Granted, an OS and the software itself should be marking the correct priority of things...but they don't.
It's entirely reasonable of them to decide, if you do not, which of your packets are to be handled first. An argument can be made that if you've already decided that, they should just go by what you say, but very few applications actually mark things. (OTOH, this would certainly encourage more marking.)
What is unreasonable is them overselling bandwidth to such an extent they have to do this for everyone. If people use 50% of the bandwidth on average, and spike to 125% once a day or something, we'd have no problem.
It's the fact that, at this point, the average usage ratio during certain hours is above 100%. Every day, for hours.
The problem isn't how they decide, the problem is that a) they're so oversold they need to decide every moment of day, and b) they're so oversold they're just randomly capping services.
That said, they aren't deciding what is 'important', they're deciding what makes more customers happier, in theory. It might be more 'important' that you download a security patch, but having 1000 customers have web browsing work 25% faster because your important download is 25% slower is entirely reasonable for a company to do. (It is not, however, reasonable for a company to be in such a situation more than once a blue moon.)
The guy didn't kill any people during those 28 minute.
The prosecution claims that he murdered people in Florida, flew back to Georgia under a false name, the plane landed, he got off it, and then showed up on security cameras 28 minutes later at his hotel.
The defense is claiming that's impossible, he couldn't have made it from the airport in that time.
Incidentally, this is a stupid defense to start with.
As someone who's been in and out of the Atlanta airport, it is, indeed, busy, but if you don't have any checked luggage, and are smart enough to use the lower pick-up area, you can easily be out of that airport in 15 minutes if you're at far terminal. Maybe 10 if you actually planned it and were athletic enough to sprint.
Getting in, of course, is hell, but getting out is fairly easy. I've left the airport in 15 minutes.
I don't know what time this happened or how bad traffic would be at that time. There are indeed times of day that it would take more than 15-20 minutes to go 5 miles in Atlanta, although the airport itself doesn't have bad traffic.
If it's a fake, clicking "unsubscribe" only confirms that a live human is still receiving and reading the mail they're spamming out -- so they can mark it as a "good" address to resell to others and keep using themselves.
This has stopped being a sane worry years ago. Spammers don't give a flying fuck which addresses are legit anymore.
As I've been suggesting, TV networks should just give the user an application that can download damn TV in advance.
I download my TV shows. I could watch them on Hulu, but a) they are crappy quality, because b) they have to stream them, and the streaming still sucks for me.
So instead I download them illegally via torrents. I'd happily download them with ads and even some sort of DRM to self-destruct them. (Although I'd really like them to play in my existing XMBC.) But that is not an option.
Give me something that can download TV shows in advance, decrypt them when they air (Or even a day after), and I can watch them without worrying if I've stopped all my torrents or might need to make a VoIP call.
Traffic shaping is a specific technical term that means 'assigning traffic priority in some manner'. Traffic shaping changes who gets served first, and that is all. It is how to order a line of traffic in some way other than 'first come first serve'. (Strictly speaking, even that order is 'traffic shaping'.)
These ISPs are, instead, traffic limiting, aka, bandwidth capping ports and protocol even when there's no other traffic.
Part of the problem is, in fact, ISPs assertion that limiting torrent traffic to 9k/s is because of 'traffic shaping', which is causing quite a lot of confusion among people who actually know what that term means, but don't know what the ISPs are doing.
It is, indeed, reasonable to traffic shape p2p to lower priority, so people's VoIP and even web browsing experience goes better. Shaping traffic so all 'downloads', as in, mostly automated large transfers, get lower priority than interactive traffic, is entirely a good idea. In addition to p2p, they should lower the priority of HTTP files over 1meg and FTP. (Need to watch for YouTube and Hulu and stuff, though.) Interactive first, downloads second.
What is unreasonable, however, is to force all p2p to 9k/s because the ISP doesn't like them.
It's one thing, a quite reasonable thing, to alter priority, as in, who gets more of the pipe when it's full, although it's worth pointing out that deciding that is fairly complicated.
It's another thing to reduce speeds when the pipe isn't full.
And it's yet another thing to have over sold your bandwidth so much that everything is throttled, all the time.(1)
This is easy to check. The amount of people doing anything that requires real time communications at four in the morning is negligible. If you cannot get max speed then, it's one of the last two.
1) There are people trying to justify this by claiming what you are sold is 'max speed' and ISP have no requirement to give you that speed...but that's nonsense. Consumer protection laws don't work off what you're 'technically' selling, you can't operate an 'all you can eat' buffet with no food, for a close example. They work off what customers reasonable assume you're selling.
If ISPs want to sell some other form of connection, that would be fine, but they can't run around calling it by the 'max speed'. (Which, incidentally, it's not even that. Presumably 'max speed' means the max speed on any protocol, as they don't specify...and if they throttle p2p, that is not the max speed.)
And at this point something occurs to me that should have occurred sooner...which consoles actually have keyboards of any sort? It's hard enough typing on a phone, but the only console I've seen that could have a keyboard are those DSs with the touch screen, which could presumably turn into a keyboard for chatting.
But how the hell would you IM with a Wii? Or a PS3? We all remember how annoying it was to put our name in using a controller at the start of the game, which is one of the reason that Wiis actually have global 'saved names' called 'Mii's that you can pick out after entering their name once, and picking what they look like. (I don't own a Wii, but I've played one.)
DSs do have wifi, and a screen that you could 'type' on, so I think you've hit on something there....by 'console', this kid is talking about the Nintendo DS. (Incidentally, I've never referred to handheld games as 'consoles'.)
And, hearing it that way, it's just as stupid. So kids are now walking around with turned-on Nintendo DSs in their pocket and using them for IMing...when they're near wifi hotspots? And this is better than cell phones...which they carry anyway, are already on, and don't require wifi?
Yeah, maybe this kid and his three friends. Certainly not teenagers in general. At the local theatre, there is one DS that I see, and no one's passing messages on it.
I was talking about where space stations should be.
You know, in actual non-decaying orbit. High earth orbit. Where we can use it go places, and not have to worry about geosync crap. (And, from what I understand, we've been slightly pushing things upward from geosync to fall apart, so we'd need to be at least a reasonable height above it.)
Although I'm willing to be convinced as to MEO...apparently, looking it up, there are less satellites there than I thought. I thought it was a busy place with all sorts of stuff wizzing around at different level, but apparently not. So high MEO might be a better place than HEO, especially with enough of a equatorial 'wobble' that we can launch outward and miss going through geosync from that directin.
Either way, low HEO or high MEO, it wouldn't be that far out of the way of the station to geosync, so we could actually stop having the silly problem where we can't reach both the ISS and geosync in the same launch, because the damn orbits are too different. With the right setup, we could actually launch a tiny spacecraft from the space station, to geosync, put/fix a satellite there, and wait until the station's orbit comes back around (Either we'd catch up to it, or it to us, depending on which orbit we choose.), and head right back to it, with very little fuel at all.
Considering that something like a third or more of space launches are to screw around with stuff in geosync orbit, it seems really idiotic to have placed our space station somewhere else entirely.
And under 400km was just stupid on top of that. Really, really stupid. Four times farther out, low medium earth orbit, would have still be difficult to reach the geosync from, but it would have at least not had atmospheric drag! Hell, 600km would have had noticeably less drag. We put it at literally the lowest place it could stay in orbit...if we constantly kept adjusting it.
And it should be roughly over the equator, so we don't have to randomly change directions to chase the damn thing down and match speeds.
Yes, I know the Russians won't like it, but that's why we need a damn treaty and some sort of equatorial land with guaranteed space launch capacity for all nations if they're willing to build a launch site there. (Or, even better, an international space program from top to bottom.)
And, again, I must ask, in what universe is it easier for a program to watch keystrokes to parse out a username and password, and then figure out the IP of the server, vs. just watching outgoing connections to port 21 and watching a standard FTP conversation where they know exactly where the username and password are, and what IP is connected to?
I'm really baffled as to how some people seem unable to realize that password capturing is very hard to automate for applications. You have to know the FTP client name, and watch for password prompt windows, and then try to read the IP somewhere (Which most infected people already have typed in and hence never will type again)...whereas password capturing is very easy for a known protocol on a known port. It is much easier than a program trying to figure out which keystrokes are the username and password.
This is why almost all keystroke sniffing applications do screen shots and record mouse clicks, too. So that another person can interpret them. The only thing that fully-automated keystroke logging is even slightly useful is grabbing credit card numbers, which follow a known pattern, which trips and records all information near that...and it still takes someone figuring out the month and year and stuff.
Reading the file the password is stored in, OTOH, is certainly possible, and slightly easier than keystroke logging...but considering the range of applications used for FTP, and the fact some people don't store passwords, it's only going to give you a fraction of the passwords that watching network traffic would.
Whereas you could write something to parse a tcpdump log of outgoing port 21 connections that got you the FTP username, password, and IP using a damn shell script and grep. Which is probably not how they do it, but the point is, it's easy.
Re:SFTP support is still spotty ....
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Yours allows it, many don't. Many administrators, and a lot of distros to start with, don't allow unencrypted ssh connections.
Oh, and I left one thing out of my list...anonymous access.
Re:SFTP support is still spotty ....
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Both SFTP and FTP[S] are stupid damn standards.
What we need is a single port (Which lets out FTP[S]) protocol with optional encryption of the password, the control channel, and/or the data channel, to whatever level you want. It should be able to be used unencrypted (Which lets out SFTP), and shouldn't be commonly tied to actual account logins (Which more SFTP is.).
This is, in fact, what WebDAV is suppose to do, but WebDAV is just an incredibly crappy implementation, and it brings in its own problems by tying it to an HTTP server, as many people are already running HTTP servers with the wrong permissions for this, and HTTP POST is a spectacularly poorly-made protocol to start with.
In only partial jest, I suggest using IMAP, which seems to manage all this stuff without any problems at all.;)
Oh, and it also needs 'finished the upload' support, where files get uploaded in their entirely and then atomically replace existing files. As part of the protocol, if you turn it on, not via clients doing an 'upload and then rename'.
Also needs good resume support with CRC checking server-side, so that clients can check that a file that's partially uploaded or downloaded is the right one by asking for a CRC of the already transferred part.
In your universe, it's really 'far more trivial' to support dozens of different FTP and SCP programs, and/or to keystoke log and magically decide when someone's typing their username and password (And then somehow figure out what site they connected to?)...
...than to watch all outgoing traffic to port 21, wait for the standard FTP username and password prompt, and log the replies and IP?
Seriously, at this point so many people are missing the point, that I'm bemoaning the collective lack of intelligence on this site. Sniffing an FTP connection is MUCH easier than decoding obfuscated passwords and monitoring thousands of keystrokes.
A program compromises it. It then reports that IP, username, and password to some other tool.
That tool then logs in, searches for.html files. If it finds them it downloads, put in javascript links to the program mentioned above, and reuploads them.
Yes, but sniffing FTP packets from a local traffic intercept is much easier to automate than sniffing passwords while typed, or trying to decrypt them from the myriad programs out there.
All you have do is watch a known port for a known character pattern.
Keystroke loggers, OTOH, require human intervention, unless you're trying to grab easily recognizable strings like credit card numbers. Stealing credentials from programs likewise requires supporting a bunch of different programs and formats.
Re:Amusingly..
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While it is possible to read an FTP password as it travels over the wire, most hackers won't go to these lenghts to break into a shared hosting account.
You didn't read the fucking summary, did you? Apparently, malware is doing exactly that.
They figured that, since they were already intercepting net traffic (To screw with web traffic) they might as well sniff port 21 and see what passwords are being used for FTP.
They then use (probably automated) tools to break into the FTP site, see if there's any HTML files there, and add javascript that loads malicious pages.
Yeah, Twitter is useful as an RSS reader of sorts. Which in turn is just a newer version of a moderated newsgroup. Note that's not a criticism...Twitter is infinitely more accessible to broadcast on, and hence more useful in many circumstances.
I also think Twitter is fairly useless for the assumed purpose, because no one wants to narrate their own life unless they're...well...crazy. You call it the 'trendy teenager way', but the dirty little secret is that no one uses it that way for more than maybe a week. That is a 'use' that does not actually fill any 'want' of people.
That said, I have a Twitter account, also solely to monitor things, although in my case it's more emergencies. For example, the recent authorize.net outage had information updated via Twitter, which is sorta a perfect use for it, requiring no infrastructure like an RSS feed would.
And, yeah, it drives me crazy when people start criticizing tools for 'social' stuff. Twitter's a tool. I'm not finding it the most useful tool in the universe, and the claim purpose of it is, frankly, fairly silly, but it's still just a tool.
People who hate it are just like people who 'don't watch TV'. I always make them define what 'TV' is, so they have to explain they don't watch audiovideo signals broadcast to them, but they will watch them recorded on film (movies) or optical media (DVDs) or generated locally (computers). And then I get hung up over streaming video, and we finally have to add 'via radio waves' in there. Which makes them sound as stupid and arbitrary as they are.
It is perfectly reasonable to say you don't watch sitcoms, or soaps, or even fiction. It's not very reasonable to say 'TV' like that's some actual meaningful thing that you could like or dislike. A TV is a display interface!
Likewise, it's reasonable to say 'Yeah, I'm not going to spend my time reading 100 pointless status updates a day'. It's not reasonable to say 'I hate Twitter!'
The real problem here is people making business decisions based on reading a fucking report instead of hiring someone who actually knows what's going on. A report written by people who do not, themselves, know what is going on.
Twitter is not used for what people imagine it is used for. Period. No one has the time or inclination to actually send status updates constantly, and frankly that was a little idiotic to start with. It's sometimes used as a sort of broadband instant messages for you you need to do that, like if you're at a concert with a dozen friends and everyone's wandering around, but it's not that useful.
It's real funny to watch 'serious' people jump on the bandwagon that never actually existed, that normal human being got bored with after four days and just hooked up to their facebook status and now update both twice a day.
It's exceptionally funny that anyone ever bought Twitter's premise. People do not want to narrate their life in real time, unless they are somewhere very boring and have nothing else to do, at which point they will MST3k their life. They don't even want to narrate it retroactively unless they did something very interesting like go on vacation. Anyone with the slightest bit of intelligence could have told investors this.
And I don't know in what world this kid lives in, but I'm around teenagers a lot, and let me tell you, they use SMS all the time. I volunteer at a local theatre. We're doing Music Man. A dozen teenagers, all with cell phones. At intermission, half of them rush to get their phones and return messages.(1)
And no one chats over 'console games'. First of all, it requires everyone to be at their game console at the same time. (I'm assuming that there's some sort of global chat for newer systems that operates independent of games, and in all games...if not this is even stupider, as they'd have to be in the same game.)
And a lot of houses have their game consoles in, you know, the living room, which means they'd be chatting in public. In front of their parents. So yeah...
Seriously, this is why you don't rely on one person's experience. That might be how he and his friends chat, but it probably totally irrelevant to society at large.
Which, of course, makes it perfect for a Morgan Stanley report.
1) However, the crazy 'people IMing people who are room with each other' report that we got a few months ago is also bogus.
It's amazing how NASA is supposedly full of rocket scientists, and yet none of them apparently understand that we should be putting 'space stations' in actual orbits that they stay in by themselves.
So we don't have to ship up fuel, and when inevitable budget cuts come along the solution is 'mothball the station and come back a decade later' instead of 'safely deorbit the station so it doesn't crash on a city'.
Likewise, they shouldn't be putting them at crazy diagonal orbits that are hard to match.
The problem is that ISS was placed by idiots. It's not in an orbit it could maintain without fuel. (It skims the atmosphere and loses speed.)
What we should do is start building space stations in, you know, actual orbit, so if we feel they've become too expensive, we can walk away and come back a decade later and, hey, it's still there. Pump more air in, check the seals, kill the space weasels, and you can use it again.
But if we leave ISS for a few years, it will eventually fall down by itself, because, like I said, it was put in orbit by morons at a dumb altitude.
And a dumb direction, while we're at it. It should be in an equatorial orbit, or a near equatorial(1), and we should build a damn equator launch pad to get to it, instead of always having to match speed and direction to catch the thing in the crazy cockeyed orbit it's in.
I'm not sure how plausible it would be to fix the orbit. The direction is probably unfixable, but I don't understand why we couldn't run thrusters and raise the orbit.
1) You don't want it exactly equatorial, because then to get through it you have geosync orbit in the way...and that's where we put all out satellites and crap. But skew it 5%, and launch from the equator to catch it at the farthest north or south skew, and you'll miss all that junk, without expending too much extra energy.
Or you can go straight through it and drop off a satellite along the way, although you'd have to change your speed back and forth.
I mean, for the ultimate evidence, look at those free blood pressure machines. Free.
And an xray, of course, is just a photographs. Chiropractors, aka, pretend doctors, have those installed in their offices and use them without any problem. (And very soon, most xray machines will be converting to digital.)
So that's testing covered. 95% of it should be dirt cheap, and the other 5% should just be covered by local medical boards made up of retired doctors.
And medical ethics already prevent unnecessary procedures and medications. And patents are a lot more likely to halt those on their own, whereas they don't care what tests you're running on their blood. Testing is really the only thing that 'unneeded' stuff could be happening without notice.
So, frankly, I say, open it all up, and then if we have problems with specific tests, let's solve those then.
Or, hell, figure out how to do them cheaper. I'm of the opinion that an ounce of prevention is worth a ton of cure, and that we should, for example, run genetic screening on children and other tests, because all too often people walk around with years with medical problems with no symptoms...until they drop dead. (See John Ritter for one example, who had a heart defect that no one ever noticed.)
It would be nice if, for example, age three was 'heart year', where we'd give kids xrays of their heart, have someone listen to it, do an EKG, and send 99% of them happily on their way with no problem...and the other 1% we'd discover some tiny problem and give them some stuff to watch for, and schedule them for an appointment every other year.
And then do their lungs at age 4, and their liver at age 5, and whatever. I am clearly not a doctor, I don't know what to test and when, but the point is that eventually we should cycle though most non-invasive tests that have a reasonable chance of discovering something, and everything in people's bodies should be at least glanced at once to make sure there's nothing obviously wrong. And proper scheduling of these preventative tests could be based on age and scheduled in such a way as to not overload the system, or present a person with a bunch of tests a single year.
And test for genetic diseases when born. (As that's not time critical, we can do most of the tests in spare moments. No one cares if it takes a decade to finish the Parkinson's test for an infant.)
That only sounds expensive, it would actually be cheaper than just letting people wander around with easily correctable problems their entire life that no one has any idea of until they become critical.
You do realize I was joking about subsidizing salaries, right?
You have suggested almost the same thing as me, leveling the cost of importation to the cost of production here. I suggested raising it to domestic levels, and you suggested lowering it to foreign levels.
But in my universe, the government requires taxes to operate, so it will collect those, whereas in yours, you want it not only to not collect taxes from foreign businesses, but to not collect them from domestic ones, and presumably also give domestic businesses extra money to cover the difference in standard of living and health laws and whatever.
So they can build factories here and pay people as if they were getting children in Whateverstan to operate their deadly machines at 5 cents an hour, and the government will just pay for the building of their factories to safety standards and give them enough to pay everyone an extra $10 an hour.
Yeah, that plan makes sense. In crazy town, where the government has infinite money and doesn't need taxes. Oh, and where you want the government to pay businesses for how cheaply they could be making their crap somewhere else, which would require a lot of work to verify.
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I don't know, nudity there is only legal without any lewd gestures...and climbing a flagpole naked seems pretty lewd. :)
Granted, an OS and the software itself should be marking the correct priority of things...but they don't.
It's entirely reasonable of them to decide, if you do not, which of your packets are to be handled first. An argument can be made that if you've already decided that, they should just go by what you say, but very few applications actually mark things. (OTOH, this would certainly encourage more marking.)
What is unreasonable is them overselling bandwidth to such an extent they have to do this for everyone. If people use 50% of the bandwidth on average, and spike to 125% once a day or something, we'd have no problem.
It's the fact that, at this point, the average usage ratio during certain hours is above 100%. Every day, for hours.
The problem isn't how they decide, the problem is that a) they're so oversold they need to decide every moment of day, and b) they're so oversold they're just randomly capping services.
That said, they aren't deciding what is 'important', they're deciding what makes more customers happier, in theory. It might be more 'important' that you download a security patch, but having 1000 customers have web browsing work 25% faster because your important download is 25% slower is entirely reasonable for a company to do. (It is not, however, reasonable for a company to be in such a situation more than once a blue moon.)
The guy didn't kill any people during those 28 minute.
The prosecution claims that he murdered people in Florida, flew back to Georgia under a false name, the plane landed, he got off it, and then showed up on security cameras 28 minutes later at his hotel.
The defense is claiming that's impossible, he couldn't have made it from the airport in that time.
Incidentally, this is a stupid defense to start with.
As someone who's been in and out of the Atlanta airport, it is, indeed, busy, but if you don't have any checked luggage, and are smart enough to use the lower pick-up area, you can easily be out of that airport in 15 minutes if you're at far terminal. Maybe 10 if you actually planned it and were athletic enough to sprint.
Getting in, of course, is hell, but getting out is fairly easy. I've left the airport in 15 minutes.
I don't know what time this happened or how bad traffic would be at that time. There are indeed times of day that it would take more than 15-20 minutes to go 5 miles in Atlanta, although the airport itself doesn't have bad traffic.
No shit.
It's one thing for human beings to joke about contracts. That's understandable.
But lawyers should not. If they do, even if they don't have to pay, they should get disbarred for that behavior.
Technically, if that's on public property, them doing it naked is illegal, and because the contract requires an illegal thing, it is not valid.
If it's a fake, clicking "unsubscribe" only confirms that a live human is still receiving and reading the mail they're spamming out -- so they can mark it as a "good" address to resell to others and keep using themselves.
This has stopped being a sane worry years ago. Spammers don't give a flying fuck which addresses are legit anymore.
As I've been suggesting, TV networks should just give the user an application that can download damn TV in advance.
I download my TV shows. I could watch them on Hulu, but a) they are crappy quality, because b) they have to stream them, and the streaming still sucks for me.
So instead I download them illegally via torrents. I'd happily download them with ads and even some sort of DRM to self-destruct them. (Although I'd really like them to play in my existing XMBC.) But that is not an option.
Give me something that can download TV shows in advance, decrypt them when they air (Or even a day after), and I can watch them without worrying if I've stopped all my torrents or might need to make a VoIP call.
They aren't 'traffic shaping'.
Traffic shaping is a specific technical term that means 'assigning traffic priority in some manner'. Traffic shaping changes who gets served first, and that is all. It is how to order a line of traffic in some way other than 'first come first serve'. (Strictly speaking, even that order is 'traffic shaping'.)
These ISPs are, instead, traffic limiting, aka, bandwidth capping ports and protocol even when there's no other traffic.
Part of the problem is, in fact, ISPs assertion that limiting torrent traffic to 9k/s is because of 'traffic shaping', which is causing quite a lot of confusion among people who actually know what that term means, but don't know what the ISPs are doing.
It is, indeed, reasonable to traffic shape p2p to lower priority, so people's VoIP and even web browsing experience goes better. Shaping traffic so all 'downloads', as in, mostly automated large transfers, get lower priority than interactive traffic, is entirely a good idea. In addition to p2p, they should lower the priority of HTTP files over 1meg and FTP. (Need to watch for YouTube and Hulu and stuff, though.) Interactive first, downloads second.
What is unreasonable, however, is to force all p2p to 9k/s because the ISP doesn't like them.
They shouldn't be reducing the speed at all.
It's one thing, a quite reasonable thing, to alter priority, as in, who gets more of the pipe when it's full, although it's worth pointing out that deciding that is fairly complicated.
It's another thing to reduce speeds when the pipe isn't full.
And it's yet another thing to have over sold your bandwidth so much that everything is throttled, all the time.(1)
This is easy to check. The amount of people doing anything that requires real time communications at four in the morning is negligible. If you cannot get max speed then, it's one of the last two.
1) There are people trying to justify this by claiming what you are sold is 'max speed' and ISP have no requirement to give you that speed...but that's nonsense. Consumer protection laws don't work off what you're 'technically' selling, you can't operate an 'all you can eat' buffet with no food, for a close example. They work off what customers reasonable assume you're selling.
If ISPs want to sell some other form of connection, that would be fine, but they can't run around calling it by the 'max speed'. (Which, incidentally, it's not even that. Presumably 'max speed' means the max speed on any protocol, as they don't specify...and if they throttle p2p, that is not the max speed.)
And at this point something occurs to me that should have occurred sooner...which consoles actually have keyboards of any sort? It's hard enough typing on a phone, but the only console I've seen that could have a keyboard are those DSs with the touch screen, which could presumably turn into a keyboard for chatting.
But how the hell would you IM with a Wii? Or a PS3? We all remember how annoying it was to put our name in using a controller at the start of the game, which is one of the reason that Wiis actually have global 'saved names' called 'Mii's that you can pick out after entering their name once, and picking what they look like. (I don't own a Wii, but I've played one.)
DSs do have wifi, and a screen that you could 'type' on, so I think you've hit on something there....by 'console', this kid is talking about the Nintendo DS. (Incidentally, I've never referred to handheld games as 'consoles'.)
And, hearing it that way, it's just as stupid. So kids are now walking around with turned-on Nintendo DSs in their pocket and using them for IMing...when they're near wifi hotspots? And this is better than cell phones...which they carry anyway, are already on, and don't require wifi?
Yeah, maybe this kid and his three friends. Certainly not teenagers in general. At the local theatre, there is one DS that I see, and no one's passing messages on it.
I know where the fucking ISS is.
I was talking about where space stations should be.
You know, in actual non-decaying orbit. High earth orbit. Where we can use it go places, and not have to worry about geosync crap. (And, from what I understand, we've been slightly pushing things upward from geosync to fall apart, so we'd need to be at least a reasonable height above it.)
Although I'm willing to be convinced as to MEO...apparently, looking it up, there are less satellites there than I thought. I thought it was a busy place with all sorts of stuff wizzing around at different level, but apparently not. So high MEO might be a better place than HEO, especially with enough of a equatorial 'wobble' that we can launch outward and miss going through geosync from that directin.
Either way, low HEO or high MEO, it wouldn't be that far out of the way of the station to geosync, so we could actually stop having the silly problem where we can't reach both the ISS and geosync in the same launch, because the damn orbits are too different. With the right setup, we could actually launch a tiny spacecraft from the space station, to geosync, put/fix a satellite there, and wait until the station's orbit comes back around (Either we'd catch up to it, or it to us, depending on which orbit we choose.), and head right back to it, with very little fuel at all.
Considering that something like a third or more of space launches are to screw around with stuff in geosync orbit, it seems really idiotic to have placed our space station somewhere else entirely.
And under 400km was just stupid on top of that. Really, really stupid. Four times farther out, low medium earth orbit, would have still be difficult to reach the geosync from, but it would have at least not had atmospheric drag! Hell, 600km would have had noticeably less drag. We put it at literally the lowest place it could stay in orbit...if we constantly kept adjusting it.
And it should be roughly over the equator, so we don't have to randomly change directions to chase the damn thing down and match speeds.
Yes, I know the Russians won't like it, but that's why we need a damn treaty and some sort of equatorial land with guaranteed space launch capacity for all nations if they're willing to build a launch site there. (Or, even better, an international space program from top to bottom.)
And, again, I must ask, in what universe is it easier for a program to watch keystrokes to parse out a username and password, and then figure out the IP of the server, vs. just watching outgoing connections to port 21 and watching a standard FTP conversation where they know exactly where the username and password are, and what IP is connected to?
I'm really baffled as to how some people seem unable to realize that password capturing is very hard to automate for applications. You have to know the FTP client name, and watch for password prompt windows, and then try to read the IP somewhere (Which most infected people already have typed in and hence never will type again)...whereas password capturing is very easy for a known protocol on a known port. It is much easier than a program trying to figure out which keystrokes are the username and password.
This is why almost all keystroke sniffing applications do screen shots and record mouse clicks, too. So that another person can interpret them. The only thing that fully-automated keystroke logging is even slightly useful is grabbing credit card numbers, which follow a known pattern, which trips and records all information near that...and it still takes someone figuring out the month and year and stuff.
Reading the file the password is stored in, OTOH, is certainly possible, and slightly easier than keystroke logging...but considering the range of applications used for FTP, and the fact some people don't store passwords, it's only going to give you a fraction of the passwords that watching network traffic would.
Whereas you could write something to parse a tcpdump log of outgoing port 21 connections that got you the FTP username, password, and IP using a damn shell script and grep. Which is probably not how they do it, but the point is, it's easy.
Yours allows it, many don't. Many administrators, and a lot of distros to start with, don't allow unencrypted ssh connections.
Oh, and I left one thing out of my list...anonymous access.
Both SFTP and FTP[S] are stupid damn standards.
What we need is a single port (Which lets out FTP[S]) protocol with optional encryption of the password, the control channel, and/or the data channel, to whatever level you want. It should be able to be used unencrypted (Which lets out SFTP), and shouldn't be commonly tied to actual account logins (Which more SFTP is.).
This is, in fact, what WebDAV is suppose to do, but WebDAV is just an incredibly crappy implementation, and it brings in its own problems by tying it to an HTTP server, as many people are already running HTTP servers with the wrong permissions for this, and HTTP POST is a spectacularly poorly-made protocol to start with.
In only partial jest, I suggest using IMAP, which seems to manage all this stuff without any problems at all. ;)
Oh, and it also needs 'finished the upload' support, where files get uploaded in their entirely and then atomically replace existing files. As part of the protocol, if you turn it on, not via clients doing an 'upload and then rename'.
Also needs good resume support with CRC checking server-side, so that clients can check that a file that's partially uploaded or downloaded is the right one by asking for a CRC of the already transferred part.
In your universe, it's really 'far more trivial' to support dozens of different FTP and SCP programs, and/or to keystoke log and magically decide when someone's typing their username and password (And then somehow figure out what site they connected to?)...
Seriously, at this point so many people are missing the point, that I'm bemoaning the collective lack of intelligence on this site. Sniffing an FTP connection is MUCH easier than decoding obfuscated passwords and monitoring thousands of keystrokes.
'You' don't compromise the password.
A program compromises it. It then reports that IP, username, and password to some other tool.
That tool then logs in, searches for .html files. If it finds them it downloads, put in javascript links to the program mentioned above, and reuploads them.
It's not 'work' at all. It's fully automated.
Yes, but sniffing FTP packets from a local traffic intercept is much easier to automate than sniffing passwords while typed, or trying to decrypt them from the myriad programs out there.
All you have do is watch a known port for a known character pattern.
Keystroke loggers, OTOH, require human intervention, unless you're trying to grab easily recognizable strings like credit card numbers. Stealing credentials from programs likewise requires supporting a bunch of different programs and formats.
While it is possible to read an FTP password as it travels over the wire, most hackers won't go to these lenghts to break into a shared hosting account.
You didn't read the fucking summary, did you? Apparently, malware is doing exactly that.
They figured that, since they were already intercepting net traffic (To screw with web traffic) they might as well sniff port 21 and see what passwords are being used for FTP.
They then use (probably automated) tools to break into the FTP site, see if there's any HTML files there, and add javascript that loads malicious pages.
Yeah, Twitter is useful as an RSS reader of sorts. Which in turn is just a newer version of a moderated newsgroup. Note that's not a criticism...Twitter is infinitely more accessible to broadcast on, and hence more useful in many circumstances.
I also think Twitter is fairly useless for the assumed purpose, because no one wants to narrate their own life unless they're...well...crazy. You call it the 'trendy teenager way', but the dirty little secret is that no one uses it that way for more than maybe a week. That is a 'use' that does not actually fill any 'want' of people.
That said, I have a Twitter account, also solely to monitor things, although in my case it's more emergencies. For example, the recent authorize.net outage had information updated via Twitter, which is sorta a perfect use for it, requiring no infrastructure like an RSS feed would.
And, yeah, it drives me crazy when people start criticizing tools for 'social' stuff. Twitter's a tool. I'm not finding it the most useful tool in the universe, and the claim purpose of it is, frankly, fairly silly, but it's still just a tool.
People who hate it are just like people who 'don't watch TV'. I always make them define what 'TV' is, so they have to explain they don't watch audiovideo signals broadcast to them, but they will watch them recorded on film (movies) or optical media (DVDs) or generated locally (computers). And then I get hung up over streaming video, and we finally have to add 'via radio waves' in there. Which makes them sound as stupid and arbitrary as they are.
It is perfectly reasonable to say you don't watch sitcoms, or soaps, or even fiction. It's not very reasonable to say 'TV' like that's some actual meaningful thing that you could like or dislike. A TV is a display interface!
Likewise, it's reasonable to say 'Yeah, I'm not going to spend my time reading 100 pointless status updates a day'. It's not reasonable to say 'I hate Twitter!'
The real problem here is people making business decisions based on reading a fucking report instead of hiring someone who actually knows what's going on. A report written by people who do not, themselves, know what is going on.
Twitter is not used for what people imagine it is used for. Period. No one has the time or inclination to actually send status updates constantly, and frankly that was a little idiotic to start with. It's sometimes used as a sort of broadband instant messages for you you need to do that, like if you're at a concert with a dozen friends and everyone's wandering around, but it's not that useful.
It's real funny to watch 'serious' people jump on the bandwagon that never actually existed, that normal human being got bored with after four days and just hooked up to their facebook status and now update both twice a day.
It's exceptionally funny that anyone ever bought Twitter's premise. People do not want to narrate their life in real time, unless they are somewhere very boring and have nothing else to do, at which point they will MST3k their life. They don't even want to narrate it retroactively unless they did something very interesting like go on vacation. Anyone with the slightest bit of intelligence could have told investors this.
And I don't know in what world this kid lives in, but I'm around teenagers a lot, and let me tell you, they use SMS all the time. I volunteer at a local theatre. We're doing Music Man. A dozen teenagers, all with cell phones. At intermission, half of them rush to get their phones and return messages.(1)
And no one chats over 'console games'. First of all, it requires everyone to be at their game console at the same time. (I'm assuming that there's some sort of global chat for newer systems that operates independent of games, and in all games...if not this is even stupider, as they'd have to be in the same game.)
And a lot of houses have their game consoles in, you know, the living room, which means they'd be chatting in public. In front of their parents. So yeah...
Seriously, this is why you don't rely on one person's experience. That might be how he and his friends chat, but it probably totally irrelevant to society at large.
Which, of course, makes it perfect for a Morgan Stanley report.
1) However, the crazy 'people IMing people who are room with each other' report that we got a few months ago is also bogus.
It's amazing how NASA is supposedly full of rocket scientists, and yet none of them apparently understand that we should be putting 'space stations' in actual orbits that they stay in by themselves.
So we don't have to ship up fuel, and when inevitable budget cuts come along the solution is 'mothball the station and come back a decade later' instead of 'safely deorbit the station so it doesn't crash on a city'.
Likewise, they shouldn't be putting them at crazy diagonal orbits that are hard to match.
The problem is that ISS was placed by idiots. It's not in an orbit it could maintain without fuel. (It skims the atmosphere and loses speed.)
What we should do is start building space stations in, you know, actual orbit, so if we feel they've become too expensive, we can walk away and come back a decade later and, hey, it's still there. Pump more air in, check the seals, kill the space weasels, and you can use it again.
But if we leave ISS for a few years, it will eventually fall down by itself, because, like I said, it was put in orbit by morons at a dumb altitude.
And a dumb direction, while we're at it. It should be in an equatorial orbit, or a near equatorial(1), and we should build a damn equator launch pad to get to it, instead of always having to match speed and direction to catch the thing in the crazy cockeyed orbit it's in.
I'm not sure how plausible it would be to fix the orbit. The direction is probably unfixable, but I don't understand why we couldn't run thrusters and raise the orbit.
1) You don't want it exactly equatorial, because then to get through it you have geosync orbit in the way...and that's where we put all out satellites and crap. But skew it 5%, and launch from the equator to catch it at the farthest north or south skew, and you'll miss all that junk, without expending too much extra energy.
Or you can go straight through it and drop off a satellite along the way, although you'd have to change your speed back and forth.
I mean, for the ultimate evidence, look at those free blood pressure machines. Free.
And an xray, of course, is just a photographs. Chiropractors, aka, pretend doctors, have those installed in their offices and use them without any problem. (And very soon, most xray machines will be converting to digital.)
So that's testing covered. 95% of it should be dirt cheap, and the other 5% should just be covered by local medical boards made up of retired doctors.
And medical ethics already prevent unnecessary procedures and medications. And patents are a lot more likely to halt those on their own, whereas they don't care what tests you're running on their blood. Testing is really the only thing that 'unneeded' stuff could be happening without notice.
So, frankly, I say, open it all up, and then if we have problems with specific tests, let's solve those then.
Or, hell, figure out how to do them cheaper. I'm of the opinion that an ounce of prevention is worth a ton of cure, and that we should, for example, run genetic screening on children and other tests, because all too often people walk around with years with medical problems with no symptoms...until they drop dead. (See John Ritter for one example, who had a heart defect that no one ever noticed.)
It would be nice if, for example, age three was 'heart year', where we'd give kids xrays of their heart, have someone listen to it, do an EKG, and send 99% of them happily on their way with no problem...and the other 1% we'd discover some tiny problem and give them some stuff to watch for, and schedule them for an appointment every other year.
And then do their lungs at age 4, and their liver at age 5, and whatever. I am clearly not a doctor, I don't know what to test and when, but the point is that eventually we should cycle though most non-invasive tests that have a reasonable chance of discovering something, and everything in people's bodies should be at least glanced at once to make sure there's nothing obviously wrong. And proper scheduling of these preventative tests could be based on age and scheduled in such a way as to not overload the system, or present a person with a bunch of tests a single year.
And test for genetic diseases when born. (As that's not time critical, we can do most of the tests in spare moments. No one cares if it takes a decade to finish the Parkinson's test for an infant.)
That only sounds expensive, it would actually be cheaper than just letting people wander around with easily correctable problems their entire life that no one has any idea of until they become critical.
You do realize I was joking about subsidizing salaries, right?
You have suggested almost the same thing as me, leveling the cost of importation to the cost of production here. I suggested raising it to domestic levels, and you suggested lowering it to foreign levels.
But in my universe, the government requires taxes to operate, so it will collect those, whereas in yours, you want it not only to not collect taxes from foreign businesses, but to not collect them from domestic ones, and presumably also give domestic businesses extra money to cover the difference in standard of living and health laws and whatever.
So they can build factories here and pay people as if they were getting children in Whateverstan to operate their deadly machines at 5 cents an hour, and the government will just pay for the building of their factories to safety standards and give them enough to pay everyone an extra $10 an hour.
Yeah, that plan makes sense. In crazy town, where the government has infinite money and doesn't need taxes. Oh, and where you want the government to pay businesses for how cheaply they could be making their crap somewhere else, which would require a lot of work to verify.