(no subject)

[jay]

Someone has finally noticed that we're talking online to the Space Station through a VPN. (Looks at VPN application, sitting on my desk here at work...)

I remember fierce battles 10 years ago with the Apollo-era old guard as to why we needed network capability *at all* on the Station... (smiles quietly).

Comments

Quiet smiles

[p3aches.livejournal.com]

brian when else do you smile quietly? And what does a quiet smile represent to you?

Singed a curious mind

[patgreene.livejournal.com]

The scary thing about the story you link to is the incident in which denial-of-service attacks threatened astronauts' well-being. The guys who hacked the shuttle must be idiot savants smart enough to hack the system but too stupid to realize why they shouldn't or else they were psychopathic and didn't care. Sort of like people who hack into hospital systems.

Re: Quiet smiles

[patgreene.livejournal.com]

His quiet smile is really very charming : >

Re: Quiet smiles

[brian1789.livejournal.com]

Some internal pleasant thought, not to be waved-around or gloated... often a small victory of some sort.

In this case, myself and various kindred souls had not only won that battle, its existence is now unremarkable. We've become the Dominant Paradigm (tm *). No one would nowadays seriously propose designing a human-crewed spacecraft now without an internal data communications network, and some kind of filtered link to Earth... but in 1992 that was controversial.

Re: Quiet smiles

[brian1789.livejournal.com]

(blush)

[brian1789.livejournal.com]

I don't know the details... my guess would be that it was dumb luck on the DOS abusers' part, they probably had a robot looking around for convenient sites to launch DOS from, and happened to randomly stumble upon the IP address of the onboard health-monitoring computer. The perpetrators may have not known the actual identity or physical location of the NASA computer that they were "borrowing"...

[patgreene.livejournal.com]

Which to me indicates almost criminal recklessness on the part of the people launching the DOS attacks, but then I'm a little rabid on this subject.

Re: Quiet smiles

[p3aches.livejournal.com]

Brian you said"Some internal pleasant thought, not to be waved-around or gloated... often a small victory of some sort."

i frequently smile for simular reasons.

Hugs T

[johno.livejournal.com]

This is one of those subtly geeky things that I've told some folks and gotten a "so what" from some and a "really cool" from others.