There is no artificial in any intelligence

I was, and am, always intrigued by the procedure or idea of creating a truly autonomous artificial intelligence. Through a long history, I always believe that the world that we are living on, the universe that we are located, are just an random incidence occurred throughout an infinite number of trials.

Humor me for a minute and consider this. There is an infinite powerful machine that can calculate the evolution of everything, with infinite time to execute the simulation. The machine will generate endless trials of simulations just to see if in any of these trials, there could be an concurrence of some kind of intelligence. Then in one universe it created, we occurred.

Who are we to tell or to prove that we are not a product of some kind of artificial intelligence? Does it even make sense to call it "artificial intelligence" if it is already an intelligence? There is nothing artificial about any intelligence, just like there is nothing natural about any intelligence.

Distract Free VMWare Setup for Windows 10 Host

When using VMWare Player 12 on Windows 10, there are two things that bothers me:

1. In full screen mode, the top bar is always visible.
2. The hot-key Win+L is called even within the full-screen VM.

For the second one, I have noticed that due to my usage of i3 window manager. i3 requires setting a $mod key for key bindings. Usually it can be either Alt key or Win key. However, since I've been using Dia a lot, I need to free up Alt key for its own key bindings. Therefore I need to use Win key. Unfortunately, the Win+L is used for both i3 and Windows 10. I'd rather disable to lock screen key for Windows than changing the default i3 configuration.

So, here I am. The following links contains the answers that I want. I will directly link them here.

1. To remove the top bar in VMWare Player 12 in Windows 10
2. To disable Win+L key binding in Windows 10

Enjoy distract free VMing!

Install UnNetHack on Ubuntu 14.04

For some reason, the great UnNetHack cannot be found in Ubuntu's repository. The PPA no longer works.

solution: make from source
Steps:

git clone https://github.com/UnNetHack/UnNetHack
cd UnNetHack
./configure
make
make install  

It seems to work without any complications.

Enjoy Nethack and UnNetHack! Elbereth!

A DDoS Ransom Incident

Recently, I've come across a set of discussion happened on the NANOG mailing list about a DDoS ransom incident. I find it rather interesting, and summarized a few notes about this incident.

What happened?

• A small company has received a ransom note from a very well-known group for potential DDoS attacks.
• The magnitude could be several hundred Gbps.
• Asked on NANOG mailing list for help.
• The attack group could most likely to be Armada Collective
• Primarily DNS and NTP amplicafication
• Web requests of 80 million per hour

Suggestions from NANOG members

• Roland Dobbins from Arbor:
• Upstream ACL (access control list)
• Nick:
• If they pay the ransom:
• the attackers can come back at any time for more.
• making the ransom a bigger business and aflicting more companies.
• Patrick Darden from p66:
• Contact FBI or other law enforcement agencies
• Contact EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation)
• John Kristoff from Cymru:
• free community service UTRS (Unwanted Traffic Removal Service), or RTBH (remotely-triggered black hole filtering)
• http://www.team-cymru.org/UTRS/
• https://www.iab.org/wp-content/IAB-uploads/2015/04/CARIS2015submission_20.pdf
• utilize BGP to distributes verified BGP-based filter rules
• provide sample traffic (pcap, flow, logs)
• Bill Herrin from Dirtside Systems:
• Whoever announces the prefix through BGP should be responsible for the defense
• Cloudflare can filter web-based attacks, incapsula can take care of IP-based filtering

Summary

• Most admins agree that there is nothing much this company can do but to ask for help from its upstream Internet provider
• Defense attacks with such maginitude (hundreds of Gbps) at the victim side is not effective
• There are BGP-based methods, such as RTBH (remotely-triggered black hole filtering), that can work on prefix-level filtering or redirection.
• But this method can incur high collateral damage depends on the size of the prefixes.
• It also requires high level of trust of this kind of collaboration (filtering traffic to downstream is not usually ecnomically benefitial to the ASes)