It' does have a GPS, but it's not for E911.... you could register the location if that were all it was.
They won't allow the device to use unlicensed spectrum. Since the frequencies that a company has licensed will vary from place to place, they want the device to know where it's located. It can then determine which frequencies it is licensed to use in that particular area. You'd think a reverse-IP location would be adequate, but the FCC apparently "requires" that they do this with GPS. I had read stories that some customers were allowed to request a bypass (AT&T would remotely program the device location and tell it to ignore the GPS and work anyway) but the FCC forced them to put an end to that practice (the FCC is always so "helpful" like that. )
There are more ironies... not only does the device need to be near a window where it can pick up a GPS lock, it also tests the signal strength of the standard AT&T towers. It dials it's own signal strength back IF it thinks that the outside signal strength should be good enough. And since the device now has to be located in a window, it'll get better signal than you could realistically get inside your home. And of course being at a window, you cannot locate the device in a central location to offer coverage to most of the home. The result is that this makes the micro-cell transmit the weakest possible signal (and of course you bought it SPECIFICALLY to overcome the problem of weak signals) and if you're not relatively close, the device is worthless.
It gets worse. AT&T allows a hand-off of a call from micro-cell to regular towers, but it can't do a hand-off in the other direction. And since towers vary their signal strength regularly and the micro-cell is now using it's wimpiest transmit power, it takes very little to make the phone think that it needs to switch to an outside tower. The result is that if you get an outside tower boost from... say 1 bar to maybe 3 bars, your phone will switch to the outside tower. A few moments later the outside tower drops back to it's more typical 1 bar signal strength. Since the call cannot do a hand-off back to the micro-cell... the call just drops.
After months of frustration, I discovered the solution. There's an external antenna jack on the back. If you ask AT&T about it, they can't tell you anything about it. They don't sell any accessories or even know what sort of antenna would work with this. You can get an external GPS antenna with a long cord (I bought one with a 25' cord.) This allows you to get the micro-cell away from the window and closer to the center of the house. BUT.. the micro-cell also varies its own transmit power based on whether it's able to detect much outdoor AT&T signal. It's in your best interest to make sure the micro-cell gets the weakest signal you can manage. I located my micro-cell to my basement... in a small closet under the stairs. The GPS antenna is in a basement window. Now the micro-cell still gets the GPS lock, but it doesn't get any outside AT&T signal... consequently it's actually willing to put out a much stronger signal and it works all around the house.
You won't be able to buy the antenna from AT&T. You'll need do a search for a GPS antenna that works with the AT&T micro-cell. I found one via Amazon for $30... one of the best $30 I ever spent. Now the device actually works as intended.
While he is perhaps wrong to have pinned the blame on the iPad (after all it wasn't the first... it was merely the most recently successful) it is true that sacrificing trees in order to disseminate information will probably eventually become more and more obscure.
Now that we've settled that, I'd like to take up a few other important issues that we've all forgotten. The invention of the steam engine put many canvas makers out of business in the ship yards and the invention of the automobile wiped out many other professions responsible for saddling and harnessing beast of burden for our transportation needs. And then there's that dastardly Mr. Edison -- if not for figuring out a way to harness electricity for light and string wire from building to building and pole to pole, we could still be employing thousands of people in the hunting and slaughtering of wales so we could get lamp oil to light the streets -- not to mention the lamp-lighters we'd be employing.
I am confident that as soon as Mr. Jackson (who feels strongly about such injustices) is reminded of these facts that he will only travel internationally by sailing ship and will ride from town to town on horse, oxen, or mule while reading news on sacrificed trees under the light of lamps run on the oil of wales hunted to extinction.... you know... so as to not appear to be a hypocrite.
Lawyers tend to have "tiered" pricing. e.g. if you bring them a case and they can settle the case by merely writing a simple letter, and the other side agrees and decides to settle, then the lawyer's cut tends to be small. The more work they have to do (e.g. if it looks like it's going to court, or if it actually DOES go to court, or if it goes to court and then has to go to appeals, etc.) the larger the chunk.
And I suppose as an "IT guy", your model might be similar. E.g. if you can help someone merely by answering a simple question or a short email, you might not charge anything at all. But if your client were a lawyer, who asked you to spend several days being deposed about the workings of a laptop security program that takes pictures via the built-in webcam and then you had to go to court to testify... well you might actually *charge* for that much work. And the lawyer would have to pay you for it whether they win the case or not.
Still, I am a bit surprised that the lawyer managed to take about 70%.
In other news, buggy whip makers think congress should mandate that all cars have horse-shafts and harnesses attached to the front... you know... just in case you still want REAL horsepower.
I cross this same border regularly, and after reading the story, something is confusing to me. The story says that he was "returning to Canada". When returning to Canada there's a toll booth on the US side where you pay the bridge toll (staffed by employees of the bridge authority -- who are not customs agents). The customs inspection is always on the far side of the bridge, in this case the Canadian side. This would have been staffed by Canadian customs agents.
Does this article mean to say that there were US Customs & Border inspection at the toll booth on the US side? That would be very irregular. The only time I have ever seen an exception is during the weekend of the Mackinac Race when police are trying to curtail drunk driving across the bridge (there's a huge party just before the race, heavy drinking, etc.).
I really feel for Mr. Watts. I'm just trying to understand what happened.
I noticed the article paints a picture as though this law will effectively break the functionality of the web and/or make it so annoying that nobody will want to put up with it. I think that's completely wrong. The conclusion that this is "Breathtakingly Stupid" is correct, but not for the reasons stated in the article.
From the article:
Here's what's coming. The now-finalised text says that a cookie can be stored on a user's computer, or accessed from that computer, only if the user "has given his or her consent, having been provided with clear and comprehensive information".
An exception exists where the cookie is "strictly necessary" for the provision of a service "explicitly requested" by the user – so cookies can take a user from a product page to a checkout without the need for consent. Other cookies will require prior consent, though.
Ok.... so you wont be barraged with consent requests every time you visit any web site that needs to maintain session state between two or more pages or track the fact that you've logged in.
So it would seem that the good news in all of this is that this really only pertains to those cookies used for annoying things like advertising and market analytics & profiling; those things that invade your privacy....or does it?
What's in a cookie? That all depends on the cookie. Some cookies store all the data being tracked by the cookie. But other cookies are essentially an index -- they store no real data, but merely help the server identify you to the server where the real data is kept. This is where things go gray and the law becomes "breathtakingly stupid."
The law assumes that websites intent on "violating your privacy" (whatever that means) actually need to use cookies in order to do it. This is like wanting to outlaw murder and in order to so, just pass a law that bans handguns (as if handguns are the only way someone might commit the crime.)
Rather than create a separate cookie which exists for the exclusive purpose of marketing analytics (or whatever other violation of a user's privacy the website or it's partners want to perform), now the website just needs to create a 'meta cookie', if you will. They have carte blanche to create a session cookie for maintaing your login or user session (essential the operation of the website) without your consent. They can create what you could think of as 'server side meta-cookies' -- where instead of storing a cookie in your web browser, they store the cookie and it's value as an attribute of your session profile information which is stored only on the server. The only cookie you actually have is your login / session cookie.
Under this scenario, the law only drives the activities of user tracking deeper into the shadows. Before you knew they were tracking you... you had a cookie. But you could delete those and know that they were gone. NOW they'll track you based on session attributes you cannot delete because it's on someone else's server.
There's a huge gray-area around the "strictly necessary" clause. If your website is entirely ad-revenue-funded, and without tracking you wouldn't be able to provide a service to your users at all, is this "strictly necessary"? Google is ad-revenue funded. Then there are sites like Amazon which performs tracking for cross-sell / up-sell purposes (e.g. "Do you want this USB printer cable that goes with that printer you just put in your cart that 98% of the other people that bought that same product discovered they needed because no printer actually comes with a cable?") After all the data needed to track those buying habits isn't essential in order to track your user session or maintain your shopping cart, but it sure is useful to the end-consumer and they're not necessarily collecting it to invade your privacy.
Not so fast. By your logic, all users also consented to having malware on their computers, and all actions performed by that malware would have happened with user consent. After all.... new computers don't just un-box themselves, plug themselves into power and go find a network connection... the user had to do that.
Just because you know what a cookie is and are aware that you can configure your browser to block some or all of them, doesn't mean everybody else does. Nor does it imply it's their own fault for being ignorant. I use the "80 year old grandma" test. There are numerous people who barely manage to use a computer, but feel compelled to (even though they are extremely uncomfortable with them) because more and more companies and services expect that users will have a computer.
Examples: (1) In many cities and towns, daily-editions of the newspaper are no longer available for home delivery. If you want the news you'll need a computer so you can read it online. (2) Wireless phone providers generally do not have printed copies of your contract agreements, terms & services, etc. If you want to view those, you'll have to go online. I've even asked some carriers if they can mail me a copy... the answer is "no, it is only available online."
Anymore, a computer is becoming something households are required to have and use, whether they like it or not, and whether they know how to use, manage, or configure their software or not. Browsers passively accept cookies and respond to cookie requests all day long; having no idea what the cookie is used for. In no way does this imply user consent.
The patent appears to be specific as to purpose and how it would work. So specific, in fact, that Twitter doesn't intrude at all. In order to make Twitter fit so as to be intruding into their patents, you have to broaden the application of the idea so that the technical implementation is no longer important.
Upon broadening the interpretation, a lot of prior art clouds the validity of TechRadium's patents (e.g. using a megaphone to shout at a large crowd is technically a "message sender" sending out one message to a whole lot of "message receivers" who "subscribed" to listen to the message (by showing up at the event) -- so apparently the idea itself isn't really new.
It doesn't stop there.
You may think the megaphone is a silly comparison or clumsy implementation of it... the point is the idea is not new, nor did TechRadium invent it. So what did they invent? Further delve in with some of the things that make their message broadcast system more elegant (yes, well we added this nifty little database so we can manage a publish/scriber model that's a managed and able to be quite a bit more selective than using a megaphone to shout at a crowd), then there's lots of prior art to show that the concept of the pub/sub model in IT predates their oldest patent by many years. The reason the concept was coined the "pub/sub" model is because it worked just like a newspaper or magazine that publishes content and subscribers (a.k.a. customers or readers) could choose to subscribe and, in the case of a publisher with different kinds of magazines, they could even decide which magazines they want to receive. They would of course use some sort of record keeping system so as not confuse what each subscriber wanted to receive. So apparently that idea isn't new either.
Essentially what Twitter "copies" is all the same stuff TechRadium had to also copy in order to come up with their implementation. This is mildly reminiscent of Apple's lawsuit against Microsoft back in the mid 80's when they claimed MS used their desktop GUI idea -- then it turned out BOTH of them got the idea from Xerox. Twitter's implementation would be (a) different and (b) probably a lot more scalable. Twitter has to handle millions of subscribers... TechRadium's solution probably only has to handle a few hundred and *maybe* a couple thousand.... tops. In order to achieve these differences in scale, the implementation is likely to be radically different.
In addition to FOSS, don't forget that there's also SaaS options (Software as a Service). For example... could you use Google Mail & Calendar instead of Outlook & Exchange for mail & calendar?
Buy a replacement at full price? You must have friends, right? Those friends must have old phones they don't use anymore because *they* got new phones to extend their contracts.
Just find a friend with a phone they don't use anymore -- they'll probably give it to you.
If you don't have any friends, just buy a used phone on eBay for a couple bucks.
It's about the fact that it can be 'tracked' -- just as the US has used cellphone tracking to hunt down bad-guys overseas, they can do the same thing to us if they know what cellphone we have.
It's not about the 'archival' of data. The Blackberry taps into YOUR traditional mail infrastructure. If you back it up, then your messages are archived.
No, it's more about the fact that an external company is granted access (usually via VPN) to your internal network (or at least part of it) and, more specifically, they get to keep a copy of your authentication credentials (so they can watch your new mail arrive, copy it, and delivery it to your device). Allowing a 3rd party company VPN access to a US government network with the Whitehouse mail server and, oh by the way, a copy of the president's username and password... well NOW maybe you can understand why they're nervous about security.
Frankly it would be better if he were addicted to an iPhone. At least with that solution you can host your email on any IMAP compliant mail server you want and nobody but you needs a copy of your security certificates, VPN gateway access, or username & passwords.
Using transmitters is only one way to monitor tire pressure. The tire pressure changes all throughout the day based on temperature. The point of these sensors isn't to report when the pressure changes in all tires equally. They're only supposed to notice when the tire pressure changes non-uniformly (e.g. just one tire is low). They also don't report if a tire is low by a pound or two... it has to be a fairly radical difference (e.g. 10 lbs low) to get noticed (I suppose the threshold that triggers the alarm probably varies by maker)
But the use of transmitters per each wheel turns out to be the expensive way to solve the problem. There's an another system that simply uses the rotational speed of each tire. The idea is that if a car is traveling in a straight line and one tire is low (say it has 20 lbs of pressure whereas all the other tires have 30), the rotational speed of that wheel will be different from the rest. The computer will notice this.
It's slightly more complicated than this because wheels normally do rotate at different speeds when a car is turning, but in that case all the wheels will rotate at different speeds (not just one of them) and the computer can tell the difference.
If you're thinking "Yes, but then you have to install a speedometer for each wheel and that would be expensive too.", then you've forgotten that any car with ABS or Traction Control already has an individual speedometer for each wheel. That's how the ABS system can determine if one wheel has locked up (if under braking conditions it is not spinning at all or at least not at a speed consistent with the rest of the wheels), or how traction control can tell if one wheel is spinning on something slippery (because under acceleration one wheel is spinning faster than the rest.)
The article is correct in that it would be possible to track a car using it's TPMS if it uses the radio transmitter system. But to draw the conclusion that our government only passed this law to spy on us is perhaps a bit hasty given that the law doesn't demand the TPMS system involve radio transmitters and there's a non-transmitting system that's cheaper to implement.
The "problem" with the 2nd Internet is that it will almost immediately become a sanctuary for 2nd Internet cyber criminals. That's why I recommend creating a THIRD Interweb thingy and just saving us all the time and bother of setting up a 2nd Internet.
I'm not sure what point they're trying to make in the article other than churn up some FUD. If I encrypt a file on my computer with a password or key and then lose my key, I cannot easily decrypt that file. So poor management of my key could make me vulnerable to loss of data -- but that's not the same level of risk as theft of data (which may be worse than losing it.)
As several others have pointed out, a 'revoked' key in no way keeps you from getting at your data. In the same way that a bank can 'revoke' a credit card, the actual card itself doesn't disappear... it's just not trusted to do anything. Unlike the credit card system, most any security software that checks key revocation lists can easily be told to ignore the fact that the key is revoked. The bits needed to perform the encryption or decryption still exist -- you just get a warning that someone says you should not trust it... but that's not the same thing as saying you can not trust it.
What that really means is you just need a good key management scheme. Whereas most people would just use a single private key, in a corporate environment you've got the problem of project-related work that might be encrypted by an employee still belongs to the company. If an employee quits, is terminated, gets run over by the beer truck, etc. etc. then the company would like to have a way to get the data that they rightfully own. This is what "key escrow" systems are for. But escrowed keys would ideally be kept in a very safe place. Of course the fact that an escrowed key exists at all allows the individual to repudiate the contents of the encrypted file -- someone else could have altered it. The solution to that conundrum is to create a "signing" key which does not encrypt and which is not escrowed, and an encryption key which is not used for signing, but which is escrowed.
So back to the FUD... I suppose all these companies have an interest in creating the fear, getting the average IT person to decide to look into it, realize what they're missing, then realize that they probably need to hire a professional security business to help build a proper key distribution and escrow system.
Unfortunately the article is light on details. While $160 is overpaying for an 80GB hard drive (esp. if it's only 5400 rpm), it's probably NOT overpaying if it includes the cost of installation as well as the cost of re-installing the OS. While the article certainly implies that they did, in fact, include the cost of installation, he doesn't mention if they did any other service or whether they broke the price down for him.
I have upgraded the hard drive on one of my old MacBook Pros and there's external compartment to access the drive. There's no quick-access panel to make this easy. The bottom case of the laptop has to be carefully opened. An experienced person could probably swap the drive in maybe 20 minutes, but then it also has to be tested and get an OS installed and that'll take longer.
Everyone jumps on the auto-parts law, but remember that law only applies to parts that can't be reconditioned. There are a number of car parts that can be reconditioned and when you have these replaced you generally do not get them back. But typically you'd know up front if you were getting new vs. reconditioned parts and if there's a deposit, etc. for the failed part. If you buy a new car battery -- even if you intend to replace it yourself, the parts store is generally required by law to charge you a 'core deposit' fee, which you only get back when you return the failed battery.
I'm amazed that this person writes that they felt they were being overcharged but then did not ask about the price before agreeing to let them do the service -- then made assumptions.
All that aside, I too would be very worried about my data falling in to the wrong hands. But isn't that ALL THE MORE reason why he should have asked questions resolved any doubt BEFORE agreeing to the service?
The processor is open-source (OpenSPARC), Sun's own operating system port on the processor is also open-source (OpenSolaris), and of course Linux is open-source. If someone wants to go through the labor-of-love to port Linux to SPARC then there's nothing "hidden".
Sun sells x86-based machines that run Linux and I think they'll even sell you a Linux distro to go with the box (of course you don't need to get from them... any distro will do.)
Based on the Drake Equation there is likely to be some quantity of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe making similar observations. Why can't we just blame them?
Did I miss something when I read the story? I'm failing to see how this is ES&S' fault.
Let me see if I got my facts straight... (a) California certifies a model A100. (b) ES&S introduces a "new" model called the A200. (c) The A200 is NOT a certified machine. (d) The voting districts approach a vendor and ask to buy a product (A200 e-voting machine) from a vendor. (e) The vendor sells them what they asked for.
Assuming I didn't miss any details, the fact that the districts asked to buy e-voting machines which were not certified as an 'approved' model is hardly the vendor's fault.
This is NOT a problem with ES&S or the A200 or even the old A100. This is a problem with buyers of e-voting machines in California. If anyone needs to be scrutinized and punished here, it's them. Even if ES&S had (accurately) told the buyers the the A200 was essentially just an A100 because it uses the same boards and wiring but the boards are mounted in a different location, they still didn't represent it as an A100 or as a 'certified' machine. The decision to assume it was ok to buy a different model was up to the buyers. Nobody forced this on them.
Had ES&S made changes (no matter how trivial) to the certified A100 and then CONTINUED to sell these modified versions still as model A100, then that would have been a misrepresentation.
Don't misconstrue why reviewers bash products
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The Perfect Phone Storm?
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Columnists don't necessarly bash products becasue they hate the product. They're in a ratings business. If everyone writes articles that praises a product, we'll all yawn and nobody will bother to read them. By bashing a product -- especially if it's a product that everyone else loves, this creates controversey.
We see this on slashdot all the time... we call it 'trolling'.
As for the iPhone we'll have to wait and see. While I can find things to criticize in Apple's products (as the saying goes.... you can't please all of the people all of the time) they do have a reputation for good products.
Did anybody *really* have high hopes about the Microsoft Zune? Maybe fan-boys did, but most people in the industry have come to expect that getting software from Microsoft is almost like getting software from the former KGB (it's loaded with 'bugs' and they maintain more control over your device than you do -- why should the Zune be any different.)
The high expectation about the iPhone is because so far most phones suck. It would be really nice to have a phone that sucks less than the one I have now. That phone is a Treo 650 that used to crash 3 times per day. Now it only screws up a few time per week and for some strange reason I am happy with this because I fear that every *other* phone will be just as bad and I'll just end up locked into another contract.
Speaking of contracts... AT&T (Cingular) says they plan to reelase "new phone plans" on June 29th which go with the iPhone. Having a very low opinion of phone companies, my assumption is that this will be a plan intended to rape buyers, but make up for the high price tag by offering poor service. (Please God tell me it isn't so) My hope is that since Apple was successfully able to keep the music industry from charging more than.99 per song the iTunes Music Store, that maybe Apple's exclusive deal with AT&T came with a clause that also limits what AT&T can charge for the rate plans on the phone in order to keep that exclusivity. I expect to have my sanity challenged for even being willing to consider such a possibility, but remember that since AT&T stands between Apple and Apple's customers. They can totally make or break the success of this product. Apple has a lot at stake and is generally not stupid when it comes to negotiations, so I'm hopeful that their agreement with AT&T keeps AT&T in check or gives Apple the right to sell the product through other carriers if AT&T can't perform.
I was a bit surprised that all the pictures only show off the outside and none of the links follow to info on what these things look like on the inside or how they work.
Basically the outside of the box has hookups for power, cooling water, and network. Everything on the inside is pre-wired. Servers aren't included, but they are designed to serve as the transport container for the servers -- not just a place to put servers once the box arrives (the racks have a shock-absorbing suspension system so that servers can be transported in the container without the need to unrack them or pack them for shipping.). When it arrives it just needs to be "plugged in" and it's literally ready to go. Since it really is a standard shipping container, all rules about shipping containers apply -- e.g. there's no shortage of trucks, trains, or boats designed specifically to hold them. They are structurally sturdy and can be stacked tall just like containers on a cargo ship.
...and I agree. I suspect the reason they wrote the law as they did was so that someone trying to piggy-back on a private network (e.g. sitting out on the street in a residential neighborhood and pinching off someone's unsecured WiFi where you clearly do NOT have permission and clearly the owner did NOT expect someone to be piggy-backing the network) would be protected by the law. But I think this is pretty stupid of the owner.
This is like me deciding to store all my money in nice little stacks of dollar bills on my front lawn just inches off the sidewalk and expecting passers by to NOT pick it up by using the rationale that it's my land and I can store my money wherever I want. Compound this with the notion that the wind just blew my dollar bills off my lawn and down the street and you picked it up without even having to step into my yard and this is basically an analogy for what's happening here. Yes... he knew it wasn't his own dollar bill... but the owner of the money didn't even care enough to keep it from blowing away can they really complain that someone else picked it up?
The means to "secure" a WiFi network are included with every WiFi network. Yes we all know that 128-bit WEP can be cracked in a minute (not to be confused with WPA which, so far, seems to be very secure)... but the mere fact that the network used any security at all (no matter how bad) implies that permission was not being freely granted to others to use the network.
This situation is a coffee shop which allow open and free access to their network. Most businesses with more than one location have a sophisticated enough network that, even if the access is free, require users to click to accept some terms of service and acceptable usage before using the network. The owner of the shop apparently had nothing. They advertise a free network, allow their SSID to broadcast, no encryption, no page to accept terms of service or acceptable usage policy, which all pretty much implies that they've rolled out the welcome mat. Then all of a sudden they decide that one particular person was expected to know that they weren't welcome to use the network at a time when everyone else was welcome to use the same network (and I agree it's rude that he never purchased anything). We infer that the distinguishing factor was that he didn't go inside the coffee shop and make a purchase -- although the coffee shop doesn't apparently state that a purchase is required.
I'm really having a hard time understanding how this guy was actually convicted of anything -- did this guy not have an attorney... or maybe just a really bad one?
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It' does have a GPS, but it's not for E911.... you could register the location if that were all it was.
They won't allow the device to use unlicensed spectrum. Since the frequencies that a company has licensed will vary from place to place, they want the device to know where it's located. It can then determine which frequencies it is licensed to use in that particular area. You'd think a reverse-IP location would be adequate, but the FCC apparently "requires" that they do this with GPS. I had read stories that some customers were allowed to request a bypass (AT&T would remotely program the device location and tell it to ignore the GPS and work anyway) but the FCC forced them to put an end to that practice (the FCC is always so "helpful" like that. )
There are more ironies... not only does the device need to be near a window where it can pick up a GPS lock, it also tests the signal strength of the standard AT&T towers. It dials it's own signal strength back IF it thinks that the outside signal strength should be good enough. And since the device now has to be located in a window, it'll get better signal than you could realistically get inside your home. And of course being at a window, you cannot locate the device in a central location to offer coverage to most of the home. The result is that this makes the micro-cell transmit the weakest possible signal (and of course you bought it SPECIFICALLY to overcome the problem of weak signals) and if you're not relatively close, the device is worthless.
It gets worse. AT&T allows a hand-off of a call from micro-cell to regular towers, but it can't do a hand-off in the other direction. And since towers vary their signal strength regularly and the micro-cell is now using it's wimpiest transmit power, it takes very little to make the phone think that it needs to switch to an outside tower. The result is that if you get an outside tower boost from... say 1 bar to maybe 3 bars, your phone will switch to the outside tower. A few moments later the outside tower drops back to it's more typical 1 bar signal strength. Since the call cannot do a hand-off back to the micro-cell... the call just drops.
After months of frustration, I discovered the solution. There's an external antenna jack on the back. If you ask AT&T about it, they can't tell you anything about it. They don't sell any accessories or even know what sort of antenna would work with this. You can get an external GPS antenna with a long cord (I bought one with a 25' cord.) This allows you to get the micro-cell away from the window and closer to the center of the house. BUT.. the micro-cell also varies its own transmit power based on whether it's able to detect much outdoor AT&T signal. It's in your best interest to make sure the micro-cell gets the weakest signal you can manage. I located my micro-cell to my basement... in a small closet under the stairs. The GPS antenna is in a basement window. Now the micro-cell still gets the GPS lock, but it doesn't get any outside AT&T signal... consequently it's actually willing to put out a much stronger signal and it works all around the house.
You won't be able to buy the antenna from AT&T. You'll need do a search for a GPS antenna that works with the AT&T micro-cell. I found one via Amazon for $30... one of the best $30 I ever spent. Now the device actually works as intended.
While he is perhaps wrong to have pinned the blame on the iPad (after all it wasn't the first... it was merely the most recently successful) it is true that sacrificing trees in order to disseminate information will probably eventually become more and more obscure.
Now that we've settled that, I'd like to take up a few other important issues that we've all forgotten. The invention of the steam engine put many canvas makers out of business in the ship yards and the invention of the automobile wiped out many other professions responsible for saddling and harnessing beast of burden for our transportation needs. And then there's that dastardly Mr. Edison -- if not for figuring out a way to harness electricity for light and string wire from building to building and pole to pole, we could still be employing thousands of people in the hunting and slaughtering of wales so we could get lamp oil to light the streets -- not to mention the lamp-lighters we'd be employing.
I am confident that as soon as Mr. Jackson (who feels strongly about such injustices) is reminded of these facts that he will only travel internationally by sailing ship and will ride from town to town on horse, oxen, or mule while reading news on sacrificed trees under the light of lamps run on the oil of wales hunted to extinction.... you know... so as to not appear to be a hypocrite.
Lawyers tend to have "tiered" pricing. e.g. if you bring them a case and they can settle the case by merely writing a simple letter, and the other side agrees and decides to settle, then the lawyer's cut tends to be small. The more work they have to do (e.g. if it looks like it's going to court, or if it actually DOES go to court, or if it goes to court and then has to go to appeals, etc.) the larger the chunk.
And I suppose as an "IT guy", your model might be similar. E.g. if you can help someone merely by answering a simple question or a short email, you might not charge anything at all. But if your client were a lawyer, who asked you to spend several days being deposed about the workings of a laptop security program that takes pictures via the built-in webcam and then you had to go to court to testify... well you might actually *charge* for that much work. And the lawyer would have to pay you for it whether they win the case or not.
Still, I am a bit surprised that the lawyer managed to take about 70%.
In other news, buggy whip makers think congress should mandate that all cars have horse-shafts and harnesses attached to the front... you know... just in case you still want REAL horsepower.
These machines were not creating any greenhouse gases while they were broken.
I wonder if he's aware that the Earth has a strong electromagnetic field. Come to think of it... the Sun is probably wreaking havoc on his health too.
I cross this same border regularly, and after reading the story, something is confusing to me. The story says that he was "returning to Canada". When returning to Canada there's a toll booth on the US side where you pay the bridge toll (staffed by employees of the bridge authority -- who are not customs agents). The customs inspection is always on the far side of the bridge, in this case the Canadian side. This would have been staffed by Canadian customs agents.
Does this article mean to say that there were US Customs & Border inspection at the toll booth on the US side? That would be very irregular. The only time I have ever seen an exception is during the weekend of the Mackinac Race when police are trying to curtail drunk driving across the bridge (there's a huge party just before the race, heavy drinking, etc.).
I really feel for Mr. Watts. I'm just trying to understand what happened.
I noticed the article paints a picture as though this law will effectively break the functionality of the web and/or make it so annoying that nobody will want to put up with it. I think that's completely wrong. The conclusion that this is "Breathtakingly Stupid" is correct, but not for the reasons stated in the article.
From the article:
Here's what's coming. The now-finalised text says that a cookie can be stored on a user's computer, or accessed from that computer, only if the user "has given his or her consent, having been provided with clear and comprehensive information".
An exception exists where the cookie is "strictly necessary" for the provision of a service "explicitly requested" by the user – so cookies can take a user from a product page to a checkout without the need for consent. Other cookies will require prior consent, though.
Ok.... so you wont be barraged with consent requests every time you visit any web site that needs to maintain session state between two or more pages or track the fact that you've logged in.
So it would seem that the good news in all of this is that this really only pertains to those cookies used for annoying things like advertising and market analytics & profiling; those things that invade your privacy. ...or does it?
What's in a cookie? That all depends on the cookie. Some cookies store all the data being tracked by the cookie. But other cookies are essentially an index -- they store no real data, but merely help the server identify you to the server where the real data is kept. This is where things go gray and the law becomes "breathtakingly stupid."
The law assumes that websites intent on "violating your privacy" (whatever that means) actually need to use cookies in order to do it. This is like wanting to outlaw murder and in order to so, just pass a law that bans handguns (as if handguns are the only way someone might commit the crime.)
Rather than create a separate cookie which exists for the exclusive purpose of marketing analytics (or whatever other violation of a user's privacy the website or it's partners want to perform), now the website just needs to create a 'meta cookie', if you will. They have carte blanche to create a session cookie for maintaing your login or user session (essential the operation of the website) without your consent. They can create what you could think of as 'server side meta-cookies' -- where instead of storing a cookie in your web browser, they store the cookie and it's value as an attribute of your session profile information which is stored only on the server. The only cookie you actually have is your login / session cookie.
Under this scenario, the law only drives the activities of user tracking deeper into the shadows. Before you knew they were tracking you... you had a cookie. But you could delete those and know that they were gone. NOW they'll track you based on session attributes you cannot delete because it's on someone else's server.
There's a huge gray-area around the "strictly necessary" clause. If your website is entirely ad-revenue-funded, and without tracking you wouldn't be able to provide a service to your users at all, is this "strictly necessary"? Google is ad-revenue funded. Then there are sites like Amazon which performs tracking for cross-sell / up-sell purposes (e.g. "Do you want this USB printer cable that goes with that printer you just put in your cart that 98% of the other people that bought that same product discovered they needed because no printer actually comes with a cable?") After all the data needed to track those buying habits isn't essential in order to track your user session or maintain your shopping cart, but it sure is useful to the end-consumer and they're not necessarily collecting it to invade your privacy.
Not so fast. By your logic, all users also consented to having malware on their computers, and all actions performed by that malware would have happened with user consent. After all.... new computers don't just un-box themselves, plug themselves into power and go find a network connection... the user had to do that.
Just because you know what a cookie is and are aware that you can configure your browser to block some or all of them, doesn't mean everybody else does. Nor does it imply it's their own fault for being ignorant. I use the "80 year old grandma" test. There are numerous people who barely manage to use a computer, but feel compelled to (even though they are extremely uncomfortable with them) because more and more companies and services expect that users will have a computer.
Examples: (1) In many cities and towns, daily-editions of the newspaper are no longer available for home delivery. If you want the news you'll need a computer so you can read it online. (2) Wireless phone providers generally do not have printed copies of your contract agreements, terms & services, etc. If you want to view those, you'll have to go online. I've even asked some carriers if they can mail me a copy... the answer is "no, it is only available online."
Anymore, a computer is becoming something households are required to have and use, whether they like it or not, and whether they know how to use, manage, or configure their software or not. Browsers passively accept cookies and respond to cookie requests all day long; having no idea what the cookie is used for. In no way does this imply user consent.
The patent appears to be specific as to purpose and how it would work. So specific, in fact, that Twitter doesn't intrude at all. In order to make Twitter fit so as to be intruding into their patents, you have to broaden the application of the idea so that the technical implementation is no longer important.
Upon broadening the interpretation, a lot of prior art clouds the validity of TechRadium's patents (e.g. using a megaphone to shout at a large crowd is technically a "message sender" sending out one message to a whole lot of "message receivers" who "subscribed" to listen to the message (by showing up at the event) -- so apparently the idea itself isn't really new.
It doesn't stop there.
You may think the megaphone is a silly comparison or clumsy implementation of it... the point is the idea is not new, nor did TechRadium invent it. So what did they invent? Further delve in with some of the things that make their message broadcast system more elegant (yes, well we added this nifty little database so we can manage a publish/scriber model that's a managed and able to be quite a bit more selective than using a megaphone to shout at a crowd), then there's lots of prior art to show that the concept of the pub/sub model in IT predates their oldest patent by many years. The reason the concept was coined the "pub/sub" model is because it worked just like a newspaper or magazine that publishes content and subscribers (a.k.a. customers or readers) could choose to subscribe and, in the case of a publisher with different kinds of magazines, they could even decide which magazines they want to receive. They would of course use some sort of record keeping system so as not confuse what each subscriber wanted to receive. So apparently that idea isn't new either.
Essentially what Twitter "copies" is all the same stuff TechRadium had to also copy in order to come up with their implementation. This is mildly reminiscent of Apple's lawsuit against Microsoft back in the mid 80's when they claimed MS used their desktop GUI idea -- then it turned out BOTH of them got the idea from Xerox. Twitter's implementation would be (a) different and (b) probably a lot more scalable. Twitter has to handle millions of subscribers... TechRadium's solution probably only has to handle a few hundred and *maybe* a couple thousand.... tops. In order to achieve these differences in scale, the implementation is likely to be radically different.
I read this story and immediately thought of last Saturday's Dilbert:
http://dilbert.com/2009-08-01/
In addition to FOSS, don't forget that there's also SaaS options (Software as a Service). For example... could you use Google Mail & Calendar instead of Outlook & Exchange for mail & calendar?
Buy a replacement at full price? You must have friends, right? Those friends must have old phones they don't use anymore because *they* got new phones to extend their contracts.
Just find a friend with a phone they don't use anymore -- they'll probably give it to you.
If you don't have any friends, just buy a used phone on eBay for a couple bucks.
It's about the fact that it can be 'tracked' -- just as the US has used cellphone tracking to hunt down bad-guys overseas, they can do the same thing to us if they know what cellphone we have.
It's not about the 'archival' of data. The Blackberry taps into YOUR traditional mail infrastructure. If you back it up, then your messages are archived.
No, it's more about the fact that an external company is granted access (usually via VPN) to your internal network (or at least part of it) and, more specifically, they get to keep a copy of your authentication credentials (so they can watch your new mail arrive, copy it, and delivery it to your device). Allowing a 3rd party company VPN access to a US government network with the Whitehouse mail server and, oh by the way, a copy of the president's username and password... well NOW maybe you can understand why they're nervous about security.
Frankly it would be better if he were addicted to an iPhone. At least with that solution you can host your email on any IMAP compliant mail server you want and nobody but you needs a copy of your security certificates, VPN gateway access, or username & passwords.
OpenSolaris, from which came features such as Dtrace and ZFS ,
OpenOffice.org,
GlassFish,
OpenSSO, or
OpenDS
(and probably several others that I missed) aren't really open source?
Thanks for enlightening me. After scratching all these projects off my list, it looks like you're right. Sun hardly open sources anything!
Using transmitters is only one way to monitor tire pressure. The tire pressure changes all throughout the day based on temperature. The point of these sensors isn't to report when the pressure changes in all tires equally. They're only supposed to notice when the tire pressure changes non-uniformly (e.g. just one tire is low). They also don't report if a tire is low by a pound or two... it has to be a fairly radical difference (e.g. 10 lbs low) to get noticed (I suppose the threshold that triggers the alarm probably varies by maker)
But the use of transmitters per each wheel turns out to be the expensive way to solve the problem. There's an another system that simply uses the rotational speed of each tire. The idea is that if a car is traveling in a straight line and one tire is low (say it has 20 lbs of pressure whereas all the other tires have 30), the rotational speed of that wheel will be different from the rest. The computer will notice this.
It's slightly more complicated than this because wheels normally do rotate at different speeds when a car is turning, but in that case all the wheels will rotate at different speeds (not just one of them) and the computer can tell the difference.
If you're thinking "Yes, but then you have to install a speedometer for each wheel and that would be expensive too.", then you've forgotten that any car with ABS or Traction Control already has an individual speedometer for each wheel. That's how the ABS system can determine if one wheel has locked up (if under braking conditions it is not spinning at all or at least not at a speed consistent with the rest of the wheels), or how traction control can tell if one wheel is spinning on something slippery (because under acceleration one wheel is spinning faster than the rest.)
The article is correct in that it would be possible to track a car using it's TPMS if it uses the radio transmitter system. But to draw the conclusion that our government only passed this law to spy on us is perhaps a bit hasty given that the law doesn't demand the TPMS system involve radio transmitters and there's a non-transmitting system that's cheaper to implement.
The "problem" with the 2nd Internet is that it will almost immediately become a sanctuary for 2nd Internet cyber criminals. That's why I recommend creating a THIRD Interweb thingy and just saving us all the time and bother of setting up a 2nd Internet.
I'm not sure what point they're trying to make in the article other than churn up some FUD. If I encrypt a file on my computer with a password or key and then lose my key, I cannot easily decrypt that file. So poor management of my key could make me vulnerable to loss of data -- but that's not the same level of risk as theft of data (which may be worse than losing it.)
As several others have pointed out, a 'revoked' key in no way keeps you from getting at your data. In the same way that a bank can 'revoke' a credit card, the actual card itself doesn't disappear... it's just not trusted to do anything. Unlike the credit card system, most any security software that checks key revocation lists can easily be told to ignore the fact that the key is revoked. The bits needed to perform the encryption or decryption still exist -- you just get a warning that someone says you should not trust it... but that's not the same thing as saying you can not trust it.
What that really means is you just need a good key management scheme. Whereas most people would just use a single private key, in a corporate environment you've got the problem of project-related work that might be encrypted by an employee still belongs to the company. If an employee quits, is terminated, gets run over by the beer truck, etc. etc. then the company would like to have a way to get the data that they rightfully own. This is what "key escrow" systems are for. But escrowed keys would ideally be kept in a very safe place. Of course the fact that an escrowed key exists at all allows the individual to repudiate the contents of the encrypted file -- someone else could have altered it. The solution to that conundrum is to create a "signing" key which does not encrypt and which is not escrowed, and an encryption key which is not used for signing, but which is escrowed.
So back to the FUD... I suppose all these companies have an interest in creating the fear, getting the average IT person to decide to look into it, realize what they're missing, then realize that they probably need to hire a professional security business to help build a proper key distribution and escrow system.
Unfortunately the article is light on details. While $160 is overpaying for an 80GB hard drive (esp. if it's only 5400 rpm), it's probably NOT overpaying if it includes the cost of installation as well as the cost of re-installing the OS. While the article certainly implies that they did, in fact, include the cost of installation, he doesn't mention if they did any other service or whether they broke the price down for him.
I have upgraded the hard drive on one of my old MacBook Pros and there's external compartment to access the drive. There's no quick-access panel to make this easy. The bottom case of the laptop has to be carefully opened. An experienced person could probably swap the drive in maybe 20 minutes, but then it also has to be tested and get an OS installed and that'll take longer.
Everyone jumps on the auto-parts law, but remember that law only applies to parts that can't be reconditioned. There are a number of car parts that can be reconditioned and when you have these replaced you generally do not get them back. But typically you'd know up front if you were getting new vs. reconditioned parts and if there's a deposit, etc. for the failed part. If you buy a new car battery -- even if you intend to replace it yourself, the parts store is generally required by law to charge you a 'core deposit' fee, which you only get back when you return the failed battery.
I'm amazed that this person writes that they felt they were being overcharged but then did not ask about the price before agreeing to let them do the service -- then made assumptions.
All that aside, I too would be very worried about my data falling in to the wrong hands. But isn't that ALL THE MORE reason why he should have asked questions resolved any doubt BEFORE agreeing to the service?
Yes, I think you are wrong on this.
The processor is open-source (OpenSPARC), Sun's own operating system port on the processor is also open-source (OpenSolaris), and of course Linux is open-source. If someone wants to go through the labor-of-love to port Linux to SPARC then there's nothing "hidden".
Sun sells x86-based machines that run Linux and I think they'll even sell you a Linux distro to go with the box (of course you don't need to get from them... any distro will do.)
I fail to see the conspiracy angle.
Based on the Drake Equation there is likely to be some quantity of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe making similar observations. Why can't we just blame them?
Did I miss something when I read the story? I'm failing to see how this is ES&S' fault.
Let me see if I got my facts straight... (a) California certifies a model A100. (b) ES&S introduces a "new" model called the A200. (c) The A200 is NOT a certified machine. (d) The voting districts approach a vendor and ask to buy a product (A200 e-voting machine) from a vendor. (e) The vendor sells them what they asked for.
Assuming I didn't miss any details, the fact that the districts asked to buy e-voting machines which were not certified as an 'approved' model is hardly the vendor's fault.
This is NOT a problem with ES&S or the A200 or even the old A100. This is a problem with buyers of e-voting machines in California. If anyone needs to be scrutinized and punished here, it's them. Even if ES&S had (accurately) told the buyers the the A200 was essentially just an A100 because it uses the same boards and wiring but the boards are mounted in a different location, they still didn't represent it as an A100 or as a 'certified' machine. The decision to assume it was ok to buy a different model was up to the buyers. Nobody forced this on them.
Had ES&S made changes (no matter how trivial) to the certified A100 and then CONTINUED to sell these modified versions still as model A100, then that would have been a misrepresentation.
Columnists don't necessarly bash products becasue they hate the product. They're in a ratings business. If everyone writes articles that praises a product, we'll all yawn and nobody will bother to read them. By bashing a product -- especially if it's a product that everyone else loves, this creates controversey.
.99 per song the iTunes Music Store, that maybe Apple's exclusive deal with AT&T came with a clause that also limits what AT&T can charge for the rate plans on the phone in order to keep that exclusivity. I expect to have my sanity challenged for even being willing to consider such a possibility, but remember that since AT&T stands between Apple and Apple's customers. They can totally make or break the success of this product. Apple has a lot at stake and is generally not stupid when it comes to negotiations, so I'm hopeful that their agreement with AT&T keeps AT&T in check or gives Apple the right to sell the product through other carriers if AT&T can't perform.
We see this on slashdot all the time... we call it 'trolling'.
As for the iPhone we'll have to wait and see. While I can find things to criticize in Apple's products (as the saying goes.... you can't please all of the people all of the time) they do have a reputation for good products.
Did anybody *really* have high hopes about the Microsoft Zune? Maybe fan-boys did, but most people in the industry have come to expect that getting software from Microsoft is almost like getting software from the former KGB (it's loaded with 'bugs' and they maintain more control over your device than you do -- why should the Zune be any different.)
The high expectation about the iPhone is because so far most phones suck. It would be really nice to have a phone that sucks less than the one I have now. That phone is a Treo 650 that used to crash 3 times per day. Now it only screws up a few time per week and for some strange reason I am happy with this because I fear that every *other* phone will be just as bad and I'll just end up locked into another contract.
Speaking of contracts... AT&T (Cingular) says they plan to reelase "new phone plans" on June 29th which go with the iPhone. Having a very low opinion of phone companies, my assumption is that this will be a plan intended to rape buyers, but make up for the high price tag by offering poor service. (Please God tell me it isn't so) My hope is that since Apple was successfully able to keep the music industry from charging more than
I was a bit surprised that all the pictures only show off the outside and none of the links follow to info on what these things look like on the inside or how they work.
Here is Sun's page that shows off considerably more info: Sun's Project Black Box page
Basically the outside of the box has hookups for power, cooling water, and network. Everything on the inside is pre-wired. Servers aren't included, but they are designed to serve as the transport container for the servers -- not just a place to put servers once the box arrives (the racks have a shock-absorbing suspension system so that servers can be transported in the container without the need to unrack them or pack them for shipping.). When it arrives it just needs to be "plugged in" and it's literally ready to go. Since it really is a standard shipping container, all rules about shipping containers apply -- e.g. there's no shortage of trucks, trains, or boats designed specifically to hold them. They are structurally sturdy and can be stacked tall just like containers on a cargo ship.
...and I agree. I suspect the reason they wrote the law as they did was so that someone trying to piggy-back on a private network (e.g. sitting out on the street in a residential neighborhood and pinching off someone's unsecured WiFi where you clearly do NOT have permission and clearly the owner did NOT expect someone to be piggy-backing the network) would be protected by the law. But I think this is pretty stupid of the owner.
This is like me deciding to store all my money in nice little stacks of dollar bills on my front lawn just inches off the sidewalk and expecting passers by to NOT pick it up by using the rationale that it's my land and I can store my money wherever I want. Compound this with the notion that the wind just blew my dollar bills off my lawn and down the street and you picked it up without even having to step into my yard and this is basically an analogy for what's happening here. Yes... he knew it wasn't his own dollar bill... but the owner of the money didn't even care enough to keep it from blowing away can they really complain that someone else picked it up?
The means to "secure" a WiFi network are included with every WiFi network. Yes we all know that 128-bit WEP can be cracked in a minute (not to be confused with WPA which, so far, seems to be very secure)... but the mere fact that the network used any security at all (no matter how bad) implies that permission was not being freely granted to others to use the network.
This situation is a coffee shop which allow open and free access to their network. Most businesses with more than one location have a sophisticated enough network that, even if the access is free, require users to click to accept some terms of service and acceptable usage before using the network. The owner of the shop apparently had nothing. They advertise a free network, allow their SSID to broadcast, no encryption, no page to accept terms of service or acceptable usage policy, which all pretty much implies that they've rolled out the welcome mat. Then all of a sudden they decide that one particular person was expected to know that they weren't welcome to use the network at a time when everyone else was welcome to use the same network (and I agree it's rude that he never purchased anything). We infer that the distinguishing factor was that he didn't go inside the coffee shop and make a purchase -- although the coffee shop doesn't apparently state that a purchase is required.
I'm really having a hard time understanding how this guy was actually convicted of anything -- did this guy not have an attorney... or maybe just a really bad one?