UK Is Persecuting The Christian Minority?

 Media, Politics, Religion  No Responses »
Mar 302013
 

In something I first heard about in the Daily Mail, so there was an instant credibility gap, it seems that Lord Carey has been blathering on about how Christians feel like a persecuted minority, and that the government is discriminating  against them.

Which is of course complete rancid rhino bile.

And any christian who feels persecuted against needs to take a good hard look at things.

According to the 2011 census, 59% of the UK population claimed to be christian. Given that 59% is more than 41%, I’d say that any christian who feels that they are a minority probably needs to take their socks off to count above 10. It is the rest of us – humanists, secularists, muslims, buddists, hindus, atheists, agnostics – who have the right to claim to be a minority. Given that 2001 (72% christian) was the first time the question was asked, it is hard to make historical observations regarding levels of christianity in the UK. Christians would of course say that we have been historically a christian society where everyone was a christian; others would say those who weren’t christian were under a great deal of pressure to pretend.

There are occasions when we get forced to sit through some sort of christian ceremony, although it was more common in the past than today. And it can be quite creepy listening to you guys speaking to your imaginary friend (or is it friends?).

Nothing to do with what goes on inside your churches of course, but christian ceremonies in public life can be excluding to those who are not christian. Take for example, the infamous council meetings where pre-meeting prayers are no longer permitted. Or rather praying out loud as part of the meeting is no longer permitted. If such prayers are part of a council meeting, they are effectively an unconscious expression of the kind of people who should take part in the meetings – that is practising christians. Or in other words, you are saying that the real minorities – atheists, muslims, etc. are not welcome.

Not that a period of silent contemplation at the start of a council meeting is a bad idea – indeed, it is probably a very good idea. And nobody is saying that you cannot talk with your imaginary friend(s) in the silence of your mind.

Carey specifically mentions the legalisation of gay marriage as one of the symptoms of “aggressive secularisation” within the government. Actually legalising gay marriage is simply doing the right thing; there is nothing in the legislation that forces anyone to get married to someone not of their choice! So it is merely allowing those who choose to, to get married to the person of their choice.

What christians who oppose gay marriage are complaining about, is that they are no longer allowed to impose their views of what marriage should be onto those who believe differently.

In other words christians are complaining about not being allowed to persecute others.

If christians still feel they are being persecuted in the UK, perhaps they should look at some of the real examples of christians being persecuted around the world (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_Christians). Any kind of inspection of what happens around the world will make any decent person claiming that UK christians are being persecuted thoroughly ashamed. Whatever the rights or wrongs of the case (and frankly in the case of the BA employee, both sides could do with being told to just grow up), being unable to wear a cross in jewellery form at work hardly compares to being stoned to death.

Media Panics Over Spamhaus DDoS Attack

 Computing, Security  No Responses »
Mar 282013
 

This article is short on references because I haven’t gotten around to filling them in … they will come

The fuss in the mainstream media about the distributed denial of service (DDoS for short) attack against Spamhaus goes to show that journalists need to buy more drinks for geeks, and the right geeks. It is nowhere near as bad as described, although the DDoS attack was real enough and definitely caused “damage” :-

  1. New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/27/technology/internet/online-dispute-becomes-internet-snarling-attack.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
  2. Daily Mail:  http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2300810/CyberBunker-revealed-Secretive-fanatic-worst-cyber-attack.html

This article is not intended to be totally technically accurate in every detail; it is intended to describe the incident in enough detail and with enough accuracy that it can be understood without übergeek status.

So What Happened?

Spamhaus are experiencing on ongoing distributed denial of service attack that started on the 20th March, and is ongoing. The initial attack very quickly overwhelmed their 10Gbps (that’s about 1,000 times faster than your Internet connection) link to the Internet. Whilst this disrupted the Spamhaus web site, and various back office services, the main service that Spamhaus provides kept running (as it is distributed).

The very clued up geeks at Spamhaus who have had plenty of experience of being under attack, very quickly contacted CloudFlare which started hosting their web sites and other back office services at numerous data centres around the globe. Their services rapidly started returning to life – it isn’t the sort of thing that can be done instantly, and probably took a lot of late nights.

However the attacks escalated and reached levels of up to at least 300Gbps (that’s about 30,000 times faster than your Internet connection) or about 13Gbps of traffic for each of CloudFlare’s 23 data centres. That’s a lot and could be responsible for Internet slowdowns …

The Internet Is Slow. Is It The DDoS?

Well perhaps. We all have a very understandable tendency to blame known events for problems we’re having. Is the Internet slow? It must be that DDoS . But it is not necessarily so.

And if all the Internet was slow for you, it is quite possible that you were unknowingly taking part in the attack! Because the attack relied on infected PCs together with other stuff described below.

It is also possible that some parts of the Internet were overwhelmed by the DDoS. Reports have indicated that Internet services plugged in alongside the CloudFlare data centres (or in them) were suffering somewhat because of the extraordinary levels of traffic. However, this is the Internet and there is always lots of stuff going on that may cause slower performance than normal in various corners of the ‘net.

Was This The Biggest DDoS Attack?

Possibly. The figure of 300Gbps (and it was probably larger than that – the 300Gbps figure was through one Tier-1 ISP) probably qualifies as the largest known public DDoS.

However DDoS attacks are not always made public; there could well have been larger attacks that were not made public.

Various responses have indicated that the attack was not as serious as described by others :-

  1. http://cluepon.net/ras/gizmodo
  2. http://gizmodo.com/5992652/that-internet-war-apocalypse-is-a-lie

It may be that these commentators are mistaken to the extent that they didn’t see a problem; it may be that European and Asian networks were more prone to a slow-down than elsewhere.

What Is A Distributed Denial Of Service Attack?

If you were an attacker, you could try sending network traffic as fast as your PC could handle to the target of your attack. However the amount of traffic you could send would be very limited – you can’t send more than the speed of your Internet connection. Say 10Mbps … a lot less than most large services use for their own Internet connections.

To make an attack more effective, you will want to have lots of people send traffic as quick as they can. And the easy way to do that is to infect PCs with some sort of malware, and use your control of those infected PCs to send out that denial of service traffic. At which point it becomes a distributed denial of service attack because the attack traffic is distributed around the Internet.

And if you can find some way of amplifying your attack traffic so that say 10Mbps of traffic becomes 1Gbps of traffic, you make your attack much more effective.

So How Was This Done?

The details of what went on become pretty hairy very quickly, but very simply :-

  1. The attacker takes control of a large number of infected PCs to make his or her “robot army” to send out network traffic under their control.
  2. The attacker instructs their robot army to send out DNS requests as quickly as possible with the source address forged as the victim’s address.
  3. The negligent ISP allows those packets out by not applying source filtering.
  4. The network traffic reaches any number of misconfigured DNS servers that answer with a larger reply sent to the victim’s address.

DNS?

This is short for the domain name system and is a service that turns names into numbers (amongst other things). You type in a name such as www.google.com and the DNS server your PC is configured to talk to turns that name into an Internet address such as 203.0.113.63 or possibly 2001:db8:0:1234:0:5678:9:12. Your PC then makes a network connection to that numeric address in the background, and fetches a web page, a music stream or some other content you want.

Without the DNS we would all have to rely on numeric addresses to make connections – a lot tougher!

There’s another factor here as that DNS is an amplifying service – you ask for a name such as www.google.com, and the answer is a whole lot longer than just the numeric address you “need” as it can (and often does) contain a number of network addresses together with associated information :-

% dig www.google.com  

; <<>> DiG 9.8.4-rpz2+rl005.12-P1 <<>> www.google.com
;; global options: +cmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 6, AUTHORITY: 4, ADDITIONAL: 4

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;www.google.com.			IN	A

;; ANSWER SECTION:
www.google.com.		61	IN	A	74.125.138.104
www.google.com.		61	IN	A	74.125.138.106
www.google.com.		61	IN	A	74.125.138.99
www.google.com.		61	IN	A	74.125.138.147
www.google.com.		61	IN	A	74.125.138.105
www.google.com.		61	IN	A	74.125.138.103

;; AUTHORITY SECTION:
google.com.		126160	IN	NS	ns3.google.com.
google.com.		126160	IN	NS	ns2.google.com.
google.com.		126160	IN	NS	ns4.google.com.
google.com.		126160	IN	NS	ns1.google.com.

;; ADDITIONAL SECTION:
ns1.google.com.		126160	IN	A	216.239.32.10
ns2.google.com.		126160	IN	A	216.239.34.10
ns3.google.com.		126160	IN	A	216.239.36.10
ns4.google.com.		126160	IN	A	216.239.38.10

;; Query time: 1 msec
;; SERVER: 10.0.0.26#53(10.0.0.26)
;; WHEN: Sat Mar 30 09:52:59 2013
;; MSG SIZE  rcvd: 264

If you are talking to a misconfigured DNS server, it could answer even when it should not. Normally DNS servers are configured to answer just for those they are intended to provide answers to – your ISP’s DNS servers will answer your questions, and not mine. However if they are misconfigured, they will answer any question and will function as a DDoS amplifier.

This does not include public DNS servers such as OpenDNS, or Google’s public DNS servers – they are specially configured to avoid acting as a DDoS amplifier – probably by imposing a rate limit to stop answering if you ask too many questions.

Source Filtering?

When you click on a link in your web browser, your browser sends out a network packet containing the request (“GET /webpage”), and that network packet contains the destination of the web server – so your request reaches it, and your own address – so the web server knows where to send the answer! Your own address (in these circumstances) is known as the source address.

With appropriate software, you can forge your source address so that replies to your request go back to a different place. Without that only the very simplest DDoS attacks would work.

Of course, it has been best practice to block forged source addresses since well, not long after the beginning of the Internet. This is known as source filtering. An Internet router is capable of deciding that packets coming in from wire A should not have the address assigned to wire B, so should be dropped on the floor.

An Internet router that doesn’t do that is poorly configured.

So How Can This Be Stopped?

The answer is that we have known how to stop this sort of attack for at least a decade. And indeed the best Internet citizens have done so for years.

The trouble lies with those on the Internet who are not necessarily the best Internet citizens. Of the big three remedies, two are probably being neglected because managers of ISPs do not see the business benefits of applying those remedies. And there isn’t a business benefit, but a social responsibility.

The three remedies are :-

  1. The average Internet user needs to take action to prevent their PC from getting infected. Get anti-virus protection, and an Internet firewall. If the PC acts weird, get it looked at. And if the Mac acts weird, get it looked at too (yes they do get infected).
  2. ISPs should apply BCP38 (which dates back to 2000) which specifies source filtering.
  3. ISPs running DNS servers should ensure that their DNS servers are properly configured to only answer queries for legitimate clients.

And if you happen to know a senior manager at an ISP, ask them about BCP38 and if they’re doing it – source filtering is probably the most important action here.

But Who Is Responsible?

It is easy to get distracted by the problems caused by those leaving poorly configured router, and insecure PC lying around on the Internet. Whilst their owners are responsible for effectively leaving tools around that attackers can use (and all too often do use), they are not directly responsible for the attack.

The attacker is.

But who were they?

The fairly credible rumours are that the attackers were either Cyberbunker or Stophaus.com, as part of a campaign against the actions of Spamhaus. Various criminals behind the flood of spam targeting your mailbox with all sorts of rubbish have long complained about the actions of Spamhaus, as they try and prevent spam arriving. And Cyberbunker is an ISP dedicated to providing hosting to services that may get shut down elsewhere – they deal with anyone except paedophiles and terrorists, which leaves a whole world of swamp dwellers that you would really rather not know about. And spammers.

Who Are Spamhaus?

Spamhaus are subject to a great deal of black propoganda – including accusations of blackmail, extortion, censorship, and probably kicking cats too. The reason? They help identify spammers, so that ISPs can choose to block spam.

Spammers are somewhat irritated by this – their business model relies on polluting your mailbox so that the 1% (or so) of people who do respond to spam is a large enough number that they can carry on making money. And they get irritated very quickly if someone tries to interfere with their “right” to use your inbox to make money.

Mail server operators have long been blocking spammers using a whole variety of methods, and some of the best collaborated on producing lists of addresses of spammers that others could use. These evolved into DNS based RBLs, and one of the most respected groups of volunteers became known as Spamhaus.

You may be thinking that you still get plenty of spam, so they cannot be doing too great a job. But :-

  1. You may be with an ISP that chooses not to use Spamhaus.
  2. You don’t see the spam that gets blocked. Even if you see dozens of spam messages a day, you may be seeing only 5% of the spam that was sent your way.

It is telling that amongst those in the know, those who deal with spam and Internet abuse in general, there is practically nobody who thinks of Spamhaus as anything other than the good guys.

 

The Latest Map Of The Internet

 Computing, Security  No Responses »
Mar 242013
 

The above links to an interesting browser which allows zooming and selection of different data sets. It’s worth a look if you’re into that sort of thing. Although it’s rather surprising that it doesn’t like IPv6 addresses!

The most controversial thing about this map of the Internet gathered during 2012, is that it was produced with the aid of a botnet or in other words this researcher stole the resources they needed. Which is obviously wrong – no matter how good the cause – but now that it has been done, there is no reason not to look at the results (whilst wrong this isn’t really evil).

The first interesting discovery here is that this anonymous researcher managed to write a simple virus that would load the Internet scanner onto many devices with default passwords set – admin accounts with “admin” as the password, root accounts with “root” as the password, etc. You would have thought that such insecure devices would have been driven off the Internet by now, but it turns out not to be the case – there are at least 420,000 of them!

You could even argue that the owners of such machines are asking to have their devices controlled by anyone who wants to. Perhaps a little extreme, but certainly some people think so or this Internet survey wouldn’t exist.

But now the results. If you look at the default settings in the browser above, you will encounter large swathes of black squares where apparently nothing is in use. The trouble is that whilst it is true that an IP address that is pingable, or has ports open is “in use”, there is no guarantee that an IP address that is just registered in the DNS is in use or not, and finally unregistered IP addresses that do not appear to do anything may very well still be in use.

Essentially the whole exercise hasn’t really said much about how much of the Internet address space is in use, although that is not to say that the results are not useful.

One special point to make is that many of the large black squares that appear unused, are allocated to organisations that may very well want to have proper IP addresses that are not connected to the global Internet. That is not wrong in any way – before the wide spread adoption of NAT, it was common and indeed recommended that organisations obtain a public IP address before they were connected to the Internet to avoid duplicate network addresses appearing. And an organisation that legitimately obtained an old “class A” has no obligation to return the “unused” network addresses back to the unallocated pool. And even if they did, it would not make a big difference; we would still run out of addresses.

The answer to the shortage of IPv4 addresses is IPv6.

 

Awesome: Fixing The Titlebar

 Computing, Working Notes  1 Response »
Mar 242013
 

The default title bar provided by Awesome is not quite to my taste. And this posting is about fixing that.

The first part is to select some colours. For me, I prefer window decorations to be subtle … grey scale; the window decorations should disappear until you focus on them. And I’m choosing to have a lighter grey for focused windows, and darker for others. The colours are set in the default-theme.lua file :-

theme.titlebar_fg_normal = "#000000"
theme.titlebar_fg_focus = "#000000"

theme.titlebar_bg_normal = "#cccccc"
theme.titlebar_bg_focus = "#e8e8e8"

The next step is to restrict the number of buttons that appear in the title bar – this is of course a matter of choice, but personally I believe that there are too many buttons by default. This is done within the main configuration file and by deleting the buttons you wish removed, which in my case means removing the lines :-

right_layout:add(awful.titlebar.widget.floatingbutton(c))
right_layout:add(awful.titlebar.widget.ontopbutton(c))

Lastly, and in keeping with making the titlebar less obtrusive, there’s shrinking the titlebar to a sensible size :-

awful.titlebar(c, { size=16 })

Which is added after the line: awful.titlebar(c):set_widget(layout) (it could be merged). There are two features I’d like to use with no method easy enough for a thicko like me to spot :-

  1. There seems no obvious way to put the title bar on the left (or right) side of the window; it seems an obvious thing to try given that screens are usually far wider than tall. There are hints that there is an attribute (if that’s the right word) called “position”, but I don’t see a way of setting it.
  2. I have removed a certain number of options for controlling the window, partially because I can never remember what those silly icons mean. But I would quite happily add a menu with all of the relevant methods – and this would be a good place to add the keyboard shortcuts (us old foggies need some helpful hints like that).

 

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