How many companies besides Apple can afford to bring Ive on as a contractor and implement his level of perfection? How many companies will continue investing until they have the perfect color “white”, the new ceramics, or the unibody designs that require completely new tooling?
I worry that Ive will quickly grow frustrated when he realizes that he is a consultant, and at the end of the day, it will be the company that makes the final decision.Will Ive want his name to be associated with an object that was deemed “good enough” by the hiring company?
Understanding the culture of an organization, the strengths and weaknesses of its executives, what the organization is capable as a whole.. that kind of access and connection comes when you are deeply integrated within it. As consultant, you are an external party, an outsider. No matter how good your ideas are, it is up to the client to decide whether or not they will be implemented.
I see Ive as the next Terry Gilliam trying to pitch Brazil! to a set of executives, except Gilliam was able to work with Criterion to ultimately release a 3 version box set: his version, what the executives wanted, and what was released in the theatre. Three completely different movies that highlight the clueless executives and the genius of Gilliam.
Or maybe he spends some time with his family and is a secret force behind the scenes, donating time to universities and design schools, trying to encourage the next generation.
40hex is a great zine from the early 90s that was focused on viruses, from a virus writers perspective. Mutation engines, polymorphism, virus decompilation & spotlights, etc.
Richard Clarke talks about his belief that stuxnet had numerous checks in place to limit collateral damage: "it very much had the feel to it of having been written by or governed by a team of Washington lawyers."
I think that purposefully built malware will have those checks hard coded into them in order to limit exposure. Will there be programatic flaws that cause it to spread farther? Yeah, that can happen. Q&A always is the first thing that gets cut.
I would suspect that the usage of more open ended tools/implants will have scope applied/enforced at the human layer. You don't want an employee going wild and knocking over everything just because they have a new 0day.
Nine years ago, my late wife had developed a tumor in her throat next to her vocal chords. She was fighting cancer while trying to be a mom to our 3 young boys. Directed radiation treatment was ruled out for this tumor, leaving surgery as the only viable option. The downside was the very real risk of her permanently losing her voice.
Hoping that she’d one day beat the cancer, but may not have a voice, I came up with an idea of trying to “capture it” in 2009 - hoping that it could be algorithmically rebuilt in the future. I reached out to a number of individuals that ultimately put me in touch with a research group that had a proprietary setup for capturing samples and rebuilding the voice. Over the Thanksgiving break, I managed to get access to a soundproof recording room and they worked with my wife to capture samples over a period of 4 hours.
Having worked in the infosec space since the 90s, my first reaction is often either how new tech/innovation can be used to bypass a control and how one could detect/prevent that. It’s easy to lose sight of how something like this could fundamentally changes a persons life.
I worked at BBN from 1996 to 1999. Not mentioned within the PDF is the role that BBN played in the Information Security space - a large portion of the L0pht (L0pht Heavy Industries / L0phtcrack / @stake, etc) worked at BBN. 4 out of 7 folks worked there. Peite Zatko (Mudge), myself, and later Chris Wysopal (Weld Pond / VeraCode) all worked in the IT Security department and were responsible for just about all things security related. Brian Oblivion also worked at the L0pht as an electrical engineer working on RF & satellite related work. Hobbit, author of netcat, also did some stints there in the late 90s. A large number of l0pht advisories came out the research and work we did to secure internal systems/software. We had some early access to Marcus Ranum’s new venture at the time - Network Flight Recorder and wrote some of the first modules. In early ‘99 I left BBN to work full time on the L0pht to write a set of hybrid protocol analysis/IDS signatures for NFR to help it become a true IDS system.
BBN was an amazing place; if you had a question about a protocol for example, you could track down one of the original authors of the RFC - sometimes they were located right down the hall.
BBN believed in employees and looked for people with passion, honesty and the desire to continually learn. I met my late wife at BBN. With a masters in Italian Literature and some scattered technical experience (satellite internet uplink/downlink stuff) she applied for a position at the company. They looked at her resume, lack of experience, and asked what Italian lit had to do with the Internet - “absolutely nothing” she replied, but expressed her interest in understanding how the Internet worked. They hired her in the CSC - Customer Support Center and slowly gave her training. She had great mentors and quickly jumped into becoming a Network Analyst, from there Infrastructure Engineer and finally to one of the peak technical groups (on the BBN Planet / networking side) - Network Engineering. Prior to BBN being sold out to GTE, she was one of two people that worked on peering arrangements for customers and other network providers. She knew the main backbone like the back of her hand and would haggle with companies to ensure that peering arrangements were fair and not one sided. Before the downfall, she argued internally as well - throwing salespeople under the bus when they’d over promise bandwidth from a local POP that was already approaching capacity. She started off with minimal technical experience and networking knowledge, but left with deep technical knowledge of Cisco router internals, BGP, and all things Internet/peering related. BBN believed in her, saw promise and invested in her - as they tried to do with everyone.
BBN was an awesome place - there was a hydro-acoustic submarine testing tank, some anechoic chambers, an amazing library, and some really cool technology. There was a meeting to show off “bullet ears” which involved a hidden sniper in a garage. The technology could identify the path of the bullet as well as the location of the sniper. For the 90s, it was an amazing place to be.
.. it always broke my heart when we were sold off to GTE to become GTE Internetworking. It eventually was bought by Verizon and spun off to become Genuity, which tanked. Level3 swooped in like vultures and picked over the remaining folks - you could keep your job if you moved to Denver or Atlanta from what I recall. Of the folks that moved, most of them were laid off in a few years. Sadly, BBN had ASN1, which Level3 scuttled in favor of their ASN - 3356.
You've covered the "last mile", but there is the upstream world to take into consideration.
1) Connecting into a CO is one thing, but your fiber is going to need to connect into something. Who is paying for your optics, is there a port or line card that can accept those optics? Does the CO actually have enough bandwidth upstream? This is a real issue.
Back in the 90s, I helped set up an ISP in Boston proper and our main competition had well over a 1000 customers attached to a single T1 (1.5mb/s) link. Everyone wanted 28.8k speeds (lol), but would normally get ~300 to 2400bps. The competition had a bunch of modems with a single upstream link. No one wanted what we were selling - guaranteed bandwidth / true 28.8 bandwidth all the time. People wanted $19.99/unlimited all you can eat. People still want that today.
Back to the CO, maybe you are lucky and they have some open ports. Worst case scenario, they want you to plop down a router and you'll do 10gb/e between. You can go with a homemade box and hope that it is stable, or you can buy expensive network gear.
2) To your customers, that "CO" is the "internet", but to that vendor/telco, it is just a single point of presence (POP). That CO has to connect to other POPs that are owned by them, and that costs real money. Eventually through a unknown number of hops, your traffic will hit an exchange point or carrier hotel. This is where your traffic exits their network and is taken up by another provider and/or company (google has their own fiber plan, for example). The amount of bandwidth at these peering/access points is finite and providers choose to peer with each other, usually at no charge, if there is an equitable distribution of traffic. The last thing that you want is for one company to take up all of the (finite) bandwidth at a peering point.
An ISP connects to multiple carriers (l3, cogent, comcast, att,verizon, etc) so that your customers have quick access to the websites/services that they want to visit - which most likely have to traverse one of those other providers. Similarly, their customers will want to access services that you are hosting, so you will take in a similar amount of ingress traffic.
With the fiber network that you are connecting your customers to, they'll most likely want to access bandwidth intensive services. You better hope that your CO has upstream capacity and a fast path to netflix/hulu/facebook/google/akamai/etc.
Or you, as a internet service provider, try and peer directly with the content providers if they allow it. If there are only 2-3 hops between you and Netflix, your users will love you. If they have to bounce around the country a couple of times, your customers will go back to Comcast (because they have a well connected backbone).
3) This doesn't even cover where you are going to get your IP addresses, if your upstream provider will announce them in BGP for you, etc. Or maybe you connect in to two carriers, get an ASN and announce your networks yourself. You are still at the mercy of your upstream providers.
I think a lot of these details are often overlooked when someone talks about network neutrality. I think network neutrality is a glib term for a number of issues:
- filtering of traffic and/or inability to access a service
- loss of freedom to host stuff "for free" on the internet
- lack of competition in "the last mile".
The FCC/TitleII stuff, from what I've heard, negatively impacted small WISPs that were trying to start up, by assuming that they were the same size as major wireless providers. A $20k fine because your lawyer failed to properly submit paperwork can wipe you out if you are a simple provider that is trying to provide access to a small community. You aren't AT&T, but title II will assume that you are - and penalize you accordingly.
For more information, read some of these filings/papers:
I worry that Ive will quickly grow frustrated when he realizes that he is a consultant, and at the end of the day, it will be the company that makes the final decision.Will Ive want his name to be associated with an object that was deemed “good enough” by the hiring company?
Understanding the culture of an organization, the strengths and weaknesses of its executives, what the organization is capable as a whole.. that kind of access and connection comes when you are deeply integrated within it. As consultant, you are an external party, an outsider. No matter how good your ideas are, it is up to the client to decide whether or not they will be implemented.
I see Ive as the next Terry Gilliam trying to pitch Brazil! to a set of executives, except Gilliam was able to work with Criterion to ultimately release a 3 version box set: his version, what the executives wanted, and what was released in the theatre. Three completely different movies that highlight the clueless executives and the genius of Gilliam.
Or maybe he spends some time with his family and is a secret force behind the scenes, donating time to universities and design schools, trying to encourage the next generation.