
If that were true, it would be a compliment to your religion. It would mean that people expect Christians to act better than Muslims.
It's not true, though. I've heard plenty of people criticize the Muslims for their part in the crusades, you being the most recent. We do generally expect Christianity to act in a more civilized manner, though, so you can take some solace in the fact that we view your superstition as being somewhat better than that of the the fanatics who killed 3,000 Americans in 2001.
I was partly kidding. Correlation doesn’t imply causation... but all of the examples were illustrations of people trying to re-write history, and in all of them the persons being demonized were primarily white Christians.
You've failed to support your argument, so you don't get to just re-assert your premise. None of the three are examples of rewriting history. None of them are examples of the "demonization of Chrsitians" - your attempts to reword your arguments notwithstanding. Either provide some evidence of this world-wide conspiracy which only you and your fellow faith-fanatics can see, or go away.
Also, stop with the asinine "repeater game". You're presumably above the age of majority - it's time you started acting like an adult.
I’m not complaining about people re-writing history. If so I’d be outraged over those heretics who claimed the earth was round, or the quacks who purported to believe that disease was caused by invisible living creatures.
Neither of those were claims about history. One was a claim about geology and/or astronomy, and the other about medicine.
I’m complaining about people re-writing history when it’s correct, making it instead falsely demonize a certain group of people.
You mean "correct" as defined by you? "Correct" as defined by a literal reading of the Bible? "Correct" as determined by people with your own ideological bias? Which of those were you referring to?
That fact isn’t invalidated by anything that Christians may believe, either truly or falsely.
What fact?
The only valid thing you've said (or, more accurately, attempted to say) is that the many idiotic, despotic, fraudulent, and generally evil acts committed in the name of Christianity do not technically invalidate criticisms made by Christians. To use an analogy, were Hitler to call Mao an evil tyrant, he would be quite correct. The fact that he would also be a hypocrite is irrelevant.
On the other hand, you happen to be both wrong and a hypocrite. My original comment was intended as a joke, albeit one which was also a valid criticism. If you want a more detailed refutation of your claims, here it is:
1. None of the examples you gave were cases of history being rewritten. All of them were either closely representative of the truth, or completely accurate.
2. None of examples given show the demonization of Christianity.
Ergo, you've completely failed to make a cogent argument. You've essentially used Slashdot as your pulpit in order to rant about some global conspiracy to "demonize Christians" which seems to have been created entirely out of your own personal delusions. You've got your panties in a bunch because a small percentage of people dare to question your irrational beliefs, so you're making yourself out to be the besieged victim, bravely standing up to the hordes of Heretics by spreading the truth and challenging their lies. This is the typical behavior exhibited by most conspiracy theorists, but seems to be especially prevalent amongst the Christian and Muslim religions due to the martyrdom complex which they encourage.
Lastly, the behavior of individuals such as yourself makes it completely unnecessary for anyone to "demonize" Christianity; the great thing about most religions is that the degree of religiosity of adherents tends to be directly proportional to how fanatical and out of touch with reality they are. Being able to look at the evils committed throughout history by various religious organizations is nice, but is completely unnecessary when we can look at some of the beliefs and behaviors which are exhibited today by believers in $DEITY. Even a fair-minded examination of modern-day Christianity would lead any rational individual to conclude that the mindless devotion to iron-age dogmas and superstitions is a silly eccentricity at best, and tends to be harmful and regressive in many cases. I got a rather bittersweet sort of amusement out of observing that the highest compliment and the most damning criticism of Christianity can both be summed up in the same phrase: "It's better now than it ever was before".
Also, I still maintain that people who underestimate the age of the earth by almost 6 orders of magnitude have no business complaining about historical revisionism. At the very least, they shouldn't expect to be taken seriously.