Hi all,
Today I was in the support chat room for OpenWrt when someone was asking about stopping people in his organisation from draining available bandwidth using Youtube. OpenWrt uses dnsmasq so it was a simple matter of blocking all domain names ending in .youtube.com - and once you do that, you then only need to worry about CollegeHumor, Vimeo, Google Video, Ebaum's World...
It really highlights the stupidity of what's often referred to as Enumerating Badness, as outlined in an article about The Six Dumbest Ideas in Computer Security. In a nutshell, it's where you say "block this, block that, let everything else through", and while it made sense in the very early days, it stopped making sense when the level of bad on the Internet began to vastly outweight the level of good. It is estimated that for every bit of good out there, there's somewhere in the order of dozens of malware, spyware, adware, trojans and viruses - which number in the millions these days. In fact, in the year to April 2008, Symantec discovered over 711,000 new viruses. There's a good reason we pay $30 per year for our anti-virus updates - it's a mammoth job trying to contain them all.
The stupid thing is, it could me made so much simpler if we focused our attention on enumerating the good programs we use on our computer. It's a near impossible task to track over a million bits of bad when even a simpleton could track 30 bits of good. Sadly, no operating system really supports this. Vista and Windows 7's UAC is a step in the right direction, but the problem is far from licked.
A far simpler solution is to look at the sorts of traffic that need priority, then assign the highest priority to those streams, then set everything else at rock bottom. I would also put the remaining traffic onto a throttle, just to be sure. This is far simpler than blocking every single video streaming website.
Showing posts with label stupidity. Show all posts
Showing posts with label stupidity. Show all posts
Thursday, September 24, 2009
Friday, March 20, 2009
Internet censorship FAIL
Hello all,
I found out last night that the blocked site list for Australia's Internet censorship system was leaked and put on display on Wikileaks. Australia's ABC has covered the story and the ACMA has published this media release dusting their hands clean of it.
The list - and I believe it to be real - contains many sites that are in fact perfectly legal - even a site to a Queensland dentist. It appears to be compiled by people who have no idea what they're going on about and makes a mockery of the censorship list.
Not that it isn't already a joke - parents are having more and more responsibility taken away from them as the years go by. I was fortunate enough to have a computer in my room growing up - my father didn't do much raising unless it had something to do with football - and with this trend on the rise parents raise kids that raise themselves. This just makes this even more of a reality.
We are closer to a 1984/V for Vendetta style world than we care to think. I can see it now - TV and radio sanitised with bulletins carefully crafted behind the scenes and sent to the stations. The Internet where you can't access a site that even sneezes a word out of turn. Curfews to curtail any sort of revolution movement. That's where we're going.
Some, however, have started now to fight against it. Wikileaks, for instance, allows a safe harbour for those who have something to say, or something to bring to light, without fear of repercussions that generally come with whistle-blowing. The Onion Router (Tor for short) allows a safe network for those to talk about controversial topics. Anonymous forums such as 4chan allow an equally safe haven for open, unabridged discussion on the topics of the day without worrying about offending someone. When these channels are used properly, freedom is an achievable goal.
However, with great power comes great responsibility. With the power to say what we want, we must take care about what we say, and to whom - but that power must remain ours to wield, we must not delegate that responsibility to someone else. We have the ability to think for ourselves, let us not let it go to waste.
Too much power is never a good thing, but if used responsibly by all, the world can be a beautiful place.
I found out last night that the blocked site list for Australia's Internet censorship system was leaked and put on display on Wikileaks. Australia's ABC has covered the story and the ACMA has published this media release dusting their hands clean of it.
The list - and I believe it to be real - contains many sites that are in fact perfectly legal - even a site to a Queensland dentist. It appears to be compiled by people who have no idea what they're going on about and makes a mockery of the censorship list.
Not that it isn't already a joke - parents are having more and more responsibility taken away from them as the years go by. I was fortunate enough to have a computer in my room growing up - my father didn't do much raising unless it had something to do with football - and with this trend on the rise parents raise kids that raise themselves. This just makes this even more of a reality.
We are closer to a 1984/V for Vendetta style world than we care to think. I can see it now - TV and radio sanitised with bulletins carefully crafted behind the scenes and sent to the stations. The Internet where you can't access a site that even sneezes a word out of turn. Curfews to curtail any sort of revolution movement. That's where we're going.
Some, however, have started now to fight against it. Wikileaks, for instance, allows a safe harbour for those who have something to say, or something to bring to light, without fear of repercussions that generally come with whistle-blowing. The Onion Router (Tor for short) allows a safe network for those to talk about controversial topics. Anonymous forums such as 4chan allow an equally safe haven for open, unabridged discussion on the topics of the day without worrying about offending someone. When these channels are used properly, freedom is an achievable goal.
However, with great power comes great responsibility. With the power to say what we want, we must take care about what we say, and to whom - but that power must remain ours to wield, we must not delegate that responsibility to someone else. We have the ability to think for ourselves, let us not let it go to waste.
Too much power is never a good thing, but if used responsibly by all, the world can be a beautiful place.
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