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Download Torrents With Your PC Turned Off
Mr.Tweak writes to tell us that they have a review posted of a new wireless router from ASUS. What sets this router apart from others is that in addition to being a wireless router/gateway is that it also functions as a thin client system with a pre-installed 160 GB IDE drive (no SATA support sorry) and three USB 2.0 ports for peripherals. If you happen to use one of those USB ports for another drive the router will also support RAID 0 and 1, quite a bit more than the average router.
It seems like a full computer would be better than this in just about every aspect--price, power consumption, etc.
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
What's so new about this? http://smoothwall.org/, http://ipcop.org/ and http://m0n0.ch/wall/ could easily be custimized to perform a similar function. Easy as installing a bittorrent application, and using SSH.
By the way, these 3 options happen to be free and upgradable.
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It needs more than the ability to run Bittorrent. You need something like Peer Guardian running to filter out all those "bad" IP Addresses.
It's more of a NAS meets Wireless router. Which is cool, but....yeah....so?
It's either on the beat or off the beat, it's that easy.
I moderate therefore I rule!
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"It seems like a full computer would be better than this in just about every aspect--price, power consumption, etc."
Heat! Time! Remember not everyone's a geek, and shouldn't have to be to get some of the offered features.
Let's not shoot ourself in the foot now. There are perfectly legitimate uses for torrents. Like downloading your favorite Linux distro. Which you could then install on your machine when finished with a wake-on-lan call from that very same router. See the possibilities are endless and all you think of is music.
I find it crazy that people are running more and more applications directly on their Internet router. The more applications and services there are running, the more likely a serious security flaw will be found in the device. Do they really think this through? This is just going to be another attack vector for script kiddies to own peoples' networks. Several months after they release this, another vendor will be releasing a seperate firewall/router to protect this device.
I hate to break this to you, but I know some people who are world-class experts in their (smallish) scientific fields who use grammar from their native languages in English, or who spell at about the level of 13 year-olds (despite being a native speaker). I like good spelling and grammar too, but their absence doesn't automatically invalidate the content of an article.
This is a great idea, _but_ imagine the possibilities for rooting these devices. With a harddrive so large, and a processor at least powerful enough to handle BitTorrent, imagine the possibilities for a remote user to install malware on it. Mail relays, fake websites, even packet sniffers to capture your login as you use online banking.
Worse still, you can run various anti-malware and anti-virus tools on your desktop, but how do you plan to even detect your router being rooted, let alone repair it? (and no, that is not an invitation for the top 1% brainiac population to suggest ripping out the drive, re-installing the firmware, or running Linux on it - we're talking about the general public).
I think it's a great idea, but if it becomes popular and these are always-on devices with a lot of services running on them, that could be a problem.
It's important to constantly remind of the legitemate uses becauses otherwise the RIAA will pass a law banning all torrents within America which will then be pressured onto Democracies who apparently have elected Bush to determine our laws.
There are also legitimate uses for explosives. They're used in construction and demolition all the time. Yet I expect most people find restrictions on explosives to make perfect sense. Just because there are legitimate uses for something doesn't mean it shouldn't be regulated.
I'm not going as far as to say that BitTorrent should be regulated, but that legitimate uses aren't enough to mean it shouldn't be.
To be serious - there are rootkits out there that script kiddies use, but they need a way in first. If the router is not running much and has the admin tools all restricted to only work through the internal ethernet interface then there really are not very many ways in. I've seen a linux box that got rooted - after it had been sitting unpatched for a couple of years somebody decided it was a good idea to give all email users an executable shell, put a compiler on there, turned on telnet, let telnet be acessable from the internet, and one user had the password "coffee". I didn't even bother to work out how they got to root from there - the only thing to do is assign new passwords, build a new system and put the proir failure down to ignorance, incompetance and overconfidence.
Personally I think a router should have a read only OS in solid state media and no way to execute from read write media that is attached to it. Flashing new versions of the OS and applications should be only possible with explicit user intervention and from the internal interface.
Is that your variation of the "Test this for a while and if you like it, buy it!" .NFO files that are distributed with pirate software. That "justification" (as much as it ever was one) went out the door a long time ago. Most software comes with a trial version now. Stuff that doesn't tends to be more specialised, but you're equally likely to be able to call someone and they'll send you a CD for evaluation. None of this "I had to get Photoshop from The Pirate Bay to perform some ... evaluation and comparison ... against The Gimp!"
True enough, and that is quite a shame. However, I hate the idea that I need to store things on someone else's server (and therefore lose control of it) in order to have access to it over the internet. Along with everything else, a good, easy to set up, home server might start showing people why ISPs closing off ports is a bad thing. As it is, I think ISPs get away with it because most of their customers have no idea it's happening, and wouldn't know how to set up their own web server if they had port 80 open.
It's important to constantly remind of the legitemate uses becauses otherwise the RIAA will pass a law banning all torrents within America which will then be pressured onto Democracies who apparently have elected Bush to determine our laws.
There's so much wrong with that sentence...
a) The RIAA doesn't pass laws. They may buy lawmakers, but that's not the same thing.
b) You cannot "ban all torrents within America" or anywhere else by simply passing laws. It's already illegal, exactly how would making it "more illegal" stop it?
c) Everything after the word "America" in your sentence makes absolutely no sense and is just ranting against Bush for some reason.
Don't get me wrong, I'm no fan of Bush either, but at least I'm capable of expressing why in appropriate ways.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Wow, if you believe the only power America has over other countries is through force, then I have nothing to say to you. I could deny it and say America can do a lot more, but what's the point? You wouldn't believe me.
Torrents have never killed anyone.
NOTE: It is not unpatriotic to question or criticize one's government. Quite the contrary, it is unpatriotic to NOT do so.
Explosives are restricted to those who have a legitimate use for them. Who has Bittorrent but no legitimate uses for it?
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
I would think that it would be VERY VERY difficult for the US government to do much to Australia economically. The government doesn't do importing / exporting - that's private business. One possibility would be to slap unreasonable tarrifs on things, but the WTO would step in in that case.
You give way too much credit to Bush's ability to shape AUS law. Time to look internally at the true source of your problems.