Daily Revolution™

4 by Mike Fratto, Aug 8, 2008 04:37 PM

Up until Matasano mistakenly let the cat out of the bag about the DNS forgery attack that Dan Kaminsky found, lots of experts were downplaying the problem as old and known. Once the details were released, those same folks agreed, that yes, the problem Kaminsky found was that bad. Since Kaminsky gave his presentation about the DNS vulnerability (along with two blog posts explaining Why So Serious and a Summary), a lot of noise is being made about the impacts.

Can I take a moment to say, “well, duh!” Alright, got that out of my system. The short story is just about everything relies on DNS. Web surfing, e-mail, anti-spam, SSL, content delivery, and so on. It’s not just that those services rely on DNS, those services can be made party to the attack. Kaminsky has no less than 17 detailed slides on why attacking DNS is fruitful. Kaminsky then dives into why SSL is not a silver bullet. Every network device, connected to the Internet or not, relies on DNS for name resolution.

DNS is more than simple name resolution. Just look at everything else DNS stores. The IETF DNS extensions working group has been adding new resources records such as storing the location of services in the SRV resource record (RFC 2782), the distribution of phone numbers and services (ENUM) in the NAPTR resource record (RFC 3403), or digital certificates and certificate revocation lists in the CERT resource record (RFC 4398). DNS is a distributed data base. Address records are just one type of record.

Kaminsky’s slide deck is great stuff. I bet the presentation was useful (now wish I had gone to Vegas), but his slides give enough detail to pick up the points. For more details and a more accessible explanation, check out Steve Friedl’s “An Illustrated Guide to the Kaminsky DNS Vulnerability.”

By Mary Allan Mill

My late husband was an aeronautical and electrical engineer, and we met when he was brought to St. Louis to work in the aerospace department of what is now Boeing - McDonnell Douglas.  As part of a government contract, he worked on both the Apollo and Gemini space projects.  I admit to being a true sci-fi fan from the days of Buck Rogers’ movies at Saturday matinees.  Learning real science fact from my husband was wonderful, but I couldn’t tell anyone.

Among friends I’ve made through the years are a couple where the husband was in similar projects in Tennessee, and it was from him that I learned about the “Mechanical Army Muel” called Big Dog.  This is the latest development of a company called Boston Dynamics, and after looking at the video download I fell in love with this fabulous, somewhat fumbling, most advanced quadruped robot on earth.

There’s an on-board computer which controls locomotion.  From certain camera angles you could swear that two inept human beings with very long legs are making fools of themselves.  However, it runs at 4 mph, climbs slopes up to 35 degrees, staggers across large rocks, and carries a 340 lb load.

To see is to believe, and it would appear that it is being further developed for space projects.

www.bostondynamics.com

By Ace in the Hole

Is the future of weaponry and crowd control already here? Ray-guns are no longer science fiction, according to an article by Tom Burghardt at InformationLiberation.com. He says that acoustic microwave armaments, laser induced plasma channels and Vortex ring guns are real live Star Wars technology. “Welcome to the twisted world of ‘non-lethal’ weapons research brought to you by the ‘fun’ folks at the Pentagon’s Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Directorate (JNLWD).”

Raytheon’s Active Denial System (ADS) is “the first integration of the key technology elements such as the millimeter wave source, cooling system, and antenna, among other things.” ADS is a directed energy weapon used for “crowd control.” Known for its “goodbye effect,” ADS is a highly-effective “pain ray.” With a range of 550 yards, the excruciating energy blasts can penetrate clothing and heats the skin to around 130 degrees F.

Read about more sci-fi weaponry coming to the real world in Burghardt’s article at InformationLiberation.com.

RELATED LINKS
Non-lethal Weapons
Mobile ADS

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My dearest Thirsty,
I hope this missive finds you well.

A writer writes alone. A reader reads alone. And so they are alone together. Just like the DJ and the listener are alone together. The painter and the admirer are alone together. The players and the audience are alone together in the dark (”how delightful!” cries my wicked sister Eris).

Let us stretch our minds across the digital divide and be alone together to share words and music and art and all the finest of what we offer alone and together.

One word has crossed my vocabulary landscape many times of late.

Impact.

I begin to hate this word for the frequency of its usage as a verb in recent popular parlance. My grammar teachers were very strict on this point. “Impact”, when used as a verb, means ‘to compact or compress’. The word is not a substitute for the verb “affect”.

On the other hand.

Language is a living thing we all create together, so if we decide to change it up to fit the moment, so be it. It is everywhere- a Wikipedia search revealed its ubiquitous presence, so I know when I’m beat. I will refrain from correcting my friends’ usage of it so they won’t glare at me. I will not refrain from snapping at the journalist on my radio, nor will I be able to avoid cringing when I read it in the news. Call it tyrannical grammatical conditioning.

I looked up this word- I’ll not repeat it, thank you – in Wiktionary.com, and the article discusses this very issue. It calls the verb usage of it “proscribed”. In other words, “not considered proper”. Well, that makes me appear rather prim, doesn’t it? Even curmudgeonly, one might say.

Alas. I overcame other tyrannical conditioning from an involuntary childhood. I suppose I can overcome this one.

Affectionately yours until next Thursday,
Lilith

P.S. However, nuclear is still only two syllables, not three. Sorry George.
RELATED LINKS
Wikipedia.com – Impact
Wiktionary.com - Impact
WordSpy
World Wide Words
Asteroid Impacts
In-situ Measurements of Particles and CME Transients (IMPACT)

By Dewey Davis- Thompson

Play nice, says Wikipedia … use the Copyleft license! Copyleft is a play on the word copyright. Copyleft uses copyright law to remove restrictions on copying and changing a work and requiring that the same freedom be granted in modified versions.

Wikipedia says “Copyleft is a form of licensing and may be used to modify copyrights for works such as computer software, documents, music, and art. In general, copyright law allows an author to prohibit others from reproducing, adapting, or distributing copies of the author’s work. In contrast, an author may, through a copyleft licensing scheme, give every person who receives a copy of a work permission to reproduce, adapt or distribute the work as long as any resulting copies or adaptations are also bound by the same copyleft licensing scheme. A widely used and originating copyleft license is the GNU General Public License. Similar licenses are available through Creative Commons — called Share-alike.”

“Copyleft may also be characterized as a copyright licensing scheme in which an author surrenders some but not all rights under copyright law. Instead of allowing a work to fall completely into the public domain (where no copyright restrictions are imposed), copyleft allows an author to impose some but not all copyright restrictions on those who want to engage in activities that would otherwise be considered copyright infringement. Under copyleft, copyright infringement may be avoided if the would-be infringer perpetuates the same copyleft scheme. For this reason copyleft licenses are also known as reciprocal licenses.”

“While copyright protects the rights of the creator by providing control of distribution and modification, the idea of copyleft is to grant Gratis freedom to all others. In this way, seemingly using copyrighted works as if there were no copyright law on them, with one exception: copyleft also grants the open access to information useful in supporting modification (e.g. source code) by enforcing its publication, and allows the original author to be acknowledged.”

You can read the rest of the entry on Copyleft at Wikipedia.

RELATED LINKS
Green for All
Wikipedia: Copyleft
Creative Commons