Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2017/09/08/rfp-for-magic-beans.html
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“homos”
Um, whatever.
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The South Koreans very much appreciate the old observation of " A fool and his money are soon separated."
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This presumes that the device won’t work as advertised, and that the real design of the device isn’t false positives directed at political opponents.
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American evangelicals have really done a number on Ugandan politics.
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General YK Museveni wants you to know that he has personally reviewed all of this gay porn and “interviewed” porn actors to insure your safety from his sharing them with you.
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Wondering if it comes with active or passive Gaydar™ technology?
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we prefer to be called “Teh Gays,” tyvm
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I have a similar yet completely unique device/gadget roughly the size of a box of tissues with a flashing light on it that is guaranteed to protect you from Nigerian prince scams and being rickrolled.
Could someone get me contact info for Hon. Lokodo Simon, Minister of State for Ethics and Integrity?
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Next you’re going to tell me George Michael is gay. And he isn’t.
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Wondering if it comes with active or passive Gaydar™ technology?
Maybe it uses Gay dependent surveillance.
Oh and BTW just spin up a cheap virtual machine outside Uganda. Install squid and configure your HTTP proxy to access the instance via ssh.
It should be automatable so that your workstation uses an API like boto to spin up your proxy instance on demand.
50 shades of gayscale, with false-color mapping.
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What is actually rather surprising is how little money was separated from the fool.
The source says that the system came in at $88,000. Probably a healthy markup over the pure hardware cost of whatever thinly rebadged x86 box it runs on; but that’s really pretty modest by the standards of anything that doesn’t have its costs amortized over a zillion units and is sold with some amount of actual engineering support.
(By way of more or less randomly chosen example: a BlueCoat filter box of ‘enterprise’ rather than ‘carrier’ or ‘telco’ scale; without a consultant to hold your hand; any hot or cold spares, a warranty of more than a year, etc. can run you close to $70,000 retail.)
Unless the vendor just totally conned them; and they open the box to discover that they got a refurbed Dell 1U with a pirated copy of NetNanny and a Jesus fish sticker on the bezel; ~$90k sounds like a fairly good deal for something even plausibly in the league of being a carrier grade surveillance and censorship widget; especially if any configuration, customization, or support-by-actual-experts is provided.
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I don’t think you can filter the internet traffic of a whole country on a single box.
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That certainly is a queer headline.
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Not if you care about reliability or plan on inspecting very hard, at least; though that still leaves the quoted price firmly in ‘actually a really good deal; or wildly oversold’ territory; since even a largely ineffective solution would require at least one box per peering point/important bit of telco/etc.
Did you have any luck digging up how much traffic this particular entire country is good for? I couldn’t find anything terribly helpful, especially if I wanted to include domestic communication, rather than just international link capacity.
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Hmmm. They have 7 million internet users so maybe one New Zealand in total traffic? Definitely not one Singapore.
Say 100 megabytes per user per day gives 700 terabytes per day of traffic. If one box can transact 1 gigabyte per second thats 86 terabytes per day per box so you need ten very high performing boxes to do the job. Best I can do I am out of envelopes.
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Quite. With the possible exception of North Korea.
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The question I have is “why do they care so damn much?”.
Not to be too dismissive, but if you’re not hurting someone (who doesn’t want to be hurt), and they’re a consenting adult, why should I bother to care where or what you do with your jiggly bits?
Why are evangelicals so obsessed with gay sex? Why the F did insanity transfer to Uganda? How in the world did that translate into buying actual f-ing censor hardware (presuming some degree of functionality).
A weird comparison would be if I, a “dog person” somehow became incensed that someone that I don’t know loved cats. HOW DARE THEY! I’ve got to figure out how to filter cats off the local internet, and have a magic device that can determine if you’re a cat or a dog person. Weird.
(and to be completely honest, while I love most dogs (unless they’re mental dicks), and am not a fan of standoffish cats in general, I’ve got a pretty cool cat that adopted me by repeatedly running into my house and refusing to leave. No chip or ID, and no response to local adverts, to the bastard gets to sponge off of me, and gets to stick his ass in my face on a regular basis. So… I guess it’s more of a spectrum of dog…cat rather than black or white. Oh god… I’ve got latent cat tendencies!!!)
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