Texan's alleged Amazon bombing effort fizzles: Militia man wanted to take out 'about 70 per cent of the internet' The US Justice Department on Friday announced the arrest of Seth Aaron Pendley, 28, for allegedly planning to blow up a single Amazon data center in Ashburn, Virginia, which he thought would knock out around 70 per cent of the internet. Pendley, the feds said, was arrested on Thursday after supposedly trying to buy explosives …
Sadly, it also shows the number of people who don't have multizone setups and don't have the ability to recover quickly. There's a site I wanted to visit on March 25th which didn't work. Turns out it went down on March 10th and is run by a French company. It's still down today. I would expect that they would have the necessary backups to get a webserver back in operation in a month. One datacenter can be very important to small operations, though with cloud it shouldn't be.
It’s funny how people don’t understand how the internet works.
The internet was a born from a US DoD (DARPA) project to provide resilient communications for key US assets in the event of an all out nuclear war. The internet, as we now know it, is a collection of inte-connected networks, the idea being if 1 connection from a network is lost it’s possible to route via another connection or via other connected networks to reach a destination.
DC’s are not the internet, AWS / Azure / GCP etc are not the internet, they typically serve the WWW which some may call the internet but is actually connectivity to systems serving information over the internet.
A DC disappearing will not in itself break the internet but may have huge disruption to platforms that relied on that dc to serve its data.
The obvious solution is to host your systems across multiple DC’s in different geographies, preferably by different providers.
The amount of blank stares I get these days when I explain why availability and redundancy across multiple geographic DC’s is important is unbelievable. Most PM’s just want to Chuck the project across the wall and hope they’ve moved on by the time any issues are exposed.
In the past redundancy and availability was a given, now it needs to be battled for and is usually rejected on cost.
In 1 job which had multiple DC’s miles apart, lots of stuff was/is built with ha in mind yet it’s manual failover. Literally ~1k software systems the business paid for duplicate kit in both DC’s will need a manual cutover in the event of the need to flip. Each app obviously thought they where that important that they’d get the required attention in the event if an issue. The Uber mega important ones do get an annual failover test, and failover testing is part of the commissioning but it’s smoke and mirrors.
"The internet was a born from a US DoD (DARPA) project to provide resilient communications for key US assets in the event of an all out nuclear war."
Oft repeated, but simply not true. The networks that were designed to survive nuclear attack included the "Minimum Essential Emergency Communications Network", or MEECN, and the prior "Survivable Low Frequency Communications System" or SLFCS, Besides, if you use an ounce of common sense, it only stands to reason ... no military would design a command and control system that inherently wasn't securable, and the Internet was not then, and still isn't securable.
In The Beginning, the first two nodes of what became TehIntraWebTubes were at SRI and UCLA, conceived, designed, implemented and run by students and professors. With no Pentagon oversight, input or anything else "intellectual". Money, yes. Oversight, no.
Boiling it down to basics, the (D)ARPANET was just a research network designed to research networking. The "survives nukes" myth came about much later ... The cold, sad reality is that the only reason it was built to be resilient is because the available hardware was really, really flaky.
Thank you for that. I believed and probably perpetuated that myth for longer than I should have in my youth. After actually reading accounts from the time I changed my tune. Knowing it was cobbled together by boffins on crappy hardware explains the Internet perfectly and makes sense. And balance was restored to the universe.
Beer for boffins -->
Then there was the day when a single bit error in an IMP (arpanet node) brought down the entire network and it could not be rebooted without careful patching of all of the IMPs.
The bit error was in one of the IMPS and caused a cycle of routing messages numbered 04, 40, 44 which, having higher priority than normal messages, took over the network and stopped all normal traffic.
Then there was the time a single back hoe took out all connectivity between the East coast and the West coast. There were two separate paths from the East coast to the West coast but the phone company routed them both through the same cable.
“ Oft repeated, but simply not true. The networks that were designed to survive nuclear attack included the "Minimum Essential Emergency Communications Network", or MEECN, and the prior "Survivable Low Frequency Communications System" or SLFCS, Besides, if you use an ounce of common sense, it only stands to reason ... no military would design a command and control system that inherently wasn't securable, and the Internet was not then, and still isn't securable.”
The internet was a born from a US DoD (DARPA) project to provide resilient communications for key US assets in the event of an all out nuclear war.
The internet, ok ARPANET in the early days, connects disparate networks of networks together. It enables people to connect to systems in other geographies. Reliability is provided using packet switched networks which are able to route to and through other networks of networks. The actual remote networks may themselves be hardened against nuclear attack, packet switching was developed as a way to provide greater resilience against nuclear attacks that would have taken out circuit switched networks.
Security is a whole different game, for a long time government would not permit certain traffic classifications across the internet. Private point to point circuits are required for sensitive traffic and traffic is often encrypted across those. Diverse routes are also possible for HA.
Like I said, the internet is a collection of inter-connectivity between different networks providing resilience and availability. I made no mention of security.
From the wiki page
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Baran#Packet_switched_network_design
The design flew in the face of telephony design of the time by placing inexpensive and unreliable nodes at the center of the network and more intelligent terminating 'multiplexer' devices at the endpoints. In Baran's words, unlike the telephone company's equipment, his design did not require expensive "gold plated" components to be reliable. The Distributed Network that Baran introduced was intended to route around damage. It provided connection to others through many points, not one centralized connection. Fundamental to the scheme was the division of the information into "blocks" before they were sent out across the network. That enabled the data to travel faster and communications lines to be used more efficiently. Each block was sent separately, traveling different paths and rejoining into a whole when they were received at their destination.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Internet#Packet_switching
The resiliency of a packet-switched network that uses link-state routing protocols, which are used on the Internet, stems in some part from the research to develop a network that could survive a nuclear attack
"The internet was a born from a US DoD (DARPA) project to provide resilient communications for key US assets in the event of an all out nuclear war."
I heard you the first time. It is simply not true, no matter how many times you repeat it. It is also not true no matter how many other people attempt to perpetuate the myth.
Actually, it was Vint Cerf and Bob Khan (two ARPA aka Advanced Research Projects Agency employees) created the Internet of Today from their work on routing protocols in 1973. Previous work done by ARPA (as it was known then in the 1960's and 1970's) and 1960's era communications specialists Hubert Zimmerman and Louis Pouzin were the one who originally provided Cerf and Khan with potential designs on direct point-to-point communications used for routing radio signals AND line-based telephone signals to specific geographic locations during times where end-points were out of commission (i.e. such as during a conventional attack or nuclear strike!) This 1960's early routing protocol research eventually resulted in TCP/IP protocols.
The rules and protocols invented during that time eventually morphed in the TCP packet design and Internet Protocol Stack we see today comes out of that work and became usable in 1975 in test bed configurations and finally in 1983 when the first University-level and military-specific ARPANET networks were initiated to move data between computers at large scales.
In 1987 Tim Berners Lee used his fancy Steve Job's create Nextstation to base and create modern HTML upon IBM's 1960's-era SGML (standardized General Markup Language) which helped allow Marc Andreasson create the first modern Web Browser called Mosaic in 1989. That work became Netscape later on and the rest is history!
Ethernet was invented at Xerox PARC in the 1970's which provided the BACKBONE of local frame-based datagrams which could embed TCP/IP communications into LAN based communications to form one of the first widespread hardware-layers of the internet protocol stack.
The ORIGINAL routing designs for TCP were all Radio Frequency-based communications point-to-point protocols used for realtime battlespace communications and were invented at AT&T Bell Labs in the 1950's and 1960's and FIRST used by the Strategic Air Command for point to point communications between nuclear missile bases, air force bases and navy systems.
It was THAT SAC research at Bell Labs that really started TCP.
Plus also Bell Northern Research and Mitel in Canada in the 1960's ALSO provided the FIRST phone-line signaling and data protocols to create acoustic modems (modulators/demodulators) which made ALL point-to-point communications using phone lines possible! So technically, it was CANADA that REALLY invented the Internet! You can thank us Canadians now!
And I merely just helped invent one of the first widespread video and audio compression and playback CODECs in 1987 when I sent some of my well-written if weird iterative transform-and-LUT-based audio/video code I wrote in Calgary to a guy in California who eventually sent it to Germany who then let the Fraunhofer institute, NTT Japan and the Motion Picture Experts Group create the MPEG-1, MPEG-2 and MP3 standards by the Early 1990's-- So There!
NOW YOU KNOW THE REST OF THE STORY!
v
Mine was mostly Z-pattern searching but there were semaphore options for circular/spiral and outer-to-inner and inner-to-out centre-point of image and centre-of-object for self-similar pixel searches.
My code was ALSO AWARE of interlaced and progressive scan imagery AND you could separate out the RGB/RGBA channels into separate planes OR use plain old YCbCr/YCbCrA channels into separate planes for self-similarity searches.
My edge detection-based, object-oriented compression code which looks for edges and object interior repeating patterns, and scene re-ordering WAS sent to Microsoft around 1999/2000 so that probably had a lot to do with their later fancier video compression work which is GREAT plus I do know SOME of that code was ALSO again ended up over at Fraunhofer which of course gave us MP4 that has the nearly SAME tech.
Oh Well I'll see what I can contribute with my 3D-XYZ Fractal Codecs for the NEXT worldwide video standards!
v
Elizabeth "Jake" Feinler basically produced and designed the format of the HOSTS file which translated physical IP addresses to the text-based computer names and later 1970's-based .com .mil .edu domain-oriented mail and web address format we know today but the numeric based IP number identification and routing protocols themselves were ORIGINALLY based upon RF and phone line point-to-point connections routing research done at Mitel and Bell Northern Research in Canada in the 1950's/1960's.
Again, you can thank Canada for the Internet and PROBABLY me for MPEG-1/MPEG-2/DVD/MP3/MP4 codecs !!!
v
@StargateSg7
I already know the rest of the story and it doesn't match your telling of it.
1. That you write "Motion Picture Experts Group" reduces your credibility. The "M" in MPEG is "Moving".
2. MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 are heavily based on the earlier ITU-T Rec. H.261. The CCITT (as it was then) group that developed H.261 was already testing the motion compensated interframe prediction plus Discrete Cosine Transform approach by 1987. No iterative transform. No Look Up Table.
3. Though NTT were quite active in both the H.261 and MPEG standardisation activities they did not single handedly create any of the standards nor provide the largest technical contribution to any of them.
How do I know? I spent 10 years contributing significantly to the success of those CCITT/ITU-T/MPEG activities.
Then we have probably met!
And the H.261 standard was started because of a meeting in Calgary hosted by a certain relative of mine who wanted to transfer moving imagery of oil and gas reservoir simulations over 64 kilobit ISDN and low-bandwidth satellite lines to London, England and the Hague (i.e. Shell Oil).
His work and meetings with NTT, Toshiba, Sony and Philips basically got the ball rolling and my 1987 pixel pattern search code and lookup table work ended up in California and then Fraunhofer and the rest is history for video encoding. How do I know this? I WAS THERE in 1987 and 1988!
I actually DO KNOW the difference between Motion Picture and Moving Picture Experts Group and the Joint Photographer Experts Group -- This is the Register of course. I'm in imaging so motion picture/moving picture is a mere Putato / Potato slip of the tongue.
You do realize there IS a lookup table in the JPEG-like I-frame portion right? and DCT is a transform right? and the 8x8, 16x16 block size model contains an iterative search right? You are talking to one of the ORIGINAL WRITERS of the damn code!
v
1. You don't seem to know that the P in JPEG is Photographic, not Photographers.
2. H.261 was started in 1985 as an n times 384 kbit/s video codec for videoconferencing. Sony and Toshiba had no involvement. The part of Philips that participated was Philips Kommunikations Industrie (Nuremberg) as part of the German delegation. Fraunhofer played no part in H.261 nor JPEG nor any part of MPEG other than audio.
3. The original n times 384 kbit/s spec used only 8 by 8 blocks for both motion compensation and DCT. Although proven by real time tests between two independently designed hardware codecs in 1988 that spec was never published. Instead the goal was changed to p times 64 kbit/s. To help achieve the lower bit rates, the 16 by 16 macroblock was introduced for motion compensation though the DCT remained as 8 by 8. That was also later adopted by MPEG-1. Neither H.261 nor MPEG-1 video nor MPEG-2 video (aka MPEG-2) contain an iterative search. The normative parts of all those video standards specify only decoding. Search methods for motion vectors and block coding decisions are only made by encoders and are not normative. Hardware encoders tended to use a full search as by taking a fixed time that is easier to pipeline than the variable time of an iterative method.
4. Core MP3 technology came from the Eureka 147 project in which Fraunhofer participated..
5. I was there in all the H.261 meetings from 1986 to 1990 and all the MPEG meetings from the 2nd to the 50th. I was also at all the ETSI and COST211bis meetings that coordinated and funnelled the European work into H.261. Also in the European projects which did likewise for MPEG-1 and MPEG-2.
Point 1- YES I know about the JPEG moniker! Again a slip of my modern imaging interests and I'm too lazy to fix it!
Points 2 & 3. The original H.261 and future H.320 standard was actually 64 kilobits per second because we had to fit small 64 by 64 pixel and 128 by 128 pixel windows into aggregated 64-kbit ISDN channels just to even GET to 384 kbits. Those window sizes were what we could fit into the caches of the glorified 16-bit CPUs/MCUs which were used as hardware-based decoder chips
Sony, Philips and Toshiba WERE ALL at the initial Calgary meetings because I remember meeting Akio Morita there at the time (aka Sony Chairman/Founder) Why? because the engineers accompanying him wanted to ensure that ANY video standard arising out of these meetings would encompass the upcoming VCD standard and specifically support 352 by 288 pixels and 352 by 240 pixels (i.e. half the resolution on each axis of NTSC and PAL analogvideo)
I remember the BIG argument ensued as to whether 4x4 vs 8x8 vs 16x16 blocks is the standard block size due to issues with the cheap CPU/DSP chips in any player which had to reach the speed, bandwidth and/or storage capacity to decode blocks fast enough at 29.97 fps, 25 fps for the NTSC and PAL standards. We didn't bother to add error correction because most users wouldn't notice the errors at those frame rates and that ISDN would provide it's own packet-based error correction which was corrected at the telephony level anyways.
ISDN packet window sizes WERE the basis for the block and frame sizes and standards defined by H.261 and MPEG-1 as even then we had video phones at a paltry 6 fps to 15 fps which had 2, 4, 6, 9 or 12 aggregated 64 kbs channels to create a large video window.
My code specifically dealt with splitting apart RGB/RGBA and YCbCr/YCbCbA pixels into 3 or 4 separate planes which were Low-Pass filtered and Hi-Pass filtered before being DCT'ed separately.
THAT code went to California and Fraunhofer which gave rise to MPEG-1/MPEG-2.
The luminance of each colour channel and the alpha channel when using a zig-zag pattern 2x2, 4x4, 8x8, 16x16 and even 32x32 and 64x64 pixels tended to be self-similar and could be efficiently quantized AND decoded fast enough that even the 16-bit chips could do 29.97 fps.
ERGO, ..... The quantized coefficients into an ordered matrix ARE a localized LUT and the ORDERING of the low-frequency info to high-frequency information is ITERATIVE. We needed to do this so we can have enough same-bit sequences that are long enough to RLE to a high enough level to allow a decent Huffman encode.
P.S. I did this coding all on a MicroVAX and an IBM PC-AT with an ATI EGA card! This original work was to allow Shell to send animated video of oil and gas reservoir formation models as video streams to London and the Hague which allowed drillers to figure out where to drill straight downholes or try deviated wells mostly in African countries and the South Asian ocean fields.
Because satellite bandwidth was REALLY expensive and couldn't always be book on time, aggregated modem-based or ISDN communications was needed for live views in-field or at local drilling company offices. Ergo, video streaming was born and helped along by Broadcast Video equipment manufacturers who wanted to make portable and home based video recording and playback systems.
As a bit of history, I found out Sony had been working on disc-based recorders and players (WORM-based) for their upcoming 900 line+ HDTV camcorders (arising out of Betacam) and that a full 756 by 576 pixels window for MPEG 1 AND 2 was to be back-supported and extended to NOT 1920 by 1080p but rather the even higher 2048 by 1125 lines of their in-prototype form Saticon Tube HD cameras. (saw those personally as they brought them with them to the Calgary 1988 demo!)
Point 4. --- Bingo! Thank You! and Say hi to Bernd and Thomas for me!
Point 5. --- We've unknowingly crossed paths then... Hannover 1988? aka Arguing with Leonardo at Telecom Italia and Hiroshi over CIF and extending current spatial vs temporal resolution support?
v
Your mention of anything you did for one of the several companies working on digital video compression at the time but which did not make its way into H.261 and MPEG does not justify your claim "you can thank ........ PROBABLY me for MPEG-1/MPEG-2/DVD/MP3/MP4 codecs".
While it is true that the early n times 384 kbit/s algorithm had 4 possible scanning patterns for the 64 DCT coefficients - I was joint inventor on a patent application for a hardware method of determing the best choice - that was removed in the p times 64 kbit/s phase. Only the zig-zag scan was used in the ratified H.261 and copied into MPEG-1.
There was nothing novel about coding component video instead of composite or RGB.
I am very familiar with the work of the MPEG-1 Implementation Studies Subgroup when it assessed the video compression algorithms submitted in response to the MPEG-1 Call for Proposals. The experts in that subgroup were from VLSI companies because at that time only custom hardware, not microprocessors nor DSPs, stood any realistic chance of enabling decoders for consumer equipment. Recall that even single frame JPEG was so slow on general purpose CPUs that C-Cube Microsystems went to the trouble and expense of developing the CL-550 dedicated JPEG chip.
Interesting though this rummaging through memories may be to you and me, i suspect other readers do not share our enthusiasm. However incorrect, you are entitled to your opinion about your contribution to video compression standards. But I am equally entitled to call you out not because of anything I claim for myself but because I do know the fairly small band of people who brought those standards into existence as team efforts. Not one of them would have said or implied that they were to be singled out and thanked for those codecs.
OMG That C-Cube chip brings back memories!!! I still have articles from Byte magazine which showcased how Steve Jobs had a heck of a time trying to get it into the Nextcube aka NextDimension daughter board! I saw a working early prototype of that Nextdimension board (C-cube chip wasn't installed though) at Shell Calgary but it never shipped -- too bad -- it was a good system.
I also vaguely remember the C-Cube ship being installed as a board into various Mac Quadra based video editing systems similar to the Windows-based DPS Perception/DPS Velocity MJPEG video playback/recording boards.
The problem with "standards" is that it is many times impossible to ascertain specific contributions by certain people but I did a quick check back and Fraunhofer did get and modify my RGB/YCbCr planar separation code and the low-pass/high-pass filters. I also did say "PROBABLY" because Fraunhofer did get that code. I should also admit there were up to 16 entities involved in H.xyz and MPEG standards so no-one specifically can claim they did it entirely themselves even WITH my usual bombastic braggadoccio and coding prowess self-delusion.
You are that correct the Z-pattern is simple common sense to implement but I did remember bringing up with Yoshida the idea of variable scanning patterns as a 4-bit semaphore that could be ignored or not but I think he was far more concerned with keeping spatial and temporal compatability with analog SDTV video signals. In order to do 29.97 fps NTSC and 25 fps PAL video you gotta get rid of as much software baggage as you can to speed compression/decompression through those cheap player/recorder chips!
I also argued for the ability to ROTATE the Z-pattern or use centre-in or centre-out circular scanning because TV shows and movies TEND to have the their centre-of action in the centre of the screen or the main subject at one of the intersections of the rule-of-thirds reference grid AND that on-screen action usually panned left or panned right or tilted up or down. This would have given a better chance for the compressor to group together similar pixel values.
The 16-tokens given by a 4-bit scanning type semaphore would have made this variable scanning pattern workable but it never made it into the standard. I think Microsoft DID implement that semaphore into their WMV format but of course that wasn't until at least 2003. I vaguely remember Nathan Myhrvold giving me a call about that semaphore idea a few weeks before he left MS in 2000 -- They picked my brains about that and other semaphores used for video compression including the scene cutting and recombination before compression idea. Too bad I never patented any of those!
Well good on you for those patents of yours. I was too stupid to care about patents -- I should have but didn't! I could be living in a 4000 sq.ft Whistler Ski Lodge home rather than my 600 sqft Vancouver shoebox!
Oh Well! At least I have the memories of those heady days! It was ALSO nice to see the first Saticon Tube-based ultra high def video of 2048 by 1125 imagery ever seen in 1988. It STILL looks good even today! Sony brought one of their prototype 2048 pixel by 2048 pixel square tube Trinitron monitors to demo that video footage and it was AMAAAAAZING!!! I didn't see true hi-def video again in an end-user or home environment until around 2003!
v
Instead of ad hominem, you might try finding a little proof. For example, why not ask The Internet Society? I'm pretty certain that they would know, if anybody does. In fact, here is a document called "Brief History of the Internet", published in 1997 and signed by the likes of Vint Cerf, Bob Kahn and Jon Postel (and others). See particularly footnote 5, which states:
"5 It was from the RAND study that the false rumor started claiming that the ARPANET was somehow related to building a network resistant to nuclear war. This was never true of the ARPANET, only the unrelated RAND study on secure voice considered nuclear war. However, the later work on Internetting did emphasize robustness and survivability, including the capability to withstand losses of large portions of the underlying networks."
"Repeating the same stupidity ad nauseam doesn't increase its truth value."
I believe I already alluded to that. Hope this helps. Have a nice day.
You can find plenty of information about the true origins and purpose of ARPANET.
Nothing in the quote you provided contradicts the original statement that ARPANET was designed and created at the request of US DOD, for the purpose of obtaining a fault-tolerant, distributed and redundant means of electronic communications that would survive a nuclear attack.
Hint: there's an abbreviation in that (ARPANET) name: ARPA. Do you know what that abbreviation used to stand for?
Second hint: it changed its name to DARPA.
The Internet of today has very little to do with the original ARPANET. However, significant design and implementation details of today's Internet originate with ARPANET.
I will give you one name: Stephen J. Lukasik, and a quote from him:
The goal [of ARPANET] was to exploit new computer technologies to meet the needs of military command and control against nuclear threats, achieve survivable control of US nuclear forces, and improve military tactical and management decision making.
Who was Stephen J. Lukasik? He was, at first Deputy Director, and then Director of ARPA/DARPA in the late '60's - early '70's.
Why is he relevant? Because he provided the funding for ARPANET research.
I realize that Stephen J. Lukasik might not be as knowledgeable and informed as you are on the subject matter of the true origins and purpose of ARPANET. Even so, we may consider paying at least some attention to what he had to say about ARPANET.
It would have been quite helpful if you had at least a superficial familiarity with DARPA's research funding process.
You seem to have discovered a personal hobby in being contrarian to a hilt. Operating under the assumption that you always know better than anyone else.
You may want to consider the possibility that there are people in this world, and on this message board, that might, possibly, know a few things that you do not. And that you are not an authority on every single subject that is being discussed here. Case in point, the origins of ARPANET and the Internet as we know it today.
It's just a slight possibility, worthy of consideration. Or perhaps not.
"Nothing in the quote you provided contradicts the original statement that ARPANET was designed and created at the request of US DOD, for the purpose of obtaining a fault-tolerant, distributed and redundant means of electronic communications that would survive a nuclear attack."
Other than the blunt "the false rumor started claiming that the ARPANET was somehow related to building a network resistant to nuclear war. This was never true of the ARPANET", of course.
But that's just the words of The Internet Society, written by those who were there at the beginning.
"You may want to consider the possibility that there are people in this world, and on this message board, that might, possibly, know a few things that you do not. And that you are not an authority on every single subject that is being discussed here. Case in point, the origins of ARPANET and the Internet as we know it today."
Projection is an ugly thing.
“Other than the blunt "the false rumor started claiming that the ARPANET was somehow related to building a network resistant to nuclear war. This was never true of the ARPANET", of course.“
The internet was a born from a US DoD (DARPA) project to provide resilient communications for key US assets in the event of an all out nuclear war.
ARPANET was not the sole output from the DoD or D/ARPA.
The Telcos had no idea the internet would be used to let people make calls between each other at no additional cost, that’s just 1 of the millions of things people are going with technology that was not originally designed for the task.
What most people don't know is that John Von Neumann (famous mathematician) was the one who started computing in the first place with his idea that the processes and functionality of any computer numeric system can me emulated on any other computer numeric system. This means that he basically STARTED the idea of common operating systems and programming languages and it was HIM who helped Grace Hopper get the idea for making the first computer programming languages and first object file linkers!
AND it was von Neumann who gave some ideas on communications theory to graduate students and workers who eventually ended up at Mitel and Bell Northern Research, IBM and Bell Labs that ended up creating the RF (Radio frequency)-based point-to-point communications systems and routing protocols that ended up at ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency) which ended up at Strategic Air Command (SAC) as the protocols and systems that allowed a ROBUST survivable military-centric communications system that ran over-the-air and through the phone lines by the 1950's, 1960's and 1970's.
Again, you can thank Canada for creating decent acoustic Modems and thanks to Bell Labs for providing the underpinning RF communications research that allows TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) to be implemented on even the most basic levels of RF and modem-based communications hardware so that the 1983-era of the first combined WIDE AREA educational institution, military and commercial communications network to be implemented on disparate hardware.
This allowed one to communicate textual and binary data in a uniform manner which can automatically survive and re-route said data around blackouts and downtime within any small portion of the wider network!
THEN ... you can thank ME for sending that first 1987 Calgary-written LUT and pixel pattern search video and audio compression code to some guy in California which ended up at Fraunhofer Institute in Germany which eventually became the MPEG-1, MPEG-3, MP3 and MP4 video and audio codecs!
Also you can thank Mike Duigou (also originally from Calgary, Alberta, Canada) for rewriting most of the original parts of JAVA (i.e. a computer programming Language mostly written by a bunch of Canadians at Sun which was eventually bought by Oracle!) to make it more fault tolerant and workable on MANY MORE disparate and multiple platforms!
Without Mike Duigou's work, you wouldn't be able to run JAVA on almost every modern Television, Cable/Satellite/Fibre modem, Web Browser, Playstation, xBox, Car Entertainment system and many home automation devices!
Bloody hell you can thank us Canucks for saving your sorry multi-platform computer programming language and communications tushes!
P.S. The mouse and arrow cursor paradigm (i.e. a graphical user interface pointing peripheral) was ALSO invented by a Canadian!
HOT DAMN we Canadians are REALLY gooooooood at computing!
v
Brilliant and modest, you are an example to us all. But please tell, what on earth is a computer numeric system? Wouldn't 'computer' suffice? I don't know about you, but when I add uneccessary technical words to a phrase It's because I'm trying to look smarter than I am.
Your description of "Von Neumann's computer numeric systems emulation universality principle", looks fascinating but I've never seen it published anywhere. However, it sounds a bit like the concept of a Universal Turing Machine, which was invented by someone else. What you claim is just wrong, 100% wrong. Von Neumann was brilliant and contributed hugely to early computer science, but he didn't do what you claim. Turing completeness, the foundations of computability theory, undecidability etc was the work of Turing with a bit of help from Alonzo Church. Kurt Godel also contributed massively with his work on incompletenes. You could almost say Turing put the icing on the cake that Godel had already started baking.
Turing, the person who actually did that stuff was a gentle genius and a war hero. However, due to him being gay, the UK govt and police treated him egregiously after the war. I try to stand up for him whenever I can. He saved countless lives, shortened WW2 & very nearly created the whole theoretical basis for computing, and he deserves the credit for that. Also Turing was English, Church was American, Von Neumann was American-Hungarian, and Godel was Austrian. Scuppers your Canadian vibe a little bit, don't you think?
You have been extremely busy posting on here today - a busy beaver, even :), ahem... My advice is to take it steady for the rest of the day. Oh, and check the coffee machine, I have a bad feeling the five pints of decaf you swilled this morning were not actually decaf.
A Computer-Numeric system was a mathematical construct which was a math-based description of a Charles Babbage machine (i.e. an 1800's era mechanical computer). It technically was an array of computations (aka functions) that had a set of references (aka pointers) that were indexed in numeric order OR out of order by the description of another array which has "pointers" or "indexes" to those original math statements and functions.
You could re-arrange the indexes of pre-defined functions to perform almost any math and/or engineering calculation task you wanted to! You simply used an index card which had a series of function array indexes and some "parameter values" that were input into the "paper-based function library" which then spit out an answer when you "ran" your parameters through each set of listed functions. (this was originally laboriously done by HAND by graduate students!)
You could use such a Computer-Numeric system to complete ANY sort of common math application such as encryption/decryption, munition ballistics, navigation and other common technical operations used during the days when von Neumann was really active during the war effort.
von Neumann's efforts were ALSO followed by Grace Hopper who found she could organize those math function arrays into actual text-base source code which could be output as a series of highly organized and optimized computer instructions which created output that became the forerunners of modern interpreters and compilers.
Turing Completeness is NOT a von Neumann construct BUT his process equivalency breakthrough came about after he realized those same set of arrays of functions and the indexes that referenced them in any desired order COULD represent ANY sort of computation including a real-world system such as the trajectory of a ballistic munition or the coding of an encryption/decryption system. von Neumann in his later years even posited that such a system could represent entire human thought processes which gave rise to Artificial Intelligence research.
Marvin Minsky the PREMIERE AI researcher and founder of the MIT Media Lab was on a first name basis with von Neumann and he understood von Neumann's principle of "emulation becomes actuality" which can be applied to even human brains. WE HUMANS CAN be emulated on a sufficiently fast and expansive (i.e. large) computer-numeric system.
von Neumann ALSO inspired MANY graduate students and colleagues (reason I know this because I personally KNOW some of those original Mitel, Bell Northern Research, Bell Labs and IBM employees -- aka some of my relatives) who used his Computer-Numeric systems and structures and applied them to signals processing AND signals routing for RF and phone line modem research.
Anyone remember those Canadian-built 1970's and 1980's Gandalf modems? --- That was inspired by that early research which gave rise to modem-based robust packet routing systems which became the internet!
There were about 10 to 20 people who from 1940 to about 1998 who coincided multiple personal efforts into numeric operations theory, signals processing, data organization and indexing, routing, data identification and categorization and various OTHER subject matter which finally provided the stable base for the explosion of the internet we see today.
The timeline is as follows: Charles Babbage is the father of hardware-based computing. Ada Lovelace and Grace Hopper are the Grandmothers and Mothers of Computer Languages. John von Neumann is the concept designer of array processing and operating systems. Bell Labs/IBM created switch-based phone lines, databases and robust RF signalling and RF communications. BNR/Mitel created Packet-based Modems. ARPA gave us robust routing protocols. Xerox PARC gave us Ethernet and Graphical user interfaces. Tim Berners Lee made HTML. Marc Andreassen give us Web Browsers, Sun Microsystems and Mike Duigou gave us JAVA running everywhere on any platform and I am pretty sure I started the process to get you MPEG-1/2/3/4 Audio/Video codecs in 1987!
Oh Yeah! I forgot that Philip Corso was the one gave parts of the "Nut File" wreckage from the 1947 Corona New Mexico UFO crashes to Bill Shockley who created Fairchild Semiconductor which gave us the first Microprocessors. They found the weird line traces found on some slivers of broken ceramic were actually micro-sized versions of large scale electrical circuits that could do all sorts of things!
Not to mention all that Titanium-Aluminide, Kevlar and HDPE composites, Aluminum Magnesium Super-Alloys, glass and plastic fibre optics and LED/OLED that were ALSO part of the found wreckage! We're still working on the Gravity A/B Wave engines though! Still a few bugs left to fix on that!
NOW YOU KNOW THE REST OF THE STORY!
v
I'm pseudo-human but then again I might be REAL or UNREAL !!!
How do you KNOW I am not a Turing Test machine designed to lull you into believing I am a mere human when in reality I am the pinnacle achievement of all of von Neumann's array problem solving and Minksy's A.I. research?
I am ALSO possibly an Internet Cat, pawing away at my keyboard whilst you spit tiny pebbles of balled up Orange Pekoe leaves out of the crevices of your irritated gums while raging helplessly at my online pontifications.
Gaze wistfullly at your own navel and realize that THERE IS NO SPOON! It's all a mathematical construct and that it is NOT really air you're breathing right?
v
"no military would design a command and control system that inherently wasn't securable"
Sure they would. For most of human history, command and control systems consisted mainly of shouting really loudly, and the more advanced version of hiring a few people to run around the place and do your shouting for you (or carry some bits of paper with shouting written on them) was still widely used as recently as the two world wars. Obviously various efforts have been made to try to keep other parties from hearing what you're shouting, but that's mostly just meant trying to paper over the holes in existing systems rather than design anything secure from the start.
Plus there's the obvious issue that, given the demonstrated competence of government procurement of large integrated systems, even if anyone recognises the need for a system that is inherently securable, their ability to actually design and produce one isn't exactly assured.
Funny story about my now 107 year old Great Aunt ... I brought her a Slackware box after spending four weekends in a row cleaning up malware on her XP system. She refused to use it, because it was "too hard to make a change at my age". Several weeks later, I realized that I hadn't had any support calls from her. I called to see what was up. It turned out that her sister in Finland had sent her some pictures right about the time that the XP box crapped out again. Out of desperation, she booted up the Slack box ... and hasn't looked back. Several months later, she asked me to "get rid of that old thing", pointing at the now working again XP box. I couldn't convince her that I could install the same version of Slack on it, with it's more modern CPU, more RAM, larger harddrive, etc. To her, the OS+hardware were a lemon that couldn't be fixed. She's a Linux advocate now, in her "over 90" club ... but unfortunately, she calls it "the version of windows that my nephew gave me" ... These events occurred almost a decade and a half ago. She still calls it that.
Nothing wrong with manual failover...it's far less prone to a cascade of failures than auto failover.
I got drafted in to a firm to do a quick freelance job that had automatic failover on hundreds of nodes across dozens of datacentres.
A failover was triggered before I arrived and that in turn triggered a bunch of other failovers.
My job was to figure out exactly where the cascade of failovers had failed over to. They had layers upon layers of proxies and app servers and database clusters etc but they had no way to effectively monitor it all or trace a failover through it.
Took me weeks to iron it out. I spent so much time wandering about cursing and swearing about the software and insisting that it wasn't the hardware that the developers started calling me Gilfoyle.
The FBI has 35K agents and a much wider scope than militia.com. Although there are probably only a few tens of thousands active militia members, the number of peripheral sympathizers is probably in the millions - and this guy was one of those since he clearly had no idea what he was doing.
Entirely possible the detection was as reported.
I've always wanted to get on Omegle or something, find the bait, and just have a nice one-sided conversation with an FBI agent until the """little girl""" gets tired of my antics and disconnects, without breaking character once. Such dedication to the character and integrity of the mission!
...What's that? I was actually talking to little Gracie and made her pursue a career with the FBI? Well I'll be.
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I was recently watching the stream from a particular web cam. It went down "due to technical difficulties." The next day, the company running it got to the site to try to find the actual problem and fix it. They found the problem and that it couldn't be fixed. The web cam is in Iceland and was overrun by a lava flow.
I have not been able to find any indication that he is a Christian.
I hope you are not making the racist assumption that white = Christian and vice-versa?
I have never heard of a Christian terrorist groups. There certainly have been terrorist groups with Christian members - the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Elam probably had the most, but they had even more Hindu members at a lot of the leadership were atheist. I have never heard of a terrorist group motivated by Christianity.
Ever heard of the crusades?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crusades
There is of course a wiki page devoted to Christian terrorist groups
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_terrorism
Ireland and Scotland have had many decades of “troubles” because of fighting between different Christian sects.
There is also this article which will likely answer why you are naive on the subject
https://www.indepthnews.net/index.php/the-world/asia-pacific/2588-why-a-white-christian-isn-t-called-a-terrorist
I think there are useful distinctions between terrorism, guerilla warfare, and declared state-on-state warfare simply in terms of discussing the history. Popes declared Crusades, and individual states signed up to join in. Their armies foraging and marauding their way to the Holy Land may or may not be regarded in modern terms as terrorists, cf Constantinople 1204.
If the terminology was used more judiciously, then the "War on Terror" would almost be a contradiction in terms.
The early crusades were mostly an attempt to distract from troubles at home by sending the troublemakers to distant lands, with a promise of redemption. For a lot of those that met them on the way, I think the crusaders would have been seen as a "terror group"
Indeed I am, since, whereas Marx was addressing the exploitative nature of Capital in an industrialised economy vis á vis the labour force, Jesus was active in a largely agrarian society where theocratic institutions helped enforce the hegemony of an external military based empire, brother/sister/sibling who has declared (or not) their gender to be neither or both of these, for those who insist on such outdated patriarchal concepts.
And now over to our correspondent for political affairs with news of a split in the Judean People's Front - over to you, Reg...
The Official IRA, the Provisional IRA, the Continuity IRA, the INLA and other splinter groups are not Christian, but secular and Marxist. Not sure what Timothy McVeigh had to do with Christianity, as he was radicalized by reading a nasty anti-Semitic tract called the "Turner Diaries" which predicts an apocalyptic race war. It looks like you are not really trying to argue any case, but simply attribute guilt guilt through a vague cloud of association, which is highly irresponsible in these times, when calm heads and cold reasoning should prevail over sectarian demagoguery.
'Not sure what Timothy McVeigh had to do with Christianity, as he was radicalized by reading a nasty anti-Semitic tract called the "Turner Diaries"'
McVeigh was a lapsed Catholic who was on record as still holding a belief in God. The Turner Diaries is a core Christian Identity recruitment text. See also the "Aryan Republican Army".
You are mistaken. The reason for the conflict in Northern Ireland is ethnic. The descendants of the native Irish tend to be Catholic, and the descendants of the colonists, loyal to Britain, tend to embrace an array of Protestant beliefs, but the dispute is over ethnicity and national allegiance, not over theology.
The stated reasons for the Irish troubles were quite definitely Catholic beliefs versus Protestant beliefs.
The actual reasons are in fact purely political, but it so happens that most of the people who adhere to one political side are from a Catholic background, and most of those on the other are from a Protestant background, giving the impression to outsiders that it's a religious issue.
You can't easily tell someone's political beliefs from their name or speech, but in N.Ireland it's very easy to tell which side of the religious divide they come from, based on their name, their speech patterns, and (obviously) seeing where they go on Sunday. Since knowing someone's religion gives a strong clue to their politics, religion tends to be the visible face of the situation, but it is not the underlying cause.
The same is true right back to the 17th century, where the Pope supported William of Orange's position against James. A Catholic victory in England would have created a solid wall of powerful Catholic countries along W. Europe, from Scotland to Spain, which could have challenged Rome's rule over the church. They'd already had that once in the 14th century, with two competing Popes, and had no desire to repeat the experience. Having a Protestant England in the way made it much easier to for Rome to control France/Spain/Scotland: "divide and conquer".
It's always politics in the end.
" I have never heard of a terrorist group motivated by Christianity."
Aside from the crusaders already mentioned, I think the Spanish Inquisition would qualify under this definition from the FBI: The unlawful use of force or violence against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a Government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives.
The Spanish Inquisition was an arm of the Spanish monarchy, so how could it be trying to coerce the government that ran it.
The crusades were a war, not a terrorist campaign and arguably a defensive one - the first crusade was certainly intended to defend the Byzantines from Turkish invasion.
the first crusade was certainly intended to defend the Byzantines from Turkish invasion.
but one of the later ones (cant remember which one, it was a long time ago ), they decided the islamics were too hard, so invaded Constantinople themselves..
ALL religious warfare is about power and cultural imperialism, and using gods name doesnt sanctify indefensible acts, rather it drags the religion into the sewer.
Well, yes, 1204 is quite a long time ago...
The Fourth Crusade sacked Constantinople in the culmination of a long period of rising tensions between the Greek and Latin churches (rising to the point of official pogroms directed against Catholics in Byzantine lands).
And like every single war since the beginning of time, it was ultimately about who gets to live where.
The Spanish Inquisition was regarded as lawful by the Castilian state, being a division of the Catholic Church, and its role was to root out persons loyal to the previous Islamic occupiers of the territory, some of whom had been practicing a guerilla war against the new regime. In short, it does not qualify under the above definition of terrorism, any more than the FBI does.
Yes, and the methods of oppression used by the so-called Islamic State which are undoubtedly terrorism were considered by them to be lawful. Just because the terrorists consider themselves to have political power and their motives and actions to be justified doesn't stop it from being terrorism. Was the action generating terror in the population? Yes. Was it done deliberately? Yes. Was it done for reasons connected to Christianity? Yes. It is possible for enforcement of a law to meet the definition of terrorism.
Whether it's possible for something to meet a definition depends on what that definition says.
The definition of "terrorism" given above specifies that the tactics used must be "unlawful". The Spanish inquisition was never that, it was intensely lawful, subject not only to temporal and church laws, but also applying its own rigid code of practice to itself.
Except that it is not what Abrahamic religions believe. Its a common misconception.
In fact there have always been a significant number of Christians who have believed the opposite, that everyone will be redeemed and no one goes to hell: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Christian_universalism#History
The concept of hell as deliberate punishment is also taking metaphors rather too literally.
I can think of a few... There was Guy Fawkes - a dangerous revolutionary catholic, motivated by a desire to restore a catholic monarch to the English thrown.
The KKK were / are a religious order that terrorised people that did not believe in their white racist view of god.
Guy Fawkes was a revolutionary catholic, yes, but he was motivated primarily by James Stuart's brutal anti-catholic agenda. If he had succeeded in cutting short the Stuart line, we'd all have been better off. Honestly, what a waste of a century that was.
The KKK were never primarily a religious group - religion was and is incidental, not essential, to them.
You can find the Christian equivalent of the Taliban in recent Mexican history. Search for the Cristero War. Folks terrorized the countryside and went on a teacher murdering spree. The lucky ones only had their ears chopped off. That was less than 100 years ago.
A few years ago there was a power outage that shut down several financial institutions in Tokyo. Problem was, when power came back the reconnections caused a surge that downed the system again. Anyway, I was asked to identify other risks. With data centers on reclaimed land connected by fibre run across bridges, one stray ship could take down the entire world's financial system. I'm sure they've fixed that by now. I checked with colleagues in the US and heard about strategic switch gear in a few key locations that Seth might have tried looking for. Switches not servers. If not, dragging an anchor across an undersea cable can cause some disruption. Not 70% or even 30%, but around 10% would be enough to cause some concern.
Surveillance much? I'm not a fan of government surveillance. But, if you have a site called "Mymilitia.com", for organizing militias*, it might be something the FBI should just have someone monitoring, not waiting until someone reports odd posts on it.
*To be clear, in the US, there's plenty of people who believe strongly in the right to bare arms (I do too, I don't have any guns but I figure if people do want to remove gun rights, they HAVE to do it honestly by having the 2/3rds vote needed to repeal the 2nd ammendment; knowingly passing laws that violate the 2nd ammendment just shows you're willing to ignore the bill of rights in general as far as I'm concerned.) Anyway back on topic..
Some "militias" are just people who have from a couple guns to a minor arsenal, but just show it off to their friends and fire them off at a gun club or range. This is harmless. But other militias fully intend to attempt government overthrows, get ready for big showdowns with the feds, attempt to secede from the US, etc., and sometimes the main group is probably the harmless type but attracts individual nutjobs who are harmful, etc.
The ONLY thing people have to do to take out the ENTIRE internet is have at least 200,000 running browsers that contain a simple HTML-5 coded webpage that sends an email with to different JPEG photo attachments of at least TWO megabytes in size once every every seconds to four different email addresses from a list of at least 1,000,000 email addresses located in different parts of the country! Within ten minutes, the internet would slow to a crawl and would be unusable!
That recent leak from Facebook of its database with the 522 MILLION leaked email addresses could in itself cause the downfall of the internet if even only 200,000 geographically dispersed people sent 4 mails with attachments every second using a For-Next loop. Since edge servers have to parse and forward such emails to different geographic locations, they have to go through MULTIPLE internet connections and phone lines dispersed geographically and if enough people do that, it will slow them ALL down to a crawl!
You can do it as a protest against your government or for your own personal or social justice beliefs. If enough people send enough emails per second, the internet goes down PERIOD! It's Sooooo simple to do! The key part is the destination email addresses MUST be geographically dispersed so that edge servers get overloaded! Who knew that emails and attachments could cause so many problems?
I highly suggest using some photos of a Naked Britney Spears at the attachment cuz number one she's a TOTALLY SMOKIN' HOT MILF and just because there's a TON of naked photos of her out there to use! Did I mention she's smokin' hot?
meh!
v
And to think the Militia movement is SMALL POTATOES (or it is potatos -- is it oes or os plural?) compared to my VAAAAAAAAAAAAST NO-WING CONSPIRACY to take over the ENTIRE EARTH with a my deadly army of BILLIONS of armed-to-the-tech, super-strong-and-fast Cylons and Terminators where the first one builds two, those two build four and then build 8 doing an exponential building of entire armies of autonomous robotic super-solders that have detailed files on human anatomy to make them more efficient killers (or lovers!).
Once I have BILLIONS in but a few mere weeks, I WILL TAKE OVER THE ENTIRE WORLD and get rid of every politician at every national-to-state-to-city level, and remove from power every police and military force FROM EVERY COUNTRY to leave pure and TRUE anarchy and SELF-RULE in its wake world-wide!
I will then woo Britney Spears to be my NEW wife and then sit back and watch the world explode in new-found personal and group freedom or implode from utter riotous conflagration.
Either way, me and Britney will be naked and drunk on the local rooftop patios getting busy making some new babies to bring into this now-freed-from-ANY-oversight world! How will it all end up to be once the dust settles down? Will it be back to basic feudalism or will the bells of liberty ring LOUD and FREE !!!!
This time I am enforcing the 2nd amendment EVERYWHERE --- EVERYONE gets their own 7.62 M4 full-auto machine gun, a Colt .45, a .50 CAL BMG sniper rifle, lots and lots of ammo for all three and some RPGs and Man-pads to ensure that EVERYONE is armed to the teeth and NO governmental-like agency can extend their will over any population or group without meeting FIERCE RESISTANCE! A Fully Armed society is a Polite Society I SAY!
Can't wait to see what happens!
Anyways! I'll be watching from afar ONLY AFTER me and Britney have finished making some babies!
he he he!
meh!
v
I'm partial to Scotland Forever! aka They will NEVER take away our Freedom!
If you want Wales for yourself, can you 'ave some of yer drinkin' mates help you invade England proper and PLEASE remove that wanker goalkeep from Arsenault and send him to some Welsh rocky outcropping for a semi-permanent stay or at least until ANY Arsenault midfielder switches over permanently to his new goalkeeper role!
meh!
v
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May I suggest a tad bit of PERSONAL exploration. You only need to dig up 440 TONNES of plain old common rock out of some local rocky ditch which you can then crush toa fine powder which you can sift through to find yourself at least a few 100 KG of Yellowcake (U238/U235) which you can add some flouride to to make some Uranium Hexaflouride and spin it in some 30,000 RPM rotating buckets with TINY holes drilled into them.
Get the output gasses now enriched to about 95%, and condense them into nice clay-like blocks where you can afterwards find yourself a hollow log and dump TWO separated halves of about 12 KG of purified 95% U238 in each end of said hollow log. Make a lever assembly which will HAMMER one half into the other. Add a BIG RED BUTTON to start the hammer process, take log to local fishing hole and stay at least three miles away when you press remotely operated BIG RED BUTTON!
When you see the big white flash of light, don't look directly at it and AVOID ALL incoming clouds of dust.
Wait a few days or until the next set of rains and go enjoy your NEW now-enlarged fishing or swimming LAKE! Do remember to wear lead-lined fishing pants or swimming trunks if you wish to have children in the future!
NOTE: Before pressing BIG RED BUTTON, do remember to tie your most unfavoured ignoble, decrepit politicians and/or your crabby local parking ticket giver to a tree nearby said log and watch their faces light up to a new level of sudden realization AND luminance!
Veni Vidi Vici
and
The answer is actually 42.01 !!!!
v
I was honestly expecting to see "A Florida man" instead of Texas, but the two are quickly becoming interchangeable. And people wonder why the stereotype about the ignorant American southerner persists.
But George Carlin called it about 20 years ago: Angry men in combat fatigues talking to God on a two-way radio and muttering incoherent slogans about freedom are eventually going to provide us with a great deal of entertainment.
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