So, in case you hadn't heard, since no one hunted down and shot the execs when they started airing pro-wrestling dramas on Sci-Fi they've been emboldened to decide the network needs a name change so they can have something trademarkable.
So, I own a scooter now, and since the weather is turning nice again, I'm looking into what can be done about little things like it's depressingly inaccurate speedometer and it's complete lack of front mounted laser weaponry (economy's fading fast and lasers don't need to reload).
While considering that perhaps I could use an Arduino to control an LED array and get an accurate speedometer read (and maybe control laser intensity) I stumbled across this video.
I wouldn't want to be the guy having to solder all those connections, but it might be worth it.
So, there's text on an alternate tab for this story, but it doesn't really put the "flavor" into things like hearing this woman breathe fire and brimstone about the hideous pillaging that financial executives have been engaging in. Literally skimming the bailout money while people are still being foreclosed on with no change in policies...
Wow. If you ever needed a reason to be mad enough to take up shoving rags into bottles of flammable liquids...
I just can't think of anything nice to say about the level of misinformation in this article, so I'm having to settle for saying things that aren't entirely hostile instead. To somewhat oversimplify, Richard Bennett has published an article to The Register making the claim that a recent behavioral change for uTorrent (a popular BitTorrent client) will result in the entire Internet's bandwidth being reduced by three-quarters.
We'll start with the out-and-out lie that heads up the article:
The leading BitTorrent software authors have declared war on you - and any users wanting to wring high performance out of their networks.
He then explains that this is because the authors of uTorrent have decided to make a change to the client so that it will default to UDP instead of TCP for data transfers. He goes on to compound this erroneous deduction with some, well, insanity.
By most estimates, P2P accounts for close to half of internet traffic today. When this traffic is immune to congestion control, the remaining half will stumble along at roughly a quarter of the bandwidth it has available today: half the raw bandwidth, used with half efficiency, by 95% of internet users. Oops.
There are some fundamental flaws in the argument he's trying to make here, one of the most glaring ones being that UDP is "immune to congestion control" (which he makes by proxy by quoting someone else, for those crying "but he's not the one that said it!"). This is simply untrue. UDP is no more immune to congestion control than TCP or ICMP. That is, it's not immune to actual congestion control... If your idea of "congestion control" is to spoof a disconnection request for a substantial number of the active connections going over a network segment (which in the 90's was called a "denial of service attack") then UDP would indeed be immune to this because UDP doesn't have a built-in "session" concept that can be so easily broken by an attacker, but that's not congestion control--at best that's connection harassment. (We won't go into detail right now about how badly Sandvine malfunctioned in addition to being the wrong solution.)
UDP was intended for real-time data transfers such as VoIP that typically move small amounts of data with a low tolerance for delay. [...] Bulk data transfers are supposed to use TCP, in large part because it shoulders the burden of congestion control for the internet’s end-to-end layer.
This is a more subtle derangement of the truth, but is no less untrue than the other premise Bennett makes. UDP was designed without handshaking protocols or methods of guaranteeing packet delivery so that it could facilitate very short transactions where handshaking or packet reassembly could introduce unuseful delays. There's no reason it can't be used for bulk transfers--it... [ Read More (0.4k in body) ]
Linksys DOS vulnerability still exists after two years
Topic: Computer Networking
6:25 pm EST, Nov 6, 2008
It's amazing how damn lazy vendors can actually be sometimes.
Two years ago in the midst of some other things, it was discovered that quite a few home network routers (Linksys included) would fail when presented with a DCC request involving bogus port numbers, which would result in an immediate disconnection of the session in use by a user's IRC client.
Relatively simple to fix, or so you'd think.
Today I've learned that even the latest firmware for the WRT54G2 is still vulnerable despite it being impossible to miss that this issue has been around for over two years now.
This despite the fact that the firmware is 1.0.01, build three, and was released on Apr 29, 2008.
The cartoonist over at IllWillPress has done a new Foamy animation centering around politics, entitled "Political Shifty", loaded for bear with the usual hearty helping of vitriol and ire.
Note: Probably not worksafe, or at least not worksafe unless you're using headphones. Language!
The low hanging fruit, i.e. idiots whose parents paid for prep school, Yale, and then the Harvard MBA, was there for the taking. These people who were (often) truly not worthy of the education they received (or supposedly received) rose to the top of companies such as AIG, Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers and all levels of our government. All of this behavior supporting the Aristocracy, only ended up making it easier for me to find people stupid enough to take the other side of my trades. God bless America.
