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We run a web based newsgroup service called BinFeeds and sometimes have users who are concerned about anonymous surfing.

First point we often tell them is this. We dont care what service you use, we know who you are. Like any subscription service... you have to log in, and thus we know who we are sending the data to - unless someone stole your account. Many of our customers think that services like the anonymizer will protect them from that. In our experience, webmasters running protected sites more often run into "anonymizer-like" users actually being people with stolen accounts or who are using it for other purposes (site mirroring, etc). 75% of Anonymizer users on our service have been of that type and they (The Anonymizer owners) refuse to act (disable the account, block the user, assist in the credit fraud investifation, etc) or take months (thus we currently block all Anonymizer users). On signups, 95% of Anonymizer users are those trying to fraudulently use a credit card. We expect both from noting the increase of such errors on Anonymizer and from our own decisions, that many webmasters will be blocking such services on an increasing basis, because for us to track anonymous users is very difficult (even though I learned it is trivial from my time at a very very large ISP/Telco).

Basically, if you just dont want your ISP to have a log of where you are surfing and what you are doing, then great! Look into one and sign up for whichever service best meets those needs.

If you are worrying about law enforcement officials or a big ISP tracking usage then just surf normally.

Though they will never admit it the telcos (or fiber providers of similar technology) know exactly what you are looking at and more importantly, where you are. By "where you are" I mean that literally. Your physical address.

On CableModems as in the initial post, it may be more difficult, but under DSL, T3, T1 (DS1, which is often dual sDSL circuits nowadays) and dialup, etc, there are multiple networking protocols and layers not ever discussed. The telcos run their own network protocols and layers on their hardware that route the data for the ISP's data layer over the telco equipment.

In the past, while working for a major ISP (who owns a very large chunk of the Internet backbone and their own fiber network and telco), a person was seriously breaching our AUP terms and the law for actions he was doing using one of our customer's accounts. He THOUGHT he was anonymous, but since we owned our telco arm (and since they are all interconnected) we did a network (circuit) trace on the connection and viola! Through that we end up with the physical address (street address and number) of the loser.

Most people forget or dont realize that in order for your local telco to be able to route internet data to you, they needed your physical address to bring the wires to your house. The network hardware isnt computer based in the sense we all think and runs different protocols in a transparent fashion that doesnt make the end user think of it as anything more than a wire going to a router someplace else (like on an internal ethernet/TCPIP network), but it is not. It is it's own network on different hardware that transports the signals to "standard" network routers (Cisco, Ascend, etc). Much like NetBIOS over TCP/IP. To the user once configured, it's "Windows file sharing" and that's it, but the reality is it is running through TCPIP.

Since "we" (my former employer) ran such a large telco, a simple call to the NOC (telco) got us the info in under 5 minutes. This can be done to an active connection or to a past connection via the activity logs. Also easy to coordinate with the other telcos for cooperation since they needed us/we needed them for the telco services to work.

If you as a user or owner of a small ISP try to get that info you will get a dozen different "I dont think that's possible" or "There is no way of doing that" or "I dont know what you are talking about" answers. Just the way it works. No one is supposed to know it works that way, and few people actually seem to think nowadays - even the technical ones - about how such a system would work - or half the world would realize that any entity with enough "power" or authority can determine exactly where you are at what you are connected to, anonymous surfing, encryption and proxying aside.

Just the sad truth... even if you are on a cell phone (btw, the logs for your location when your cell phone is ON (and in some phone's cases, off as well as long as it has power) are kept for decades and have been since the late 80's at least... right down to a few hundred foot circle.

- Rob

How can I get in on this great deal???

www.BinFeeds.com
The best online XXX Newsgroup Binary Galleries
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How can I get in on this great deal???

www.BinFeeds.com
The best online XXX Newsgroup Binary Galleries
Thumbnailed for ease of use!! Click here and help /. help me make money!!!

While people can argue the technical merits of each database app till the end of time, first, a lot is dependant on individual situations. One server we run FoodPlaces Restaurant Guide has a far larger database set than our XXX Binary Image Newsgroup (USENET) Server. The hardware is slightly in favor of BinFeeds, but we have lotsa problems with table errors and such, even though currently the FoodPlaces tables are far larger and far more complex.

The reason quite simply seems to be the way MySQL handles threads, concurrent operations, locking and errors. FoodPlaces is primarily database read queries with no updates, inserts or such, while BinFeeds uses tons of update, insert and fetches. MySQL bombs horribly in such a situation.

Point is, I can post tons of numbers showing the amazing power of MySQL based off the limited updates and inserts on FoodPlaces and the high traffic of the site, or I can post logs of table crashes that sometimes exceed 2 an hour for BinFeeds, with only adequate performance.

It may be interesting to see TRUE real world results that show how MySQL handles varying ranges of each database "function" occuring "concurrently" (inserts, updates, deletes, fetches, etc). For a BinFeeds setup, we should have stuck with DB2, even with some of the xtra coding it needed. We're going back to it in October. For FoodPlaces (which is what erroneously made us switch to DB2 for BinFeeds) MySQL is ideal and the performance is fine.

The really big problem is that MySQL.com does/used to advertise the following:

From MySQL.COM
MySQL is the world's most popular Open Source Database, designed for speed, power and precision in mission critical, heavy load use.

From that statement (also in the manual), and the FoodPlaces results, as well as more in the manual touting MySQL's ability to handle concurrent operations, we made the decision to switch BinFeeds to MySQL. Bad move - based off good test results for FP and other similar type sites - and more importantly off erroneous, misleading info in the manual.

-Rob

(1) Anyone hear of Lexmark ("Still trying to pretend we aren't really part of IBM") International? Let's say the "new" office suite this guy develops somehow "takes off"... and MS decides to drop their office suite except for the big collaborative business aspects (which, compared to Notes, doesnt exist)....

(2) Didnt this guy write Word before he worked for MS anyway? (not really a question... he did, regardless of or as supported by current belief). Perhaps that is why he has retained the rights... a good contract when he was bought out by MS in the beginning (and thus this isnt something as sinister as possibility #1...)

Dunno - it will be interesting to see how things go. But those are the only things I could think of that would explain why he got to leave with all his IP.

-Rob

BinFeeds

In just this topic, someone else pointed out how stupid it was that our politicians, with no knowledge of such things, make and pass laws that govern them without at least talking with sufficient experts in the field. I was hoping my post pointed out the poster I was respnding to, with apparently less knowledge - and an adversion to rollercoasters - was doing the same thing *I* did to him - except I had justification (he was wrong, jumped to a conclusion and then used a 6 year before the event, hazy by his own admission 13 year old kid memory to slam a company about something he had no technical knowledge of then, and seems to have as little of now).

Hopefully that type of behavior will stop since it often hurts many legitimate individuals and companies. If Gillians did something wrong, they should be hammered for it, not for a 13 year old's incorrect, admittedly hazy, recollection of the past. - Rob BinFeeds

I simply did the following...

• Set up one OS/2 Warp 4 system with touchscreen and Warp's built in Voice Navigation and Dictation
• Installed House/2 (OS/2 only)
• Configured some macros and REXX objects to the Voice interface
• Wrote a tiny (under 10K) app to create a touchscreen interface... (this can also be done using HTML, image maps, forms and a web server with a REXX script in the background on the web server) this added touchscreen interface to the whole affair accessible anywhere I chose - or everywhere internet enabled.
• Enabled the security sensors to visually activate zones on the monitor showing activity in the building
• Used a wireless microphone that was plugged into the PC's microphone port to control anything from anywhere (you need a decent one).
• Add(ed) X-10 to IR to X-10 interfaces as wanted, and X-10 to alarm to X-10 interfaces as needed (though there are a ton of X-10 direct sensors which I also use)

This was 5 years ago when House/2 first came out.

- Rob