Excellent article, but he forgot my favorite, CLOCK$. I used to have a web page with a big, shiny red button linked to <A HREF=”c:\clock$\clock$”> and the message “don’t click the button or your computer will be destroyed and all your files deleted”. It didn’t really do that, but it would instantly crash any Microsoft system prior to Win98SE or thereabouts. People did click on it, which still kind of amazes me.
I don’t know if the world really needs another IPC mechanism, but there it is.
Richard Stallman finally figured out a way to get online that was ideologically acceptable.
…he now connects to websites from his own computer – via Tor and using a free software browser. Previously, he used a complicated workaround to more or less email webpages to himself. The announcement brought a surprised gasp and a round of applause from the 300-plus attendees.
“At one point, I used to believe that the Firefox trademark license was incompatible with free software, I found out I was mistaken – it does allow the redistribution of unmodified copies,” he said.
Using Microsoft’s Remote Desktop Connection Manager 2.7, I can open 61 separate server consoles on a Dell Optiplex 390 with an i3 processor.
System performance outside of RDCman turns to treacle, but inside it the consoles are quite usable.
I had a bunch of PuTTY SSH windows open, and a fair number of tabs in firefox, too.
Humans are pack animals. They need to gather according to shared traits and then see an enemy of everyone who does not fit.
— Some geeky guy on Slashdot.
Computer scientists are taught classical categorization, which has little correspondence to how our brains actually categorize. The Aristotelian “necessary and sufficient” check-lists of traits, on which we’ve built giant monoliths of computer code (hello, Active Directory) and theory (hello, cladistic phylogeny) are something like the phlogiston theory; a bluntly workable model, that lets you get things done, but also fundamentally wrong, and thus a limitation on what can be understood and predicted.
Research that’s been ongoing since the 1960s or earlier, by people like Eleanor Rosch and Paul Kay, and later George Lakoff and Ronald Langacker, has provided significant amounts of data showing our brains do not assign people to us/them categories because they have a set of traits that we’ve understood and identified. In neurological reality, we assign people to categories based on how closely we think they resemble one or more prototypes, which might be real people (a group leader, typically) or an idealized belief or perception of how men and women should be. The prototype can be fixed (like, say, Jesus) or constantly changing (like, say, a political candidate).
There will always be someone in the group who least resembles the prototype, so there is always a scapegoat available if there’s not enough food or someone needs to take the blame for some unavoidable accident. There may also be anti-prototypes and whoever most resembles that person is less “in the group” than someone who is otherwise the same but lacks these correspondences with the anti-prototypes.
In a strange way this confirms one of Cipolla’s famous “basic laws of human stupidity“; since we’ve evolved a categorization method that mainly serves to quickly identify who gets thrown off the sled when the wolves are catching up, of course there will always be more than enough people to fill that role. If you need a scapegoat, you’ll always be able to identify someone as the stupid person responsible; our brains are biased to work that way.
Real data proving that UI design for function beats UI design for aesthetics. Well, for web and app designer aesthetics, anyway, which are trend-based and emotional rather than useful.
Zero tolerance means no harmless prank shall go unpunished.
This kid’s prank demonstrated that children in his school have the ability to easily see the questions to be used for the state’s standardized tests, because teachers there apparently have full administrator access to the school’s network, and their passwords are their upcased last names.
But nobody cares about that… I think they’re basically freaked out because it’s Florida, and the kid’s prank was to put a picture of men kissing on his teacher’s desktop. Education be damned, we must punish the gaiety! The teenager has since been released into his parents’ custody.
Originally, back when the ARPAnet merged with SRI, BBN, NSFnet and MERIT to become the Internet, and dinosaurs still roamed the earth, there was no such thing as a “network router”. How can that be? Meh, it’s just semantics. The terminology has evolved.
Internet-connected systems that routed traffic (which was most of them, back in the day) usually ran a program called “gated” (that’s the GATEway Daemon, written at MERIT) that routed IP traffic between networks. A lot of those oldtimey networks were connected by UUCP dial-up links that were only live between 11pm and midnight to save money, so the code was written to support poor quality network links that came and went somewhat randomly.
Any physical network connection that would accept packets bound for some remote network was called a gateway. Gateways were defined by their network addresses. A data structure was created to hold information about which gateways led to which networks – this is called the routing table. The individual entries in that table are created by specifying a set of target IP addresses (using a network address and a mask), a target gateway, and which physical connection to use to reach that target gateway. That terminology is still in use in some commands, such as the “route” command. The individual routing table entries quickly came to be called routes.
At some point somebody at Stanford or MIT came up with the concept of the default gateway. This was a hack, that has become a crucially important networking concept today. No matter what kind of OS they were running, network-connected computers already had routing tables that held networks, masks, and gateways – so a special “fake network” was defined for the purpose of putting a default gateway into the existing tables. It has an address/mask pair that makes no sense at all – 0.0.0.0/0.0.0.0 – this is intentional, so the fake network entry can’t possibly interfere with any real networks.
The network stacks of all modern systems (post 1979) will look for a route to a target address, and if they don’t find one, they will use the route defined by the 0.0.0.0/0.0.0.0 routing table entry. It’s a wild swing, the hail mary pass, you just throw it out there and hope for the best.
Since the default route fits the format that is used for all other routes (it just has an impossible ip/netmask pair) it can be carried on any dynamic routing protocol – BGP, EIGRP, OSPF, RIPv2, you name it. This usually causes more problems than it’s worth, so most places do not distribute default routes dynamically. Instead they are configured by DHCP or defined manually, and cannot fluctuate.
Anyway, today, individual people have their own computers, instead of sharing a computer with 500 other people using dumb terminals, so most of our hosts don’t route, so their routing tables are almost empty. They will typically have two entries:
1) the default route, still called the default gateway in many implementations
2) the route to the local net, which is specified by the host’s IP address and mask, and uses the physical ethernet port as the gateway.
A host that has no default route can only talk to machines on networks for which it holds specific routes.
Multicast-capable hosts (like linux and Windows machines) may also have multicast routes in their routing tables, but that is something you usually only see on servers at this point. It will become more common on end user desktops in the future, though; MacOSX and Ubuntu already have multicast capabilities turned on from the factory.
So today any network-capable widget might have static routes, defined by the system administrators, and those static routes might include a default route. It might also have dynamic routes, learned by communicating over the network with other systems, and those dynamic routes might include a default route. You can still call the target of the default route the default gateway if you wish, or you can call it the default route’s next hop, but most networking pros will just say default route or default gateway interchangeably. We’re a little sloppy with the language.
Oddly, over time computers have become less and less capable of dealing with multiple default routes. The pre-v2 linux kernels handled it effortlessly, but modern linux is just as bad in this respect as Windows.
Language evolves, although not always for the better. I personally have found it advantageous to adopt or at least be fluent in the terms and notations used by the youngest generation of technologists. I try to say folder instead of directory, for instance, because directory now means a backend database accessed by LDAP, instead of an on-disk filesystem data structure. I insist on using only international date notation. And I would like to train myself to pronounce router the same as rooter – which is almost certainly going to be the standard pronunciation before I manage to retire – but I haven’t got that programmed into my wetware yet. And I try to always say route instead of gateway whenever possible. The only time I want to use the word gateway is when I’m specifically talking about the target of a route. It’s not that the term is wrong in all other contexts, it’s just that it’s somewhat sloppy and very old-fashioned; it’s like calling your car a flivver instead of a beater.
I suppose this was inevitable.
“Comcast is a tool designed to simulate common network problems like latency, bandwidth restrictions, and dropped/reordered/corrupted packets.”
Despite my well known obsession with the Antikythera device, I somehow didn’t notice Loz Blain’s excellent 2011 sildenafil samples Successful samples of generic viagra treatment: You always want a treatment that had been withered away for a long time. Utilizing the internet for getting generic levitra online drugs can save you lots of money. Secondly lack of knowledge can be one reason why this drug is very famous in so many people is due to the veins carrying less blood to cialis online mastercard those parts. Gizmag column, which pretends to be solely about Hublot’s recreation of the mechanism as a somewhat clunky wristwatch.
Microsoft’s Azure Cloud service failed at almost exactly midnight last night, taking down hundreds of websites who may have thought that hardware redundancy could magically protect them from sysadmin oopses, as well as users of Xbox live and Microsoft’s flagship service Office 365.
Viva Zorggroep, a Dutch healthcare organisation with 4,000 employees, said it had also been affected as a consequence of adopting Microsoft’s online apps.
“At this time, our supporting departments such as finance, HR, education, IT et cetera are working with Office 365,” said Dave Thijssen, an IT manager at the company.
“This morning these servers were unresponsive, which means users were not able to log in to Office 365.
“As a result they had no access to email, calendars, or – most importantly – their documents and Office Online applications.“We also had trouble reporting the outage to our users as most of digital communication – email, Lync, intranet/Sharepoint – was out.
The outage persisted for over five hours for some customers and apparently there are still latency issues at this time. This is of course a violation of the Service Level Agreement… so you can keep a nickel or two of your monthly rent, I bet.
Coverage here. Very impressive, but personally I was even more impressed by the DIY spectrometer.
If you were thinking to yourself “what my PHP-based content presentation system really needs is an expensive backend from a company that has historically done incredibly poorly with PHP” then Microsoft has got your number.
There’s people claiming that the high tech industry is essentially racist, because it’s got a lot of white people in it, especially in high positions. The way the census works makes it hard to compare, but this is what I fudged together for the entire USA’s racial and gender demographics from the 2010 census figures. It’s probably pretty close to correct.
• The USA: 64% white, 16% Hispanic, 12% black, 5% Asian, 3% two or more races, <1% other, slightly less than 51% female, slightly more than 49% male. Here's the numbers delivered by the high tech companies (as quoted in this interesting essay):
• Apple: 55% white, 15% Asian, 11% Hispanic, 7% black, 2% two or more, 1% other, 9% undeclared, 30% female, 70% male.
• Facebook: 57% white, 34% Asian, 4% Hispanic, 3% two or more races, 2% black, <1% other, 31% female, 69% male.
In the previous years it was a common sight to see the exasperated faces of people waiting outside restaurants to get a medicine. cialis sample 20mg tadalafil Though, it is a beneficial drug but you need to repeat these steps to last longer in bed. The lack of interest, libido, low self-esteem, sense of uncertainty about an event, mastercard cialis online the impact of impotency. One can satisfy their partner for around 4 hours to 6 hours. http://robertrobb.com/why-the-mueller-report-wont-have-the-calming-effect-it-should/ levitra prescription online as the name suggest is the generic version of branded levitra.
• Google: 61% white, 30% Asian, 4% two or more races, 3% Hispanic, 2% black, <1% other, 30% female, 70% male.
• Twitter: 59% white, 29% Asian, 3% Hispanic or Latino, 3% two or more races, 2% black, 2% other, 1% American Indian or Alaskan native, 1% native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander, 30% female, 70% male.
• Yahoo: 50% white, 39% Asian, 4% Hispanic, 2% black, 2% two or more races, 2% other/not disclosed, 37% female, 62% male, 1% other/not disclosed.
Obviously the raw numbers don't tell a complete story, but they are interesting. Oh, and for those who haven't thought about it, the subcontinent of India is in Asia. AND for the record I have met very few people in my life who could be accurately described as "white" or "black" - most people I know are various shades of pink or brown, sometimes with a yellowish or bluish undertone in certain lighting, and quite often with contrasting spots.
It’s got better support for filesystems and for SD cards, despite Google’s claim that file managers and removable storage are simply too confusing and difficult for their user base. Google’s been flooded with complaints about their rejection of SD cards (and Android tablets like the nVidia Shield that support SD cards are massively outselling Google’s offerings) so perhaps calling their customers clueless wasn’t such a great business move. I haven’t heard anything about the app permissions debacle, so I’m assuming that’s still horribly broken.
Want to build a ginormous botnet without doing a lot of work? Compromise one of the Internet’s soft spots.
If you take over bOINGbOING.net, you can use the site to inject malware in 1.3 million visitors. Chump change! How about TheChive.com, or Kottke.org, or whatever? Face it, you’re not going to get more than 15 million suckers. It’s just too much effort for a lazy man; you’d still be doing a lot of hard work to recruit a paltry few million zombies.
So, you take over jquery.com, or typekit.com. Now you’re cooking with gas! It’s become common practice for websites to use remotely sourced scripts – so there are thousands of sites that will blindly push out whatever is in the file jquery.js at jquery.com, and all that site’s visitors will run it just as blindly. So if you take over a popular script or advertisement source, you can leverage that into billions of individual attacks, quite easily.
And that’s my Halloween horror story for this year.
Wiktenauer is an ongoing collaboration among researchers and practitioners from across the Western martial arts community, seeking to collect all of the primary and secondary source literature that makes up the text of historical European martial arts research and to organize and present it in a scholarly but accessible format.
Looks like the Antikythera treasure ship is not yet exhausted?
The Daily Mail’s coverage is unexpectedly better than the BBC‘s, despite the usual Daily Fail sidebar of celebrity gossip.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MqhuAnySPZ0
Hobbit’s netcat can be used to vomit forth network traffic as fast as your machine can generate it. We don’t need no steenkin’ LOIC!
Anyway, I needed to test a WAN pipe to see if Comcast was delivering the bandwidth we’re paying for – we’re supposed to have a 200 Mbps link to Boston.
[root@monster ~]# yes | nc -4 -u -v -v -n remotehost.boston.com 9
The yes command just screams “yes!” incessantly, like a teenage boy’s dream girlfriend. We pipe the output to netcat, and force it to use UDP and IPv4 to send all the yes traffic to a host in Boston. UDP port 9 is the “discard” service, of course, so the machine at the other end just throws the traffic away. We already constantly monitor all the routing nodes in the path so we can see and graph what happens to the packets in real time.
Turns out the host can generate 80Mbps, sustainable indefinitely. That goes into the 200Mbps Comcast pipe… and only 4Mbps comes out the other end! Thanks, netcat! Time to call Comcast!
Don’t do this if you aren’t ready to deal with the repercussions of completely smashing your network. Saturating interfaces, routers and pipes will severely impact normal business routines, and should be saved as a last resort.