I've seen so many posts of people just not getting it. All seem to concur nobody wants tv on their phone. Well, tests in Korea have shown that it was the first application that overloaded that their 3g network. I think many of us are too big a geek to see through the eyes of a 13 to 30 year old woman with a small, dull job and ditto man. The soap watching type. This is also the type that buys stupid ringtones. Well, they are the ones where the real money comes from and they will buy in to this. I promiss you. Either this or 3G soap of the day on demand.
The main reason why tv hasn't caught on as much for downloads, compared to movies is the VCR. Yes I know we have all been downloading series for years. However in the US, you generally can see repeats later in the week, or turn on your VCR or Tivo. So you will see what you want. So in one of the largest internet economies the VCR saves many people from downloading. Whereas movies take forever to arrive on DVD and there is a price to pay for them.
In the rest of the world downloading of a serie generally happens after someone has grown to like the serie and then gets frustrated with the fact that it isn't broadcasted anymore, or they have to wait for 6 months to see part two of the cliffhanger episode. In general, but not always a tv-serie only becomes popular in a country after it has been broadcasted, whereas word of a movie travels fast and all around the globe.
Your argument is correct for the most part. I'm willing to bet some are going to hate it. However a smart salesperson can also use it to his/her advantage. Point the buyer at the fact that the price difference is not large, that their are benefits in buying in a shop, because of service and then use a recommendation for an extra as a way to sell an item on top of the deal. If there is a steep price difference then try to give the buyer a package deal with a discount, which still leaves the seller with a nice margin.
Research in the Netherlands has shown most Dutch people search online for product information, but buy offline if the price difference is not too high, or they want instant gratification etc etc.
Great that this idea is being implemented.I have thought of fiddling with the Dutch equivalent of Pricewatch and Froogle on my Treo 600 in a store to see for instance what a certain keyboard would cost elsewhere. In the end I ended up with searching online first for what I wanted and just recording the prices on a paper list. (envelope scraps are just so passe)
I would like to add a feature request. Could they hook it up to the review sections as well, so that it becomes possible not only to see how much it costs elsewhere, but also if people like it at all. Even nicer would be if it could turn into some augmented shopping list, complete with tips like If you buy this, you will need that etc.
Great idea of the British. Unfortunately other EU-countries are not that far yet. So instead of a harmonized market it becomes disharmonized. Gives the French another reason not to harmonize their spectrum use
It is still impossible for participants to a Darpa contest to cross a desert in an autonomous car. Most of them got nowhere. Mercedes did do tests on the German Autobahn with autonomous cars, but that was a very isolated test, where a human was supervising. The reason they tried it on the highway, was because it is an "easy" place to do the driving. Driving in city's is hard. Driving in complex situations is hard. Just think of yourself driving and then think of all the times where you thought "sorry, mate", "where did he come from", "What the F", "hmm if that little girl would have been one second earlier, I wouldn't have noticed her".
what I am trying to say, computers driving cars is a HARD problem. The Public to accept a computer to drive a car is even more hard. If the worlds first fully autonomous car kills somebody it will be headlines all over. A PR nightmare.
ha, I think I can top that when it comes to research. Look up a project called LOFAR. It is a distributed sensor array for astronomy, basically creatin a huge radio observatory of a couple of hundred kilometers in The Netherlands. The amounts of data those guys talk about is measured in tens of gigabits per second, continuously for years and years and years. Big Blue is building the supercomputer for that.
But your right DNA sequencing, Biotech, but also Medical Imgaging demands huge huge amounts of storage
No matter how much google stores, it is not the one to look at when you're talking corporate data storage. Corporate datastorage is about storing all the data of all your oil fields, in a way you're sure you don't loose it. It is about storing every single product that you make in a database, complete with tracking of location and which customer bought it. It is about all those things Google doesn't do and doesn't care about. I am willing to bet that for its financial system Google is using similar to the one shown here. Why? because it is reliable.
Google is using of the shelf hardware, because it doesn't matter to them if they loose data because of disk failure. As long as it doesn't happen too often and from the perspective of the customer doesn't matter, it is not a problem.
Now think of google having to have an accurate and 100% corrrect archive of the internet, which has to be searched and correlated 7 years back and then see what they would come up with.
Could someone please tell those in charge that the basic premise of peer to peer (and modern networking as a whole for that matter) is not to cheat somebody out of his/her rights. Peer to Peer is the holy grail of modern networking. Everybody who has ever thought about networking has been wondering how to build a network in such a way that all nodes can connect with all others, without having the need for a central switch/server controlling all the aspects of the communication.
In the lower network levels you see these kinds of networks in wireless setups. They tend to have problems with scalability. In the higher network layers it has turned out to be possible to create networks that are not in need of a fixed central node that controls communications. However you do see the advent of supernodes to improve communications.
Illegal stuff generally ends up on the most efficient network setup. It used to be BBS, then FTP and now Peer to Peer. However in the end, Kazaa, Gnutella and Bittorrent are all modern answers to the question: How do we build an FTP-system without the need for a central server that will run out of its bandwidth the moment it is announced on Slashdot.
Well, you might not be gaining from this as a professor. But then you're not doing it right. You should do like so many professors and write your own book and then require all your students to use it in their classes. You will get money from that and judging from what I see here in the Netherlands, the fee is quite nicely rewarding. Though there are professors who take in mind the situation of their students and either publish without wanting a fee, there are others who put one or more of their books on list of nescessary books while only using one chapter of the entire book.
The games industry needs to get alot better focus on their target audience and the way they spend their income on entertainment (Books, music, dvd's and games). It is simpel micro-economics. Only a small fraction of a monthly income is spent on entertainment in these areas and in my personal experience, if I have bought a book for 20 euros, I won't easily buy a new dvd or game of the same price. It is not that I am not tempted, but I just don't have the money.
The problem with newly released games is that they cost twice as much as a new book (take for instance Confusion Neal Stephenson) For me they go beyond my monthly entertainment allowance and I therefore have bought CSI in the bargain bin this month (only 7 euros) but certainly haven't bought a 50 euro game.
Even worse is that many new games are not as much fun as they appear to be. This is true for cd's, dvd's and books as well. However, the pain in buying the wrong thing is much lower because of the lower prices.
So all in all the games industry needs to make it worthwhile for me to buy a game at a whim, without considering the enormous price and without making me scared that I might have bought a lemon. In order to do this, prices have to come down. Way down to the same level of a good book, cd or dvd.
Alright, back from the weekend. Let me explain this to you in a simple manner. Lets say you run a high profile Apache server. You're a good sysadmin, you do everything by the book, patch when its available, have a properly worked out and thought out security procedure around the machine, firewall and IDS in place etc. Nobody can claim you're negligent in any way proper. You're the guy people call if they need to know about security.
One day you find out evil shit is being distributed by your server. You check and find it on your server. You remove it and make sure if anything is put back there, you will know about it. But your big problem is, you don't know how somebody got onto your machine. You don't have a f*cking clue, you check all lists, you call every security buddy of yours for something that has gone under your radar. At the end of the day your still baffled. You report it to the SANS people and they tell you you're not number one on this and oh yeah, the other guys are also very clueful.
Now you've all cleaned your servers, like good admins do, you're not spreading bad stuff anymore. But you're shitting bricks, because there is a hole in your system and you don't know where it is and what it can do. The last thing you want is that it gets broadcasted worldwide that your system was infected. Why? Because even though you've cleaned the system (you're a good admin, you don't leave infected systems infected) there is a hole that at least one guy can exploit. You don't want every real hacker trying his skills against your system and maybe also finding out where the hole was. I am not talking about scriptkiddies, you laugh about them, you're good, you're protected against that stuff. I talk about real smart guys that upped the ante against the entire security community. You don't know what the problem is, you don't know what they can further do on an exploited system.
This is about you and your system, not about the world and their systems. You're clean they stand no harm from you.
Ok, the article states: To prevent further abuse, the list is not published. The exploit is server side, not client side according to reports. Admins of the servers must have been warned and hopefully have cleaned the server already by now. So the public at large is not under threat from their high-profile site. Then not publishing the list is logical under the following reasoning.
What if it is a Zero day exploit on IIS. There is no fix yet. Admins are struggling to clean the servers, but have no clue if what they did to prevent whatever is going on, actually works. Criminals all over the world will be searching for clues on what the exploit is and will want to actively exploit it as well. We don't know what is going on, so it might be possible to put a nice little rootkit undetectible on the server and later use it for interesting purposes. By not naming the sites they are putting an extra, albeit thin, layer of protection around the sites. The list of websites for criminals to target, will be much longer than it could have been if each and every site that was affected would be named on the internet. Most sites are (hopefully) clean right now, so the public is not at risk, but until we know what goes on, the server sure is.
You really belief this wouldn't happen. Well guess what, it already happens. In the Netherlands we had a case where an ISP didn't want to stream the data they got from a radio station. So they blocked it. They wanted to get paid. Their argument was that the data would take up too much bandwidth. Fact is that the internet business model is build on the fact that everybody pays his end of the network. A simple peering would have helped them alot.
The pain with biometrics is, that it is so sexy and so hyped up, that people aren't willing to look at the numbers behind it. Contrary with what privacy and security people always shout, the biggest problem isn't that it doesn't stop criminals and terrorists. The single biggest problem of biometrics is its failure rate.
If you want to roll out biometrics on a massive scale, an accuracy of 0.1 percent chance for falsely rejecting a person means that at an average large airport, like JFK, Atlanta, Heathrow means that 1 in a thousand scans fails. Now this might not sound as a big chance, but since you need to go through the biometric scanner twice, when you get on or when you get off. So this reduces the amount of people nescessary for failure to 500. Result is that with the hundreds of millions flying on a yearly basis in Europe and the US over 100.000 people might not get on or off a plane.
AARGHH... sorry for not getting that definition just exactly right. But with that whole rant on broadband you have given an excellent example of why people outside of the technical world have so much trouble talking to techies. Next time you read an article, a comment etc, read it and ask yourself: Do I understand what is meant? Does the definition of this particular term have a relevancy to the subject at hand? Does giving the definition add to level of discourse? Do I have anything to say on the subject? If all of these are answered with yes, then do as you have just done.
Unfortunately here it was completely out of context. It is nice to know certain technical fields define the term a bit different. Well, guess what.. I work for the government we know all about hairsplitting on definitions. Do you know the subtle differences between attribution, delegation and mandate? (If you do, i have more mean ones):-)I'm better in my own language ofcourse;-)
With regards to your worm/vector scenario comment I have to remark the following. Yes I know it is not that different from a corporate LAN/WAN on the technical side. For all I care we use exactly the same switches, IDS's etc. And ofcourse I know you need to have the best techies available, I worked with some of the best! However it is all different from the workfloor policy wise. One cannot just require everybody to have a virusscanner on their computer. One cannot disconnect somebody because their machine is acting weird. One cannot sysadmin a customers computer. Legally speaking even testing for vulnerabilities is already walking the edge.
The trouble with 7500 to 50,000 home connections is managing it. You see I envisage a future where we will have one connection (fiber) and that will do it all. It will do phone, tv and internet, surveillance camera's and domotica, heart rate monitoring. It will also do our professional activities, like a doctor going through MRI's at home and giving feedback to the operating room in an emergency. A young kid age 18 managing several small enterprise networks from his parents house and student dorm. A jennicam, a remote talk with a psychiatrist.
Giving everybody freedom on the network, like they have in their car on the highway. But also laying down the road rules and enforcing the rules. We will have many different devices hooked up to the network. Each of these devices will have vulnerabilities. Now we need to be able to distinguish which ones to quarantine and which ones not. I don't care how good a sysadmin is, she cannot check it all not even with a whole team as good as her. Our current systems tell us something bad has happened, our future systems will need to tell that you're vulnerable to something bad happening.
Good sysadmins are lazy. They automate everything they can, so they have time for a the difficult stuff and still be able practice Counterstrike. Only when we automate we will be able to run a huge network that does everything including the shopping. Only when we automate, it will be cost-effective
I'm currently working on ideas to get real broadband (10 mbit) and higher to houses and businesses (minimum of 7500 houses). One of the worries I have is how such a network can be run in a safe and secure manner. Previous experience in running a campus network has learned me, that you cannot trust the end user in doing things right. This becomes espescially true when you're planning for a door to door roll-out of 10mbit+ networks. Imagine a new worm which makes use of such networks. The amount of network traffic it can generate is amazing.
My solution would be an automated quarantine system, which would quarantine a system ones it is found compromised or vulnerable. Quarantine means in this case that the internet traffic is redirected to a specific page and there the user will find an explanation and a solution. Other traffic, like VOIP and TV over IP should run uninterrupted. (This could be realized for instance by having VOIP and TV on separate VLAN's or by allowing certain IP-adresses)
This system has to be automated. The reasons for automation are: 1. You cannot expect a networkadmin to continuously monitor 7500 to 50.000 connections. 2. Vulnerabilities are many and a system you've just checked by hand could easily be vulnerable the next day, because somebody installed a new piece of software with some old problems. (One can expect people to install a vulnerable version of winamp on a daily basis! Just think of all the cd's in comptermagazines that carry a version of Winamp) 3. Warhol worms are fast! Within fifteen minutes almost all vulnerable connections will have been infected. If the vulnerability was already known, the system should have been quarantined. If it is unknown, it should be able to disconnect 5000 infected systems immediately once it knows how to detect the vulnerability/worm. 4. The system should preferably be scanned upon connection to the network. Time and time again.
Yes there are all kinds of problems associated with this idea. But if you have a better solution, one that doesn't require me to rely on the intelligence of the average John Doe, please do tell me.
No way dude. Didn't they teach you in University that networks are divided in several layers? The cost of cable companies are governed by this as well. Basically their costs are split in three: 1. Cost for general overhead (huge CEO fee and a bit for the cleaning lady), 2. Cost for the maintenance/write off and investment in physical layer and active components 3. Programming.
Well, the cost for overhead and the physical layer (the cable) is payed by all and on an equal basis. You shouldn't pay less for that part if you want to see less tv. All the channels you get over it each require a fee as well. That fee is paid for you by your cable company to the holders of the rights (RIAA MPAA etc). That fee grows higher once you put more channels over the cable and lower if you want less. Problem is ofcourse that over all those fees a margin is leveraged by your cable company, so they will not be too happy with this idea. But 6 channels should never cost you more than 50. It could however be very little since 30 channels here in the Europe cost about 3 euros in fees.
BTW I pay 12 euros a month for 30 channel cable tv here in The Netherlands;-)
Slashdot Mirror
I've seen so many posts of people just not getting it. All seem to concur nobody wants tv on their phone. Well, tests in Korea have shown that it was the first application that overloaded that their 3g network. I think many of us are too big a geek to see through the eyes of a 13 to 30 year old woman with a small, dull job and ditto man. The soap watching type. This is also the type that buys stupid ringtones. Well, they are the ones where the real money comes from and they will buy in to this. I promiss you. Either this or 3G soap of the day on demand.
The main reason why tv hasn't caught on as much for downloads, compared to movies is the VCR. Yes I know we have all been downloading series for years. However in the US, you generally can see repeats later in the week, or turn on your VCR or Tivo. So you will see what you want. So in one of the largest internet economies the VCR saves many people from downloading. Whereas movies take forever to arrive on DVD and there is a price to pay for them.
In the rest of the world downloading of a serie generally happens after someone has grown to like the serie and then gets frustrated with the fact that it isn't broadcasted anymore, or they have to wait for 6 months to see part two of the cliffhanger episode. In general, but not always a tv-serie only becomes popular in a country after it has been broadcasted, whereas word of a movie travels fast and all around the globe.
I hope I make some sense
That is why the Dutch website www.vergelijk.nl also incorporates the shipping and handling charges in their price comparisons. :-)
You still might like a service like this, when shopping because it could give you extra features, like customer reviews, suggestions etc.
Your argument is correct for the most part. I'm willing to bet some are going to hate it. However a smart salesperson can also use it to his/her advantage. Point the buyer at the fact that the price difference is not large, that their are benefits in buying in a shop, because of service and then use a recommendation for an extra as a way to sell an item on top of the deal. If there is a steep price difference then try to give the buyer a package deal with a discount, which still leaves the seller with a nice margin.
Research in the Netherlands has shown most Dutch people search online for product information, but buy offline if the price difference is not too high, or they want instant gratification etc etc.
Great that this idea is being implemented.I have thought of fiddling with the Dutch equivalent of Pricewatch and Froogle on my Treo 600 in a store to see for instance what a certain keyboard would cost elsewhere. In the end I ended up with searching online first for what I wanted and just recording the prices on a paper list. (envelope scraps are just so passe)
I would like to add a feature request. Could they hook it up to the review sections as well, so that it becomes possible not only to see how much it costs elsewhere, but also if people like it at all. Even nicer would be if it could turn into some augmented shopping list, complete with tips like If you buy this, you will need that etc.
Great idea of the British. Unfortunately other EU-countries are not that far yet. So instead of a harmonized market it becomes disharmonized. Gives the French another reason not to harmonize their spectrum use
It is still impossible for participants to a Darpa contest to cross a desert in an autonomous car. Most of them got nowhere. Mercedes did do tests on the German Autobahn with autonomous cars, but that was a very isolated test, where a human was supervising. The reason they tried it on the highway, was because it is an "easy" place to do the driving. Driving in city's is hard. Driving in complex situations is hard. Just think of yourself driving and then think of all the times where you thought "sorry, mate", "where did he come from", "What the F", "hmm if that little girl would have been one second earlier, I wouldn't have noticed her".
what I am trying to say, computers driving cars is a HARD problem. The Public to accept a computer to drive a car is even more hard. If the worlds first fully autonomous car kills somebody it will be headlines all over. A PR nightmare.
Simple: Electronic Data Interchange EDI.
International standard, developed just exactly to make this possible.
ha, I think I can top that when it comes to research. Look up a project called LOFAR. It is a distributed sensor array for astronomy, basically creatin a huge radio observatory of a couple of hundred kilometers in The Netherlands. The amounts of data those guys talk about is measured in tens of gigabits per second, continuously for years and years and years. Big Blue is building the supercomputer for that.
But your right DNA sequencing, Biotech, but also Medical Imgaging demands huge huge amounts of storage
If I'm not mistaken there is a filter on certain words here... So I bleep stuff out. :-)
Loose data is what you get when English is ones third language, typing is quick and thinking is slow. It is called a spelling error.
No matter how much google stores, it is not the one to look at when you're talking corporate data storage. Corporate datastorage is about storing all the data of all your oil fields, in a way you're sure you don't loose it. It is about storing every single product that you make in a database, complete with tracking of location and which customer bought it. It is about all those things Google doesn't do and doesn't care about. I am willing to bet that for its financial system Google is using similar to the one shown here. Why? because it is reliable.
Google is using of the shelf hardware, because it doesn't matter to them if they loose data because of disk failure. As long as it doesn't happen too often and from the perspective of the customer doesn't matter, it is not a problem.
Now think of google having to have an accurate and 100% corrrect archive of the internet, which has to be searched and correlated 7 years back and then see what they would come up with.
Not in The Hague. Subtitling is still there.
Simple
And then somebody slaps the AC over the head with a large trout and points him to the DNS.
Could someone please tell those in charge that the basic premise of peer to peer (and modern networking as a whole for that matter) is not to cheat somebody out of his/her rights. Peer to Peer is the holy grail of modern networking. Everybody who has ever thought about networking has been wondering how to build a network in such a way that all nodes can connect with all others, without having the need for a central switch/server controlling all the aspects of the communication.
In the lower network levels you see these kinds of networks in wireless setups. They tend to have problems with scalability. In the higher network layers it has turned out to be possible to create networks that are not in need of a fixed central node that controls communications. However you do see the advent of supernodes to improve communications.
Illegal stuff generally ends up on the most efficient network setup. It used to be BBS, then FTP and now Peer to Peer. However in the end, Kazaa, Gnutella and Bittorrent are all modern answers to the question: How do we build an FTP-system without the need for a central server that will run out of its bandwidth the moment it is announced on Slashdot.
Well, you might not be gaining from this as a professor. But then you're not doing it right. You should do like so many professors and write your own book and then require all your students to use it in their classes. You will get money from that and judging from what I see here in the Netherlands, the fee is quite nicely rewarding. Though there are professors who take in mind the situation of their students and either publish without wanting a fee, there are others who put one or more of their books on list of nescessary books while only using one chapter of the entire book.
The games industry needs to get alot better focus on their target audience and the way they spend their income on entertainment (Books, music, dvd's and games). It is simpel micro-economics. Only a small fraction of a monthly income is spent on entertainment in these areas and in my personal experience, if I have bought a book for 20 euros, I won't easily buy a new dvd or game of the same price. It is not that I am not tempted, but I just don't have the money.
The problem with newly released games is that they cost twice as much as a new book (take for instance Confusion Neal Stephenson) For me they go beyond my monthly entertainment allowance and I therefore have bought CSI in the bargain bin this month (only 7 euros) but certainly haven't bought a 50 euro game.
Even worse is that many new games are not as much fun as they appear to be. This is true for cd's, dvd's and books as well. However, the pain in buying the wrong thing is much lower because of the lower prices.
So all in all the games industry needs to make it worthwhile for me to buy a game at a whim, without considering the enormous price and without making me scared that I might have bought a lemon. In order to do this, prices have to come down. Way down to the same level of a good book, cd or dvd.
Alright, back from the weekend. Let me explain this to you in a simple manner. Lets say you run a high profile Apache server. You're a good sysadmin, you do everything by the book, patch when its available, have a properly worked out and thought out security procedure around the machine, firewall and IDS in place etc. Nobody can claim you're negligent in any way proper. You're the guy people call if they need to know about security.
One day you find out evil shit is being distributed by your server. You check and find it on your server. You remove it and make sure if anything is put back there, you will know about it. But your big problem is, you don't know how somebody got onto your machine. You don't have a f*cking clue, you check all lists, you call every security buddy of yours for something that has gone under your radar. At the end of the day your still baffled. You report it to the SANS people and they tell you you're not number one on this and oh yeah, the other guys are also very clueful.
Now you've all cleaned your servers, like good admins do, you're not spreading bad stuff anymore. But you're shitting bricks, because there is a hole in your system and you don't know where it is and what it can do. The last thing you want is that it gets broadcasted worldwide that your system was infected. Why? Because even though you've cleaned the system (you're a good admin, you don't leave infected systems infected) there is a hole that at least one guy can exploit. You don't want every real hacker trying his skills against your system and maybe also finding out where the hole was. I am not talking about scriptkiddies, you laugh about them, you're good, you're protected against that stuff. I talk about real smart guys that upped the ante against the entire security community. You don't know what the problem is, you don't know what they can further do on an exploited system.
This is about you and your system, not about the world and their systems. You're clean they stand no harm from you.
Ok, the article states: To prevent further abuse, the list is not published. The exploit is server side, not client side according to reports. Admins of the servers must have been warned and hopefully have cleaned the server already by now. So the public at large is not under threat from their high-profile site. Then not publishing the list is logical under the following reasoning.
What if it is a Zero day exploit on IIS. There is no fix yet. Admins are struggling to clean the servers, but have no clue if what they did to prevent whatever is going on, actually works. Criminals all over the world will be searching for clues on what the exploit is and will want to actively exploit it as well. We don't know what is going on, so it might be possible to put a nice little rootkit undetectible on the server and later use it for interesting purposes. By not naming the sites they are putting an extra, albeit thin, layer of protection around the sites. The list of websites for criminals to target, will be much longer than it could have been if each and every site that was affected would be named on the internet. Most sites are (hopefully) clean right now, so the public is not at risk, but until we know what goes on, the server sure is.
At the last ripe meeting Peter Koch gave a presentation on what I think was a methodologically better survey as the one presented here. The survey is at: http://www.ripe.net/ripe/meetings/ripe-48/presenta tions/ripe48-dns-survey.pdf
You really belief this wouldn't happen. Well guess what, it already happens. In the Netherlands we had a case where an ISP didn't want to stream the data they got from a radio station. So they blocked it. They wanted to get paid. Their argument was that the data would take up too much bandwidth. Fact is that the internet business model is build on the fact that everybody pays his end of the network. A simple peering would have helped them alot.
The pain with biometrics is, that it is so sexy and so hyped up, that people aren't willing to look at the numbers behind it. Contrary with what privacy and security people always shout, the biggest problem isn't that it doesn't stop criminals and terrorists. The single biggest problem of biometrics is its failure rate.
If you want to roll out biometrics on a massive scale, an accuracy of 0.1 percent chance for falsely rejecting a person means that at an average large airport, like JFK, Atlanta, Heathrow means that 1 in a thousand scans fails. Now this might not sound as a big chance, but since you need to go through the biometric scanner twice, when you get on or when you get off. So this reduces the amount of people nescessary for failure to 500. Result is that with the hundreds of millions flying on a yearly basis in Europe and the US over 100.000 people might not get on or off a plane.
You might be one of them!
AARGHH... sorry for not getting that definition just exactly right. But with that whole rant on broadband you have given an excellent example of why people outside of the technical world have so much trouble talking to techies. Next time you read an article, a comment etc, read it and ask yourself: Do I understand what is meant? Does the definition of this particular term have a relevancy to the subject at hand? Does giving the definition add to level of discourse? Do I have anything to say on the subject? If all of these are answered with yes, then do as you have just done.
:-)I'm better in my own language ofcourse ;-)
Unfortunately here it was completely out of context. It is nice to know certain technical fields define the term a bit different. Well, guess what.. I work for the government we know all about hairsplitting on definitions. Do you know the subtle differences between attribution, delegation and mandate? (If you do, i have more mean ones)
With regards to your worm/vector scenario comment I have to remark the following. Yes I know it is not that different from a corporate LAN/WAN on the technical side. For all I care we use exactly the same switches, IDS's etc. And ofcourse I know you need to have the best techies available, I worked with some of the best! However it is all different from the workfloor policy wise. One cannot just require everybody to have a virusscanner on their computer. One cannot disconnect somebody because their machine is acting weird. One cannot sysadmin a customers computer. Legally speaking even testing for vulnerabilities is already walking the edge.
The trouble with 7500 to 50,000 home connections is managing it. You see I envisage a future where we will have one connection (fiber) and that will do it all. It will do phone, tv and internet, surveillance camera's and domotica, heart rate monitoring. It will also do our professional activities, like a doctor going through MRI's at home and giving feedback to the operating room in an emergency. A young kid age 18 managing several small enterprise networks from his parents house and student dorm. A jennicam, a remote talk with a psychiatrist.
Giving everybody freedom on the network, like they have in their car on the highway. But also laying down the road rules and enforcing the rules. We will have many different devices hooked up to the network. Each of these devices will have vulnerabilities. Now we need to be able to distinguish which ones to quarantine and which ones not. I don't care how good a sysadmin is, she cannot check it all not even with a whole team as good as her. Our current systems tell us something bad has happened, our future systems will need to tell that you're vulnerable to something bad happening.
Good sysadmins are lazy. They automate everything they can, so they have time for a the difficult stuff and still be able practice Counterstrike. Only when we automate we will be able to run a huge network that does everything including the shopping. Only when we automate, it will be cost-effective
I'm currently working on ideas to get real broadband (10 mbit) and higher to houses and businesses (minimum of 7500 houses). One of the worries I have is how such a network can be run in a safe and secure manner. Previous experience in running a campus network has learned me, that you cannot trust the end user in doing things right. This becomes espescially true when you're planning for a door to door roll-out of 10mbit+ networks. Imagine a new worm which makes use of such networks. The amount of network traffic it can generate is amazing.
My solution would be an automated quarantine system, which would quarantine a system ones it is found compromised or vulnerable. Quarantine means in this case that the internet traffic is redirected to a specific page and there the user will find an explanation and a solution. Other traffic, like VOIP and TV over IP should run uninterrupted. (This could be realized for instance by having VOIP and TV on separate VLAN's or by allowing certain IP-adresses)
This system has to be automated. The reasons for automation are:
1. You cannot expect a networkadmin to continuously monitor 7500 to 50.000 connections.
2. Vulnerabilities are many and a system you've just checked by hand could easily be vulnerable the next day, because somebody installed a new piece of software with some old problems. (One can expect people to install a vulnerable version of winamp on a daily basis! Just think of all the cd's in comptermagazines that carry a version of Winamp)
3. Warhol worms are fast! Within fifteen minutes almost all vulnerable connections will have been infected. If the vulnerability was already known, the system should have been quarantined. If it is unknown, it should be able to disconnect 5000 infected systems immediately once it knows how to detect the vulnerability/worm.
4. The system should preferably be scanned upon connection to the network. Time and time again.
Yes there are all kinds of problems associated with this idea. But if you have a better solution, one that doesn't require me to rely on the intelligence of the average John Doe, please do tell me.
No way dude. Didn't they teach you in University that networks are divided in several layers? The cost of cable companies are governed by this as well. Basically their costs are split in three: 1. Cost for general overhead (huge CEO fee and a bit for the cleaning lady), 2. Cost for the maintenance/write off and investment in physical layer and active components 3. Programming.
;-)
Well, the cost for overhead and the physical layer (the cable) is payed by all and on an equal basis. You shouldn't pay less for that part if you want to see less tv. All the channels you get over it each require a fee as well. That fee is paid for you by your cable company to the holders of the rights (RIAA MPAA etc). That fee grows higher once you put more channels over the cable and lower if you want less. Problem is ofcourse that over all those fees a margin is leveraged by your cable company, so they will not be too happy with this idea. But 6 channels should never cost you more than 50. It could however be very little since 30 channels here in the Europe cost about 3 euros in fees.
BTW I pay 12 euros a month for 30 channel cable tv here in The Netherlands