A laptop wandering around a city sending out an eMail attack from 
different WiFi locations could be very difficult to stop.  Several 
laptops wandering around a city would be just nasty.


Adam Maloney wrote:

>I'm having trouble understanding the danger here.  This is already a
>common hosting solution (albeit, not with Cygwin).  FreeBSD and Linux both
>have software that let you run multiple virtual machines on the same
>physical hardware.  And there's vmware of course.  IBM has
>enterprise-class servers that can run hundreds or thousands of unique
>instances of Linux (or AIX) on one server.  IBM calls this LPAR - Logical
>Partitioning.  Sun also has something similar, although I don't remember
>what they call their flavor.
>
>Hosting companies like it because they can give a customer full control
>over their virtual machine, and they can't influence any other customers.
>You can buy 1 biggie-sized server and charge customers a premium rate for
>"virtual server" instead of "virtual host".
>
>This is actually more difficult to do mass-hacking versus virtual
>webhosting with Apache or IIS.  Since you need to break into X machines to
>deface X websites, rather than breaking into 1 machine to deface a bunch
>of sites.  And since each machine is it's own instance of Linux, it will
>likely be running different software and be patched at a different level.
>
>Granted, you have the problem that you can take out all of these virtual
>servers if the 1 machine goes down - but you have the same problem with
>virtual webhosting already.  And you wouldn't be running 1000 instances of
>Linux on a big Pentium box.  No, this would be a 32-way IBM p690, or a
>106-way SunFire 15k (drool).  You need to lose a lot of components before
>the whole system chokes.
>
>  
>
>>Vanishing websites at the click of the (X)
>>Virus distributors, script kiddies, crackers of the worst kind could 
>>really kick some serious butt. And with WiFi coming in to its own we 
>>could have all sorts of problems.
>>
>>Sam
>>
>>    
>>



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