Cyber Armies

According to the following story the Air force is entertaining the thought of creating its own bot net. All your bot are belong to us.

The U.S. would not, and need not, infect unwitting computers as zombies. We can build enough power over time from our own resources.

Rob Kaufman, of the Air Force Information Operations Center, suggests mounting botnet code on the Air Force’s high-speed intrusion-detection systems. Defensively, that allows a quick response by directly linking our counterattack to the system that detects an incoming attack. The systems also have enough processing speed and communication capacity to handle large amounts of traffic.

Next, in what is truly the most inventive part of this concept, Lt. Chris Tollinger of the Air Force Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Agency envisions continually capturing the thousands of computers the Air Force would normally discard every year for technology refresh, removing the power-hungry and heat-inducing hard drives, replacing them with low-power flash drives, then installing them in any available space every Air Force base can find. Even though those computers may no longer be sufficiently powerful to work for our people, individual machines need not be cutting-edge because the network as a whole can create massive power.

After that, the Air Force could add botnet code to all its desktop computers attached to the Nonsecret Internet Protocol Network (NIPRNet). Once the system reaches a level of maturity, it can add other .mil computers, then .gov machines.

To generate the right amount of power for offense, all the available computers must be under the control of a single commander, even if he provides the capability for multiple theaters. While it cannot be segmented like an orange for individual theater commanders, it can certainly be placed under their tactical control.

http://www.armedforcesjournal.com/2008/05/3375884

Have I found it?

Well, I think I have found the Linux flavor for my R61 Thinkpad.

I have tried:
Version of Linux / Reason(s) for not keeping on my notebook

Debian based-
1. Ubuntu 7.10 and 8.04 - the Ubuntu guys/community has done a great job of making Linux a more user friendly distro than most. Out of the box most everything works without a hitch this is great! But, I need more battery life than 2 hours which was the maximum I was able to obtain with Ubuntu tweaked with Powertop and all un-needed services swithced off.

2. Debian Etch - The tried and true base for most things *nix. But, I didn't have the time or the energy to manually configure everything that I needed to configure. For example the screen resolution, Wifi card and Suspend to Ram.

3. ParsiX - This little up and comer from Iran is a very nice "niche" linux. Only issue with this distribution is the use of Xorg 7.2 and the "bug" with the Lenovo screens. Whatever I tried to fix it with just would not give me the use of my entire screen.

Redhat based -
4. Centos 5.1 - It truly is wonderful that Redhat, even though they don't want to delve into the desktop arena are allowing the source to be put out for free "as is" this allows many people to use Centos as a highly reliable server for years to come. With many having great luck on older hardware and desktops. But for a newer notebook this is just flat out not the distro, I am not knocking it at all it is awesome and I still use it for server purposes but not for my R61. The Suspend to Ram, Suspend to Disk, Wifi are not able to be used without recompiling a newer kernel from scratch 2.6.18 just cant cut it these days.

5. Fedora - This is great if you are looking for cutting edge low life cycle Linux fun, but if you are looking for support longer than 13 months you are in the wrong place. There is a great wiki entry in regards to this, and that in and of itself is one of the few reasons I have to say nay to Fedora.

Novell/Suse -
6. OpenSuse 10.3 - This is/was my favorite distro as I have used Suse on and off since Suse7 and loved it. But the ports that seems to be made for the Suse SLED 10.1 that is shipped with R61's never seemed to make it into the 10.3 tree in time for me to be able to deal with. I really hated giving this one up but the lack of battery life and the screen resolution "bug" shared with Parsix made me switch.

Mandriva(Mandrake) -
7. Wow! I was always gun shy of a distro that asked you to pay for Linux. But after trying to free version I may deviate from that path. Everything works, less the Opek Finger print scanner but that will come in time. Add the availability or "Laptop" kernels for power savings and I am SOLD!

Granted I have not tried Slackware or Gentoo, maybe one day.

More to follow later.....

XP SP3 and the SPIN!

As everyone in the world now knows Microsoft has delayed SP3 for Windows XP, until it fixes an issue with interoperability in relation to its own Dynamics Retail Management Software. I was curious as to how many companies use this software and in the last few days looked at every store I went into and to my surprise none were using it. Not even the dry cleaners...

Is this a ploy to to push Vista into our faces and onto our computers? I don't feel this is the case as they have also pulled Vista SP1 from auto installation, but not manual download. I am thinking larger issue than DRMs one which they don't want to explain. But what is it? A backdoor? A severe kernel vulnerability? Who knows, all I have to say is:
*Conspiracy theorists unite!*

I do have it installed and running on my notebook. And my box hasn't been Pwned, yet....