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Panama Decrees Block To Kill VoIP Service
An anonymous reader writes "In an apparent attempt to stem telephone company revenue losses due to Internet telephony, the government of Panama has decreed that 46 UDP ports be blocked by all Internet service providers. The ports include ones that are commonly used for voice over IP as well as some that are used for other purposes, apparently with the idea that these, too, could be used to circumvent the POTS (plain old telephone system, a term of art) in making telephone calls."
How difficult could it be to write some software to use VoIP on port 80 or some other commonly used port?
Banning VoIP? Whats next? Possibly banning email to help the USPS?
And why did you staple the trout to the RAM?
There are 65534 other ports wich can be used for VoIP, they must block them too!
I can't believe the citizens will allow crap like this to go on for very long, I coulda swore government was to serve it's people, not protect make sure people have to give up all thier money to big companies. What a bunch of crap!
Please adapt.
People have tried to fight progressive technological evolution for ages and it has yet to ever work once. Any country making laws forcing its citizens to live behind the times is only hurting itself. What if panama had outlawed the original telephone because it hurt the post office? Granted, Voice IP isn't quite as drastic a step, but it is progress and it will succeed on its own merit, laws or no laws.
Click here to read too much about my personal life
Even better, "accidentally" bomb their capital. Everybody knows that American smart bombs constantly get lost and land on Americans therefore everyone will beleive that such a bombing was entirely accidental.
If you're Panamanian and you are reading this, you might want to go and fire or execute a few legislators. You might also consider banning lobbying, which has ruined the USA.
-Pete-
Isn't blocking off ports against 'the spirit of the internet'? I mean, isn't it supposed to be open and unrestricted? (especially by companies)
I feel guilty every time I boot Windows
So all the geeks who want to call their drug dealers are out of luck.....!
Curse you!
If person2person chat programs with voice capabilities, then whoever provides the software (I know Yahoo messenger and ICQ can do that, although it's not VoIP) should be able to make it switch ports easily.
If companies (such as the one I use to call Russia if/when I ever do
Or is my logic flawed somewhere and the port block like that would achieve the desired effect?
Cheers,
DVK
"The right to figure things out for yourself is the only true freedom everyone shares. Go use it"-R.A.Heinlein
The Panamania Government has decreed all citizens are to wear tin foil hats to block telepathic circumvention of POTS.
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
What happens when VoIP goes over port 80 or 443. They're going to effectivly pause Panama's technological progression. Oops!
The obvious solution is going to be a transmission tax on VoIP calls. Cheaper than the old way, but it will begin to cost you money. Hate them you might, but the phone companies have real expenses in physical property, technical services, and customer service. They need to get paid. It will be less than they are used to, but they won't be giving it away for free much longer.
---
When you come to a fork in the road, take it! --Yogi Berra--
The old adage says that the Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it. While we may not be able to call into Panama using VoIP, will transnational calls that used to go through there be routed around?
After this kind of crap, I don't think I'd have any problem with them blocking UDP 53.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
...some banana republic adventurism!
Heck, maybe it'll tide us over until Iraq War II debuts in January.
In fact, I think it would be a piece of cake to cobble together a proxy server that did just that. The clients wouldn't even have to change their software other than to point to the intermediate proxy server.
The problem here though comes in talking to the rest of the world. The above-mentioned servers have to direct the traffic to the destination servers at some point. Those servers are completely outside the control of the subversives to be. Those servers have to know that the traffic being received is actually VoIP and deal with it appropriately.
It can be done, but it will require servers outside of Panama to cooperate with the scheme.
Of course, once the Panama government locates those sites (shouldn't be hard) they'll start gopher whacking them with a variety of tactics: legal shutdowns through warrants, DOS attacks, etc. Vendors from outside of Panama will also rush to fill the void, and that software will also subsequently be outlawed.
The bottom line though is that the government will not be able to control the VoIP "problem" entirely without just pulling the plug on all Internet activity. That would be a steep price and they will face economic pressure to not do it.
Oh well, they'll learn this one the hard way I guess.
Please mod this post only if you think others should/n't read this. I have enough ego^H^H^Hkarma. Thanks!
All those wires connecting North America to South America that have to go through tiny Panama... the ground there must be completely cluttered with fiber optics.
Hahahaha, I love it when orginazations simply think blocking a single port will keep people from using a service. Oh well some people simply don't have a clue.
I would assume that there will soon be:
VODNSOIP
VOHTTPOIP
VOICMP
Um.... Panama is not in mexico... A few contries seperate them.
According to the article, the following UDP ports are being blocked: 1034, 1035, 2090, 2091, 5000, 6801, 6802, 6803, 9900, 9901, 12080, 12120, 12122, 22555, 26133, 30582, 35061, 38000, 38100, 38200, 47563, 48310, 51200, and 51201.
# 1034-1035 Unassigned
lrp 2090/udp Load Report Protocol
prp 2091/udp PRP
commplex-main 5000/udp
# 6791-6830 Unassigned
iua 9900/udp IUA
# 9901-9908 Unassigned
# 12007-12171 Unassigned
vocaltec-phone 22555/udp Vocaltec Internet Phone
# 26001-26207 Unassigned
# 31417-32767 Unassigned
# 34250-36864 Unassigned
# 37476-38200 Unassigned
# 47558-47623 Unassigned
# 48004-48555 Unassigned
Most are unassigned anyways.
Example: I buy a new tool. It is a clawhammer. For some reason, this deprives the company making nail removers of money, especially considering their old nail removers were overpriced.
So, the government affiliated nail remover maker goes and makes buying clawhammers illegal.
This is immoral. You can't just rent-a-law because your overpriced technology is being smashed by a preferrable alternative.
I mean, just because you can buy laws (ie: riaa), doesn't mean it should be allowed to happen..
Hello? Big business? I wonder who lobbied for that change. Because is it good for their citizens? Or just the government's big money backers? This isn't just an American problem. This is another red flag telling us we need to get special interest groups out of all governments.
Couldn't you use an SSH tunnel to circumvent the blocks? Thats how I do samba and VNC (but thats for security purposes so I can keep my router zipped up tight). I don't know how tunnelling would work with a centralized server, but you could certainly tunnel ports directly to another comp. For windows user, PUTTY works great. Putty
ssh -L5903:localhost:5903 24.46.xxx.xxx
the government of Panama has decreed that 46 UDP ports be blocked by all Internet service providers.
That's unbelievable!... that it happened in Panama before America.
the U.S., as well as many other countries, already do, albeit in a different industry. When the U.S. says: "You, as a citizen, are not allowed to circumvent insuring your automobile, say by having infinity cash [sic] that you're willing to use to pay for any damages that you might inflict, but must go through a PRIVATE, government regulated insurance agency in order to use the public roads..."
Except for satellite and other wireless communications, ALL VoIP in Panama (as elsewhere) goes through wires that sit on the Government's land (that would be everything). If I can't use a public road except by playing by the rules of regulated private companies, (even if I know of a cheaper alternative), why should Panamians be allowed to use data lines going through public land, except by playing by the rules of a regulated private company?
Okay, that's the most contrived example I could think of. I don't think there's a closer equivalent -- some candidates were Edison (the electric company) - run public schools (look it up -- but you're not required to go to one, since you can homeschool) and private appraisals mandated in certain cases by the government.
Anyway, uh, yeah, HOW DARE THEY.
1034, 1035, 2090, 2091 and 5000 -- aren't those all in the dynamic address range? Wouldn't blocking those ports cause sporadic communications failures in programs such as web browsers?
So what does it matter. I mean, have you done VOIP at 42K dial up?
I don't like big words..., does that make me anti-semantic?
On the positive side, this should kill the Windows Messenger popup spams, which propagate over UDP ports.
On the negative side, it will kill Quicktime, which needs UDP ports for negotiating a connection.
In an apparent attempt to stem telephone company revenue losses due to Internet telephony, the government of Panama has decreed that 46 UDP ports be blocked by all Internet service providers.
The ports include ones that are commonly used for voice over IP as well as some that are used for other purposes, apparently with the idea that these, too, could be used to circumvent the POTS (plain old telephone system, a term of art) in making telephone calls.
In the decree, the Panamanian government requires "that within 5 days of publication, all ISPs will block the 46 UDP ports used for VoIP and any other that could be used in the future (which could end up being all UDP ports)," according to a reporter and computer consultant there, and that "the ISPs will block in their firewall or main router and in all their Border routers that connect with other autonomous systems."
This "unequivocally decrees that all routers, including those not carrying traffic from Panama, but that might be traversing Panama, have the 46 UDP ports blocked."
The significance of the government action affects areas far beyond that nation. Due to its geographical location, numerous undersea cables connect in the country, making it a substantial hub for international IP traffic.
Among the services that are to be disrupted are NetMeeting, Dialpad, and Net2phone, which labels itself "communication without borders," a claim which apparently will no longer be true if one of those borders is Panamanian or communication is between two countries whose IP traffic passes through Panama.
The decree is apparently rooted in complaints by Cable & Wireless Panama (Motto: "If you're worried about your data, voice, or Internet service provider, we're here to help"), which says it is losing money due to users employing the Internet to make otherwise expensive internetional telephone calls -- calls that would otherwise be listed on Cable & Wireless bills.
The UDP ports involved include: 1034, 1035, 2090, 2091, 5000, 6801, 6802, 6803, 9900, 9901, 12080, 12120, 12122, 22555, 26133, 30582, 35061, 38000, 38100, 38200, 47563, 48310, 51200, and 51201.
The decree was published October 25.
Among the services that employ some of those ports are "nlockmgr," the NFS lock manager responsible for rpc.statd and rpc.lockd, which in turn are responsible for crash recovery functions for locked files and for processing file locking requests, respectively; telnet; and numerous VoIP services.
In addition to those who wish to save on their phone bills, the government order blocks the perfectly lawful use of those ports by businesses that have legitimate VoIP applications allowed in the country.
There were reports late Sunday that Panamanian ISPs were planning a demonstration aimed at exhibiting their displeasure with the government action.
Out of simple curiosity, I plugged 'panama phone company' into Google.. after all, what could this little pissant country have in the way of phone companines? And what are the first two links to pop up?
Privatization - Phone Company: and A Case of Privatization Gone Wrong: Panama's Wires Crossed. Perhaps this is the start of some revenue-generating stunt to pull some dumbass decision-maker's ass out of a fire somewhere?
-fester (capt. conspiracy?)
ps.. I'm sure Panamanians by and large dislike this as well.. the 'pissant' is directed at the governmental representation of Panama, which right now looks suspiciously like a boil on someone's ass.
-'fester
The company that requested it is C&W Panama, a subsidiary of C&W, based in UK. Isn't UK the US' best friend?
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Adapt or die. There is no rule that states established businesses get to do business "the old" forever. If a better cheaper way of doing things comes along, oh well, tough cookies. There were once a lot of blacksmiths as well. So to the phone companies I say, Adapt or Die, better yet just die.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
Actually, you're wrong. If you have enough cash and can prove it (by posting a bond for example), in many states you can avoid purchasing insurance. Essentially, you are self-insuring yourself. Whether that is a smart thing to do is another question entirely.
-- Error: Cannot find file REALITY.SYS - Universe halted, please reboot!
This ranks up with the CBDTPA as the most absurd legislation of the twentieth century. There are so many loopholes around this law it's stupid, not to mention the fact that banning a port to try and stop any certain service is stupid -- as has been pointed out, it's not exactly amazingly difficult to change the port used by the program. *clap clap* I think Panama secretly elected GWB. This is exactly the kind of ignorant decision he's famous for.
People have been saying for years we need transparent encryption of internet connections (OK mabee I've been saying it) Once 'important' countries like Panama start playing routing games like this it becomes even more important.
Such heavy handed actions might be just what projects like FreeSwan need to get more universal acceptance. That all being said does anyone honestly belive that panama will be able to block *all* UDP traffic, while they are at it is might be a good idea to block ICMP and TCP - both of which could potentially carry voice data as well.
There is no money to be made in telecommunication in the long run if technology runs its course. Or at least it is going to gross millions instead of billions. In that situation even the remnants of the industry remaining today would largely have to collapse.
... with Bush's soft stance on monopolies the time is ripe to bring the US a couple of steps closer to corporatism, and after that the WTO and globalization can take it on a world tour, and the combined bribing power of the content and the telecommunication industry might just be the force which can accomplish it.
The industry is too big and too rich to go down without a fight, in Panama this results in naively blatant intervention. In the US the telecom industry will probably pair up with the content industry to outlaw private private peer to peer broadband communication sooner or later, under the guise of security and copyright protection. Only a monopoly or a price fixed ogliopoly will be able to squeeze money out of people on the same scale as today for communications in the future
This is very embarassing, but not a surprise.
This is yet another example of our British friends at Cable & Wireless adapting to the local culture of the country which they're sucking the blood out of. They obviously have quickly learned the Panamenian way of politics and have paid off all the necessary politicians, which can often be bought very cheap.
Cable & Wireless is privatization gone totally wrong. The previous phone company was a government owned company called INTEL, and Cable & Wireless beat US GTE and took over the phone system of Panama. The results have been horrible.
Local calls in Panama used to be like in the US, you paid your minimal fee and could talk all the minutes you wanted. Cable & Wireless brought the wonderful European model of paying for each minute for local calls.
If that wasn't enough, they also charge you per minute (I think) for calls from a land line phone in your house to a cell phone. That is, you pay for calling a cell phone and the person on the cell phone pays too. I had to find this the hard way after making a few calls to some friends from my grandmothers house.
So, people are fed up with them, and the internet savy are using Voice over IP a lot. I used to receive a lot of calls from a cousing over dialpad.com (when it was free). This was the ideal system to make a call to the US, dialpad was for US calls only, but the funny thing is that this worked great if you lived in another country.
Here's a good article on the whole mess Cable & Wireless is creating;
A Case of Privatization Gone Wrong -
Panama's Wires Crossed
- sigs are for wimps.
you dont loose your hands for downloading a voip proxy this do ya?
...the more they stay the same. The third-world telco monopolies have been fighting a similar battle against long distance "callback" companies for over five years now, and for the most part they've been losing badly. They've known for a while that VoIP services were the next big threat, but it doesn't look like they have any better idea how to deal with them.
One detail that usually gets left out of these articles, though: the "local third world telco monopoly" is not in any way a homegrown Panamanian entity. No, the citizens of Panama, like most of their neighbors in the carribean, are getting royally screwed by our dear friends at Cable and Wireless.
News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters? Like hell.
GTE insisted that they couldn't possibly have been hacked, but next month, her phone number was *still* racking up $1000s in 900 porn. They claimed her teenage son was the hacker, so she told them to physically cut all phone wires to the house at the connecting point, which in the rural area was several miles away.
Next month, the 900 porn continued to rack up $1000s. So then, GTE took her to court. They actually claimed, in court, I kid you not, that her teenage son was hacking the phone company using mental telepathy! The whole small town believed it too, and started treating her son like a space alien. Fortunately, the judge was not a country yokel, and threw the case out of court.
The real hackers were eventually caught when they got tired of 900 porn, and hacked the White House phone system so they could eavesdrop on Clinton's phone calls. This was noticed, and brought the FBI down on their case. The story of their capture was on Slashdot, but I can't find it at the moment.
I bet this is really just an elaborate plan by the phone companies in panama. They probably brived a few lawmakers into passing the law, as is often the case in third world countries. However this is so exagerated that I wouln't be surprised if this doesn't last too long. I personally see this as a big disrespect to freedom, privacy, civil rights, common sense, innvation, and everything else good that can be fit in between.
The government of the United States passed a new law prohibiting the manufacturing of internal combustion engines in order to protect the extensive investments of the horse-and-buggy industry against the encroachment of "automobiles". A new 50% tax increase is also planned on the steel and rubber industries as the products of these industries are used extensively in the manufacturing of "automobiles"
Indiana tried this 105 years ago... That will put Panama about the right technological place in time.
-- Multics
I'd like to think this couldn't happen here (in the USA)... but, I really think it could with p2p.
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
...that's the same Cable and Wireless, aka Exodus, where Slashdot currently hosts all of its servers.
News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters? Like hell.
Ah. A technical solution to a social problem. I swear, the politicians never learn and never will.
My
Limekiller
There is too much money in the industry, but technology in the long run can drive the cost per bit so low that no matter what the income wont be able to sustain the industry in its present form.
... but it will create monopolies in the process, and new competitors will have a hard time since they werent given their infrastructure for free in the dot com bubble aftermath.
;)
How do we manage to benefit from the potential low costs of communication? If we let the market do its work we end up with the industry collapsing into itself
How about collectivization
So everyone will just blue box. Problem solved :/
Oh no - they're going to block UDP 46 - how diabolical - There's no way around that!
...
It just goes to show you how monumentally stupid the institution of goverment is
---- "Logoff! That cookie shit makes me nervous!" - A. Soprano
No, a browser uses a TCP port, at least to make a request to a web server (after DNS lookup on UDP port 53). These are UDP ports -- a different port space.
Since when did they get telephones in Panama?
I remember playing Escape Velocity waaaay back in the day. Great game, man.
Glad to see you are porting the newest one over to Windows, I haven't had a Mac in years and years....
Tim
Omnia vestra castrorum habetur nobis.
This is exactly the sort of thing that I expect to push the adoption of IPSEC or another transport level encryption scheme; not the desire to prevent loss of personal information or financial data. Rather than the elimination of eavesdropping, the increased resistance to targeted filtering will be the "killer app" that encourages widespread use of on-by-default encryption by Joe User.
I've wondered this for some time now, and with such developments as VoIP and G3, why don't telco's increase audio fidelity?
I think that if a telephone call could have the same bandwidth as (for example) a 22khz 16bit wav file, then people would feel better about using such archaic technology as the telephone. If 3G phones used more bandwidth for audio, rather than using some crappy lossy compression scheme, more people would think "hey, cool, my new cell phone sounds much better than my landline"
in short, if you can't compete with the same ol' bag of tricks, improve your service so it's at least on par with the competition.
Handicapping competing technologies is a silly way to innovate.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Get a rough translation of the actual decree from AltaVista's Babelfish
Insurances are reasonable idea however, these measures are probably all in all not a benefit to Panama's society as a whole.
You might find both to be as reprehensible in theory because they rely on unmandated use of force by the government (from the liberalistic point of view) but in practice the merits of the two still differ.
BTW if all roads were privately owned most of their owners would almost certainly cooperate on this matter and make you take an insurance from private agencies regulated by them. Because if I had the choice between their roads and roads where I run the risk of getting my car totalled by someone without the means to refund me I would choose the first, if I wanted to insure myself against my personal risk on this second set of roads it would almost certainly end up costing me more.
Well gee (Score:0, Insightful)
Usually I reserve this for posters, but I'll say it for the moderator this time:
Hey look, it's that fucking genius kid again.
Actually, in the state of Ohio at least, if you own 25 or more cars, you are automatically considered self-insured, and don't need to buy insurance. In theory, you could buy 25 old, beat-up cars for $100 each, and never pay for insurance again. Of course, you'll still be liable if you crash into someone with the car you're trying to avoid paying insurance on...
The 90% of the Population who have no idea whatsoever what Voice over IP is, much less what a port is (is that where i plug in my mouse? hehe) issued this statement: "So?".
"There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals."
So what? They speak Mexican. That makes them Mexican.
Several more rare tropical bird species have become extinct as the Government of Panama steps up it's efforts to prevent the use of VOIP using avian carriers.
Speech: Free
Beer: $699.00
The company Cable and Wireless made a contract with the government of Panama a few years ago giving them "all rights" for the telephony service, therefore no VoIP is permitted. As all we know, its almost impossible to block VoIP but it demonstrates why a country like this (my country BTW) will always be what you ppl call 3rd world country. Because a couple of ppl are just in the gov for the cash and they doesn't mind or can't think of the crappy future that'll have the next generations.
So if a new protocol does the initial negotiation via TCP port 80, using HTTP to carry out that negotiation, which then switches to the agreed random UDP port, they'd have to block TCP port 80, or require all ISPs to proxy filter HTTP (assuming it was easy to detect inside HTTP), or block all of UDP (if they leave 53 open, use that).
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Can we get a list of ten questions together for Van Halen regarding this issue?
I'm sure that the leader of Panama is either:
1. Paid off by the phone company to do this.
2. Owns the phone company either overtly or covertly.
2. Is being paid off by some U.S. company.
Poltics always gets in the way of progress.
So to the phone companies I say, Adapt or Die, better yet just die.
If they "just died," the vast majority of Americans would be without internet access, since they either use DSL or the phone line to dial up (what, you wanna give the cable companies a monopoly?). Even if they do use cable or get on at work, who do you think runs a good chunk of the lines to these businesses? WorldCom, Sprint, AT&T, Qwest and Verizon own the vast majority of the backbone here in the states. If they just up and died, so would the internet in the US. If you make them "adapt" they'll just start charging you per KB/MB/GB instead, and they'll price it so their income doesn't drop, which means everything will be a hell of a lot more expensive in the bandwidth-intensive future
You adapt or grow up, better yet just grow up.
I'm surprised no one mentionned piggybacking on port 53 UDP. No one can afford to block that port and comprehensive filtering would be prohibitive in CPU cost for large links. DNS over TCP exists, but the overhead is not exactly light.
Alex
Then how do you suggest people that live in small towns get to work and shop if they do not have a personal automobile/roads?
Mass transist does not work in a small town.
And some of those 'corrupt' politicians dismantled public transportation because it was/is a very large sinkhole for tax dollars.
As funny as you thought that was, it's painfully close to the truth. The U.S. government recently enacted a 38% duty on all soft-wood lumber imports from Canada in order to protect its own lumber industry. Now they expect Canada to supply raw logs for processing south of the border (not to mention cheap electricity with which to process it).
I lived in the country in the Mid-90s (after Manuel).
And it once again sounds like the corrupt workings of their ruling junta.
Typical situations:
Transito (traffic cops) targetting rich foreigners for some BS violation, so they could receive bribe money. It was so common, that my friends always planned on taking extra cash to pay corrupt traffic cops.
The railroad system turned over by the US (at the time already "turned over" to the Panamanian govt) which in a few years had became totally non-operational due to local inept management.
Many reliable stories of gov't for hire (much like the US) where the politicos where bought off, not by campaign contributions, but people bought by large amounts of cash for personal gain.
All in all the ordinary people of Panama were friendly and had the attitude: oh well it happens, might as well be happy. (Papas e chulatas) Potatoes and bacon. oh well.
Personally I am surprised the Canal still operates. But one thing most Americans don't realize is that a provision in the treaty stipulates the US can reclaim it if it becomes non-operational. That in my opinion, is the reason the canal hasn't followed the fate of everything else "turned over" and ruined by its corrupt govt.
It seems to me that they would be more successful to try to attract people to the telephone than they would by banning VoIP. For instance the telephone companies could adopt the methods & practices of USA Datanet (http://www.usadatanet.com); they could increase their revenue and decrease their operating costs by simply adapting/adopting the technology available to them. By drawing people to the telephone by way of THEIR VoIP solution they ensure a good customer base for not only an inexpensive long distance solution, but for their local calls by simply allowing customers to use what they already know (with an added bonus, no waiting for your phone to boot!).
And raise with my BGP block. I call.
I don't want knowledge. I want certainty. - Law, David Bowie
port 80 as used for http is a tcp port, not a udp port.
<ANAL>
There is no such thing as a "UDP port" or a "TCP port". A port is a port. What protocol it uses depends on the software that opens the port and listens on it, or how it is configured via /etc/services, or whatever your flavor of OS uses.
Yes, port 80 is normally used for http, which is a TCP protocol, but calling port 80 a "TCP port" is incorrect.
</ANAL>
Karma: Frotzed (mostly due to the Frobozz Magic Karma Company)
This is simply because there are too many people in the state of Ohio with 25 or more junkers in their lawn who also refuse to pay for auto insurance...
On a more economics note, efforts like these are generally doomed to failure, or to be very very expensive. If there is an economic inefficiency, there are ALWAYS financial incentives for some parties to remove or bypass the inefficiency. This is why monopolies eventually fall, smuggling of drugs is so costly to stop, and blocking a few UDP ports will be at best temporarily effective in blocking VOIP.
--side issue here. You CAN do an indemnity personal bond for car insurance, just most people don't and it's little known about. It's also expensive, goes by state minimum liabilites, and you'd of course want more than those minimums any more with the cost of cars and people in the hospital, etc, but if you got it you can do it and keep your wealth unless it's needed by your proven negligence.
Got a neighbor periodically goes to panama for his oil business stuff, he sez the government there is roughly equivalent to say chicago in corruption levels, ie, total top to bottom. I imagine them mucking with the internet only applies to peons, that if you are at least a semi connected fatcat and pay the correct bribes you can do whatever you want, but at that level you could afford long distance so the point is moot. Most (not al, generally speaking here of course) civil laws in regards to anything but fraud in it's various forms more or less exist to protect the already wealthy's status quo. No different here than in panama, not really.
I'll give you an example I am running into locally here where I live. I'm in the market for a small piece of property to have a home on. My income level for this would be in the uber cheap range. Anywho, this county a few years ago decided on a minimun acreage size for new homes, 1.5 acres. Well, ok, fine and dandy..... trouble is, for the decades preceding this, they "allowed" smaller than that to be deeded up as lots and now exist in undeveloped abundance by the hundreds or thousands really, like 1.1 acre, etc. These lots are now useless except for growing weeds and trees, people are stuck with them now, no one wants to buy them, you can't do anything with them, but they are still taxed. This benefits the more recent richer arrivals who took the county over(lotta cash under the table money gets spread into country government is the popular notion) and don't want it to be farming/light manufacturing, they want it to be yet another yuppie retirement/second home vacation place.
Poorer people are untermenschen here, you can WORK here, but they would rather you to live over real far away some other place and commute, please go home at quitting time, no riff raff. It sucks but that's another example of a civil statute enforced by their bureaucrats and hired badged mercenaries to benefit the more wealthy.
It's not perfect - Compressed RTP does a CSLIP-like elimination of most of the IP, UDP, and rTP overhead, but doesn't work over IPSEC or most other tunneling protocols.) That means bandwidth is pretty tight over 28.8-upstream dialup modems (especially if you don't always get full speed), but I'm not aware of any better tunneling solutions.
It'd be nice to have some tradeoffs like putting more than one voice sample per IP packet, which is not so hot for quality but cuts the packet overhead in half, and the protocols *ought* to have encryption as a standard feature, so you don't need tunneling for the general case, but it's a good start.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
s/Panama/USA/g
s/VoIP/P2P/g
s/C&WPA/{MP,RI}AA
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
"Cable & Wireless Panama is the leading telecommunications company in Panama and provides national and international fixed voice services on an exclusive basis until 2003. The company also provides mobile, data, Internet access, IP solutions and other deregulated services in a competitive market. "
Note that they have voicelines all to themselves until 2003. Sounds like a grab all that you can before running move.
so anyone know exactly how pissed of isps have demonstrations? would be kinda cool(not for buisnesses but from a fuck that law POV) if they actually shut all their routers or border routers of for a day. kinda like a hey you want those port blocked? fuck it well do them all for you :)
It may be economically beneficial to build a road from point A to point B, but no private interest will do it because once the road is built, everyone can just skip around the tollboothes and the building company will never get paid.
Historically speaking, when turnpikes first became more common in the early 18th century, they were mostly financed by private and local interests, despite the fact that road making companies nearly always had horrible returns on investment. The reason was that the economic benefits of the roads were so great that associations of merchants and individuals would band together and form road companies. Some joined for civic minded reasons, others out of self interest because roads would bring the town and themselves greater business. The infastructure of roads was gradually taken over by states, and with the advent of the personal automobile, began to become competitive with rail.
Automobiles and trucks have vast advantages over rail for most uses. You can leave whenever you want and you can go wherever you want. The creation of the interstate highway system has broughten vast economic benefits. States can subsidize economically inefficient interests (eg. farm subsidies), but saying that road construction and the personal automobile is inefficient is just pure baloney.
Governments as of late have thrown massive subsidies towards alternative energy sources, public transportation, electric cars, and the like. Saying that road construction is inefficient and subsidies are the only reason for the current dominance of the automobile is rather absurd.
Just a little plug for the GPL'd Free internet phone, Speak-Freely.
.deb is rather old.
It uses UDP ports 2074 - 2076. From the article these are not blocked.
Works quite well (I've had better trans-pacific quality with it versus the expensive telephone connection [talking both connections to same party at the same time]). Loads of features, including VOX and PGP encryption. Very good help section.
There's both a basic UNIX cli version (use the xspeakfree tcl/tk frontend in CONTRIB or sflaunch) & a fully developed windows version.
http://speakfreely.org/
(I'm just Happy User)
It's in Debian as speak-freely, but the
~.~
I'm a peripheral visionary.
http://www.lib.utexas.edu/maps/americas/central_am erica_ref01.jpg
Note that traffic still can get to the South American continent without going through Panama.
Dominican Republic or (gasp) Cuba to Colombia for example. Or Puerto Rico to Venezuela. And I haven't even touched wireless solutions yet.
A decade or so ago, when Joe Nacchio was working for AT&T before he started Qwest, he gave us a talk at Bell Labs where he drew a curve on the screen that showed the market price of long-distance voice telephone minutes. It took a steep dive, settling down asymptotically toward zero; given the prices of the time, he was showing it going from a quarter to a dime to a nickel to a penny. What could we do about it? Well, the choices were adapt or die. Use technology to cut costs, and use lower prices (plus advertising) to get people to make more phone calls.
Many countries' PTTs were abusing their monopoly positions by charging excessively non-cost-based prices for their service, ripping off their customers and damaging their overall economies by interfering with international communications and therefore international trade. In the past couple of years, they've been taken down not only by callback companies, but by wholesalers using VOIP technology to keep their costs much lower than the PTTs costs. Everybody wins from that, except the greedier PTTs, and most of them were using excess international prices to cross-subsidize local calling.
What's the next step? What happens if VOIP drops costs to the equivalent of $0.001 per minute? The most likely big impact turns out not to be the costs, but the fact that you no longer need a gigantic expensive #4ESS telephone switch to route large numbers of calls - internet routing technology works quite well for that, with something DNS-like to help with end-user location. Unlike those of you who aren't in the telephony business, yes, we do care that our last several business models have gotten the chairs kicked out from under them, but the problem of proposing new business models for telcos is ours, not that of the people who are trying to make us obsolete.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
As it was:
Can you hear me now? Good!
As it will be:
Can you hear me now? Hello? Can you hear me? Hello?!?!
OK, Slashdotters - each and every one of us
who do business with C&W needs to get on the
phone (irony) and express our displeasure.
After all, it seems unlikely that the Panama government came up with that list of ports by themselves.
C&W has a *lot* of IP business - let's take it away and see how they feel.
Anyone for VoIPX? (just kidding of course)
Was thinking of a good explanation of term "banana republic"... this should do nicely, if it can be summarized in one sentence.
Auto industry actively destroyed mass transit. trolly cars, etc in California back in the day.
It seems smart if you can afford the risk. Not only will you pay less on average, but you'll probably drive more carefully if you're insuring yourself.
For one, look at France; tollbooths do work, period.
Secondly, you contradict yourself: you state that private concerns won't build roadsbecause there's no return on investment, then finish off by saying that road construction is efficient...
All of which doesn't change the fact that personal transit is wastefull, inefficient and poluting. And it literally stinks.
-- Waht? Tehr's a preveiw buottn?
Two of the problems of VOIP over cable are service reliability and reliability during power failures. The easiest way to fix the latter is to integrate some cheap cellphones into the equipment. Service reliability's a bit harder - the economics of the cable TV business assume that you need enough technicians and trucks to take care of most failures, so customers are happy and you don't need to rebate their bills for downtime very often, but that fundamentally it's just television, and if it goes down for the weekend in bad weather, your customers can read a book or go watch videotapes until you can get it fixed.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I'd call somebody up with my computer and complain!
Oh....wait...
Mordor...a magical, mythical land where women are more rare than dragons--but where every man would rather find a dragon
In the telephony business, we invented the concepts of "natural monopolies" and "universal service" as the hook to let TPC get monopolies over local telecom service, and instead of buying politicians with cold cash, we bought them with the concept that they were "doing good", and "encouraging development", and giving them the ability to hire their friends as telecom regulators. Well, that was a fun game for almost a hundred years, but technological change has made it easier for other people to get in the game, and as the computer industry and telecom industry have gotten closer together, the costs of doing business have come way down.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Let's say building a lighthouse off a rocky point stops ten ships from running aground on the shore each year, saving $1 million per incident for a total of $10 million. Let's say building the lighthouse costs $5 million. It's easy to see that building the lighthouse is a good idea. Unfortunately the lighthouse won't be built by a single private company because whoever builds it will NEVER get paid (and with these prices its cheaper for each individual shipper to let his/her ships run aground than build the lighthouse himself). Why? because there's no way to charge people for a good which they can just get for free. Once the lighthouse is built, no one can stop other boats from seeing the light. This is called a "non-excludable" good. You can't "exclude" other people from consuming it. Once it's built, you can't STOP other people (non-subscribers) from using it.
The only way to build the lighthouse is if all the shippers band together and agree to jointly build the lighthouse. This is completely analogous to voters getting together and voting for canidates who are for road construction.
Backing up my previous point, roads are also fairly non-excludable, in the early eighteenth century of America, federal law mandated that tollboothes for roads be a certain MINIMUM distance apart (around 30 miles). Whole companies /groups developped which made small bypasses around tollboothes. Tollboothes couldn't collect tolls on local residents moving short distances from one side of the toll to the other.
Furthermore, there's NO WAY to put toll boothes on local roads. (You have a booth at the end of each driveway??)
Your point is somewhat correct in that tolls sort of work on some large French highways (and they most definately work on bridges, where it's really easy to control the entrances and exits). I'm not really sure a French model where you have to stop every few miles and pay a toll is a really great thing though. It might be better to have everyone pay a little bit more in gas tax and not have tolls on freeways.
I'm not saying that personal transportation doesn't pollute. I'm merely saying that personal transportation is NOT economically inefficient.
Interesting... free flow of commerce East to West, and vice-versa, via the Canal.
No flow of Internet voice South to North, and vice versa.
I guess they relate to boats, and not bits. Perhaps the Panamanian government is run by cousins of those running Greece (you know, the ones that temporarily banned video games).
btw, What's the status of a boat in the canal? Is it in Panamanian territory, or international waters? Floating data haven/ISP via wireless?
Roads are generally referred to as a public good.
But they are not a "public good", they are something that only drivers want and need, yet everybody effectively has to pay for roads and other driving related costs. If we wanted to, it would be easy to make only drivers pay for driving-related costs: pay for large chunks of road construction, health care, military, and the legal system out of gasoline taxes.
Automobiles and trucks have vast advantages over rail for most uses.
Sadly, a lot of areas of the US are built in a way that you can't do without a car anymore. I cannot afford to live an area where I can walk to the post office or to a store. But that's not an "advantage".
You can leave whenever you want
Too bad that you can't arrive whenever you want, however, since travel times by car have become unpredictable in many places.
and you can go wherever you want.
Not really. There are plenty of places I can't easily go by car because there is no parking. And what's the point anyway? I spend 45 minutes in the car to go from one parking lot to another. I'd much rather have the goods and services I need around locally and spend less time in the car.
The creation of the interstate highway system has broughten vast economic benefits.
The same is true for public transportation: it creates jobs and makes the movement of goods and services more efficient.Governments as of late have thrown massive subsidies towards alternative energy sources, public transportation, electric cars, and the like.
"Massive" relative to what? Compared to the automobile, all those subsidies are negligible. Hell, just the indirect health costs resulting from use of the automobile probably dwarf everything we spend on all those alternatives combined.
Saying that road construction is inefficient and subsidies are the only reason for the current dominance of the automobile is rather absurd.
I didn't say it was "the only reason". But without massive subsidies, direct and indirect, the personal automobile wouldn't have become widespread. Furthermore, people have no choice anymore: many parts of the country have been built and set up that people can't do without a car anymore. And people are forced to bear a lot of the costs of driving whether they own a car themselves or not. It's not surprising that everybody has a car under those conditions. I do as well--I could not afford not to. But you are fooling yourself if you think that that is a good way to live or economically efficient.
This is immoral. You can't just rent-a-law because your overpriced technology is being smashed by a preferrable alternative.
I can not decide if my answer is ontopic or not as it is political. However, the reason "rent a laws" happen (in this country at least)is that big industry makes big contributions to political parties and candidates. When this is regulated things will be different. For example, if it were capped at 1,000 dollar contribution then the sierra club would be as influential as Exxon. So, if you think it is immoral to have rent a law going on, then you need to think about that issue as you VOTE!
The preceeding applies to all parties and is not meant as a partisan post.
Sure there's dozens of ways to get around their port blocking, but I have a feeling it will have the effect they desire. Only a handful of people will have the knowledge and resources to circumvent their port blocking. In fact, the number is probably small enough that the government won't have to put in any more effort.
Sad... but probably true.
say by having infinity cash [sic]
Uhh...erk...
You found a grammatical error in your own sentence, but rather than correct it you add a [sic]?
It remembers me of the record labels saying they're losing profit because of the various P2P networks.
In most countries (if not all) the telcos are still the ones who carries most of the Internet traffic, as the dial-up connections are the most used. So what they lose (or, better said, do not earn) in terms of phone calls they get it for IP traffic over the phone lines, which goes to them anyways. And the proportion of the VoIP calls over the dial-up internet users is tiny compared to the number of total phone line suscribers who doesn't uses VoIP or doesn't have internet connections at all.
I think the Panama government is doing WAY wrong with this, as they're supposed to defend the PEOPLE rights over the COMPANIES and not the other way.
Has the telcos presented the government confident statistics about their lose of revenue because of the use of VoIP? Has the government made a deep study case?
And because of all this there comes to my mind another question: what happens with the ISP's contracts? They're supposed to give you access to the 100% of the Internet, not 99.9% of it. So this is not just a violation of the consumers rights, but also of the ISPs ones because they're forced to not to give their customers a complete service.
Articulos para gente geek: Poleras, linux, libros y mas
You might be paying less /on average/ but bad scenarios are a lot worse. The reason we pay insurance companies more money than they give out is for the guarantee that we will never have to individually pay more than the average that each person puts in, (minus the surcharge).
It's like the state lottery: sure, on average I'd rather keep my dollar than get 40 cents for it, but a dollar a week doesn't make any difference to me one way or another, whereas whoever wins the lottery gets a big increase in lifestyle, and that person COULD be me. I'm willing to pay 60 cents for the CHANCE to pool my 40 cents with the 40 cents of everyone else who plays.
Likewise, if a business is about to fail miserably, it can try something really risky, that either will make it go bankrupt a few months earlier, or end up keeping it afloat.
Risk management FREQUENTLY deals with worst-case scenarios as well as "expected return", ie, what you call average. That's why I'd rather walk 15 minutes and arrive exactly on time to an appointment than take the bus, for which I have to wait, and arrive on average 6 minutes earlier. (Because buses come every n minutes, but I don't know when the last one came.)
Fun stuff.
Are you sure this wasn't in Australia? The plan smacks of the intelligence and wisdom of our local minister for The Arts and Technology (he knows nothing of either).
Why do governemnts protect dying, inefficient industries and hold back the growing, efficient ones? Is it always because of monetary 'incentives' from the old boys' club? I hope not, but I assume so.
Panama, I congratulate you! You are idiots.
They want to block UDP ports that *can* be used for VOIP? Why not *make* 'em block all UDP and let them find out how screwed that actually leaves them? Wanna see a government backtrack on a previous decision really quick?
Unless Panama wants to block all web browsing...
Bear with me while I explain
UDP is used for VOIP because TCP is a streaming protocol and as such isn't particularly useful for real-time data transmission -- as said by another poster elsewhere, it's preferable to just simply lose a packet every now and then rather than to have the connection pause suddenly while TCP handles congestion control.
So... what I imagine is this: a system running VOIP listens to a randomly chosen UDP port rather than a specifically chosen one. The exact port to try to connect to is found by connecting to the system via the TCP port 80, and the VOIP system responds to the connection request letting the caller know which UDP port to actually use, and then the TCP connection is closed. The caller can then use the UDP port it was informed about. Since the system can be listening on ANY UDP port, possibly even one that would normally be used for some other well-known service, the government would have no choice but to create a ruling that would unilaterally block all UDP.
Seriously... I think it would be close to hilarious to see what they would come up with to try to stop that.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
No, I just like the sound of it. It's playful. My eleven year old brother said to me the sentence "This cheat gives you INFINITY LIFE!!!" I liked it. He said: "OOOOH! It evoluted!!" haha, because he thought that was the term, since the game said "evolution". :)], and not some grammatical machine.
I correct him, of course, but I like how playful some "wrong" things sound. I'm a human bean, after all, [sic
I'll call something non-sequiturial, if I think it doesn't follow, and use strong verbs with an -ed suffix, although I can't think of one that I tend to do with just now...
I say that I like Boston enough to want to live in it for keeps, or that "You know what they say: there are only two ways to skin a cat: head to tail and tail to head", before adding, "But you know what? That's more than one way!", in a context where a normal person would just say "there's more than one way to skin a cat."
Sometimes I go the other way, and use the original form of an expression that has come down to us differnetly, for example saying, "The proof of the pudding is in the eating" (rather than "the proof is in the pudding", taking pudding to mean desert, or the end), and when whereas a normal person might say "The best laid plans...", signifying the idiom "the best laid plans of mice and men", I'll quote the full phrase:
"You know what they say:
The best laid schemes o' mice an' men gang oft a-gley."
With a heavy bobby burnsy accent.
Same for shakespearean quotes common in the language, and, especially, Alexander Pope.
Other times, I'll put a twist on it. If I don't want to talk about religion any more, I'll say:
"Silly mortal! Don't question Gods's plan,
The proper study of mankind is MAN."
If someone tells me they like Chevre (goat's cheese), I will say,
"You know the reason we even are able to milk cows at all today is because we have the practice from back when we were goatherds. It's like airplanes -- you couldn't have them if it weren't for the pioneers in dirigibles."
But of course Pope put it more succinctly with:
True ease in milking comes from milking goats,
As he flies best who also ably floats.
Anyway, that's all.
The only reason I use [sic] when misquoting or misdeclining or misspelling purposefully is to stave off the hordes of ravenous pedants who lurk around slashdot and other places, much like yourself, actually.
Sometimes I'll be tricky, and say something that the pedants find objectionable but really makes sense:
"Hopefully, I say, we should be finished by tomorrow."
(Because some old schoolers don't use hopefully except as an adverb; not as a sentence-modifyer.)
Anyway, toodles.
Panama is, unfortunately, not the only country to try this. Pakistan, for example, has one telco company handling all outgoing internet traffic (telco monopoly until dec 31 2002). They blocked various VoIP sites *and* MSN voice chat last month.
This was done unilaterally, with support from the supposedly independent telco regulation authority.
People complained, ISPs took out ads in papers and made press releases about it, and it's now looking like the sites will be unblocked by the end of the week. Hopefully.
It used to be public domain. I think it's GPL now.
A while back Captain Crunch made a little bit of history by placing his first VOIP call with Speak Freely - from India, where VOIP has long been illegal and I'm pretty sure the ports are supposed to be blocked.
The way people can find what port to use for you is that you can have your name and IP address listed on a webserver. When people look you up they'll see your port. You'll have to instruct people you talk to to set the port, not just the IP address.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
So basically you expect us all to get an inside joke? And if we don't get it we're "ravenous pendants"? Interesting.
That's the long and short of it, yes.
But they are not a "public good", they are something that only drivers want and need, yet everybody effectively has to pay for roads and other driving related costs. If we wanted to, it would be easy to make only drivers pay for driving-related costs: pay for large chunks of road construction, health care, military, and the legal system out of gasoline taxes.
A "public good" is not something which every stinking last citizen of that country needs, wants or uses. Libraries are also a public good dispite the fact that they are only useful to people who can read, who are able to travel there, and who want to use them.
No, a "public good" is a thing which benefits the general economy but which is impossible to finance through normal capitalist means because the cost/reward linkage is not a direct one. In the same way, mass transit is a "public good" dispite the fact that the only people who can use mass transit are people who live near the stations. (Meaning the Federal dollars subsidizing the Amtrak raillines in New York--something which my tax dollars help to support--are unusable to me as I live in California.)
Sadly, a lot of areas of the US are built in a way that you can't do without a car anymore. I cannot afford to live an area where I can walk to the post office or to a store. But that's not an "advantage".
There has been a tremendous amount of research done into creating civic projects which minimize the need for transportation, or attempt to create transportation corridors which allow the use of mass transit in a more efficient manner.
The problem is twofold. First, there are a lot of people, and by and large most of them don't want to live in a cramped little apartment building in a 200 floor skyrise for the sake of minimizing the horizontal distance they need to travel to work. Most people would rather live in houses and housing developments--and unfortunately, no matter how hard you try, when you get more than a few thousand houses together, you have a transportation problem that cannot be easily solved by busing or rail.
Second, when you get more than a few thousand people in the same town, the combinatorial problem of N people (where N is large--such as Los Angeles, where you're pushing tens of millions), and M places they need to go (such as work, grocery store, etc), and you have a severe transportation problem. Los Angeles is trying to fight the problem by creating time and economic incentives for people to move to transportation hubs--that is, they're trying to fight the problem by severely re-engineering the way people live in Los Angeles. But as I said before, people don't want to live in high rises, they want to live in houses--to the point where they'd rather spend three hours a day in a car to go to work every day so they can have their house.
Transportation is a bitch of a problem. Assuming that poeple rely on cars because of some sort of Detroit conspiracy is extremely simple minded.
Too bad that you can't arrive whenever you want, however, since travel times by car have become unpredictable in many places.
Actually, even in the most severe places, you can arrive by when you want if you just pay attention to the traffic reports and leave early enough. While "I'm sorry I'm late; bad traffic" is occassionally true, more often than not it's the grown up version of "my dog ate my homework."
Not really. There are plenty of places I can't easily go by car because there is no parking. And what's the point anyway? I spend 45 minutes in the car to go from one parking lot to another. I'd much rather have the goods and services I need around locally and spend less time in the car.
People's transportation uses tend to break down into three categories. There are personal errands (groceries, shopping), work, and recreational (going out to see a movie, etc.)
Do not confuse them just to make a hairbrained point. If you are not buying your daily personal errand products and services locally, what are you thinking? Most people do most of their grocery shopping, dry cleaning, post office, etc. erands locally--you're a fool if you are driving an hour and a half each way to the grocery store.
And work is work--for the most part, businesses are required to provide sufficient parking for their employees, so if you are having a hard time finding a place to park at work, you should takl to your employers, not just assume that there is some sort of conspiracy to make your life difficult. (Life *is* difficult, it doesn't need a conspiracy.)
It's only the recreational areas where there is a problem with parking. But in general that's because most recreational areas (such as parks, movie theaters, etc) generally are not built with sufficient parking for peak usage, because it winds up being inefficient from a cost analysis standpoint. (Why build a four floor parking garage if 95% of the time, you will never use three of those floors?)
And in that case, there really is no good solution--except perhaps not going out to see a movie during peak times.
The same is true for public transportation: it creates jobs and makes the movement of goods and services more efficient.
No it does not. Mass transportation of products is only efficient when you have a lot of product going from point A to point B. In fact, most of the United State's logistical infrastructure is now organized around that fact. That's why when you send a FedEx package to the next city over, it generally is flown into Memphis--because centralization of transportation corridors is more efficient than solving the O(N**2) problem of moving products directly to their destination.
But once you get to an endpoint--such as the Port of Los Angeles, or the Ralphs Grocery Distribution Hub in Los Angeles, or whatever other central hub that is serviced by rail--you now must rely on surface street traffic and trucks, not mass transit or public transportation--to move the product to the end store.
I didn't say it was "the only reason". But without massive subsidies, direct and indirect, the personal automobile wouldn't have become widespread.
I don't believe so.
The automobile solved two problems--which accounted for it's massive initial acceptance and for public pressure to create better roads. (Roads significanly predated cars by a few thousand years, by the way--even paved roads with lined beds were built by the Romans.)
The first problem cars solved was the expense and general hassle of owning a horse. Descriptions of the streets of New York's horse maneur problem, especially during the summer, is rather shocking. New York spent a significant amount of resources just cleaning horse droppings on a daily basis, and the illnesses that arose from horse droppings, as well as the stench was shocking. And while we are now (and rightfully so) concerned with the public health problems of car pollution, horse pollution was a real and rather terrible problem.
The second problem cars solved was that cars were more reliable and required less maintanance than horses. You didn't need to provide a stable and hay, or extra space. And that, along with Henry Ford's pricing efforts to bring the price of mass produced cars down to a reasonable level, allowed private individuals for the first time access at any form of private transportation whatsoever.
But you are fooling yourself if you think that that is a good way to live or economically efficient.
The most "economically efficient" way for people to live is in massive studio apartment highrises clustered in tight little clusters around mass transportation corridors.
But, with the exception of Manhattan, people don't want to live in tiny little fishbowl cages stacked a hundred floors high. They would rather live in their own house on a 1/4 acre lot in the suburbs--and once you start taking people's desires for space and elbow room into account, transportation goes from being a relatively simple exercise of moving people around from a small number of hubs to an O(n**2) problem of figuring out how to allow a person to efficiently go from just about anywhere in a several hundred square mile area to just about anywhere else in a several hundred square mile area.
And that's hard.
People do not want to live in an "economically efficient manner"--taken to the extreme, that would mean that people would wear all the same clothing and eat algae-based paste that wouldn't need to be moved in refrigerated trucks to the grocery store. Instead, people have certain desires (such as a nice house in the suburbs on a quiet street, or unique furnature and decorations, or to go to a movie and a quaint little restaurant in the next town) which makes transportation issues a royal pain in the ass.
Is it a good way to live? I dunno. But I can't see eliminating choices from people's lives in the name of making something economically efficient--that's absurd. And backwards: the question is not what is the most economically efficient solution, but what is the most economically efficient way to give people what they want--including that house in the suburbs which makes transportation by anything other than some form of powered motorized vehicle impractical.
Just goes to show that a properly regulated free market is best! And of course that a poorly regulated free market, like in Panama and a lot of other places, is worse than a government owned monopoly.
Woopty Doo Basil, what does it all mean?!
No, a "public good" is a thing which benefits the general economy but which is impossible to finance through normal capitalist means because the cost/reward linkage is not a direct one.
Indeed, it is. And my point is that roads and other car-related infrastructure do not benefit the general economy relative to other choices that we have, and that it would be possible to finance them through "normal capitalist means". Hence, they aren't a "public good".
Transportation is a bitch of a problem. Assuming that poeple rely on cars because of some sort of Detroit conspiracy is extremely simple minded.
I'm not "assuming" anything. I have lived in places where public transportation works. Transportation in the US just sucks in comparison, and it really decreases quality of life greatly.
Most people do most of their grocery shopping, dry cleaning, post office, etc. erands locally--you're a fool if you are driving an hour and a half each way to the grocery store.
Who cares about "locally"? The question is: is it walkable or reachable by public transportation, and it isn't. Working in high-tech, there are almost no places in the US where I could move to and walk to work and do shopping on foot.
people don't want to live in tiny little fishbowl cages stacked a hundred floors high.
Housing prices in modern cities prove you wrong: the prices of condominiums in Manhattan, San Francisco, and Boston show that those places are highly desirable places to live. The same is true for places like downtown Los Gatos and Palo Alto. People like to live in communities where they can walk places and use public transportation. Also, there is nothing "tiny" about condominiums.
But I can't see eliminating choices from people's lives in the name of making something economically efficient
But it's not a choice: in the US, I effectively don't have the choice not to use a car. There is little usable public transportation, schedules suck, and many important places, you can't get to other than by car. And if I gave up my car, I would still be forced to subsidize driving-related costs with more money annually than I spend on my car. Furthermore, many of the direct costs of owning a car are fixed: once you buy it, you might as well use it becaues the incremental cost is small compared to the sunk costs. That is what keeps the automobile around.
If people paid for the actual cost of driving on a per-use basis, just like they do for public transportation, and if a decent system of public transporation were deployed in the US so that we actually had a choice, few people would use cars on a regular basis because it just doesn't make sense. Give people the choice and they will take it.
Is it a good way to live? I dunno.
Well, I do, because I have actually lived in places where public transportation works, and let me tell you, it's great. A good system of public transportation together with good urban planning doesn't mean communism, it doesn't mean that you never drive, it doesn't mean living in tiny boxes, it just means that most people can do most things without being forced to use a car on a regular basis.
Tunnel the VoIP through SSH then. Most people I know would refuse to use an ISP that blocks SSH since it's used for plenty of other legitimate things.
Follow me
VoIP uses a LARGE amount of bandwidth. If these and similar sorts of services are disabled then bandwidth will be freed for other uses. Ok , its only a small compensation but nevertheless...
This is no the way most French motorways work.
How they work is the following:
* toll motorways are a closed domain. There is no way you can enter this closed domain without going through a booth (or destroying some property, namely fences) (of course, emergency services have some specific bypasses to efficiently go to the points of accidents. Opening these emergency bypasses without the proper equipment also means trespassing and/or destruction of property). It is of course an serious offense to build a unauthorised bypass
* You take a ticket at the entrance booth, you swipe at the exit booth. Or, you can subscribe for dirt cheap to a service which just OCRs your license plate at both boothes and bills you later.
* One of the networks actually requires you to pay about every 40 km. This is so because it was built "cheaply", by linking together pieces of for-toll motorways and toll-free motorways (see next paragraph). On this network, if I remember correctly, OCRing your license plate requires only to *slow down* to 30 km/h, not actually stop.
* Motorways are divided into two classes; link motorways and local. Local ones have so many entries and exits it would be uneconomical to put boothes on them; and the effect they have on discongesting the local & city road networks warrants them Public Good status. Link motorways are almost always for-toll, and you have exchanges only about every 10-20 km. (There are exceptions, for instance the Méridienne motorway, which has been completely subsidised, and built for dis-enclaving a mountainous, very rural and comparatively poor region. Also, some regions (Brittany, Alsace) deliberately choose to subsidise the motorway construction so they remain toll-free. Finally, some important national and departemental roads are also extended to 2x2 lanes, though of a slightly smaller gauche (and a 110 km/h speed limit, instead of 130 km/h on real motorways); these roads are never for-toll.
For the French-system worshippers, one thing must be taken into account: it is unlikely the motorway companies break even before 2040, 2050 (the first couple of motorways gave their full return now, but the concession has been extended to subsidise the construction of the less profitable ones. There is a definite balance made here between the purely capitalistic notion of ROI and the notion of "Aménagement du Territoire" -- in other words, deliberately subsidising the development of some regions to limit the rural exodus and keep a reasonable balance of population & activity density).
How amusing. I take it you've never bought anything from a store? How do you suppose it got there, hmmm?
Rail works if you have:
Fortunately, lots of people do have such stuff, or even are such stuff themselves, but over short distances between many points with arbitrary journey start times and routes, mass transit systems are the wrong paradigm.
Sadly, a lot of areas of the US are built in a way that you can't do without a car anymore. I cannot afford to live an area where I can walk to the post office or to a store. But that's not an "advantage".
Sure you can - but you can't expect the benefits of big-city living in a small community. There are plenty of small towns in the US, where people say hello to each other in the streets and the waitress in the diner remembers your name.
But you cannot expect the world to adapt itself to your personal preferences. Either you live in a sprawling metropolis and have access to all it offers, or you live in a small town and adopt the lifestyle. Either way, you make your own choices.
The sour black cherry sez:
e bb.php?ubb =get_topic;f=1;t=002643;p=2
We are now shift leaders at AM/PM!
And the black men are shakin in they boots!
Please Discuss.
http://www.askheartbeat.com/UBB/ultimat
Don't wanna join the 21st century, eh? Well, enjoy your intranet down there folks. If you don't want my VoIP packets, I don't want any packets from you at all. ... lessee ... where are those ipchains rules.
Although I have no regular correspondents in Panama, I'll block everything from Panama until the ludites come to their senses. I recommend you do the same.
UDP made me think of another thing with those initials. Usenet Death Penalty. Which simply put is a refusal to accept posts from the server under UDP and eventually a refusal to transmit posts to that server.
The simple solution to this is to remind C&W Panama that their behavior is unacceptable. Persuade the surrounding ISP's to set their routers to drop all packets from C&W Panama ISP section and watch their customers from ISP to go bye bye. Nasty but effective. It's not something that would be nice to do but desperate times need desperate measures.
Death to IRC, the bane of the long distance service provider! IRC is stealing the money that people would normally have to pay for 24-hour-a-day party-line conversations between twenty or more people! Billyuns of dollars are being lost, and are probably being used to fund terrorism!
Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more, Or close the wall up with our American dead!
In response, the Post Office has also decreed that the protocols POP3, SMTP and IMAP should also be banned in an attempt to win back loss revenue.
As far as I can see the solution for this is obvious - DSL technologies. Now I dont have VoIP, but if I did BT (I am in the UK, that is my telco) would still be getting something, cos I am buying my ADSL from them.
So the telco company has to change its business model slightly, so what - adapt!
Although John Dvorak was speaking about copyright law when he said this, It still sounds appropriate:
What's happened, and the point I keep trying to make, is that technology has changed the economics of these industries.
This is indeed true of teh VOIP scene. What a pathetic lack of understanding of the technology the Panamanian governement has displayed. Many of those ports are just as easily used by many apps that they definately don't want to ban. Exchange Sever is one example, but there are many more.
-- -- Warning. Do not stare directly at the sun.
And if needed... VoIP will take the SSL bangwagon... and thrus the port/content will be "unavailable" for blocking...
LOL
P.S.- Why in the hell the phone company doesn't simply change the focus and make competitive offers for ISP connections?
These companies offer fantastically cheap call costs to other countries. How do they do it? Well, all they need is an access channel into the PSTN in both countries at either end of the call. They can then route traffic over the much cheaper Internet backbone, rather than pay either phone company's international rates.
Either they have the general support of each country's phone company, or they don't. If they don't, what they do is pretend to be a large company which needs a PBX to do its work. They then route the internet traffic into the PBX and pay the normal business user rates for phone service.
Billyuns of dollars are being lost, and are probably being used to fund terrorism!
Er, the story is about Panama, isn't it? Please try to keep /. reflexive US-bashing in check. Thank you ;)
The quality of life there was unmatched by anything I have found in the Bay Area (where I live now), even though I made a fraction then of what I make now. The sad thing is that most Americans don't realize how poor the quality of life in America actually is. (In case you are wondering why I didn't stay there--it's because my friends, family, and job are here.)
I just don't know what to say about the intellectual capacity of someone who judges the quality of life in the US by looking at the Bay area.
If you don't like the Bay area, why don't you check out the other 99.9999% of the country?
I could not find "Fobbit Fone". Could you provide a link?
You're assuming that the telcos are part of a very simple market mechanism and that VoIP users are somehow cheating the system.
Much of the cost of international calls isn't the bandwidth, but the overseas "termination charges" that carriers get to charge each other to terminate calls on their networks.
Which gets at your most important assumption, that Internet users are "stealing" bandwidth on long-haul links. The internet users have to be self-funded, including out of country bandwidth, otherwise the providers wouldn't be in business.
The subsidy that's probably happening is that the local phone company is probably funding 75% of its operations based on international termination fees and access to overseas carriers. Panama being Panama, you can imagine that about half the people don't even pay for phone service (steal it, government giveaways, etc), and the half that do pay probably pay some ridiculously cross-subsidized amount.
What needs to happen is that the Panama PTT needs to right its economics. The local phone network (ie, calls made end-end inside Panama) need to be wholly self-funding, and NOT reliant on international access & settlements. International calling needs to pay for international calling ONLY.
The problem is twofold. First, there are a lot of people, and by and large most of them don't want to live in a cramped little apartment building in a 200 floor skyrise for the sake of
The 8 million or so people living in London would seem to disagree with you. Interestingly, I don't see many "200 floor" buildings here (or in the rest of Europe, for that matter) - if anything, a building is on average 3-5 floors (except for council housing, et al.)
unfortunately, no matter how hard you try, when you get more than a few thousand houses together, you have a transportation problem that cannot be easily solved by busing or rail
I'm a bit confused by this statement. Again, I can only speak of where I am -- but in addition to walking, there's the tube, buses, rail, cycling and, of course, driving. How exactly is this a transportation problem?
Personally, I ride a bicycle. It's healthy and gets you to where you need to go quickly - 15-20 minutes across town. Not to mention, it's good for the environment. Why support oil companies?
Cheers!
I understand 100% about JLo. I'm with you there, brother. :)
But how many other people have asked you what the hell Bill Gates has to do with pr0n?
(Sorry, it just sorta read that way...)
Any sufficiently well-organized Government is indistinguishable from bullshit.
This type of behaviour is common with Cable and Wireless. I currently live in the Cayman Islands and the Terms and Conditions of the internet service offered by C&W explicitly states that VOIP is prohibited:
7.2 The Service is offered subject to the availability of the necessary facilities. The Customer may not resell the Service to any third party or permit any third party to use the Service or Service Agreement Software. The Customer shall not allow the Service to be used, modified or adapted to transmit voice on the public telecommunications system of either C&W or any foreign telecommunications provider, and the Customer shall not connect to the PSTN at either the local or the distant end
If you want internet access you must accept this agreement since C&W is the only ISP in Cayman.
A couple years ago Net2Phone was sued by Cable and Wireless in the Caymans for offering long distance service within the Cayman Islands. C&W won the case since it violated the government mandated monopoly given to C&W for telephone services in the country. More recently, C&W has blocked access to BestNetCall.com.
A phone call to North America costs US$1.46 per minute through C&W. A call through BestNetCall was being offered at US$0.26 per minute. You can see why they are aggressively attacking any service that undermines the cash cow they have in Panama and the Caymans.
Just on a side note, they are also gouging the consumer for internet service as well. The cheapest DSL service they offer costs US$90 per month and its throttled to 128 down, 64 up! If you want 1544 down, 256 up you have to pay US$432 a month. Dialup costs US$44 for 30 hours per month plus $2.32 for each additional hour. You can get unlimited dialup hours for $96 per month, but you also have to pay $0.03 per minute local phone charges on this plan.
I think the real question here is: isn't the government suppose to protect people's interets and not companies profits?
Another case were goverment is of no use: MS vs. USA
Some of the protocols that will eventually have to be blocked as a result include... udp portions of netbios ...and this would be a bad thing???
The whole damn country of Panama is far too dain bramaged from all the drugs they did in the '70's and '80's to ever fit back into world society anymore.
Silly Rabbit, Trix are for KIDS!
Over 10 years ago, I wrote a plan that would replace 90% of the roads in the US. Railroads are obsolete: think about it, you have 1,000 people going from point A to point B and if one person wants to get on or off you have to stop the entire train. Dumb.
What's needed is an elevated personal transportation system. Think about:
100% safe (no drivers, all automated -- no more car insurance)
50 times faster (low end speeds of 120 mph, high end near 600 mph -- meaning an end to air carriers for all but overseas flights)
fuel efficient (solar panels could charge the system)
No more traffic jams (cargo carriers rerouted to holding areas during rush hour and move to their destinations at night)
Reduced gov't spending on road maintenance (this system would be cheaper to build and maintain).
You could put your kids in it in the a.m., it wouldn't stop except at the school.
I sent the proposal to the Transportation subcommittee. That was 1991. But this will never fly because it would kill the gas companies, the car companies (who could manufacture the Personal Transportation Vehicles, but would mean a major retooling), insurance companies, etc.
We've had the technology to do this for over 20 years. But don't hold your breath. Too many $$$ interests at stake and your loved ones lives aren't worth it to them.
I know! It is exactly what the RIAA and MPAA are doing:
:/
1) New technology comes along and obsoletes a buissness model
2) Old buisness model uses power to by law outlawing new, better technology, rather than adapt
Seems reasonalbe to me.
The government of Panama is just a little less capable than the US. The US goverment would have made it illegal to discuss which port any service was on including in research paper.
Spell check? Why bother. That is what grammer/spelling Nazi freaks who waiste band width posting "spell right" are for.
Panama is a very corrupt compa^H^H^H^H^Hcountry. The government and law enforcement there is very easily bought out. More easily than in the US. I don't remember the details, but I think it was Panama that had the law enforcement killing citizens because of protests or labor meetings or something. This is he country that spawned Manuel Noriega.
4 09 67 [Indymedia]
e ct /panama/ [The Panama Deception]
http://www.indymedia.org/front.php3?article_id=
http://webslingerz.com/eclauset/mediasouth/proj
A technical problem that stems from MANY social/govt problems. I don't know if Slashdot is ready for this...
In a democracy: The people vote for who makes decisions, the voted person makes decisions. I a political democracy (what we have): The people vote for who makes the decisions, the voted person takes bribes.
I mod down anyone who says "I will be modded down for this", regardless of the rest of their comment
Banning VOIP ports is silly, not just because controlling the internet this way is a bad idea, it's because the quality of internet service over there is so bad that VOIP is almost unworkable anyway. Or at least, that's what I've discovered, being called by my father-in-law from Panama using net2phone. "Hello? Hello? Hey, it must be your dad calling, I can't hear anything."
Everyone knows that damage is done to the soul by bad motion pictures. -Pope Pius XI
This comes to mind.
Articulos para gente geek: Poleras, linux, libros y mas
"Why are so many people looking at wire cutters?"
"Dunno, let's feature them on the front page"
How does the internet handle voip and other streaming? surely it puts a massive strain on the network or are the major lines and routers so high-bandwidth that it doesnt care? what would happen if more people started using voip instead of the phone?
and cant you just change ports anyway? if you were using some sort of IM system anyway it wouldnt take long to negotiate a port number semi randomly.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
, as well as many other countries, already do, albeit in a different industry
No, acutally it's pretty different.
If you don't insure your car, you're not allowed to drive on public roads. Yes, a third party makes money, but they actually perform a service (and, as others have pointed out, you're wrong in the fact that you can't escape it.)
Now, if the government mandated which insurance company you had to use, or took a percentage of the profits from other insurance companies and gave it to their preferred one, then there might be some sort of similarity..
As soon as that happens, come back and post a response.
In most developing countries, the government, not private industry, runs the state monopoly telecom carrier, and is the sole economic beneficiary of its operation. The cream of telephony for these governments has always been international long distance, something that they've always jealously protected from any competitor, even ham radio. [Want to know why morse code lasted so long in amateur radio? Hint: It's not easy to learn, it presents a barrier to entry, and every developing country has a vote at the ITU.]
Even if they're using a contractor like C&W, the government reaps most of the profit from those $5 per minute calls to overseas families. Ah, the evils of Socialism!
FZX
...-.-
The government of India is already doing that. But we use "Speak Freely" and can change to port number to anything we like. It's free, open source, and it works (Even on a 56kb dialup on VSNL).
People wonder why I complain about the US govt. regulating business, e.g. Microsoft. This new legislation in Panama is the sort of thing you face when you start allowing govt. to regulate business. Once a business realizes that the govt. is willing to write laws to protect one business at the expense of another (In this case teleophony vs. internet, which is surprising since you'd think the same company would run both in Panama) they will naturally use govt. for their own ends to get an unfair advantage. Similarly, you can argue netscape did the same thing to MS. Tried to use the govt. to give them an unfair advantage because they couldn't compete against MS. You can argue MS is a monopoly, but at least they aren't using force supplied by the govt. for gain an advantage. All MS can do is negotiate contracts. Let Panama be a lesson as to the dangers of allowing govt. to interfere with business.
Vote for Pedro
Send them to Greece to get some cork to block their important game ports.
I love it when business models/technologies start to become outdated; then, rather than evolve, the companies involved try to use litigation to prevent their own extinction. It's disgusting.
Like you have a right to force people to use your services because if they don't, how will you get their money? (sorry, I know I could have worded that in a less trollish way.)
On a partially related note: Does that remind anyone of any companies in the US?
I repeat myself..
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
Ironically, the US Gov't doesn't carry insurance on its vehicles. Neither does it carry bonds. This is because the US Gov't essentially has "infinity cash" - at least in US Dollars. If a gov't employee rear-ends somebody, the gov't just pays the damages.
Off topic I suppose, but interesting trivia none the less.
I lived in Panama for over 5 years. 92-97. I can tell you the Cable & Wireless had little to do with the POTS till just recently. See, The way things work there is that all the polititions are bought and payed for just like you buying a new car. Favors are exchanged so freely that corruption is part of the culture.
You where charged for all outside your immediate vicinity. All local calls where free of charge and still are.
The proble lies When you place call outside the country. You could not use a long distance carrier. You had to pay the local telco rate wich was state ran. Near $1.55 per minute to call the US. Calling card Companies started to throw in local access numbers for each of the cities and sell calling cards for much less than half that rate. But the Local Telco go wind if this in started shutting down those numbers. All with the support of the Local polititions of course,
When internet access started getting cheaper around 1994 I turned allot of Panamaians onto Net2Phone.com (aka IDT) They would allow 800 numbers to be called freely over the internet at that time. So all you needed was a 56k dialup and any calling card and voila local US rates form Panama. Cable & Wireless actually imporoved things a little. Most people stopped using POTS when BellSouth moved in hard with Digital PCS Phones. It's cheaper to call long distance on the cell than on the POTS. Now, No one even barely uses thier POTS in that country ecpect for local calling and faxes. I dought that this all really has any affect on POTS strangle hold for long. AT&T is moving into the area now and will offer GSM services for the first time. I was in Panama just this past March. Let me tell you. PCS phones are just as cheap if not cheaper than in the US.
I agree with most peoples thoughts. This will be circumvented pretty easily.
Two Towers-Two Worlds.One seeks triumphs and freedom for man.The other deems man unworthy and wrecks them.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
one of the main factors barring adopting voip in many areas is the fact that it doesn't work over tcp.
Yes, I understand fully why tcp is not the best protocol for voip.. however....
NAT. So many ISPs now, especially in poorer countries, use NAT. And not even good nat... the kind of nat that really only works well with tcp.
True. In fact, many large cab companies are self-insured. They are distributing the risk over a large fleet of vehicles, so in the long run they come out ahead, even if there are a few nasty accidents.
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
The problem is twofold. First, there are a lot of people, and by and large most of them don't want to live in a cramped little apartment building in a 200 floor skyrise for the sake of minimizing the horizontal distance they need to travel to work.
I personally would love to live in such an apartment. Sadly, I think that the events of 11 Sep, 2001 will really decrease new skyscraper building projects. I think the coolest thing in the world would be to live and work in an arcology, but I don't really think that we will see arcologies becoming a reality any time soon. I believe they could even make economical sense by themselves, but even if they are paid for in a public good model, I would approve.
Did you mount a military-grade, variable-focus MASER on an unlicensed artificial intelligence?
Of course, taking this reasoning to its logical conclusion, goods would never pass state, city, or neighborhood boundaries. Protectionism is always wrong and stupid.
Hello! We have many roads exactly like this in the US, rural and urban areas alike!
Mod this shit insightful!!! I'm not kidding!
I guess there is nothing that special in the French motorway model (except perhaps the large body of law exceptions the motorway companies were granted -- and with all instances of law purchases I've heard about in the US, I'm not even sure that the fact that the French State grants special laws to cater for the needs of Mixt Economy (= semi-owned by state) Companies is that special after all.
Once again, governments are forcing technology to remain stagnet. With every great new innovation that means more bang of for the consumer dollar, companies using aging, legacy equipment would rather invest in politicians before technology. Traditional telcos don't want to embrace the VoIP industry (they'd rather rip us off every month) or lose their monopoly, so they convince gov't that VoIP is the spawn of Satan or something. Think P2P with music and movies. Think DIVX and/or TiVo technology with studios and TV networks. Think stem cell research and tissue/organ cloning with corrupt, decrepid organized religions (some that would rather forgive child molesters before accepting the fact that not everybody follows the belief system). Now think of the oldest industries and how little they have had to change (thanks to lobbying and unions) while technology offers better alternatives for the public (who the government should be working for): auto industry, telcos, movie studios, big-5 music corps., etc. Sure, there have been changes, but fundamentally, the same cow has been milked to death at the consumer's expense. And even when a young, new leader steps up to the executive plate, there are usually enough old white guys pulling the strings or dangling the carrot; thereby, innovation is squashed again. Am I bitter? Yes.
Cnet published an article naming Panama Idiot of the week for disabling the VOIP ports. The government of Panama was bound by exclusivity contracts with cable and wireless, negotiated by a previous administration. This measure is the unfortunate consequence of a corrupt and neoliberal government. The current government delayed, as much as legally possible the measures seeking to beneffit the public. The exclusivity contract with cable and wireless will expire within two years and VOIP ports may be restored after that. R.