I'm absolutely not advocating against early planning, that is good. What isn't good is misrepresenting the problem.

Guys, look at This list of Class A.

Prudential insurance? A class A? Almost 17 million addresses?

Ford motor company? General electric?

DoD has 11 class A chunks? That's almost 200 million addresses. You could give almost everybody in the united states a mobile phone with that.

These are just the most obvious ones. Does Apple really need 17 million addresses? Does HP? Xerox PARC?

This FUD has been getting spread around since the late 1990s. I think we're fine, and I think we're going to be fine for quite a while into the future.

Yes, you absolutely can DDOS them, you just probably couldn't do it with an existing, canned tool like LOIC. (I'm assuming LOIC just does HTTP?). Have you ever noticed that, when the internet bails out at your friendly neighborhood coffee shop, they're usually unable to process credit card transactions? This is because all of those desktop card terminals talk to VISA/Mastercard/AMEX/etc's payment processing servers over the public internet. The transaction is protected with strong encryption the same as VPN or HTTPS is, but this doesn't mean it can't be attacked.

Keep in mind that there is almost no "hacking" going on here, they're just flooding it. This is why this type of DOS attack is almost impossible to stop. The same technique could be applied to any service.

This shouldn't be even remotely difficult to do for anybody who has more than a very, very basic understanding of computer networking.

Again, no. You're not worried about specifically attacking the protocol, you're looking to just overwhelm the machine with traffic.

Maybe I'm out of the ordinary, but I've never replaced a phone because it was out of date, I've only ever replaced it when it breaks.

I doubt any of my desktop machines would still be crunching if they got banged up against my keys in my pocket for 16 hours a day.

This is something that I've tried and tried and tried to explain to some of my friends that work in marketing. When you are sending spam, you are literally using somebody *else's* property in a way that they don't want you to use it in order to give them messages.

This should be looked at no differently than causing unused speakers in my house to play radio advertisements when I want them turned off.

You send spam, and it's taking up a limited resource (disk, bandwidth, power, man hours, etc.) to your end and against the will of the recipient. I really hope that there are more cases like this.

This is called "antivirus$year" and it's been around for a long time now.

Unless you were being sarcastic...

The real WTF here is that

A) Cryptome is running on Network Solutions
B) The email associated with the account is on *earthlink* ???
C) None of these things have been shut down.

Seriously, doesn't cryptome host some pretty shady stuff? On the same level as wikileaks, isn't it? What the hell is going on here?

If that was the case, they probably wouldn't come out of their spaceship. Our atmosphere is filled with water.

That is absolutely fantastic news. Could you point me at a place where I could buy one?

The reality is that the derivative technologies are not always things like "we need to invent a solar panel", they're not even "we need to invent light composites", they're "we need to figure out a way of quickly producing these exotic materials on a large enough skill to fill the demand that the military is going to have for these.".

Isn't it frustrating that the military never encourages the development of new technology?

I cannot think of a single civilian use for something like this, and definitely not a use for any of the derivative technologies. /sarcasm...because, well, nerdgasm