Just had an idea....

Ok i was reading this article tonight (which i got from digg as usual) and something occurred to me.
"Lyon still wanted to find out who was behind the attacks. He and Brown scanned the traffic data, found a zombie, and, thanks to an opening in Microsoft Windows, were able to see what other computers it had been connected to. This led them to a chat server in Kazakhstan; when they connected to it, they saw more attacks in progress. They notified the F.B.I. and the Secret Service, but, Brown said, “they sort of threw up their arms, because it was in Kazakhstan.” To Lyon, however, the lesson was clear: with clever techniques and a little luck, any attacker could
be found."

"thanks to an opening in Microsoft Windows"
This gives me an idea; whats the best way to find a zombie army, by being in control of the zombies themselves.....

SO on with the idea, what if there was a piece of software similar to the bot software that resided on a good bit of the machines involved, similar but different in that it would be used by a good network to gather information about a given attack, and could possibly either disrupt that attack (by commanding the pcs under its control to quit participating) or could just gather information about the attack to be given to the authorities. The software could be installed on a voluntary basis, like seti@home.

The idea that enables this is, the criminals running these bots dont know/care what else is running on the bots themselves. So your program could run alongside thiers without them realizing you are gathering data on them.

In fact the ppl like Lyon, could theoretically setup a farm of machines and just let them be infected and maybe then one of thier machines would be one of the bots attacking, and could be used to trackback to the attackers....

Note to self: always finish reading the article before posting idea to blog, there are alotta ppl alot smarter than me. :/

The Great Depression

The other night me and my grandma were sitting at dinner talking and I decided to ask her "what caused the Great depression?" And she didnt know, she said "well the stock markets crashed" so I asked "why?" and she said "well money had no value" and I said "but why? What caused it?"

Ultimately it had never been explained to either of us so for the purpose of educating my already very clever readers....

The answer is the leaders in countries with the most influence were having a problem with deflation (money wasnt worth anything) and they in turn used solutions that would work on inflation to try and solve this problem. Most americans (or at least I didnt) dont realize the great depression was worldwide.

So to compress it down more, alotta really "smart" ppl had a whole string of bad ideas which ultimately lead up to the stock market crashing, banks folding, and ten years of turmoil.

Luckily we came out of it, and eventually someone had a bright idea to network computers which eventually snowballed into the idea of wikipedia, which happens to be where I got my information. :)