Posts by noodle heimer

sunbelt has misled about a/v in the past

A year or so ago their anti-spam hardware devices started developing troubles detecting viruses.

Questions were asked and answered on the Sunbelt mailing list; Alex Eckelberry stated "It (one of the viruses not caught by the product) is recognized by Bitdefender, but due to the nature of this trojan, I would trust defense in depth more than I would trust any AV engine."

What he meant to say was "your expensive antispam and antivirus product is currently unable to download a/v updates. Our admins have already been on yoiur system but are not permitted to tell you we have ID'ed the fault."

Also, the company issued a press release advising everyone using either its appliance or its software antispam tools to block all ZIP files at the gateway.

the vanilla 409

Can take either 3.5 or 2.5 disks and has very similar noise levels, but a bit lower - probably because they can fit larger, slower fans into the case.

The power consumption on the 409 is similar at idle (16w for the 409 versus 12w for the slim)

If only the Reg editors would ask their hardware reviewers to study up on benchmarking methodoloy or else focus on the usability and cite more thorough benchmarks than they can provide. benchmarking a nas properly ... it's a complicated process and the benches here provide precious little info, as is invariably the case in hardware reviews.

My tests of the 409 gui leave me very disappointed. It is much prettier than the Promise GUI, yes.

However, all that enabling NFS support does is start the NFS daemon - there is no option to work with /etc/exports given (that I could see) in the GUI in either simple or full mode. The only editor available at the commandline by default is vi. Asking a newbie try to work in vi and then try to get a working exports file going is just atrocious. At least the Promise NFS gui actually did ask "oh, um, who should have access to the NFS mounts?" and then set up an export, even.

Raid level migration is similarly murky. Expanding a raid from 1 disk to three in raid 5, you are not shown which disk will be used as the data source, you have to trust the device that it is in fact going to erase only the newly added disks. Very pretty but very uninformative as to which disk is where. Or how many total you will be left with.

If only the original promise 4300 weren't such a noisy beast! The 4600 is somewhat tempting, but does not give you what Synology does, real root access to the box and a package manager.

If I were recommending one of these to someone who wasn't a pro, though, I might recommend the gen 2 2disk Promise system in preference over a Syn 209, because while ugly the UI is actually more functional. I will wait and see to find out how loud the next generation of Promise systems are. The claim is that the 4600 is fairly quiet and fairly fast.

I'm so confused

I had thought that the Register's official editorial policy was that there was no need to pay attention to CO2 levels?

Yet, this article seems to imply that polluting the Atlantic with soluble iron would be a good thing because it would promote CO2 capture?

Could you please get James Inhofe, your chief scientific advisor, to let you know which way to report this story? Good news, or totally unnecessary?

While you're at it, you probably need to sign up for his geoscience and earth history course. You likely already have the textbook inherited from Gran, but I've seen far too many Reg hacks act as if Evolution is something more than the devil's work.

i have a pearl

and I find it to be a read-only device. Problem is, I do 60 wpm on a real keyboard, and don't read manuals. It's possible that it's a useful keyboard for those who are not used to going fast and/or who read manuals. I'm find with it as it is, though; the boss pays for it and he's not expecting me to reply from it, he's expecting me to know when gear sends me email.

@Tom: dunno who gave you the spec

it's a combo of ip blacklisting, ip whitelisting, probably some amount of feeding unknown URLs back home for categorization, and also skin blocking. Early press reports had a user looking at piglet photos, and see that they were blocked; looking at nude photos featuring black girls, and see that those were unblocked.

I'm thinking that last bit is probably what relies on face detection.

ever driven a volvo in snow?

Now, I'll admit, the last Volvo I owned was an 87, so perhaps Gramps Volvo finally died and new people are running the design show now.

I drove a Volvo in heavy winter snow for several years, and my Christ it was a godawful ride in snow. The design theory seemed to be "we'll make it weigh twice what it ought, and have an insanely strong passenger compartment, because we KNOW it's going to land tits-up sooner or later."

It more or less worked. I once spun out at low speed (20 mph or so) in heavy snow and ice. The vehicle who slammed into me had $5k worth of damage. I needed to reseat a hose on the engine block and drove home.

This new push-me-pull-you engine plant sounds like a ton of fun, yes indeed.

tech may win wars, but I laughed when i understood this one

Show of hands - anyone here spent any time trying to get one of the nice automatic telescope mounts calibrated?

Much of what they're doing is much of what this beast is trying for.

I don't expect great things out of this, especially in real world conditions.

On the wireless fusing... sadly, it sounds as if anyone who can generate enough signal to arm the cartridges will probably have already microwaved the d00d carrying the high-end shooter. Truly that did sound like an amusing attack mode against these weapons.

virt not part of the x86 instruction set

And hence, Microsoft has decided to release a major software package which is incompatible with the x86 instruction set.

Hardly Intel's fault. They defined the x86 instruction set and documented it fully a dog's years ago.

is there an april fool decoder ring around?

Because i'm really, really hoping this is an April 1 spoof.

That would explain why the PDF draft is hosted on Register servers and not elsewhere.

Against that, it looks a lot like a draft bill, and if there was a punchline in the PDF, I didnt' see it.

Unfortunately, we're now to a point where this kind of craziness might be a put-on, but it might be straight up.

go ATT PHB morons!

These are the same people who brought us "in 2012, one house will consume the entire bandwidth of today's internet" or similar twaddle.

Curiously enough, these remarks always come out when they're in front of governments, hat in hand for dough for something.

The bandwidth claim came as they were asking for (another) subsidy to build phone lines and networks, thereby being able to pocket 100% of the profit, rathe than a niggardly 80%.

What were they asking for dough for here? Security measures already no doubt in place as a side benefit of the NSA data mirroring project - if you're going to do total traffic inspection, as they are in their joint venture with NSA, surely you can add the security layer to that. What are they, asking to be subsidized twice for that?

I believe the Reg covered the earlier remarks, but for those who missed the article: ""In three years' time, 20 typical households will generate more traffic than the entire Internet today." - Jim Cicconi, reported in http://news.cnet.com/2100-1034_3-6237715.html

Supermicro: cheap, thinly certified, sloppy QA

Let us know when a vendor that's capable of doing QA and willing to pay the fees to have their gear certified releases something like this. Until then, this is a giant step down in the being-able-to-sleep-nights sweepstakes.

but are those computers networked?

Seriously. The systems with access to SCADA may not themselves have access to the internet. But to state that power plants live in some kind of internet-free zone is silly.

Blaster compromised US power distribution in 2003, not because it was a SCADA attack but because it took out systems at power plants as collateral damage. I suspect there would have been issues even if the SCADA controllers themselves remained entirely untouched by the attack, simply because IT staff at compromised sites were running like hell to fix the Windows boxes.

http://seclists.org/bugtraq/2003/Sep/0053.html

And blaster was really more of a prank than anything else; it used a publically posted PoC as its payload, looked for new hosts to infect, and crashed systems. Yes, it was a large pain to deal with, but it wasn't installing other code or formatting harddrives on restart or silently phoning home. It was incredibly noisy and easy to see. But it was also very fast!

Power generation infrastructure has been neglected for decades in the US and lots of Europe.

Does anyone here think that the facilities are staffed to afford the eyeballs to do monitoring of logs on SCADA systems?

There was a great Defcon talk on SCADA attacks last year and the presenter admitted "it's noisy as hell. But no one reads the logs, so it doesn't matter." He was considering working with fyodor (nmap) to add the SCADA attack to the nmap toolkit and to make it much quieter.

Once you're inside a network, if you know what you're doing, whether an internal host talks to the internet or not is not a problem. As long as they talk to switch ports, you can talk to them. If you can get the guy who answers phones to read your email and click on a link, or visit your website, the odds that you can get access to a windows box that talks to internal switches just went through the ceiling.

The real concern is not worms or script kiddies. It's people with folks on salary with training and practice doing attack/defense in teams. State actors and large organizations could undoubtedly do this; the real problem is in coming up with a defense against it in a heavily privatized and decentralized system.

We mostly dislike the geographic firewalls in China, Australia, Burma, etc.

We may ultimately find that what we need are business sector firewalls mandated by governments that can require all actors in a given sector to be running behind a common and commonly secured set of connections. Not just hardware platforms, but actually insist these folks drop their current addresses and buy leased lines to dedicated data centers with budget for ingress and egress monitoring and response.

My guess is we won't get to a state like that until someone seriously, ahem, degrades performance on SCADA infrastructure. The politics of doing it may be completely untenable even then.

their secret successes are teh bomb, though

Good for the CIA, still recruiting reprobates and fools after all these decades.

Absolutely, this ass should be repatriated to Egypt for trial there, then after sentencing, to Algeria for trial there. He is a convert to Islam, according to ABC, so trying him under anything but Sharia makes no sense.

We in the US are told again and again that their secret victories are most excellent, and we just need not to notice all the torturing, disappearing, drug-dealing, raping and assassinating they're up to.

fired for cause, per Info Week

Pretty minimal sounding cause, but teh IW writeup says he was canned for writing a script that changed server settings without approval from his "supervisor."

If *that's* why you're canning a high level 'nix guy, you do not leave him unattended after the termination hearing.

Jaysus, no wonder these people are tanking.

you peeps trust young earth creationists?

Might want to kno that some commentary is misleading you on the role of Theon vis a vis Hansen. From the Senate website, you can find Theon saying "I did not have the authority to give him his annual performance evaluation." In the US, your supervisor does that. If you don't do it, you're not supervised by that person.

Theon has this to say as well: "one could say that I was, in effect, Hansen’s supervisor." Which means "I was not hansen's supervisor, one could say."

Inhofe's a young earth creationist. He's well schooled in the art of finding geriatrics to wheeze things that sound believable to him and to persevere in his faith in Man's dominion over Nature for all time in the face of mountains of evidence that this might not be a Bright Idea.

Watching the Reg throw itself under the Jesus Bandwagon on this one continues to be breathtaking.

Aphasia, or general twistedness

Did anyone else read "The ten-time Grammy" as "the ten-time Tranny" on their first pass, or is it just me?

oy. That's not a review

That's typing up a press release because it's almost christmas and someone wants to pop down to the pubs early.

Odds on that "raid" controller is the crap SATAraid from intel in the ICH known to the linux world as fakeraid, and available on motherboards from every vendor in creation.

the ram? Be ready to test it for faults yourself. (Learn to love memtest, as I had to *after* rma'ing a supermicro 'workstation' a few years back - and getting exactly the same shite back in the door. I did the ram tests myself, then got ram that worked. Glad it wasn't the slots, I suppose.)

The power supply? 300 w? I understand not needing a full bore 1200 w supply, but topping out at 300 is weak, to say the very least. The slavishly copied press release didn't mention, can it be fitted redundantly? Of course not, which is why it didn't come up.

my advice: never buy from "super red dot" as this outfit is known hereabouts. Apparently back in 486 days they did quality builds. Long since past, those days.

Now, look at any major linux vendor's site for supermicro products that have been qualified. Perhaps they've started qualifying them lately, but as of two years ago, they were too effing cheap to qualify their systems with linux distros.

I honestly don't get why the reg thinks this is more or less than anyone else's tower PC.

Before you get all screamy about not calling the fuzz...

I think a lot of people thought it was a hoax. He'd had his justintv account pulled for empty suicide threats in the past, according to an LA Times writeup.

How can you tell the difference between someone who's actually downed a handful of pills and someone who's crashed for the night after saying something stupid online?

It's not helping justintv that one of their moderators explained the lack of interest by tagging the kid as an attention whore.

copy in / copy out performance

Is almost certainly limited by the network, not the drive hardware on either side.

The folks at smallnetbuilder do a lot of NAS reviews, and have a formal benchmarking methodology.

Any rate, the speed of the WD unit sounds okay. The control interface looks like nothing to write home about. I agree with the synology user that if you're looking to do a 4 or 5 T nas array you'll be putting a lot of money into it. Might as well get a box that can run a real LAMP stack. synology and one other vendor offer 'em.

Take a look at the smallnetbuilder review - this little guy apparently only supports WD drives and has some lameness about managing RAID that's surprising for a 4 disk box. Also, no hot swap. It's pokey, too, in comparison even with the Buffalo. 16 h to build the array? Ouch.

It's cheap, but if you want cheap you can buy an empty Promise box and fill it with drives yourself for cheaper. In the US, this guy is supposedly selling for 1k; the promise box can be had for 300, and the WD 1T drives can be found (with patience) for 150/each.

The new release of the promise is supposed to be relatively quiet. Don't know if that is true or not.

It can be an attack and a decision to manage perception

Someone mailed anthrax. I think we can agree on that. One question is, who did so? At the time of the initial attacks, and for at least three years afterwards, the pool of suspects was in the tens of thousands in the US alone. (Every member of a large microbiological society was sent a letter asking them 'if you can think of anyone, would you tell us?' A joke, as bad as the Unabomber investigation.)

Did the attacks originate in the US? There was a turf war between various agencies on the answer to this question. Dueling experts from Ft. Detrick, the FBI, etc were being quoted, mostly anonymously. The schools of thought were largely "furrin divils" versus "local wingnuts."

At some point, not one but four independent government source were reported by ABC news to have said that bentonite had been found in the samples being analyzed, and further declared that the Iraqi weapon program used bentonite to weaponize anthrax.

That leak to ABC was deliberate perception management. It was instrumental in making the US more willing to attack Iraq -- a number of people are on the record as saying that they were swayed by the bentonite story. (Lots of good reporting in Salon on this topic.)

The White House had decided by the start of business September 12 that a return to Iraq was on the dance card. Bob Woodward reported that. The week of the 11th, the NSA was openly discussing perception management to channel people's responses to September 11. By 'openly discussing,' I mean 'in interviews broadcast on PBS that very week.'

Putting the anthrax on Iraq was brilliant. Low likelihood that the mailer was going to be busted in a relevant timeline. The mailer might even have ties to the middle east - no one knew at the time. Why not plant disinformation in the press?

Now we hear years later:

- no bentonite

- no silica of the sort which would be use for weapons forming

- local boy makes good. BTW, this local boy writes letters to his hometown paper, lots of them, that make him seem a lot closer in outlook to Dorothy Day than Tim McVeigh.

I'd like to see ABC come clean about who those four sources were, or at least -- if not divulge their identities -- have a chat and ask them for their responses to the death of Ivins, and also what the fuck they were thinking when they said 'bentonite' before. And yes, run a story about what those four had to say, now after the fact.

As for Ivins: I haven't taken time to read the transcript of the Q and A yet. What I know from what I have read is that they've done a good job of saying "the strain came from a flask in Ivins' lab" in a non-adversarial setting. No one to ask informed questions about chain of custody, about analytical methods, no one with time and background being paid to study the evidence presented.

Granting the FBI that flask still leaves them a long way from Ivins. In these labs, people wandered around and in and out on a very regular basis. (I had the opportunity to spend a little time at the facility in the mid-90s; yes, it's got strong military overtones - but at the end of the day, it's full of boffins with boffin habits.)

The reporting on lab procedures and sample handling throughout the case makes it very clear that they actually don't know who had access to what and when.

Could not have happened to nicer fellas

Does the UK still sentence people for being bankrupt?

Be wonderful if it did. Then, after financial ruin and other hijinks for the screws, they'd have a shot at being clapped up alongside some of the folks they normally get to take the piss out of.

Borstal Boy comes back around.

Also, has anyone noticed that the environmental pieces are often run with no opportunity to comment? Today's 'anti science greenies,' for instance, which serves largely to shill yet another political site that Orlowski favors, has no comments field.

Also, I note with interest that the Register managed not to hear the good news announced this weekend: for the first time in memory, the norther passage 'round the pole is navigable just now. Seems 'twas only a month or six weeks ago the Reg was clapping itself on the back and claiming that 2008 wasn't on track to match 2007 for Arctic ice reduction. 2007 would then be a one-off, so the bizarre Inhofe echo chamber hereabouts was saying.

hypothetical ssd improvements

I read the source article, and it also didn't actually quantify the performance benefit of doing the SSD changes.

any chance of running a filesystem bench before and after these tweaks to see if they do anything?

I was more interested in an article sort of three links away from your source; over on tom's hardware, they're arguing that SSDs are, in addition to screamingly expensive, worse power sucks than conventional HDDs.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-hdd-battery,1955.html

Makes me suddenly more interested in hdd-equipped SCCs than I'd been.

what happens when a sloppy BOFH gets canned

Oh, that's rich.

One of the computers was one the company had bought *twice.*

Once on its credit card, and again used?

And since this fella'd sold them a lot of their systems, what are the odds

that they bought it both times from him?

Muahahahahah.

I need a new keyboard.

And yes, employees using their workplace computers to store data have zero expectation of privacy. Duh. In a managed or even half-managed network, they have no expectation of privacy even for web browsing. There are going to be logs available to consult, or at the very least some ability to look into network flows and document them, even if lots of other things aren't formally logged.

BGP routing may be logged, but

There are still games being played with it. A year ago I was at a talk where a fairly cute attack was outlined. One element of it was that folks were publishing BGP routes to ip4 addresses that are (as of now) dark. I can't remember now the exact value of advertising routes to IPs that don't exist, but there was value to doing it, and no indication that the BGP gatekeepers were paying close attention to it. No traffic for legitimately assigned addresses was interrupted; who was complaining? Which NOC employee at a tier 1 or tier 2 carrier has time to analyze phishing email misdirects?

As far as folks who want to trust SSL and plan to not use a system if the SSL cert isn't correct because DNS has been compromised upstream: all well and good for you. If you give the pointy haired boss who runs personnel a browser popup with two buttons, one of which says "you can't work for a few hours while IT figures out what's wrong with this crypto" and one of which says "you can keep doing what you think is your regular work by pressing this button," which button will get pushed?

And if the choice comes up a second time, because the first time the PHB accidentally made the safer decision the first time out?

Unless you're using a proxy that's set up to reject certs that don't pass, with no bypass mechanism, there will be a lot of people breaking SSL intentionally from inside the firewall; they won't understand what they're doing, but they'll compromise their own systems again and again.

How confident are you that the people whose computers handle your transactions are protected from making this mistake? Not just banking, but medical, pharmacy, car insurance, concert tickets....

and the attack sled is published

http://www.caughq.org/exploits/CAU-EX-2008-0002.txt

Moore's built a 'sploit to put in his kid-friendly engine.

As of last night, the Sprint EVDO DNS infrastructure was vulnerable. don't know if they've dealt yet or not. Par-tay!

hm. seconds of runtime. swank, but not so much

Wow. The company website is interesting. For some applications, I suppose these would be helpful, but given that they've only got 60 seconds of runtime

at half load under the most favorable conditions (some of the kit is rated as low as 15 seconds!) seems like a very, very spendy route to go.

Not so much as a deskside device, though. These pups need a full cabinet to

live in!

this is probably around whaling and spearfishing

This is probably about installing keyloggers and remote control services more than self-propogating code. You can buy malware to put in an email or host on a website; the goal is not to spread like a virus (thereby giving copies of itself to security firms) but to remain in use in a limited pool of interesting machines and be unlikely to be picked up.

The professional malware industry periodically seed malware into residential IP space to find out if a/v companies are hiding honeypots in them. They know if there are honeypots there, since all of a sudden the signature blocks recognize unreleased malware. (Saw a great slide illustrating a post to a malware forum on this topic a few months ago.)

This is the kind of stuff that folks pay reasonably well for, and is likely to be undetected for months after its initial release (unless there's good network reporting and someone has time to read the sensors and has time to analyze, rather than simply reimage, a compromised machine and they have time to find the original source of infection and escalate that to their a/v vendor. How many machines are you administering? How many of the above processes are automated and hence efficient at most companies? Just the reimaging one. Guess which one managent favors over forensics?)

I see malware sent to users with titles at and above director, and the a/v on server never sees it, and the a/v product on the workstation never sees it. The best stuff is the stuff embedded in word documents, since there's no way to tell the corner offices that henceforth, we're blocking .doc at the gateway. The outbound filter often does block it phoning home. Does it always? Of course not.

Samples of these targeted malware loads submitted to symantec, mcafee, etc. shortly after their purchase would cost the client who'd violated the EULA dough. It would likely lead to earlier detection of the stuff, and an awareness that the CFO's password at the payroll site was blown. Generating new malware is basically free; once you've got the tools to flip a bit in your malware, or repack it with a different packer, you're going to bypass the next signature update and be able to supply your compliant customers with a/v evading product. But if your target is now extra-suspicious, you may not get a second chance to install a keylogger on that CFO's system.

The threat of reporting to the a/v community is a pretty good one. All that a/v can do by itself is react to past threats; you buy it because you have to, and because a lot of malware is crap software that does re-use enough chunks of old attack methods that it may be picked up.

don't know that it's entrapment, really

I think a lot of us are thinking "look, it's a *click* of a *mouse* for christ's sake. We're at risk of an armed search party?

In the US, posession of child porn is an offence full stop. It doesn't matter if you knew you had it or not. (The legal term of art is it's a "strict liability offence") I'm not surprised that following a link that purports to lead to kiddie porn is enough to justify the search warrant.

What is alarming as hell, though, is that there is now also a law making it an offense to follow an illegal hyperlink. I do hope that that is a) not accurate reporting or b) on its way to being overturned by the court. Yes, any of the spidering scenarios above would come under it, and so could the use of many pretty normal site hoovering utilities.

It isn't that surprising to me that wanting kiddie porn badly enough to visit the vatican library online, excuse me, follow the link to the photo of J Edgar Hoover in his nightie, again, I apologize I'm having a line noise problem here, visit the link the FBI set up which won't download any porn at all but will get you in their database is enough for at least some judges to sign a search warrant.

It's astonishing, if it's true, that following a link can be designated "illegal." How do you prove that the user knew what the link was?

If they get there, and you've been trying to track down keygens for your apps and spending time in the twilight between keygen sites and the smut sites they pimp themselves to to pay for their bandwidth, you may be in trouble.

Back up to "strict liability" - intention is not needed, nor is knowledge of the posession. Accidentally and unknowingly having kiddie porn around is an offence in the US.

How likely is the scenario? Not real likely - but the fact that one of the defendants here was busted for two thumbnail images (as well as allegedly destroying evidence, and the astonishing 'following an illegal hyperlink' crime.)

Well, boy, howdy.

Anyone think the MPAA might be interested in planting some kiddie porn in popular torrents, and then calling in the law? They wouldn't get a settlement, but the chilling effect of that on file trading would be extreme. And if the MPAA obtains evidence illegally, and then turns it over to the law, the evidence can be used.

Furhter, with a strict liability offence, it does not matter how the smut came into your posession. It's illegal, you are done. The MPAA could have come in while you were out, copied it to the harddrive - and you'd be liable for it.

@Paul M, others claiming 'mccarthyism'

You ought to have a look at this outfit's website.

They do have a page devoted to spin control on smoking. They're also in mourning for rightwing codger Bill Buckley. (emphysema, no?)

http://www.heartland.org/Article.cfm?artId=10594

It's very amusing to hear people say "stop with the ad hominem attacks, reply to their statement" - well, I just read the statement. There's no data to argue with. It's a bunch of assertions. You may not like the IPCC report, but it has footnotes, and explains where its data are coming from.

I was reading this statement because I was hoping for some information on who the signatories were. None is forthcoming. How many people? How many were scientists? One press account I read called it about 15 scientists, total. The person who's listed as the Executive Director of the Climate Science (sic) Coaltion is ... not a scientist. .

Finally, for those who want the evidence to be ironclad before anyone does anything: there's a risk/benefit you have to be willing to sit and think about. Let's assume for now that *neither* side is 100% sure of their position. Let's further assume that there's a 1:10 chance of the climate change skeptics being correct (that's very generous, once you step out of the IT libertarian echo chamber and into the real world). How much will it cost us if we act now? How much will it cost us if we wait 30 years and then need to act? How much do we actually save by doing nothing?

Changing industrial policy is like turning a ship -- it's far more difficult to do if you need to do it quickly than if you start early.

And finally for the folks who just hate the carbon trading schemes: I agree, I'd much rather see draconian, ironclad cuts. I'd like to see ordinary citizens equipped with Stingers and stationed at airports ready to stop aircraft whose engines have started. I'd like to see executives from every auto company selling a sport utility vehicle forced to tow it a mile a day using hooks fastened to their nipples.

Two points: first, you don't want these to become commonplace opinions. Hell, *I* woudn't wnat these to become commonplace opinions; surely I'd be found guilty of an eco-crime sooner or later.

Second, even I have to admit that the trading in sulfur dioxide emissions in the US has done a great deal to improve the situation with acid rain and its effects on plants and fish. (And those who claim - there are still those who do - that acid rain was a hoax? Why is it that the trading system for the emissions helped so much, then?)

on boingboing in 2005, looks like

Hm.

Since we can't (now) get this in the States via amazon I did a google for playmobil security checkpoint.

The third hit apparently dates to '05, with a link from someone named Josh.

Seems to've been on the market for a long time before we all noticed.

@jamtits

The best analogy I've seen for the whole carbon offset circle jerk is that it resurrects the ancient Medieval practice of buying Indulgences for Sins.

No one understands how it works, the theology's rather muddled, and you have to deal with specially frocked invividuals to work it (nowadays, hemp and sandals)

This applies also to the carbon trading schemes many in the US want to put into play as part of their, ahem, industrial policy every bit as much as it does to the lowly sobs who send off a few hundred a year in guilt money to offset visiting Granny on an airplane.

Cable companies have been numskulls forever

Back in the day, around 98 or 99, the cable companies wanted to <snicker> outlaw NAT, or at least put things in their terms of service telling their customers they couldn't use NAT. The cable companies were pissed that they weren't able to sell you a per-computer service, as they could a per-television service,

I agree that rate-limiting bit torrent traffic is, or in any case should be, completely legitimate behavior. It's not the same as rate-limiting traffic that originates from a network source that hasn't bribed you to play nice with them.

The folks who are claiming that traffic shaping based on protocol is the same as rate-limiting based on network of origin do indeed put my teeth on edge.

At the same time, if you buy your connection from a cable ISP, well, too bad. It's been explained again and again how the US cable internet offerings suck at their very core.

Guess what? Cable sucks. Any and all cable offerings: suckage. Guys selling cable? Weasels. In the end, I hope Comcast loses big-time in front of a jury - a big enough damage settlement based on using inflammatory language like 'forging' in front of a dimwitted jury that their stock takes a big hit. I also hope Comcast gets the award reversed on appeal, preferably on appeal about 4 years later, in front of judges who can read without moving their lips.

highly amused

Just amazing. For the people on about anarchy being all about self control, yadda yadda blather blather blather:

Burning Man was started by artists. It bills itself as still drawing from that tradition, and good artists have always done shit like this. To call in the cops and press criminal charges against someone for a very interesting alternative take on the smeg^B^B^B^B festivities?

And particularly to torch the man during the total eclipse?

Come on, all you gaia-hugging, moon-worshipping yos: your sacred event has got to be more interesting when it happens

a) before all the poseurs from the Bay Area drive in for the holiday weekend, when it's still just the pure Artistes and such

and

b) when Luna herself is being transformed, drenched in crimson and then reborn, echoing in the heaven what happens on the playa - a rebirth from ashes

no?

The idea that someon would be charged criminally - enough so that they have to post a 25k bail - for making a spontaneous freewheeling weeklong performance art fest more spontaneous and free of scheduling? When at least one of the events key organizers' responses was (according to wired) laughter (once he knew his cash cow had been extinguished enough to save the spectacle, natch?)