Judge Bean
Senior Member
JT Foundation/Oliver Williams Research
This is incorrect. A vast majority of government 'equipment', i.e. workstations, are Windows based systems. However, a lot of DNS servers and routers are not. You'll find a mixture of UNIX, Windows, and even FreeBSD as edge servers for DNS and such. At the desktop, you'll find Windows. Linux is not considered 'ready-for-Primetime' and as such it has not been rolled out on a large scale. In some 'scientific labs', Linux is used.
Windows source code is hardly wasted space nor '35 to 45 %' REM statements. (LOL! ' REM statements '.. give me a break.) I am involved in the 'Shared Source Initiative' and I have seen a large portion of the Microsoft Windows source code for W2k3 and XP and I currently test for them on Longhorn.
Apple isn't all that safe... check the statistics at CERT for how many reported issues there are for each O/S... they're all vulnerable and the comparisons are pretty upsetting. It's more a matter of how many eyes are looking at breaking the system. Apple has maybe 3% to 6% of the marketplace... hardly a tasty target for cracking.
I would expect that kind of rhetoric at Slashdot... not here, though.
To answer Paul's question, *most* government (military is what I am most familiar with as of late) users are indeed proxied like crazy and there is a huge amount of monitoring. However, you'd be surprised how little of them are actually spoofed or obfuscated to the outside world. Perhaps it is a manpower issue as even the best systems require wetware (people) to audit what's going on.
Now... if I were to don my 'paranoia cap', I would say that some of the 'three-letter agencies' out there indeed obfuscate and spoof. The last network of that type that I was able to have some 'drive time' on was at the beginning of this year and they did some nifty things.
Some of the three-letter agency folks do work through off-site networks and you'll find that they appear in logs or stats pages as home users on networks like Comcast, Verizon, etc. The Department of Navy has some very interesting toys and pride themselves on the networks that they build. Their security and counter-cyberterrorism folks are young, smart, and work all hours... but you probably won't see them show up in logs... or easily recognize it. Regular military and government? Yep, they show up.
I do web hosting as a revenue stream for my business and my girlfriend sells 'Middle Eastern Belly Dance' supplies at her website (on my servers)... hmmm... I wonder why all those .mil and .gov IP addresses show up there? LOL! Methinks 'Middle Eastern' might have caught their attention... especially since I do some government contracting... but then again, if it were really serious, I doubt that the generic government addresses would be what I should worry about...
I'm not sure that I understand all of this except the bellydancing part, but does this mean that the government has the ability to monitor but there's too much to monitor; or that it's too lazy or incompetent to monitor all that it might want to? Either way, I'm happy, but it looks as though the "threeletter" people prefer us to try to guess if they're watching-- the idea gives them power.
This is incorrect. A vast majority of government 'equipment', i.e. workstations, are Windows based systems. However, a lot of DNS servers and routers are not. You'll find a mixture of UNIX, Windows, and even FreeBSD as edge servers for DNS and such. At the desktop, you'll find Windows. Linux is not considered 'ready-for-Primetime' and as such it has not been rolled out on a large scale. In some 'scientific labs', Linux is used.
Windows source code is hardly wasted space nor '35 to 45 %' REM statements. (LOL! ' REM statements '.. give me a break.) I am involved in the 'Shared Source Initiative' and I have seen a large portion of the Microsoft Windows source code for W2k3 and XP and I currently test for them on Longhorn.
Apple isn't all that safe... check the statistics at CERT for how many reported issues there are for each O/S... they're all vulnerable and the comparisons are pretty upsetting. It's more a matter of how many eyes are looking at breaking the system. Apple has maybe 3% to 6% of the marketplace... hardly a tasty target for cracking.
I would expect that kind of rhetoric at Slashdot... not here, though.
To answer Paul's question, *most* government (military is what I am most familiar with as of late) users are indeed proxied like crazy and there is a huge amount of monitoring. However, you'd be surprised how little of them are actually spoofed or obfuscated to the outside world. Perhaps it is a manpower issue as even the best systems require wetware (people) to audit what's going on.
Now... if I were to don my 'paranoia cap', I would say that some of the 'three-letter agencies' out there indeed obfuscate and spoof. The last network of that type that I was able to have some 'drive time' on was at the beginning of this year and they did some nifty things.
Some of the three-letter agency folks do work through off-site networks and you'll find that they appear in logs or stats pages as home users on networks like Comcast, Verizon, etc. The Department of Navy has some very interesting toys and pride themselves on the networks that they build. Their security and counter-cyberterrorism folks are young, smart, and work all hours... but you probably won't see them show up in logs... or easily recognize it. Regular military and government? Yep, they show up.
I do web hosting as a revenue stream for my business and my girlfriend sells 'Middle Eastern Belly Dance' supplies at her website (on my servers)... hmmm... I wonder why all those .mil and .gov IP addresses show up there? LOL! Methinks 'Middle Eastern' might have caught their attention... especially since I do some government contracting... but then again, if it were really serious, I doubt that the generic government addresses would be what I should worry about...
[/b][/quote]I'm not sure that I understand all of this except the bellydancing part, but does this mean that the government has the ability to monitor but there's too much to monitor; or that it's too lazy or incompetent to monitor all that it might want to? Either way, I'm happy, but it looks as though the "threeletter" people prefer us to try to guess if they're watching-- the idea gives them power.
