MeFi post: Lakota Indians Declare Independence

So, wait, haven't AIM and other activist organizations essentially been trying to do this for years? They don't recognize the "Vichy Indians" of the tribal government, so I'm curious about what makes this different than, say, Wounded Knee.
posted to MetaFilter by dreadpiratesully at 6:55 AM on December 20, 2007

MeFi post: A New Afrikan Republic in the New World

Actually, if you click on the image in the wikipedia page you get a list of maps which includes one of the percentage of African-Americans per census tract. It looks quite similar, and not much more even or uninteresting than the one featured.
posted to MetaFilter by dreadpiratesully at 11:02 PM on November 8, 2007

MeFi post: too quiet...

Or would the internet just crash if enough people got infected and started sending out 80,000 emails each?

This is pretty close to the real concern here. The collective bandwidth of all of the people who do open "video.exe" could, if used properly, pose a legitimate threat to Internet infrastructure.
posted to MetaFilter by dreadpiratesully at 7:18 AM on October 15, 2007

Or, what he said.
posted to MetaFilter by dreadpiratesully at 7:19 AM on October 15, 2007

I think this quote from the second to last link is notable:

As more black hats investigate the CME711 code, the network will become more vulnerable to takeover attacks. I hope these guys cut their losses and start breaking down the net soon. I would hate to see such a large botnet in the hands of some second rate script kiddy.

Even if the authors/current owners of the network are purely in it for the money, the command and... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by dreadpiratesully at 7:29 AM on October 15, 2007

Hincandenza, I may misunderstand you, but nonetheless I'll point out that a digital signature need not come from a third party authority. CAs and the like sell trust, not prime numbers. Anybody can generate a cryptographic key and use it to sign messages. The botnet hosts, unlike users of an e-commerce website, only need to verify that the message was signed with the expected key. They do not need to verify that the key belongs to anyone in particular.
posted to MetaFilter by dreadpiratesully at 3:02 PM on October 15, 2007

That's the second time that's happened to me in this thread, and that time I even previewed. I give up.
posted to MetaFilter by dreadpiratesully at 3:03 PM on October 15, 2007

Flunkie, I'm intuitively inclined to agree with you, but apparently it's a very hard problem.
posted to MetaFilter by dreadpiratesully at 7:35 PM on October 15, 2007