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April 12, 2006
"I was with Moses as he sent Caleb into the Promised Land ahead of his people."
DailyKos, of all places, has a brilliant analysis of the NSA's capabilities, as understood in light of the recent news regarding AT&T. In particular, it has a nice explanation of what these Narus semantic traffic analyzers the NSA is abusing en masse can handle. Bewert breaks down the bits so you laymen out there can get a grasp on the extent of this little government project: via
How powerful is this? OC-192 carries about 10 gigabits of data per second. Ten billion bits per second, monitored in real-time. That is stunning. This is one damned powerful machine, one of the most powerful I've ever heard of in 25 years in IT.
And what does it monitor while looking at this 10 billion bits of IP data per second? First lets take a look at what the network model is, the OSI model of seven layers. NarusInsight focuses on two layers: number four, the transport layer, built on standards like TCP and UDP, the physical building blocks of internet data traffic, and number seven, the application layer, built on standards like HTTP and FTP, which are dependent on the application using them, i.e. Internet Explorer, Kazaa, Skype, etc. It monitors 10 billion bits per second at level four and 2500 million bits per second at level seven. For reference, the 256K DSL line I am using equals .24 million bits per second. So one NarusInsight machine can look at 10,000 million DSL lines at once in great detail. That is a pretty damn big number. This is some really serious hardware with equally serious software. Which is our next subject.
Note that bewert's connection is kinda slow, so the calculations might highball a bit. It's immaterial, though, since I doubt the NSA'd use only one box at a time. They probably have racks of them in each peering station.
The basic plot arc of Microserfs is that an ensemble of 'softies quit their jobs and move to San Fran to create a new software start-up. They begin building something called Oop! (can this sound any more like present?), which actually is a pun off object-oriented programming, but is essentially a 3D modeling program which you can use to create pretty much anything. The idea is loosely inspired by Legos, but in the intervening decade nothing has been invented to compare it to -- until I recently saw Will Wright demo his new game, Spore.
+ Even though the inaccurate predictions are less numerable, they say more about the mid-'90s than the accurate ones.
+ The descriptions of Microsoft campus life -- right down to the soccer fields and hidden paths -- are still quite accurate. The detail that seems to have changed the most is the relationship of employees to Bill. He was apparently a Geek God in 1994, whereas now he's more of a beleaguered Yoda. It's good we skipped over the anti-trust days though.
+ There's a great observation early in the book about how Microsofties don't put bumper stickers on their cars. This is still startlingly true, and it gives campus a sort of post-political feel. Or at least as post-political as 20,000 Audis lined up in a cement parking garage can be.
I've been trying to track down the origin of Red Box. Back when Apple bought NeXT, but before Jobs kicked Amelio out, the company laid out a roadmap for OS X, then code named Rhapsody. It was all about compatibility back in those days. Rhapsody would run on PowerPC and Intel chips, and there would be an API layer offered for Windows as well. People would compile once to run under OS X and Windows. But the coolest part was the rumored Red Box. This component of Rhapsody-on-Intel would allow native use of Windows applications, translated on the fly like under WINE in Linux. Now, Apple never, as far as I know, ever said a damned thing about Red Box. I looked through all the old Rhapsody faqs in the Wayback Machine, but there's nary a word. The oldest source I can find is this MacKido post that references Red Box. I'm beginning to think MacOSRumors made it up.
To make the platform even more appealing and compete in a corporate world - Red Box will allow many Windows Applications (Win32 apps) to run as well. Apple is not talking about this much, so this is a lot of speculation and rumor. On Intel, RedBox will be the Windows API's running natively on top of the other services. On PowerPC, the RedBox will be an Emulator that will allow Windows Application to work on Rhapsody. Apple may not directly offer RedBox on the MacOS since there are already a few good emulators available, or they may just make a licensing deal with Connectix (or Insignia) to bundle their emulators.
How-to: build a modern Enigma machine via
Posted by Jon Rubin at April 12, 2006 07:47 PM
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