Existing Wifi uses channels open for use internationally (more or less). It sounds to me that this might not be true in this case. That is one reason for alarm.
That is why there were a series of comments following the original post, indicating that you should copy sh and setuid that. It is still insecure, but a lesser of two evils.
There are a lot of people here saying that if by making it open source, you can strip the DRM.
This is true, but it doesn't mean that the file will be anything like the original. What do I mean by this? Well, if they were to use a lossy encryption algorithm, then the decrypted copy will be uncompressed. Of course, it would be playable, but at a significantly larger file size. It would be practically the same as the "CD workaround" in iTunes, or recording and recompressing the line-out from your sound card when playing from any existing DRM scheme.
Personally, I see this as being the best way for someone to implement an opensource DRM scheme, as having the source in no way "enables" the user.
In the end, its really just yet another x86 blade chassis.
This is a bit expensive, but pretty much on par, cost-wise, to solutions from Sun and Dell. I don't see many small businesses choosing these, but I don't see many small businesses going with a blade chassis anyway. Personally, I just don't see the business sense in chassis servers, since they don't save that much power, don't save that much space, require specialty parts which are hard to obtain and expensive to replace, offer little to no advantage for management, and cost a lot more money. For me, this chassis (fully loaded) would cost $25k more than my current configuration (equally configured).
That is still $6/gallon... when I was in Poland a year ago, prices were under 4PLN/l, what are your unleaded prices now? By the way, in the US, we're not even paying $4/gallon (2.39PLN/l) for old-fashioned regular unleaded.
As you said, the advertisers are paying for the younger viewers, not the old "majority" of viewers. The television executives might not care if they lose viewers 55 and older, even if that is millions of viewers, if they only make money on viewers 18-45...
Running a (modest, by todays standard) 6Mbit connection at 100% (or, hell, even 50%) utilisation will cost a hell of a lot more than 10 bucks a month. More like thousands.
I don't know of any residential provider that has 10mbps internet for $10/mo. Second, Cogent sells wholesale bandwidth at $4/mbit, it does not cost "thousands". What does cost thousands are dedicated OC-[3-48] lines, but data is cheap.
Here, for about $48/mo, Verizon has a 10/2mbps FIOS connection, which is $4.80/mbit. That means that if each user was using 100% of their downstream bandwidth, Verizon would be still "making" $0.80. Of course, Verizon has costs other than raw bandwidth, such as maintenance. They've also got a 20/5 connection that offers rates as low as $2.90/mbit.
However, the trick is that the $4/mbit wholesale bandwidth costs from Cogent are for upstream and downstream. Verizon is only giving a 2mbps upstream to their customers, they then sell to business customers that primarily require upstream transit. I understand that my example of Cogent with $4/mbit is sort of an oddity in the market, but they make a profit from that, so it might not be far from Verizon's wholescale cost per mbit.
The moral of the story? At least with Verizon, they're not massively overselling their data, and those per mbit charges are at a rate that could very much conceivably support each user running at 100% utilization.
The only way in which Verizon is "too good to be true" is the fact that despite these low, but not impossible, per-mbit charges, they're running fiber to your home and have high support costs since they're dealing with non-technical users (like the stereotypical grannie). If I was ordering for my business, I'd pay about that for data, but I'd pay a whole lot more for that fiber run.
My own short list:
newegg, nextwarehouse, geeks.com, and cdw.
CDW is the most expensive of them all, but they're extremely fast and reliable. The only problem I've had with them is that on some gear, like Cisco, they might have a sales agent contact you to make sure that you're ordering what you need -- and they will neg. with you. This can be a great thing, and it is a fabulous service, but it does slightly delay the receipt of gear that you might need right now, today. Overall, this has been rare, and when it happens you will get a phone-call, you can simply confirm your order and it will still come in a very acceptable time-frame.
Newegg is usually great, but I've had cases where they would randomly complain about my different shipping and billing addresses (that were used on prior purchases) and would drop my order. That would delay shipments by days or even weeks, but I'd eventually get the equipment. This once happened when I needed the shipment the next day, and had paid for next-day shipping, and worse--the product had gone up in price. Again, Newegg figured it out for me, and adjusted the prices, but I'm cautious about purchasing from them when I have a strict, close deadline.
Pygame is a python wrapper for SDL, which is abstracts the display. It supports accelerated 2d canvas drawing, it supports surfaces which are more or less sprites. SDL (and by extention, pygame) also supports OpenGL.
Regarding OpenGL being "slow", I'm not sure where you're getting that idea from. OpenGL is plenty fast if you have hardware acceleration and don't use unaccelerated functions like glDrawPixels.
There is no good reason to put time-capsules underground besides some strange belief that it should be done that way. You're much better putting the contents above-ground inside of a wall, behind a plaque, etc. This way, it is much less likely for there to be water or other sorts of damage that plagues underground storage, you also have a smaller chance of it being lost or forgotten. If secured properly, there should be very minimal risk of tampering.
I know know what this worm is doing exactly, but it could try random usernames, or simply usernames identical to that the key was stolen from (if stolen from local user eric, try remote user eric). A really smart worm would even check the known_hosts file, to direct its attack to the most likely hosts to contain a matching public key.
What it means is that there are apparently some administrators not running Debian that have naively thought that the issue didn't affect them. However, if they haven't blacklisted those keys, they will undoubtedly have some users that generated their keys on Debian, which are vulnerable.
The worm will exploit this to obtain local non-root user access, and through local privilege escalation exploits will obtain root. Then, they will steal the keys stored on the host that might be used to connect out to other hosts. The last part of this is the deadly part, because those keys are not blacklisted, and will thus connect to and infect the hosts that don't have vulnerable-old-debian keys.
What this means for me, as the administrator of a web hosting company that has patched their servers, is that we will undoubtedly see illicit login attempts. With some really bad luck, one of those login attempts might work, despite our patching. Then, we are at the whim of how well we're secure against local privilege escalation.
I would go so far as not to suggest using any Microsoft Windows product for online banking. Not because Microsoft Windows is inherently insecure, but because it is defacto insecure due to the high penetration rates of Windows systems.
The problems with the Radiohead album have been multifold. First, there was a lot of publicity regarding "free" distribution. At release, the Radiohead website was generally considered cumbersome and difficult to use, and was suffering from outages.
The problems downloading the album from the Radiohead site drove many to download the files from peer to peer networks, with the media-driven misconception that this album was "free". Unfortunately, the extent to which the album was "free" was greatly over-exaggerated by the media, as it was not free for redistribution. This is a fact that likely eluded the average consumer not intimately familiar with copyright law.
Above all, a user will take the path of least resistance, legal or not. For some users, they find resistance in prices they cannot afford, but that is not the only reason for piracy. Other reasons include empty store shelves, DRM (digital rights management), and uncooperative websites (as with 'In Rainbows'). All of these barriers to legal ownership result in piracy.
Almost unfortunately, record companies have already realized this. Yet, they have decided to implement these ideas backwards. They are attempting to reduce the relative barriers to legal ownership by increasing the barriers to illegal ownership. This has been done via the legal system, with their infamous lawsuits.
I agree with the general idea of that record companies must adapt and embrace free downloads through peer-to-peer networks, as NiN has done with their release of Ghosts. NiN has released their Ghosts album free for download and redistribution under Creative Commons.
al-Qaeda is an Arabic term and in translation can be alternatively spelled as al-Qaida. The US government has apparently referenced it by this spelling in the past, mostly during Bill Clinton's presidency.
The BBC continues to spell color as 'colour', and gray as 'grey'; read CNN for the proper spellings.
I like the suggestion of using a shell account. Yes, you can do everything, such as email, on the server.
For Firefox, if *not* blocking images altogether, an ad-blocking plugin would be a good suggestion as well to minimize how much is downloaded. Turn off HTTP pipelining, increase nglayout.initialpaint.delay, use lots of tabs, and have plenty of coffee handy. If you don't use tabs, you can leave pipelining on, but you might want to optimize the number of connections. There are plenty of resources and suggestions online that indicate how you can optimize firefox for dialup.
I suggest running a private HTTP proxy through a secure, compressed tunnel. This is now very possible and inexpensive with VPS accounts. The proxy could compress all text, force caching of CSS/JS, recompress images, block images over a given size threshold, perform adblocking, etc. Filtering through HTML Tidy (to remove comments, etc) and then compressing, you can have small performance gains as well. Greasemonkey can be used to make specific optimizations your most frequently accessed pages.
How is this something in which government should get involved?
Since the government granted monopolies for the delivery of wired broadband services?
The problem we have is that today, for some, the internet is as important a utility as electricity. Would your family move from the home they've owned for 50 years if the (only) electric company said they would only give you 1 amp / 110v of power to run your home on? I'm sure that with such a restriction, many reasonable people would first contact the electric company to complain, and then without resolution would escalate to their local government, and finally would move to a more reasonable location.
I don't see why internet access should be no different. While I understand how many can live without internet, I can also understand how people lived (and live...) without electricity. Like electricity, if its important to you and the utilities refuse to offer it, move to where there is service or stop complaining! Meanwhile, the government should do more to encourage the private expansion of broadband access so that it is as accessible and available as electricity has become.
Personally, I recommend that if you need an option, without moving... get a T1 and be frugal! Look at your phone bill, and subtract that from the cost of a T1 (probably about $500/mo). You could then use one channel of your T1 for telephone -- OR -- use an inexpensive VoIP provider. You can signup for broadvoice.com at $10/mo, and there are other decent alternatives as well. Next, subtract your cable bill if you have a VGA/DVI port on your TV (or buy one for ~$600) and a spare computer (I suggest buying a used Mac Mini Solo for $200-300). Instead of cable, look at maybe buying a Slingbox (~$100) and installing it at a family member's house, or watching TV-on-Demand through Hulu.com/ABC.com/itunes. If this is for an older couple, the Slingbox option should be quite simple if properly configured for them.
With those numbers, if you're paying $50/mo for telephone now, and $50/mo for cable tv, you can add internet for a net monthly increase of $400/mo and $1000 in equipment, assuming you don't already have the HDTV/slingbox/media-pc. You will probably save a small bit on electricity if you currently have a CRT television. Compare the cost of this over two years ($10600), when presumably you may have less expensive options, to your dream home improvement project, such as a new bathroom or kitchen. It is true that those improvements would increase the value of your home, but if your alternative is moving, losing $10,600 to internet access might be less than you could lose by selling your home in the current housing crisis.
You might wish to try reading some Tolstoy, he wrote very much a fiction of the sort, 'based on a real story'. It was dramatized, fictional, but based on real-life occurances. Yes, they're fictional, but they real give insight to culture and history.
As examples... War and Peace was a fictionalization of the Napoleonic wars, while Hadji Murad is a fictionalized account of a real man's exploits during the fight (1711-1864) for Chechnian independence from the Russian Empire.
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Existing Wifi uses channels open for use internationally (more or less). It sounds to me that this might not be true in this case. That is one reason for alarm.
That is why there were a series of comments following the original post, indicating that you should copy sh and setuid that. It is still insecure, but a lesser of two evils.
I'm suspecting it is insecure allocation of ptys?
There are a lot of people here saying that if by making it open source, you can strip the DRM.
This is true, but it doesn't mean that the file will be anything like the original. What do I mean by this? Well, if they were to use a lossy encryption algorithm, then the decrypted copy will be uncompressed. Of course, it would be playable, but at a significantly larger file size. It would be practically the same as the "CD workaround" in iTunes, or recording and recompressing the line-out from your sound card when playing from any existing DRM scheme.
Personally, I see this as being the best way for someone to implement an opensource DRM scheme, as having the source in no way "enables" the user.
In the end, its really just yet another x86 blade chassis.
This is a bit expensive, but pretty much on par, cost-wise, to solutions from Sun and Dell. I don't see many small businesses choosing these, but I don't see many small businesses going with a blade chassis anyway. Personally, I just don't see the business sense in chassis servers, since they don't save that much power, don't save that much space, require specialty parts which are hard to obtain and expensive to replace, offer little to no advantage for management, and cost a lot more money. For me, this chassis (fully loaded) would cost $25k more than my current configuration (equally configured).
A one time pad... with oneself. This is an excellent idea, as long as they don't subsequently search your home ;-)
That is still $6/gallon... when I was in Poland a year ago, prices were under 4PLN/l, what are your unleaded prices now? By the way, in the US, we're not even paying $4/gallon (2.39PLN/l) for old-fashioned regular unleaded.
As you said, the advertisers are paying for the younger viewers, not the old "majority" of viewers. The television executives might not care if they lose viewers 55 and older, even if that is millions of viewers, if they only make money on viewers 18-45...
I don't know of any residential provider that has 10mbps internet for $10/mo. Second, Cogent sells wholesale bandwidth at $4/mbit, it does not cost "thousands". What does cost thousands are dedicated OC-[3-48] lines, but data is cheap.
Here, for about $48/mo, Verizon has a 10/2mbps FIOS connection, which is $4.80/mbit. That means that if each user was using 100% of their downstream bandwidth, Verizon would be still "making" $0.80. Of course, Verizon has costs other than raw bandwidth, such as maintenance. They've also got a 20/5 connection that offers rates as low as $2.90/mbit.
However, the trick is that the $4/mbit wholesale bandwidth costs from Cogent are for upstream and downstream. Verizon is only giving a 2mbps upstream to their customers, they then sell to business customers that primarily require upstream transit. I understand that my example of Cogent with $4/mbit is sort of an oddity in the market, but they make a profit from that, so it might not be far from Verizon's wholescale cost per mbit.
The moral of the story? At least with Verizon, they're not massively overselling their data, and those per mbit charges are at a rate that could very much conceivably support each user running at 100% utilization.
The only way in which Verizon is "too good to be true" is the fact that despite these low, but not impossible, per-mbit charges, they're running fiber to your home and have high support costs since they're dealing with non-technical users (like the stereotypical grannie). If I was ordering for my business, I'd pay about that for data, but I'd pay a whole lot more for that fiber run.
My own short list:
newegg, nextwarehouse, geeks.com, and cdw.
CDW is the most expensive of them all, but they're extremely fast and reliable. The only problem I've had with them is that on some gear, like Cisco, they might have a sales agent contact you to make sure that you're ordering what you need -- and they will neg. with you. This can be a great thing, and it is a fabulous service, but it does slightly delay the receipt of gear that you might need right now, today. Overall, this has been rare, and when it happens you will get a phone-call, you can simply confirm your order and it will still come in a very acceptable time-frame.
Newegg is usually great, but I've had cases where they would randomly complain about my different shipping and billing addresses (that were used on prior purchases) and would drop my order. That would delay shipments by days or even weeks, but I'd eventually get the equipment. This once happened when I needed the shipment the next day, and had paid for next-day shipping, and worse--the product had gone up in price. Again, Newegg figured it out for me, and adjusted the prices, but I'm cautious about purchasing from them when I have a strict, close deadline.
Completely agreed. Tigerdirect is as good as any other vendor until you have a problem, and then they're the worst you'll ever deal with.
Pygame is a python wrapper for SDL, which is abstracts the display. It supports accelerated 2d canvas drawing, it supports surfaces which are more or less sprites. SDL (and by extention, pygame) also supports OpenGL.
Regarding OpenGL being "slow", I'm not sure where you're getting that idea from. OpenGL is plenty fast if you have hardware acceleration and don't use unaccelerated functions like glDrawPixels.
Some might beg to differ.
There is no good reason to put time-capsules underground besides some strange belief that it should be done that way. You're much better putting the contents above-ground inside of a wall, behind a plaque, etc. This way, it is much less likely for there to be water or other sorts of damage that plagues underground storage, you also have a smaller chance of it being lost or forgotten. If secured properly, there should be very minimal risk of tampering.
Sorry, I meant to write, "I don't know what this worm is doing exactly".
I know know what this worm is doing exactly, but it could try random usernames, or simply usernames identical to that the key was stolen from (if stolen from local user eric, try remote user eric). A really smart worm would even check the known_hosts file, to direct its attack to the most likely hosts to contain a matching public key.
What it means is that there are apparently some administrators not running Debian that have naively thought that the issue didn't affect them. However, if they haven't blacklisted those keys, they will undoubtedly have some users that generated their keys on Debian, which are vulnerable.
The worm will exploit this to obtain local non-root user access, and through local privilege escalation exploits will obtain root. Then, they will steal the keys stored on the host that might be used to connect out to other hosts. The last part of this is the deadly part, because those keys are not blacklisted, and will thus connect to and infect the hosts that don't have vulnerable-old-debian keys.
What this means for me, as the administrator of a web hosting company that has patched their servers, is that we will undoubtedly see illicit login attempts. With some really bad luck, one of those login attempts might work, despite our patching. Then, we are at the whim of how well we're secure against local privilege escalation.
I would go so far as not to suggest using any Microsoft Windows product for online banking. Not because Microsoft Windows is inherently insecure, but because it is defacto insecure due to the high penetration rates of Windows systems.
The problems with the Radiohead album have been multifold. First, there was a lot of publicity regarding "free" distribution. At release, the Radiohead website was generally considered cumbersome and difficult to use, and was suffering from outages.
The problems downloading the album from the Radiohead site drove many to download the files from peer to peer networks, with the media-driven misconception that this album was "free". Unfortunately, the extent to which the album was "free" was greatly over-exaggerated by the media, as it was not free for redistribution. This is a fact that likely eluded the average consumer not intimately familiar with copyright law.
Above all, a user will take the path of least resistance, legal or not. For some users, they find resistance in prices they cannot afford, but that is not the only reason for piracy. Other reasons include empty store shelves, DRM (digital rights management), and uncooperative websites (as with 'In Rainbows'). All of these barriers to legal ownership result in piracy.
Almost unfortunately, record companies have already realized this. Yet, they have decided to implement these ideas backwards. They are attempting to reduce the relative barriers to legal ownership by increasing the barriers to illegal ownership. This has been done via the legal system, with their infamous lawsuits.
I agree with the general idea of that record companies must adapt and embrace free downloads through peer-to-peer networks, as NiN has done with their release of Ghosts. NiN has released their Ghosts album free for download and redistribution under Creative Commons.
al-Qaeda is an Arabic term and in translation can be alternatively spelled as al-Qaida. The US government has apparently referenced it by this spelling in the past, mostly during Bill Clinton's presidency.
The BBC continues to spell color as 'colour', and gray as 'grey'; read CNN for the proper spellings.
Nor were there gun-control laws preventing the people from taking an equal stand against their government.
I believe that Steve Mann of wearable computing fame was the first to create an algorithm for photo stitching.
I like the suggestion of using a shell account. Yes, you can do everything, such as email, on the server.
For Firefox, if *not* blocking images altogether, an ad-blocking plugin would be a good suggestion as well to minimize how much is downloaded. Turn off HTTP pipelining, increase nglayout.initialpaint.delay, use lots of tabs, and have plenty of coffee handy. If you don't use tabs, you can leave pipelining on, but you might want to optimize the number of connections. There are plenty of resources and suggestions online that indicate how you can optimize firefox for dialup.
I suggest running a private HTTP proxy through a secure, compressed tunnel. This is now very possible and inexpensive with VPS accounts. The proxy could compress all text, force caching of CSS/JS, recompress images, block images over a given size threshold, perform adblocking, etc. Filtering through HTML Tidy (to remove comments, etc) and then compressing, you can have small performance gains as well. Greasemonkey can be used to make specific optimizations your most frequently accessed pages.
Since the government granted monopolies for the delivery of wired broadband services?
The problem we have is that today, for some, the internet is as important a utility as electricity. Would your family move from the home they've owned for 50 years if the (only) electric company said they would only give you 1 amp / 110v of power to run your home on? I'm sure that with such a restriction, many reasonable people would first contact the electric company to complain, and then without resolution would escalate to their local government, and finally would move to a more reasonable location.
I don't see why internet access should be no different. While I understand how many can live without internet, I can also understand how people lived (and live...) without electricity. Like electricity, if its important to you and the utilities refuse to offer it, move to where there is service or stop complaining! Meanwhile, the government should do more to encourage the private expansion of broadband access so that it is as accessible and available as electricity has become.
Personally, I recommend that if you need an option, without moving... get a T1 and be frugal! Look at your phone bill, and subtract that from the cost of a T1 (probably about $500/mo). You could then use one channel of your T1 for telephone -- OR -- use an inexpensive VoIP provider. You can signup for broadvoice.com at $10/mo, and there are other decent alternatives as well. Next, subtract your cable bill if you have a VGA/DVI port on your TV (or buy one for ~$600) and a spare computer (I suggest buying a used Mac Mini Solo for $200-300). Instead of cable, look at maybe buying a Slingbox (~$100) and installing it at a family member's house, or watching TV-on-Demand through Hulu.com/ABC.com/itunes. If this is for an older couple, the Slingbox option should be quite simple if properly configured for them.
With those numbers, if you're paying $50/mo for telephone now, and $50/mo for cable tv, you can add internet for a net monthly increase of $400/mo and $1000 in equipment, assuming you don't already have the HDTV/slingbox/media-pc. You will probably save a small bit on electricity if you currently have a CRT television. Compare the cost of this over two years ($10600), when presumably you may have less expensive options, to your dream home improvement project, such as a new bathroom or kitchen. It is true that those improvements would increase the value of your home, but if your alternative is moving, losing $10,600 to internet access might be less than you could lose by selling your home in the current housing crisis.
You might wish to try reading some Tolstoy, he wrote very much a fiction of the sort, 'based on a real story'. It was dramatized, fictional, but based on real-life occurances. Yes, they're fictional, but they real give insight to culture and history.
As examples... War and Peace was a fictionalization of the Napoleonic wars, while Hadji Murad is a fictionalized account of a real man's exploits during the fight (1711-1864) for Chechnian independence from the Russian Empire.