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You realise that number crunching data processing boxes are absolutely nothing new right? Even SETI wasn't a new concept when it was put into use. All kinds of data has been crunched on clusters.
Oh, and the project is now BOINC, because it's no longer just SETI. BOINC stands for Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing, for the curious and lazy.
Sure but SETI popularized it and was one of the first if not the first to come out after everyone started getting dialup accounts with the new generation of public ISPs moving from University based providers to private startups. Plus it came with a cool screen saver when there wasn't any available that didn't suck or cost money.
People paid for screen savers???????????
And Berkeley has been one of THE areas for Computing in general. How do you think we got Vi? And TCP/IP ? ;) And LSD, heh.
They made ACID the FIRST time ;)
gore, yes people paid for screen savers and for trialware or sharware because there was no FTP to get it from and disk duplication cost money. So you would pay like 5 buck to have a program sent to you. Unless you were lucky enough to have a university or government account. U. Mass. and Michigan had the best file servers. It's funny you mention Berkeley, they had a screen saver suite you could purchase that was quite popular, I ran into it all the time. Well I assume the company was associated with Berkeley U. but then again perhaps ex. students? They packaged the "After Dark" suite with the infamous "Fly Toasters" screen saver. They were necessary or your monitor was toast from Burn In.
[OT]
I remember those! They're back
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That all said, back to the original topic: if they've hosed Carnivore and are using a specialized commercial version of "something" I don't think we can make the assumption that their server setup is standard. Perhaps clustered supercomputers (multiple Big Blues?)? GRID?
As the joke goes, it's no coincidence that BSD and LSD both came out of Berkeley.
I wouldn't be surprised if they had supercomputer clusters especially Big Blue's. They also probably switched to something along the lines of ethereal or something similar. Or even just a hub and some custom program.
jk/
Yes I remember After Dark................I liked "nocturnes"..............sort of reminded me of walking through a user department.
/jk
As for "carnivore", it used to rear its head in the "paranoia pages" every now and then, but I wonder how much it was actually used.
I also wonder why it actually got so much publicity? For a while I have suspected that it was more a crime prevention tool than a crime detection one...........a sort of "if people know that we have this, it will keep the amateurs out of the game and give us more time to concentrate on the professionals" social engineering type philosophy?
just a thought
Super Computers are insanely expensive. I doubt the FBI gets a whole bunch of time. Even high profile terrrorist targets are back logged for months if not years. They get wayyy to much credit. ;)
IBM Blue Gene /L would be one machine that could handle these loads.