High Level FUD Opportunities
on
Cyber-Attacks?
·
· Score: 2
Well, working in IT, this is probably a wrong thing to say....but
The U.S. highest leaders are generally clueless about a great many things, especially technology.
So, while I have in the past plausibly ridiculed the prospects of Osama bin Laden using his laptop computer to communicate via the Internet using steganographic means from his goat-ridden non-electrified hovel in the mountains of Asia, close advisors to the President have spun stories to trigger fear, uncertainty and doubt in the minds of decision makers.
They've promoted these fallacies not out of malice, but rather in the interests of getting their particular piece of bread buttered. There are plenty of people in the business that would enjoy making money by contracting out a few projects that will be fun to work on, but which are of small substantive value.
But, hey, if I was pressured the same way, I'd probably lash and "Do Something" to make myself look like I was an active leader, look like I knew what was going on, etc.
I saw the press release in Newsweek. Oops, I mean article.
They got one thing right, that there was considerable doubt and uncertainty that people would jump at the chance to own a chance to truly be owned.
The thing that occurs to me, however, is that a lot of software is going to take a performance hit has it does PKI work, encrypting data, checking keys over the network, etc.
That, and the complexity of software will needs increase. As if current software is so trivial and simple that two five year olds could debug all the problems in IE within an afternoon.
II think it is going to take more than just a few years to crack a hole in that shell.
Sheesh, even MS itself has a hard time with that.
Despite all the arm twisting with pricing, backwards incompatibility (genuine or not) and big advertising campaigns, you still have loads of consumers running moss-covered versions of Windows that are not up to "XP".(3.1, 95, 98, 98Se, ME)
If MS has a hard time convincing consumers to upgrade their hardware given all the resources at their disposal (like getting OEMs to preload the new OS), you can bet Linux will have an even harder time.
The slow pace of Linux desktop penetration is no mystery.
Likewise, there is no mystery as to why the uptake of Linux in the server arena has been so rapid. It's growth has been strong, even if its growth has not been equal to the media hype of two years ago.
Yes, we all need to make better efforts towards releasing better software that's been more thoroughly tested.
But, despite this sloppiness, the higher than historical growth in worker productivity in the U.S. over the past 10-15 years has been attributable in no small part to the adoption of software and the automation of business processes.
There's never been an expectation of privacy in any public place
Then we can categorically surmise that people talking in hushed voices or whispers in public places have absolutely no reason to do so.
People have had the expectation that some privacy existed in publicly accessible places. Simply, if people were close by, then you expected less privacy. If the nearest person was 100 meters away, you expected more privacy.
Now, with telephoto lenses in cameras and shotgun microphones, your expectations will change subtly but significantly because the cues for sensing privacy that worked for millenia no longer work.
I think a while back the tech industry learned the lesson that "push" technlogy was only viable to a certain extent. People didn't mind getting headlines refreshed on their desktops or reminded of "buddies" logging on to IM systems, but they got annoyed pretty quick if they felt like something was getting rammed down their throats and they were getting raped monetarily.
The exact same lesson is getting played out on a much slower time scale in the music and film distribution business.
The payola problem simply highlights the inefficiencies built into the current distribution system. The weight of it creaks and the smell of it reeks.
Lower power usage is a good direction for regular computing, too.
Many have noticed the increasing trend towards laptop computers as a primary computer for people concerned not just about portability, but also about space, electric power and noise issues in their abodes. A noisy tower and 60 lb space-hogging CRT is too uncool. Sleek LCD monitors, minimalist keyboards and no noisy cooling fans is where it's at.
And, many have noted too, that most CPU power is going to waste these days. Except for a few games and for the server environment, most CPUs spend their time waiting for someone to type in a character into MS Word or click the next link for a browser.
I think you'll see a shift to more energy efficient CPUs in a big way in a much broader market sector than supercomputing. Namely, desktop client access devices will go this route, too.
You got me thinking....here's another troll for you.
If federal antitrust settlements require opening up the interfaces into Microsoft's software to a greater degree, then do they not have grounds to sue the government on the basis of the DMCA for circumventing a copyright protection scheme?
I don't work for IBM and don't have first hand experience with their services setting up web sites, but I suspect that they know how to set up a capable high traffic web site (didn't they do the Olympics a while back?)
OTOH, if I'm correct, that leaves two other options:
someone powerful is deliberately Slashdotting that article;
a heck of a lot of people are genuinely ininterested in learning how to use Samba as a PDC.
How much of that BW is actually used and how does it vary during with the time of day and day of week?
What's the ratio of traffic to and from user queries compared with the traffic searching the web and do you expect to scale indefinitely as growth continues on the current path?
From what little I know, one of the biggest hindrances to using Linux on a laptop effectively is that most all of them use Winmodems with closed, proprietary and difficult to reverse-engineer interfaces. IIRC, IBM distributed the binary drivers need to get their winmodems to work under Linux.
There are sharp developers that could probably write some of these drivers if they had the specs for interfacing to the hardware, but I fear that the complete specifications for winmodems will be more scarce than they are for insides of the some of latest video cards (nVidia, anyone?).
I need to buy a laptop soon for doing on the road presentations and would like not to be stuck having to use ppt on Windows. I was leaning away from Dells and towards IBM solely because of IBM's support for Linux on their own hardware. Now, I'm not so sure.
There used to be anonymous re-mailers like penet and some by cypherpunks (C2) that would be nice to have around. I think spam usage killed off those remailers that survived the suits by the Church of Scientology.
What the U.S. government doesn't realize is that the same unreasonable searches of your cyberhome that they think will do "something" to combat terrorism (it's arguable just how much genuine security this gains), are also the same policies that, as they are mimicked worldwide, will make it easier for oppressive regimes (North Korea, Iraq, China, Saudi Arabia, etc.) to clamp down on political dissent and the free exchange of ideas in their nations.
I can only presume that the Bush administration has decided for us that some small amount of potential security under hypothetical circumstances is worth the cost in freedom of expression, not only in the United States but around the world.
And here was I, thinking that the U.S. was a standard bearer promoting democracy and the principles of human rights embodied in the U.S. Constitution.
Yep, I'm a licensed contractor and when through all that hassle to build my own house a number of years ago.
Practically, being a contractor is a 5hitload of headaches and worries about scheduling, people (eg, some of the framing crew didn't show up, are in the slammer for DUI, etc.), and money.
What I found was that whatever money I might have saved by being my own contractor got used up in buying better quality construction at each stage of the process. I know my house is not going to have the same raft of problems as most tract houses do after 7 years, but I paid extra for doing things the right way with the right materials.
There are a few important lessons I learned the hard way.
Good people that do what they say, when they say and care about what they do are worth the money.
Whatever it is, it will take longer.
Whatever it is, it will cost more.
And, absolutely, no matter the story (and you'll hear them all), don't pay people too much too soon into the job (I liked dividing into thirds).
I know that TiVO was more or less invented by hackers that can sympathize with people wanting to fiddle with hardware to do more than what could be convenient marketed for $x99.99 at Best Buy.
I've heard that some of them hang on different boards, dispelling rumours, clarifying what are stupid ways to backup your TiVo, etc.
Meanwhile, I know that some in the hacker community (Andrew Tridgell?) deliberately withdrew an early version of code he had that could crack the video streaming format filesystem on the TiVo's. I think that such decoding of video, especially combined with Ethernet access to the device, would have caused the Powers That Be to get riled up in a hurry (if TiVo hackers started to trade TV and movies the same way that Napster users were trading songs).
I've got two TiVo's and I upgraded them to use larger 100 GB IDE drives. It's great.
I'm not sure what this new Red Storm machine has in the way of individual nodes, but Sandia has some history in parallel computing, dating back to the paper
Gustafson, J.L., G.R. Montry and R.E. Benner. "Development of Parallel Methods for a 1024-processor Hypercube."
SIAM Journal on Scientific and Statistical Computing Vol. 9, No. 4, July 1988.
as well as the ASCI Red machine, which, IIRC, was the first machine to break the 1 teraFLOPS barrier.
That machine, BTW, was built by Intel out of fastest Pentium chips of the day. I think a later upgrade to Pentium IIs increased its speed to about 3 teraFLOPS.
As far as MP machines are concerned, it could be argued on the basis of the ASCI Red machine that they have a fairly "economical" strategy [I know, I know, it's hard to argue that anything costing $9e7 as being "economical" - but you are talking about buying one of the fastest few computers in the world - rack mounted Athlon MPs could do great until you get up to O(100) processors, but doing the interconnects for O(10000) processors gets to be tricky].
Also there is CPlant,
their own (everybody's gotta have one) pet project to build a B----- cluster out of Alpha based machines running a modified Linux.
Sure, build a big suite of tests to run and check for things to go wrong. Every bug fixing process suggests it own test.
Then you find out that you don't have the time and resources to run all the tests everytime someone makes a change to the codebase.
So, use smaller suites of the faster tests and weed out some of the ones that have been ironclad passes for the last 5 dozen code checkins. For frequent testing it makes sense to only shake what's new and rickety, not what's stood through 10 hurricanes.
Run the exhaustive complete test suite infrequently, say when a release is imminent, or as often as you can afford to spare the resource cycles.
It will teach you a bit about your system and how to get it running Linux.
Note, I didn't say anything about Linux (even though I love it and run it all time:)
In fact, it's usually better to get that crusty old PC system with something like Win 9x.
Then, doing things for yourself teaches you how to get around the system, swim through the murk, teaches you how to find out things, how to change things or not change things, etc.
You're best prepared to answer
"I need X to get Y done. Can't you do something about that?"
when you've already had some experience needing X to get Y done yourself (or even needing X_prime to get Y_prime done).
Don't get me wrong - doing a Linux install will teach you a great many things and many things that will be of value in the IT industry. But it's more efficient to learn what the common problems are by imitating the common system with all its special crud and idiosyncracies.
It is hard to complain about a 24-hour response time for a bug.
No, it's not:)
Seriously, though, it's a pretty impressive turn around time and should give some credence to those of us making arguments that the support is really there for open source projects like Apache, even though there's no "1-800-HELPME" number nor
an expensive maintenance and support agreement.
Any company using that as its documents destruction policy will be sued out of existence faster than you can say, "Jack Flash".
Maybe for environmental reasons, sure.
But, AFAICT, many companies are eager to have a documents policy that specifically spells out how they erase old emails after 2 years, or whatever, etc. Stuff is expected, almost mandated, to be destroyed in an orderly and timely fashion.
It's funny.
I think there's more fear of legal liability after things like Monica Lewinsky's emails and Bill Gates emails to other MS executives, than there is thought to be gained by holding on to past information.
Personally, I've thought the more the better as far as archives are concerned - it's possible to search them for problems that previously came up and got resolved, etc. Probably my job function is so unimportant and requires so little duplicity that I don't appreciate the value of covering my tracks.
But seriously, I cannot immagine anyone learning the "basics" better than fiddling around with things, and learning how they work (by breaking them more likely than not).
My thoughts exactly.
Find a crusty old 1995 vintage computer at a garage sale and force yourself to bring it to life where you can browse the internet, write a letter, print it out, and play your favorite CD. For good measure, read some files off a floppy created with an entirely different platform and application.
At that point you will have an inestimable education on what most everyday IT is really all about.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, working in IT, this is probably a wrong thing to say....but
The U.S. highest leaders are generally clueless about a great many things, especially technology.
So, while I have in the past plausibly ridiculed the prospects of Osama bin Laden using his laptop computer to communicate via the Internet using steganographic means from his goat-ridden non-electrified hovel in the mountains of Asia, close advisors to the President have spun stories to trigger fear, uncertainty and doubt in the minds of decision makers.
They've promoted these fallacies not out of malice, but rather in the interests of getting their particular piece of bread buttered. There are plenty of people in the business that would enjoy making money by contracting out a few projects that will be fun to work on, but which are of small substantive value.
But, hey, if I was pressured the same way, I'd probably lash and "Do Something" to make myself look like I was an active leader, look like I knew what was going on, etc.
If only somebody would release a distro that clueless newbies could use.
Right.
Lessee:
- clueless newbies,
- large distribution channel,
- big company with legions of support minions.
Hmmmm....AOL.
I saw the press release in Newsweek. Oops, I mean article.
They got one thing right, that there was considerable doubt and uncertainty that people would jump at the chance to own a chance to truly be owned.
The thing that occurs to me, however, is that a lot of software is going to take a performance hit has it does PKI work, encrypting data, checking keys over the network, etc.
That, and the complexity of software will needs increase. As if current software is so trivial and simple that two five year olds could debug all the problems in IE within an afternoon.
No, there's a word that describes Palladium.
That word is "Bob".
II think it is going to take more than just a few years to crack a hole in that shell.
Sheesh, even MS itself has a hard time with that .
Despite all the arm twisting with pricing, backwards incompatibility (genuine or not) and big advertising campaigns, you still have loads of consumers running moss-covered versions of Windows that are not up to "XP".(3.1, 95, 98, 98Se, ME)
If MS has a hard time convincing consumers to upgrade their hardware given all the resources at their disposal (like getting OEMs to preload the new OS), you can bet Linux will have an even harder time.
The slow pace of Linux desktop penetration is no mystery.
Likewise, there is no mystery as to why the uptake of Linux in the server arena has been so rapid. It's growth has been strong, even if its growth has not been equal to the media hype of two years ago.
Yes, we all need to make better efforts towards releasing better software that's been more thoroughly tested.
But, despite this sloppiness, the higher than historical growth in worker productivity in the U.S. over the past 10-15 years has been attributable in no small part to the adoption of software and the automation of business processes.
There's never been an expectation of privacy in any public place
Then we can categorically surmise that people talking in hushed voices or whispers in public places have absolutely no reason to do so.
People have had the expectation that some privacy existed in publicly accessible places. Simply, if people were close by, then you expected less privacy. If the nearest person was 100 meters away, you expected more privacy.
Now, with telephoto lenses in cameras and shotgun microphones, your expectations will change subtly but significantly because the cues for sensing privacy that worked for millenia no longer work.
I think a while back the tech industry learned the lesson that "push" technlogy was only viable to a certain extent. People didn't mind getting headlines refreshed on their desktops or reminded of "buddies" logging on to IM systems, but they got annoyed pretty quick if they felt like something was getting rammed down their throats and they were getting raped monetarily.
The exact same lesson is getting played out on a much slower time scale in the music and film distribution business.
The payola problem simply highlights the inefficiencies built into the current distribution system. The weight of it creaks and the smell of it reeks.
Lower power usage is a good direction for regular computing, too.
Many have noticed the increasing trend towards laptop computers as a primary computer for people concerned not just about portability, but also about space, electric power and noise issues in their abodes. A noisy tower and 60 lb space-hogging CRT is too uncool. Sleek LCD monitors, minimalist keyboards and no noisy cooling fans is where it's at.
And, many have noted too, that most CPU power is going to waste these days. Except for a few games and for the server environment, most CPUs spend their time waiting for someone to type in a character into MS Word or click the next link for a browser.
I think you'll see a shift to more energy efficient CPUs in a big way in a much broader market sector than supercomputing. Namely, desktop client access devices will go this route, too.
You got me thinking....here's another troll for you.
I don't work for IBM and don't have first hand experience with their services setting up web sites, but I suspect that they know how to set up a capable high traffic web site (didn't they do the Olympics a while back?)
OTOH, if I'm correct, that leaves two other options:
- someone powerful is deliberately Slashdotting that article;
- a heck of a lot of people are genuinely ininterested in learning how to use Samba as a PDC.
Take your pick:)How much bandwith you guys use/have?
Addaddendum:
How much of that BW is actually used and how does it vary during with the time of day and day of week?
What's the ratio of traffic to and from user queries compared with the traffic searching the web and do you expect to scale indefinitely as growth continues on the current path?
they don't stop giving out hardware documentation
and that's the real rub in this case.
From what little I know, one of the biggest hindrances to using Linux on a laptop effectively is that most all of them use Winmodems with closed, proprietary and difficult to reverse-engineer interfaces. IIRC, IBM distributed the binary drivers need to get their winmodems to work under Linux.
There are sharp developers that could probably write some of these drivers if they had the specs for interfacing to the hardware, but I fear that the complete specifications for winmodems will be more scarce than they are for insides of the some of latest video cards (nVidia, anyone?).
I need to buy a laptop soon for doing on the road presentations and would like not to be stuck having to use ppt on Windows. I was leaning away from Dells and towards IBM solely because of IBM's support for Linux on their own hardware. Now, I'm not so sure.
That optical fiber can probably be threaded through the pipes. After all, they're only filled with, uh, "liquid".
Optical fiber can't be much worse than some of the tree roots that can infest septic lines.
Hilarious.
I just noticed, that one part of the non-settling states' demand, boiled down into a small phrase...
if I were to change it just slightly, toThere's a subtle distinction going on that says a lot.
There used to be anonymous re-mailers like penet and some by cypherpunks (C2) that would be nice to have around. I think spam usage killed off those remailers that survived the suits by the Church of Scientology.
What the U.S. government doesn't realize is that the same unreasonable searches of your cyberhome that they think will do "something" to combat terrorism (it's arguable just how much genuine security this gains), are also the same policies that, as they are mimicked worldwide, will make it easier for oppressive regimes (North Korea, Iraq, China, Saudi Arabia, etc.) to clamp down on political dissent and the free exchange of ideas in their nations.
I can only presume that the Bush administration has decided for us that some small amount of potential security under hypothetical circumstances is worth the cost in freedom of expression, not only in the United States but around the world.
And here was I, thinking that the U.S. was a standard bearer promoting democracy and the principles of human rights embodied in the U.S. Constitution.
Yep, I'm a licensed contractor and when through all that hassle to build my own house a number of years ago.
Practically, being a contractor is a 5hitload of headaches and worries about scheduling, people (eg, some of the framing crew didn't show up, are in the slammer for DUI, etc.), and money.
What I found was that whatever money I might have saved by being my own contractor got used up in buying better quality construction at each stage of the process. I know my house is not going to have the same raft of problems as most tract houses do after 7 years, but I paid extra for doing things the right way with the right materials.
There are a few important lessons I learned the hard way.
And, absolutely, no matter the story (and you'll hear them all), don't pay people too much too soon into the job (I liked dividing into thirds).
It's a fine balance.
I know that TiVO was more or less invented by hackers that can sympathize with people wanting to fiddle with hardware to do more than what could be convenient marketed for $x99.99 at Best Buy.
I've heard that some of them hang on different boards, dispelling rumours, clarifying what are stupid ways to backup your TiVo, etc.
Meanwhile, I know that some in the hacker community (Andrew Tridgell?) deliberately withdrew an early version of code he had that could crack the video streaming format filesystem on the TiVo's. I think that such decoding of video, especially combined with Ethernet access to the device, would have caused the Powers That Be to get riled up in a hurry (if TiVo hackers started to trade TV and movies the same way that Napster users were trading songs).
I've got two TiVo's and I upgraded them to use larger 100 GB IDE drives. It's great.
I'm not sure what this new Red Storm machine has in the way of individual nodes, but Sandia has some history in parallel computing, dating back to the paper
as well as the ASCI Red machine, which, IIRC, was the first machine to break the 1 teraFLOPS barrier.That machine, BTW, was built by Intel out of fastest Pentium chips of the day. I think a later upgrade to Pentium IIs increased its speed to about 3 teraFLOPS.
As far as MP machines are concerned, it could be argued on the basis of the ASCI Red machine that they have a fairly "economical" strategy [I know, I know, it's hard to argue that anything costing $9e7 as being "economical" - but you are talking about buying one of the fastest few computers in the world - rack mounted Athlon MPs could do great until you get up to O(100) processors, but doing the interconnects for O(10000) processors gets to be tricky].
Also there is CPlant, their own (everybody's gotta have one) pet project to build a B----- cluster out of Alpha based machines running a modified Linux.
Somebody mod up dmorin.
Sure, build a big suite of tests to run and check for things to go wrong. Every bug fixing process suggests it own test.
Then you find out that you don't have the time and resources to run all the tests everytime someone makes a change to the codebase.
So, use smaller suites of the faster tests and weed out some of the ones that have been ironclad passes for the last 5 dozen code checkins. For frequent testing it makes sense to only shake what's new and rickety, not what's stood through 10 hurricanes.
Run the exhaustive complete test suite infrequently, say when a release is imminent, or as often as you can afford to spare the resource cycles.
just type it in a search engine...
What are you asking, man! I'd have to learn how to read, write and think to do that.
Can't I just get a warm fuzzy feeling by buying a large support agreement from Microsoft?
Besides, I'll be among a large herd of IIS users - who could possibly know and want to `sploit me with Code Red?
Most buyers at my site are using fradulent credit card numbers anyway, so if the database gets owned it's not all that big a deal.
It will teach you a bit about your system and how to get it running Linux.
Note, I didn't say anything about Linux (even though I love it and run it all time:)
In fact, it's usually better to get that crusty old PC system with something like Win 9x.
Then, doing things for yourself teaches you how to get around the system, swim through the murk, teaches you how to find out things, how to change things or not change things, etc.
You're best prepared to answer
when you've already had some experience needing X to get Y done yourself (or even needing X_prime to get Y_prime done).Don't get me wrong - doing a Linux install will teach you a great many things and many things that will be of value in the IT industry. But it's more efficient to learn what the common problems are by imitating the common system with all its special crud and idiosyncracies.
It is hard to complain about a 24-hour response time for a bug.
No, it's not:)
Seriously, though, it's a pretty impressive turn around time and should give some credence to those of us making arguments that the support is really there for open source projects like Apache, even though there's no "1-800-HELPME" number nor an expensive maintenance and support agreement.
Any company using that as its documents destruction policy will be sued out of existence faster than you can say, "Jack Flash".
Maybe for environmental reasons, sure.
But, AFAICT, many companies are eager to have a documents policy that specifically spells out how they erase old emails after 2 years, or whatever, etc. Stuff is expected, almost mandated, to be destroyed in an orderly and timely fashion.
It's funny.
I think there's more fear of legal liability after things like Monica Lewinsky's emails and Bill Gates emails to other MS executives, than there is thought to be gained by holding on to past information.
Personally, I've thought the more the better as far as archives are concerned - it's possible to search them for problems that previously came up and got resolved, etc. Probably my job function is so unimportant and requires so little duplicity that I don't appreciate the value of covering my tracks.
But seriously, I cannot immagine anyone learning the "basics" better than fiddling around with things, and learning how they work (by breaking them more likely than not).
My thoughts exactly.
Find a crusty old 1995 vintage computer at a garage sale and force yourself to bring it to life where you can browse the internet, write a letter, print it out, and play your favorite CD. For good measure, read some files off a floppy created with an entirely different platform and application.
At that point you will have an inestimable education on what most everyday IT is really all about.