Tuesday, June 27, 2006

Ignoring the "Great Firewall of China". Richard Clayton is presenting a paper (blog post here) that discusses how to defeat China's national firewall: ...the keyword detection is not actually being done in large routers on the borders of the Chinese networks, but in nearby subsidiary machines. When these machines detect the keyword, they do not actually prevent the packet containing the keyword from passing through the main router (this would be horribly complicated to achieve and still allow the router to run at the necessary speed). Instead, these subsiduary machines generate a series of TCP reset packets, which are sent to each end of the connection. When the resets arrive, the end-points assume they are genuine requests from the other end to close the connection -- and obey. Hence the censorship occurs. However, because the original packets are passed through the firewall unscathed, if both of the endpoints were to completely ignore the firewall's reset packets, then the connection will proceed unhindered! We've done some real experiments on this -- and it works just fine!! Think of it as the Harry Potter approach to the Great Firewall -- just shut your eyes and walk onto Platform 9¾. Ignoring resets is trivial to achieve by applying simple firewall rules… and has no significant effect on ordinary working. If you want to be a little more clever you can examine the hop count (TTL) in the reset packets and determine whether the values are consistent with them arriving from the far end, or if the value indicates they have come from the intervening censorship device. We would argue that there is much to commend examining TTL values when considering defences against denial-of-service attacks using reset packets. Having operating system vendors provide this new functionality as standard would also be of practical use because Chinese citizens would not need to run special firewall-busting code (which the authorities might attempt to outlaw) but just off-the-shelf software (which they would necessarily tolerate). [Schneier on Security] 10:23:51 PM    comment []

Adventures in DIY radio. Mary Lu points to a report to the FCC that confirms what she and others have long suspected: that most of the FM transmitters sold to play iPods and the like over FM radios are out of compliance with the FCC's Part 15 rules. [The Doc Searls Weblog] (The rest of the post explains the details of the assertion.) 7:28:12 PM    comment []

It's His Space Now. Twilight of the media moguls? Not for this guy. With the $580 million purchase of MySpace, News Corp. chief Rupert Murdoch is betting he can transform a free social network into a colossal marketing machine. From Wired magazine. [Wired News: Top Stories] 7:28:11 PM    comment []

Where are we? Rise of the Videonet. [unmediated] 7:26:58 PM    comment []

Waxy notes: Jeopardy all-time champion Ken Jennings is blogging. he's a good writer, and funny! for example, his writeup on a trivia court decision, movies to sitcoms, and his giant head [via] 7:26:49 PM    comment []

The Truth About Boys and Girls, and Education Sector report by Sara Mead, challenges recent assertions that males are at risk, losing out, or vanishing in contemporary American educational systems. But the truth is far different from what these accounts suggest. The real story is not bad news about boys doing worse; it's good news about girls doing better. In fact, with a few exceptions, American boys are scoring higher and achieving more than they ever have before. But girls have just improved their performance on some meas­­­ures even faster. As a result, girls have narrowed or even closed some academic gaps that previously favored boys, while other long-standing gaps that favored girls have widened, leading to the belief that boys are falling behind. . . . The hysteria about boys is partly a matter of perspective. While most of society has finally embraced the idea of equality for women, the idea that women might actually surpass men in some areas (even as they remain behind in others) seems hard for many people to swallow. Thus, boys are routinely characterized as "falling behind" even as they improve in absolute terms. In addition, a dizzying array of so-called experts have seized on the boy crisis as a way to draw attention to their pet educational, cultural, or ideological issues. Some say that contemporary classrooms are too structured, suppressing boys' energetic natures and tendency to physical expression; others contend that boys need more structure and discipline in school. Some blame "misguided feminism" for boys' difficulties, while others argue that "myths" of masculinity have a crippling impact on boys.3 Many of these theories have superficially plausible rationales that make them appealing to some parents, educators, and policymakers. But the evidence suggests that many of these ideas come up short. Unfortunately, the current boy crisis hype and the debate around it are based more on hopes and fears than on evidence. This debate benefits neither boys nor girls, while distracting attention from more serious educational problems—such as large racial and economic achievement gaps—and practical ways to help both boys and girls succeed in school. . . . There is also some evidence that girls who graduate from high school have higher aspirations and better preparation for postsecondary education than boys do. For example, a University of Michigan study found that 62 percent of female high school seniors plan to graduate from a four-year-college, compared with 51 percent of male students.17 Girls are also more likely than boys to have taken a variety of college-preparatory classes, including geometry, algebra II, chemistry, advanced biology, and foreign languages, although boys are more likely to have taken physics. But this is another case where boys are actually improving, just not as fast as girls. 7:36:12 AM    comment []