Wednesday, May 14, 2003

Adapted from a Clemens Lecture presented in April for the Mark Twain House in Hartford, Connecticut: Vonnegut on "Shock and Awe" -- which Cory calls a wry, sharp indictment of war and the Bush presidency. [bOing bOing] Captivating, personal essay, that traverses war and peace, Samuel Clemens and Clemens Vonnegut, Abraham Lincoln, James Polk, Mount Rushmore, and the weather. 8:33:54 PM    comment []

Taking aim at denial-of-service attacks, by Robert Lemos, CNET News.com. Graduate students from Carnegie Mellon University on Monday proposed two methods aimed at greatly reducing the effects of Internet attacks. In two papers presented at the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy here, the graduate students suggested simple modifications to network software that could defeat denial-of-service attacks and that could be implemented in the current protocol used by the Internet. The symposium, sponsored by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, began Sunday and lasts through Wednesday. Steven Bellovin, a research fellow in network security at AT&T Labs, said both proposals are credible attempts at solving for network administrators the sticky problems of denial-of-service attacks. . . . The [first] proposal takes advantage of largely unused bits in the headers of network traffic--the digitized address information attached to each electronic message--to fingerprint data based on the route the information took through a network. A victim suffering from an onslaught of data could use the fingerprint, or path-identifier number, to decide whether the traffic from certain regions of the Internet should be blocked by its Internet service provider. . . . The second presentation, also by a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon, proposes that servers use "puzzles"--problems that take a certain amount of processing time to solve--as a means of taxing any computer that tries to communicate with the server. Such a technique, which has also been suggested as a way to defeat spammers who send unsolicited mass e-mail, would help defend against denial-of-service attacks that attempt to tie up a victim server's memory with hundreds or thousands of connections. 12:01:39 PM    comment []

War against SARS Spills into Cyberspace, by Antoaneta Bezlova, Inter Press Service. China's all-out war to contain the spread of SARS has spread to cyberspace, showcasing the influence of a young but thriving Internet society in the world's most populous nation. Authorities have detained 107 people for spreading rumours about the situation around the Severe Acute Respiratory Situation (SARS) over the Internet and through mobile text messaging - a sign that authorities are worried about social stability in a city that is fighting an uphill battle to contain the illness. The arrests took place in 17 provinces and cities, including Beijing, Guangdong and Hebei provinces -- all areas designated by the World Health Organisation (WHO) as SARS-affected. 10:01:20 AM    comment []

Hackers: iTunes can be shared over Net. By John Borland, CNET News.com. The new music jukebox software, released two weeks ago as part of a set of high-profile Apple music announcements, contains features that allow Mac users to stream music to each other over a network. The songs are not downloaded permanently but do allow computer users to listen to any song on another network-connected Macintosh's hard drive. Several groups of online programmers say they have figured out ways to extend this feature from a local area network to the Net. A few Web sites and software applications are claiming to allow people to search other Net-connected Macintosh computers' hard drives in order to listen to songs online. . . . The rise of the new services threatens to put Apple's software squarely in the center of a controversy that the company had hoped to avoid with the release of its new iTunes online music store. That site, which offers easy access to a huge music catalog of 99-cent songs, won strong kudos from record labels as a big step forward in the authorized distribution of music online. It's not wholly clear whether sharing music with a few, even anonymous people online veers completely away from that vision. 4:59:32 AM    comment []