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Comments · 3,191
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Is this on topic?As seen on Adequacy.org, News for Grown Ups.
The Linux operating system was born in 1991 and was created by one man, a
Finnish student coincidentally named Linux Torvalds. Since these humble
beginnings, a multi-million dollar
industry has sprung up to exploit the commercial potential of Linux, but
until recently Linux has eluded mainstream acceptance. However, due to the
recent economic downturn together with uncertainty over changes to Microsoft's pricing policy, Linux is
now being touted as a serious contender to Microsoft Windows. While there
are many other alternatives to Windows, including BSD which is based on SUN's (Stanford University Network - correction by bc) server-grade Solaris operating system,
none have commanded the same level of media attention as Linux.
Linux Mandrake is just the
latest in a long line of quirkily christened versions of Linux. Previous
versions of Linux have been named Red Hat, Slack Ware,
Storm and Coral. In stark contrast to the mundane names such
as 98, ME or NT preferred by Microsoft, the crazy
names of each Linux release hint at its renegade nature.
My foray into the world of Linux began by downloading a "CD image" from
the Linux web site. But don't worry, this isn't software piracy, it's
perfectly legal! Linux is shareware, meaning that it can be freely
redistributed without fear of a visit by the Business Software Alliance. The free
availability of Linux is a major reason for its popularity among
cash-strapped students and self-styled anti-capitalist hackers.
Before installing new software, it is always advisable to read the
documentation. Unfortunately, an unpleasant surprise was in store for me
in the "required configuration" section of the manual.
I was shocked to learn that Linux Mandrake only runs on Pentium
processors, meaning that my hopes of testing the water with my old Gateway 486 were dashed. Furthermore, a
whopping 32 megabytes of memory are required to run Linux! Although the advocates of Linux self-righteously
boast the efficiency of their chosen operating system and deride the
"bloatware" produced by Microsoft, it appears that their claims are
blatantly incorrect. Although my humble 486 will happily run Windows 95,
it seems that Linux requires far more powerful, and more expensive,
computer hardware. Is this really the sign of a lean, mean operating system?
Of course not.
Sadly, not even being able to install Linux is just the first of my many
complaints. A brief perusal of the
features of Linux Mandrake reveals that Linux is sorely lacking many
crucial productivity applications. For example, why isn't the industry
standard web browser, Internet Explorer, included with Linux? Despite the
best efforts of the experts at the Internet
Engineering Task Force to encourage adoption of the Internet Explorer
standard, the creators of Linux seem to think that they know better. By
refusing to adhere to recognised standards, Linux is simply undermining
its own credibility.
Similarly, almost all of the world's most popular and widely used software
is completely incompatible with Linux! It may surprise you to learn that
your copy of Microsoft Office, Outlook Express, or Lotus Notes will not
work under Linux. Those who wish to use their computer for recreational
purposes are also out of luck, for almost all of the most popular games
are unavailable for Linux. Although a wide range of software is freely
available for Linux, these pitiful offerings are mostly unfinished, unreliable and do not
bear comparison to their commercial counterparts.
Computer security is also an area that seems to have been overlooked by
the developers of Linux. In these times when hacking and viruses are
commonplace, it defies belief to learn that no anti-virus software is available for
Linux. To add insult to injury, there is no Linux version of the popular
ZoneAlarm firewall. By using Linux,
you are issuing an open invitation to the hordes of ne'er-do-wells on the
Internet.
The shortcomings of Linux are obvious. Without even installing Linux
Mandrake, I have exposed several fundamental flaws. Surely it is not too
much to expect that, after ten years of development, the creators of Linux
would have addressed these problems? The real question that the
prospective Linux user must ask himself is, "Why bother?" After all,
Microsoft Windows comes free with most PCs and there simply isn't a need
to replace it, particularly not with a product of inferior quality.
Although it is always tempting to support the underdog, Windows XP will
be the deserved victor in the battle ahead. I recommend that those
Adequacy readers who are hoping to upgrade their operating system
patiently wait for the release of Windows XP, rather than foolishly
wasting their time, effort and money on Linux. -
Re:10 Thousand marks for what?
Now if it had an ethernet port and a built in webserver showing how hot the coffee is and how much is left it would be a whole nother matter.
As long as it complies with RFC 2324 then I am all for it. -
Re:Heh, won't work
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Re:Heh, won't work
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Re:Heh, won't work
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Re:Heh, won't work
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Re:Heh, won't work
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Re:Heh, won't work
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Re:Heh, won't work
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international domain names
For those of you interesting in reading about the current work being done on resolving Foreign Characters. See the work that the idn group is doing IDN
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Re:Offtopic
I completely and 100% agree that geolocating a user by IP is completely pointless: With the reasons you mentioned (NAT, mega-proxies like AOL, etc.). Indeed I am advocating that that solution has been a completely failure. In any case reverse-DNS geolocation takes too long and is too resource intensive for most websites to utilize them (not to mention often the ISPs have totally incorrect information).
Instead my suggestion is that browsers themselves, i.e. Mozilla, Opera, IE, allow the user to set their location and it passes it through as an HTTP request header (just like User-Agent or any of the other basic HTTP 1.1 headers), and this header carries through unmolested by any proxy servers en route. I tapped into wininet.dll and did this for all IE requests (or any other app that uses wininet) coming from my PC, in my case conforming to this draft so technically any site I visit knows where I am. I drafted my own proposal for a method for encapsulating user location.
Now of course there's the
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ADEQUACY GIVES THUMBS DOWN TO MANDRAKE!!#@$As seen on Adequacy.org, News for Grown Ups.
The Linux operating system was born in 1991 and was created by one man, a Finnish student coincidentally named Linux Torvalds. Since these humble beginnings, a multi-million dollar industry has sprung up to exploit the commercial potential of Linux, but until recently Linux has eluded mainstream acceptance. However, due to the recent economic downturn together with uncertainty over changes to Microsoft's pricing policy, Linux is now being touted as a serious contender to Microsoft Windows. While there are many other alternatives to Windows, including BSD which is based on SUN's (Stanford University Network - correction by bc) server-grade Solaris operating system, none have commanded the same level of media attention as Linux.
Linux Mandrake is just the latest in a long line of quirkily christened versions of Linux. Previous versions of Linux have been named Red Hat, Slack Ware, Storm and Coral. In stark contrast to the mundane names such as 98, ME or NT preferred by Microsoft, the crazy names of each Linux release hint at its renegade nature.
My foray into the world of Linux began by downloading a "CD image" from the Linux web site. But don't worry, this isn't software piracy, it's perfectly legal! Linux is shareware, meaning that it can be freely redistributed without fear of a visit by the Business Software Alliance. The free availability of Linux is a major reason for its popularity among cash-strapped students and self-styled anti-capitalist hackers.
Before installing new software, it is always advisable to read the documentation. Unfortunately, an unpleasant surprise was in store for me in the "required configuration" section of the manual. I was shocked to learn that Linux Mandrake only runs on Pentium processors, meaning that my hopes of testing the water with my old Gateway 486 were dashed. Furthermore, a whopping 32 megabytes of memory are required to run Linux! Although the advocates of Linux self-righteously boast the efficiency of their chosen operating system and deride the "bloatware" produced by Microsoft, it appears that their claims are blatantly incorrect. Although my humble 486 will happily run Windows 95, it seems that Linux requires far more powerful, and more expensive, computer hardware. Is this really the sign of a lean, mean operating system? Of course not.
Sadly, not even being able to install Linux is just the first of my many complaints. A brief perusal of the features of Linux Mandrake reveals that Linux is sorely lacking many crucial productivity applications. For example, why isn't the industry standard web browser, Internet Explorer, included with Linux? Despite the best efforts of the experts at the Internet Engineering Task Force to encourage adoption of the Internet Explorer standard, the creators of Linux seem to think that they know better. By refusing to adhere to recognised standards, Linux is simply undermining its own credibility.
Similarly, almost all of the world's most popular and widely used software is completely incompatible with Linux! It may surprise you to learn that your copy of Microsoft Office, Outlook Express, or Lotus Notes will not work under Linux. Those who wish to use their computer for recreational purposes are also out of luck, for almost all of the most popular games are unavailable for Linux. Although a wide range of software is freely available for Linux, these pitiful offerings are mostly unfinished, unreliable and do not bear comparison to their commercial counterparts.
Computer security is also an area that seems to have been overlooked by the developers of Linux. In these times when hacking and viruses are commonplace, it defies belief to learn that no anti-virus software is available for Linux. To add insult to injury, there is no Linux version of the popular ZoneAlarm firewall. By using Linux, you are issuing an open invitation to the hordes of ne'er-do-wells on the Internet.
The shortcomings of Linux are obvious. Without even installing Linux Mandrake, I have exposed several fundamental flaws. Surely it is not too much to expect that, after ten years of development, the creators of Linux would have addressed these problems? The real question that the prospective Linux user must ask himself is, "Why bother?" After all, Microsoft Windows comes free with most PCs and there simply isn't a need to replace it, particularly not with a product of inferior quality.
Although it is always tempting to support the underdog, Windows XP will be the deserved victor in the battle ahead. I recommend that those Adequacy readers who are hoping to upgrade their operating system patiently wait for the release of Windows XP, rather than foolishly wasting their time, effort and money on Linux.
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why "forgery" can be a good thing
That and banning ANY sender info or header forgery, require a valid mail or phone AND e-mail contact in all commercial e-mail, and I think the spam problem will be pretty much done.
Banning header "forgery" is a very bad idea, if you mean that (as people usually do) to indicate making the email appear as if it came from someone other than the actual sender. [You may not have meant it so broadly, but a lot of people do, so I feel justified in pointing a few things out for at least their benefit, so forgive me for taking this opportunity to make a general rant about the issue.]
Note that RFC 822 explicitly allows the From: header to be something other than the actual sender of the message (though it does require a Sender: header, but MUAs tend not to display that). It's easy to "forge" From: addresses because email was designed with this "forgery" in mind. Note also that because of Received: headers, it's actually difficult to mask the message's true origins. It's just that most people don't know about headers, so they focus on the From: line.
RFC 822 gives several examples of how this feature of email can be used, but here are a couple from my daily life:
1) I am a sysadmin at a rather large organization. I often find the need, when acting in an official capacity, to send email to users as "manager" or "postmaster" or "security" or as some other hat that I wear. This makes people notice the email, marks it as a formal note, allows the other admins to deal with responses to the mail, and has a number of other benefits. For a variety of reasons, it would be rather unprofessional for me to send out such email as myself. (Should the tens of thousands of users we support have to keep track of the staff changes in the our department?)
2) On the side, I do hosting for a number of smaller organizations. Sometimes the people who run these organizations feel the need to send out an email in an official capacity. In this case, they often send the mail with a From: address of something like info@foo.org, and the message originates on a totally different network than the one on which the foo.org machines live. Should the senders be forced to log into the foo.org machines as the "info" user and run mutt or maix? It's much better for them to be able to use their preferred MUA and their ISP's MTA. [This is why I get worried when I hear about ISPs requiring certain From: addresses.] Also, the people who send the message are not always the ones who answer mail to info@foo.org. Should organizations be forced to structure themselves around the requirements of email?
That's just my personal experience -- there are lots of other cases, I am sure.
Keep in mind that email was in large part modelled after the US postal system. It's interesting to note that return addresses are not always required by the USPS (think about post cards).
That said, I do think that some sort of valid return contact information is important (and I do hate unsolicited {mail,email,faxes,phone calls}). We should, however, be careful when recommending that certain things be outlawed -- just because we can not see a legitimate use of something does not mean that such a use does not exist and that the people engaging in that use should be punished for the bad behavior of others.
<offtopic rant>
It seems like this issue arises a lot on slashdot, and among the newbies I talk to. People tend to bash large, highly featureful packages or protocols (e.g. sendmail and X11) because they think that the particular ways they use them apply to all other cases. It's a natural tendency, I suppose, but sometimes I feel like I should wear a button reading "that doesn't scale" or "what about the corner cases" or something similar when talking to junior sysadmins.
</offtopic rant> -
Re:Egress FilteringEgress filtering, also called "Network Ingress Filtering", is already formally defined and described in IETF RFC 2827. As most of you know, the IETF defines the key Internet standards, and the IETF completed this RFC back in May 2000. In it, the authors recommend that all service providers implement egress filtering "as soon as possible". You can see this RFC at http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2827.txt.
It would be a good idea to legally require ISP's to implement egress filtering. It won't stop DDoS attacks, but it would make it far easier to trace and stop malicious network activity.
There are also some efforts to try to "throttle" DDoS attacks from the sending side (e.g., by watching to see if there are many unanswered packets and then slowing down transmission rates). If these efforts scale and their current problems can be fixed (e.g., how do you handle broadcasting?), perhaps they could be made a legal requirement, or perhaps there could be a general legal requirement that ISP's implement methods to counter DDoS attacks, using egress filtering and throttling as examples. There are ways to make this work legally, by creating a more general law and setting up a body to create the more specific regulations (which can be flexible as technology advances and new attacks emerge).
The fundamental problem with Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks is that they are very hard for victims themselves to counter; the best place to counter them is near the attacker, but victims generally have no control over networks "near" the attacker. Since DDoS attacks don't particularly hurt the "sending" ISPs, this is a problem that will not be solved by simply waiting for people to do it themselves. Thus, I think there's a need for "good Internet citizen" legal requirements to make DDoS attacks easier to counter.
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Re:Umm, what?
Network Address Translation
See here and elsewhere via google for lots of info.
ipmasquerading is an example of this using in the linux kernel, where packets from one ip address (your neighbor's wirelessly-connected laptop, perhaps) are changed so that they appear to come from a different place (the ip address associated with the cable modem, for example), and reply packets are then forwarded back to the translated source.
read about iptables and netfilter in kernel 2.4.x for the latest...
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Adequacy Reviews MandrakeAs seen on Adequacy.org, News for Grown Ups.
The Linux operating system was born in 1991 and was created by one man, a
Finnish student coincidentally named Linux Torvalds. Since these humble
beginnings, a multi-million dollar
industry has sprung up to exploit the commercial potential of Linux, but
until recently Linux has eluded mainstream acceptance. However, due to the
recent economic downturn together with uncertainty over changes to Microsoft's pricing policy, Linux is
now being touted as a serious contender to Microsoft Windows. While there
are many other alternatives to Windows, including BSD which is based on SUN's (Stanford University Network - correction by bc) server-grade Solaris operating system,
none have commanded the same level of media attention as Linux.
Linux Mandrake is just the
latest in a long line of quirkily christened versions of Linux. Previous
versions of Linux have been named Red Hat, Slack Ware,
Storm and Coral. In stark contrast to the mundane names such
as 98, ME or NT preferred by Microsoft, the crazy
names of each Linux release hint at its renegade nature.
My foray into the world of Linux began by downloading a "CD image" from
the Linux web site. But don't worry, this isn't software piracy, it's
perfectly legal! Linux is shareware, meaning that it can be freely
redistributed without fear of a visit by the Business Software Alliance. The free
availability of Linux is a major reason for its popularity among
cash-strapped students and self-styled anti-capitalist hackers.
Before installing new software, it is always advisable to read the
documentation. Unfortunately, an unpleasant surprise was in store for me
in the "required configuration" section of the manual.
I was shocked to learn that Linux Mandrake only runs on Pentium
processors, meaning that my hopes of testing the water with my old Gateway 486 were dashed. Furthermore, a
whopping 32 megabytes of memory are required to run Linux! Although the advocates of Linux self-righteously
boast the efficiency of their chosen operating system and deride the
"bloatware" produced by Microsoft, it appears that their claims are
blatantly incorrect. Although my humble 486 will happily run Windows 95,
it seems that Linux requires far more powerful, and more expensive,
computer hardware. Is this really the sign of a lean, mean operating system?
Of course not.
Sadly, not even being able to install Linux is just the first of my many
complaints. A brief perusal of the
features of Linux Mandrake reveals that Linux is sorely lacking many
crucial productivity applications. For example, why isn't the industry
standard web browser, Internet Explorer, included with Linux? Despite the
best efforts of the experts at the Internet
Engineering Task Force to encourage adoption of the Internet Explorer
standard, the creators of Linux seem to think that they know better. By
refusing to adhere to recognised standards, Linux is simply undermining
its own credibility.
Similarly, almost all of the world's most popular and widely used software
is completely incompatible with Linux! It may surprise you to learn that
your copy of Microsoft Office, Outlook Express, or Lotus Notes will not
work under Linux. Those who wish to use their computer for recreational
purposes are also out of luck, for almost all of the most popular games
are unavailable for Linux. Although a wide range of software is freely
available for Linux, these pitiful offerings are mostly unfinished, unreliable and do not
bear comparison to their commercial counterparts.
Computer security is also an area that seems to have been overlooked by
the developers of Linux. In these times when hacking and viruses are
commonplace, it defies belief to learn that no anti-virus software is available for
Linux. To add insult to injury, there is no Linux version of the popular
ZoneAlarm firewall. By using Linux,
you are issuing an open invitation to the hordes of ne'er-do-wells on the
Internet.
The shortcomings of Linux are obvious. Without even installing Linux
Mandrake, I have exposed several fundamental flaws. Surely it is not too
much to expect that, after ten years of development, the creators of Linux
would have addressed these problems? The real question that the
prospective Linux user must ask himself is, "Why bother?" After all,
Microsoft Windows comes free with most PCs and there simply isn't a need
to replace it, particularly not with a product of inferior quality.
Although it is always tempting to support the underdog, Windows XP will
be the deserved victor in the battle ahead. I recommend that those
Adequacy readers who are hoping to upgrade their operating system
patiently wait for the release of Windows XP, rather than foolishly
wasting their time, effort and money on Linux. -
OF COURSE its more secure!!! ;)
I don't know about you, but this thing seems much more like-- Firewall Enhancement Protocol. The writers of this rfc seem to think that this is the best thing for the internet since OSPF....
Seriously-- allowing ANY sort of RPC through a firewall has some serious risks. -
A Review of Mandrake 8.1As seen on Adequacy.org, News for Grown Ups. The Linux operating system was born in 1991 and was created by one man, a Finnish student coincidentally named Linux Torvalds. Since these humble beginnings, a multi-million dollar industry has sprung up to exploit the commercial potential of Linux, but until recently Linux has eluded mainstream acceptance. However, due to the recent economic downturn together with uncertainty over changes to Microsoft's pricing policy, Linux is now being touted as a serious contender to Microsoft Windows. While there are many other alternatives to Windows, including BSD which is based on SUN's (Stanford University Network - correction by bc) server-grade Solaris operating system, none have commanded the same level of media attention as Linux.
Linux Mandrake is just the latest in a long line of quirkily christened versions of Linux. Previous versions of Linux have been named Red Hat, Slack Ware, Storm and Coral. In stark contrast to the mundane names such as 98, ME or NT preferred by Microsoft, the crazy names of each Linux release hint at its renegade nature.
My foray into the world of Linux began by downloading a "CD image" from the Linux web site. But don't worry, this isn't software piracy, it's perfectly legal! Linux is shareware, meaning that it can be freely redistributed without fear of a visit by the Business Software Alliance. The free availability of Linux is a major reason for its popularity among cash-strapped students and self-styled anti-capitalist hackers.
Before installing new software, it is always advisable to read the documentation. Unfortunately, an unpleasant surprise was in store for me in the "required configuration" section of the manual. I was shocked to learn that Linux Mandrake only runs on Pentium processors, meaning that my hopes of testing the water with my old Gateway 486 were dashed. Furthermore, a whopping 32 megabytes of memory are required to run Linux! Although the advocates of Linux self-righteously boast the efficiency of their chosen operating system and deride the "bloatware" produced by Microsoft, it appears that their claims are blatantly incorrect. Although my humble 486 will happily run Windows 95, it seems that Linux requires far more powerful, and more expensive, computer hardware. Is this really the sign of a lean, mean operating system? Of course not.
Sadly, not even being able to install Linux is just the first of my many complaints. A brief perusal of the features of Linux Mandrake reveals that Linux is sorely lacking many crucial productivity applications. For example, why isn't the industry standard web browser, Internet Explorer, included with Linux? Despite the best efforts of the experts at the Internet Engineering Task Force to encourage adoption of the Internet Explorer standard, the creators of Linux seem to think that they know better. By refusing to adhere to recognised standards, Linux is simply undermining its own credibility.
Similarly, almost all of the world's most popular and widely used software is completely incompatible with Linux! It may surprise you to learn that your copy of Microsoft Office, Outlook Express, or Lotus Notes will not work under Linux. Those who wish to use their computer for recreational purposes are also out of luck, for almost all of the most popular games are unavailable for Linux. Although a wide range of software is freely available for Linux, these pitiful offerings are mostly unfinished, unreliable and do not bear comparison to their commercial counterparts.
Computer security is also an area that seems to have been overlooked by the developers of Linux. In these times when hacking and viruses are commonplace, it defies belief to learn that no anti-virus software is available for Linux. To add insult to injury, there is no Linux version of the popular ZoneAlarm firewall. By using Linux, you are issuing an open invitation to the hordes of ne'er-do-wells on the Internet.
The shortcomings of Linux are obvious. Without even installing Linux Mandrake, I have exposed several fundamental flaws. Surely it is not too much to expect that, after ten years of development, the creators of Linux would have addressed these problems? The real question that the prospective Linux user must ask himself is, "Why bother?" After all, Microsoft Windows comes free with most PCs and there simply isn't a need to replace it, particularly not with a product of inferior quality.
Although it is always tempting to support the underdog, Windows XP will be the deserved victor in the battle ahead. I recommend that those Adequacy readers who are hoping to upgrade their operating system patiently wait for the release of Windows XP, rather than foolishly wasting their time, effort and money on Linux.
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SCTP -- reliability, but probably not throughput
Stream Control Transmisson Protocol -- solves head-of-line blocking (not that useful for file transport), accomplishes redundancy (via multiple network interfaces). Updating an ftp client/server to support SCTP (instead of TCP) would be mostly trivial.
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Re:"Dot-US" and XRP/BEEP data pointI don't believe there's any public document that describes a BEEP profile for what NeuStar is calling XRP, but there _is_ one for the Extensible Provisioning Protocol (EPP), a work item of the IETF's provreg working group:
It may be that NeuStar is using XRP as a brand name for their implementation of EPP. FWIW there is an open source implementation of EPP available on SourceForge:
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"Dot-US" and XRP/BEEP data pointNote that the article stated that the NeuLevel subsidiary will share some of the security and technical developments used in ".biz."
Hopefully one of these shared technical developments will be the reuse of the eXtensible Registry Protocol (XRP), which is defined as a profile for the Internet-standard BEEP framework. NeuStar used hardened implementations of the BEEP framework, called "Beepcore," that my former employer Invisible Worlds developed under contract.
I don't know of any open source implementations for XRP, but these Beepcore implementations are available as free software under a BSD-style license at Beepcore.org.
............ kris
Kris Magnusson
(formerly marketing and developer relations manager for Invisible Worlds) -
Re:Cygwin!
Does cygwin's telnetd support s/key one-time passwords? ssh would be much better, but at least s/key would prevent password sniffing. (Or at least make it useless, since as the name implies, the password only works once).
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Re:Calendaring server is what we need
RFC 2445, 2446, 2447
These documents describe the iCalendar protocol, supported by Outlook and Palm Desktop, if I remember correctly.
Open source servers:
ReefKnot - still pre-alpha, developing a Perl iCal library and server implementation, looks like it has promise for the future.
WorldPilot - a Zope product, looks like it mostly works well, I'm looking forward to playing around with it. Anyone know of any others? -
Re:Calendaring server is what we need
RFC 2445, 2446, 2447
These documents describe the iCalendar protocol, supported by Outlook and Palm Desktop, if I remember correctly.
Open source servers:
ReefKnot - still pre-alpha, developing a Perl iCal library and server implementation, looks like it has promise for the future.
WorldPilot - a Zope product, looks like it mostly works well, I'm looking forward to playing around with it. Anyone know of any others? -
Re:Calendaring server is what we need
RFC 2445, 2446, 2447
These documents describe the iCalendar protocol, supported by Outlook and Palm Desktop, if I remember correctly.
Open source servers:
ReefKnot - still pre-alpha, developing a Perl iCal library and server implementation, looks like it has promise for the future.
WorldPilot - a Zope product, looks like it mostly works well, I'm looking forward to playing around with it. Anyone know of any others? -
Re:Good thingWe don't need more companies like Rambuzz
Or Cisco. Thanks for sandbagging VRRP, RFC2338. Oh hell. Read the IETF Page of Intellectual Property Rights Notices and weep. -
Re:Good thingWe don't need more companies like Rambuzz
Or Cisco. Thanks for sandbagging VRRP, RFC2338. Oh hell. Read the IETF Page of Intellectual Property Rights Notices and weep. -
Here is the official stance
of the Internet Architecture Board on enabling wiretapping
RFC2804
So now we have the group that defines internet standards saying that requirements to implement wiretapping should not be included in protocol design discussions. That does not mean that the FBI couldn't put a BIG HONKING device in a couple of places on the internet and globally adjust all routing tables so that packets went to it... but then there is something about too much information hidding the data -
heh.. you are alll wrongWhy are you all saying to use satilites, and Wireless stuff!
The kids don't need to Play Quake or Half Life @ school(well I do but thats another subject
I think you need to take a closer look at RFC 1149 the Carrier Pigeon Internet Protocol (CPIP). According to this site Pigeons can fly 40-50 Miles per hour, so that would give you about 2 hours per webpage. I would reccomend some major caching servers on the school end. Also it would be a good Idea to invest in a Pigeon farm, this would also give your students great expereince in farm managment.
Another idea is to break some standards and perhaps use an UDP tunnel betweent he sites on your pigeons to make sure you don't have to do all the tcp handshake stuff. O yeah..
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Re:Questions I've Come Across Learning Lisp
I think the Common Lisp community could learn a lot by examining the Scheme Request for Implementation and the IETF RFC processes. Both groups seem to be able to set standards on a semi-ad-hoc basis. With the current hibernation of the ANSI standardization committee, there should be some kind of semi-formal forum to discuss extensions to the language and the standard libraries (e.g. the MOP, Gray streams, SERIES).
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Membership, constituency and stake-holdersI'm personally a member of ISOC; my membership costs US$35 per annum. As ISOC is the IETF's parent body, that makes me part of the IETF's constituency. The IETF is answerable to me and to thousands of people like me for what it does. By contrast, W3C membership costs US$50,000 per annum, and in consequence W3C membership is limited to a few hundred large corporates. Many important sections of the stake-holders of the Web, the users, the open source developers, the thousands of authors and site administrators, and the private citizens, are not represented at all.
It seems to me that this is the key to the current problem, and illustrates that fixing the current problem - the incompatibility betwen RAND licensing and open source software - won't fix the underlying problem and this sort of hting will keep on occurring.
This raises a number of questions for me:
- What is the justification for having a W3C separate from the IETF?
- If it's reasonable to have two standards-setting bodies for the net, why not three?
- Why should we, as people explicitly excluded from the W3C's processes, treat W3C as authoritative?
- What if anything is W3C going to do about expanding its constituency?
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Re:The more OS's the Better.Standardization shouldn't be "hell on choice"
It only is that way when some platform specific, propreitary method becomes the de facto standard. That's the whole reason for the IETF standards process.
Standards should enhance choice by providing inter-operability for certain components while allowing customization of others. As the best and biggest example, TCP/IP is highly standardized and yet you can choose from a bewildering variety of stacks for different operating systems.
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Proposals to threaten to fork the standards baseResponding to the RAND proposal I drew up this analysis and proposal in which I suggest we prepare to launch an alternative standards body; since I circulated it I've learned that Bernhard Rosenkraenzer (Bero) was working on a similar proposal. Linux Weekly News has a front page editorial making the same suggestion.
This is possible and practical and we should prepare to do it. However, to have three Internet standards bodies would be a bad thing. What we should really seek to achieve is a situation where:
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Either
- W3C commits to not incorporating any proprietary technologies into standards, and
- W3C opens up its membership to ordinary peoplr, with a subscription for individual members of not more than US $50 per annum
- or
- W3C winds up and IETF resumes the role of setting Web standards, and
- IETF commits to not incorporating any proprietary technologies into standards.
So long as W3C remains a rich corporations club this sort of proposal will come bach again and again. It is, after all, in the rich corporations' interest.
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Either
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Re:Unicode my assHere is what AskJeeves says about "UTF-8" (which is as you can easily see the character code of the SO-6 XML doc I pasted here.
UTF-8 encoding:
UTF-8 is an efficient encoding of Unicode character-strings that recognizes the fact that the majority of text-based communications are in ASCII, and it therefore optimizes the encoding of these characters.
It IS unicode.
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mod this upModerators, mod this up.
And fix the link
http://www.ietf.org/html.charters/manet-charter.h
t ml-Ben
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Re:So...
I agree in principle, but then therell be an even worse schism between MSIE and the OSS browsers than now. At least the two sides try to implement the same standards now. If the OSS browser coders intentionally decide to start using their own standards, it will only get worse. We have to be able to implement the same stuff the commercial browsers do unless were trying to marginalize ourselves.
FYI, the IETF and ISO have been standardizing on proprietary standards for years. POSIX, for example (ISO 1003.6). And, UTF8, 16, 32 are all standards but are owned by Unicode, Inc. -
Re:ahh...security?Yes, wireless networks are insecure. However, as the article suggests, using IPSec solves the problem pretty nicely.
Or does it?
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Re:Onion Networks
Thanks, Jason. I just played around with the FEC Library a little, and it is really cool. I wish I had the time (and skill) to make use of it myself. I also took a browse through the IETF documents (someone posted a link.), and learned a lot.
Do you get much feedback from users of your library? I'm curious what other projects are going on, especially open source ones that I could follow. How much can you reveal about the content distribution project you are working on? For example, what platforms, and when it will be on the market.
How long do you think it will be until multicast becomes the mainstream delivery method for popular packages over the internet? That would obviously take generally accepted standards, widely-adopted packages, and I expect a lot of expensive Cisco upgrades! Do you forsee it any time soon? -
Reliable Multicast StandardsThese issues have already been solved by the reliable multicast transport group at the IETF.
The cornerstone technology to any reliable multicast system is FEC (Forward Error Correction) which is an encoding technique that can repair lost or corrupt packets.
We at Onion Networks have created a very solid FEC library that will form the foundation of our open source implementations of the reliable multicast protocols. The FEC library can be had at http://onionnetworks.com/components.html
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Re:My Letter
IETF is RAND since 1996, as stated in rfc 2026.
Linked from IETF's IPR page -
Re:Then let us make the IETF the arbiters of the W
IETF is RAND, see rfc 2026 Section 10.3.2 and 10.3.3
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Re:respond (not just on this board)
before sending comments, you should also read IETF's position regarding IPR, it is described in rfc2026.
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IETF IP policy
In fairness, it should be noted that many IETF
standards are also encumbered by patents. See http://www.ietf.org/ipr
Some patent holder grant the rough equivalent of
RF licenses, others RAND licenses. Only the latter
is a requirement according to RFC 2026.
One interesting difference, however, is that one
needs at least two independent, interoperable
implementations, both of which have to have exercised the licensing policy, to advance a document from Proposed to Draft Standard stage.
(For reasons unrelated to IPR issues, most recent
IETF RFCs are Proposed Standards, not Draft
Standards.) -
This is not at all surprising
No one should be surprised by the change in patent information. Look at the membership structure of the W3C. We can compare it to the membership structure of the IETF, a group I think everyone would consider open and "free."
First, in the W3C, membership is only offered to organizations. In the IETF, all individuals can participate in the Working Groups; any individual can generate a RFC.
Second, in the W3C, membership costs either $5000 or $50,000. IETF membership is free. It does cost money to attend an IETF meeting, but that cost is around $500; well within the reach of any serious developer.
Control of working groups in the IETF (and the IESG) is based on technical ability or desire. In theory, you don't really have to be a prior participant in the IETF to run a working group. (But it helps. A lot.) In the W3C, you must be a member (paying $5000 or $50,000), in order to run a WG.
In the IETF, decisions are made on rough consensus. In the W3C, decisions are also made based on consensus with elaborate procedural systems. It's interesting to compare and contrast the amount of procedural information on the W3C's web site versus the IETF's web site.
In general, all IETF working material is open and accessible to the public. You can read RFCs as they are being written; you can read, post, and comment on IETF mailing lists. W3C working material is not open to the public.
Companies may ask if the IETF is unfriendly towards business. I do not think this is the case. Look at Cisco. Cisco has certainly participated in the IETF; they are very involved in the development of several IETF standards. However, Cisco still has the ability to develop their own proprietary protocols and still has the ability to make secret agreements with other companies.
In short, membership in the W3C has always been primarily by businesses. In fact, there is no way for an individual to join the W3C. Anyone surprised by an extreme pro-business slant of the W3C is not really familiar with the W3C's nature.
[You might wonder why companies don't control the IETF as much as they control the W3C. My theory is that the W3C works on items much more relevant to the end user. A mass-market consumer is much more amazed by SVG than they are by packet switching. Companies have a strong interest in controlling what the mass-market consumer sees.]
(Refs: W3C Membership, IETF Web site) -
Re:Arms race prediction
Possible problem: are there any browsers that cannot request the ad image while the main content page is stalled? i.e. non multi-threaded?
That doesn't have anything to do with multi-threadedness. Many browsers have a limit on the number of simlutaneous requests per hostname or per window in order to reduce network congestion. In particular, both Internet Explorer and Mozilla limit the number of persistent HTTP connections to a given server to two, based on this recommendation in RFC 2616: "A single-user client [that uses persistent connections] SHOULD NOT maintain more than 2 connections with any server or proxy." (See this bugzilla entry for discussion about how many connections Mozilla should maintain with each web server.)
If several image tags come before the iframe tag, the page will not finish loading until those other connections time out. The same will happen if a browser intelligently decides to download images in the main content before it downloads images in iframes (this may happen anyway, if the HTML of the main content loads before the HTML of the iframe). -
Re:Networking over FireFireWire?
In terms of MacOS 9 or MacOS X built-in, RFC2734 standard IP1394 networking, Apple has no plans to build this capability into the OS (as reported to me by Apple development).
You can visit my grad project page for more information on IP1394 and related IEEE-1394 (FireWire) information. -
Re:One Time Pad Random Generation : OT
For starters, you want to read RFC1750.
Of course, under Linux and many other modern OSes, you can simply read from
I've seen code that uses setjmp/longjmp timing, seek delays and many other sources of POSIX randomness. The key thing is to make sure that external influences do not remove your randomness.
Hardware devices exist as well. -
Re:Looking goodSticking to the standards include the RFCs. Now take a look at RFC1945 especially
Section 10.15 User-Agent:This is for statistical purposes, [...] , and automated recognition of user agents for the sake of tailoring responses to avoid particular user agent limitations.
Now take a look at the note to this recommendation.Note: Some current proxy applications append their product information to the list in the User-Agent field. This is not recommended, since it makes machine interpretation of these fields ambiguous.
So this field is there, exactly for this reason, to provide user-agent tailored pages. Lastly, the main-purpose was not to differentiate between Netscape and IE, but between different HTML version capable browsers. If one intends to provide even more specialised pages, it'll be his/her decision and problem, not yours. -
Re:Patents not secret
The people attending, for example, IETF or IEEE standardization committees, are not representing their company, but themselves. In a big company people attending these meetings do not necessarily know about all the patents company is holding. It is even worse regarding patent applications: patents are public, but the patent applications are confidential even within the company filing the application. At best, a company can offer to license all standardized technology to everyone at reasonable and non-discrinatory terms (whatever that is). For more information, read the IPR policy of IETF and the section 10 of RFC 2026.
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Re:Patents not secret
The people attending, for example, IETF or IEEE standardization committees, are not representing their company, but themselves. In a big company people attending these meetings do not necessarily know about all the patents company is holding. It is even worse regarding patent applications: patents are public, but the patent applications are confidential even within the company filing the application. At best, a company can offer to license all standardized technology to everyone at reasonable and non-discrinatory terms (whatever that is). For more information, read the IPR policy of IETF and the section 10 of RFC 2026.