...is that folks still continue to download illegal stuff using connections in their name even after being told what can happen to them. Most folks that don't read slashdot or other tech blogs (read: 95% of the population) don't believe that this could ever happen to them. I've been down this path before, but it wasn't with a roommate, it was with a partner in a small business. He would download crap from our office which was in the company's name, and he and I were the two officers of the company, so we would probably both be screwed. In the end, I realized there was nothing I could really do since he wasn't interested in stopping, and I couldn't force him to stop. I just came to grips with the fact that if they ever came knocking, I could let them sift through my PC which had various code and other uninteresting and totally legal stuff on it, and then point them to his (personally owned) PC which was full of illegal crap and let them decide who did the downloading.
Put the ISP account in his name, that way any infringement notices will go to him. Or get your own ISP that you pay for and share with no one and let the others work it out amongst themselves. That way you don't have to worry about it.
There's something wrong with your project process. In normal organizations, these questions would need to be answered well in advance of the "in two weeks we get to play with 1200 shiny new servers!" moment. It seems as though one or both of the following must be true. A) you're related to the project in some ancillary, not really important way and are just trying to help out the people really running the project, or B) your company has more money than they know what to do with and are dying to spend it on anything you ask for. If it's the latter, are you hiring?
So...the summary states "they've reworked their DNS servers so that they forward the first three octets of your IP address to the target web service". Uh, doesn't my browser send my WHOLE ip address to the web service when I make a HTTP request anyway? How is this different/better?
If what they meant to say is that the resolver sends the first three octets of my ip address to the destination's name servers when doing a recursive lookup, then how is this any better than using any old DNS? In other words, the big advantage to Google DNS for example is that it's free and fast. If their DNS server now has to ignore any cached records and do a recursive lookup for EVERY request, doesn't that negate the speed advantage? Obviously once someone in my/24 requests www.itunesdownload.akamai.net, then that specific IP should be cached for all requests from the same/24 for the TTL specified by the site operator, but for all other sites that will probably not have been hit recently, and thus not cached, I only see this adding more latency.
They should just do it in the web stack instead of trying to do it down in layer 4. User navigates to the download page, then the webserver has your full IP, geolocates you and redirects you to a download from a local server.
You forget about the large market of pre-pubescent teens with access to their parent's credit cards. Your product does not have to make financial or functional sense as long as you can convince said teens that they need it. See Furby, Tickle me Elmo, etc. Incredibly overpriced but parents buy them because it makes the kids happy. $2800 for a year's worth of the kid spending time playing games instead of getting into trouble or doing other annoying stuff is not a stretch.
There are plenty of kids with rich parents who will buy them pretty much whatever they want if they pout long enough.
Well, no....you couldn't. I'm not aware of any CPE in common use today that supports connections that fast. If you have a terabit of bandwidth available at your DC or NOC or whatever place where you peer with the rest of the Internet you can say that you have a terabit of bandwidth, but you can't tell your customers they can get "up to" a terabit of bandwidth if their CPE maxes out at 50 mbps. It's all semantics, and I understand your point, but you have to be careful about how you word it.
If the CPE can do 50 meg, you can say "up to 50 meg". But of course you also have to content with the notion of "50 meg to the node" vs "50 meg to the Internet". You could have your entire network of let's say 10000 subscribers in a given city, each with a connection into your network at 50 meg, and your entire network is linked to the 'net at 20 meg. Obviously, nobody is ever going to get more than 20 meg to the Internet, and most folks will struggle to do anything at all with their connection because the uplink will be so overloaded, but you could still say you're giving them a 50 meg connection. It's just 50 meg to your network, which says nothing about how fast they can actually connect to the Internet at large.
One of Anonymous' purposes was to act as a check on douchebag companies that do stuff like this. Suing a guy for providing a link to some infringing works he had nothing to do with creating? That's pretty douchbag-ish in my book. That'd be like the RIAA suing me for saying, hey, you know what - there's this protocol called BitTorrent and with it you can download pretty much anything you want. I think some retribution would be in order in both cases.
...if Twitter's not been using SSL for authentication why has nobody called them out on it this whole time? After all, they're a major social network and they don't protect login credentials? WTF??
You know, I'm surprised someone in congress hasn't proposed this yet. After all, when your company is drowning in debt, you just cut it loose and start another one. Why not with a country? Of course, that would nullify all of our treaties and such, and give the current government a chance to rewrite the constitution which would probably be a really bad thing. Probably not worth the current debt.
I agree. This is all spelled out very clearly in the agreement for service. Does it suck? Yes. Is it shady or illegal? I'd have to say no. The issue here is that Americans are so used to blindly signing anything put in front of them without reading it. When I bought my house and it came time to sign the mortgage paperwork which consisted of probably no less than 20 signatures, the girl they sent to my office with the paperwork was annoyed that I wanted to actually read it before signing. I told her if she didn't want to wait, she could take it back and tell her boss to send me a copy for review like I originally requested, and we could reschedule the closing. That shut her up pronto.
But seriously, Americans in general believe that most companies have their best interests at heart and don't believe that what's in the TOS actually applies to them. All the way to the collections department.
Agreed - wired "just works". Trying to adopt a wireless-only network is a much tougher proposition. And let's not forget that 95% of those IP phones businesses are so in love with ain't gonna work without wired ethernet. The other 5% that can work without it are all gonna require wall warts because wireless means no PoE. The only area I see a wireless-only network making any kind of sense is in the home, very small offices with only a handful of computers, and temporary workspaces. Everywhere else you're better off paying to run wire. Just about any office space you can buy ought to already have some sort of wired network in place. If you're building something, it definitely makes sense to wire it since it's so insanely cheap compared to doing it after the fact.
Your analogy is flawed. Hotels that provide free wifi do indeed spend next to nothing on maintaining that infrastructure - and it shows. As the network guy for a major organization (we probably have 85% household name recognition in the US, probably higher in Europe/Asia) that has 20% of its staff spending >200 nights/year in hotel rooms, I can tell you that hotel wifi coverage leaves much to be desired. About 50% of hotels with free wifi will have one of the following: A) coverage that makes it unusable in half the rooms, B) restrictive/broken firewalls, or C) a lack of bandwidth to the point of being useless for getting any work done. Try using a network like that in your place of business and see how long it takes management to cave on running cat5. Not long is my guess.
Sorry, I thought it was obvious that I meant only compatible with AirPlay in the context of streaming music from mobile devices, since the article was about the headphone jack, which is the primary method folks use to get their tunes from their phone into their car stereo at present, but I can see how that could be confusing.
Why not just use WiFi/Bluetooth or some other type of PAN? I've got AirPlay at home and don't have to plug my phone in to play music from it, so why hasn't Apple been beating automakers to death to get them to include it in their vehicles? I think that would be a huge selling point for Apple - if the car is only compatible with AirPlay, that'll make people think twice before buying an Android phone.
How often do folks really reach out to Microsoft for support anyway? Typically support calls go either to an on staff IT person or a local consultant, so the fact that the OS is no longer supported doesn't really make much of a difference.
I would stick with whatever the latest version of Windows the systems can run. If they can run Win7 then I would definitely recommend going that route, but if they can only run XP, that should be fine. Remember that most folks will have no clue what Linux is so when it won't run their Windows software they'll assume there is something wrong with the computer.
Same thing for Office - yes OpenOffice or similar may get the job done, but the folks using it probably won't understand what it is, and if the computer will be used by folks trying to learn about computers in order to get a job, or by kids trying to do school work, you'll really be doing them a disservice if they don't have access to MS Office, since that's what they'll probably use at work and/or school. Does that suck? Potentially, yes, but unfortunately that's just how it is.
If you end up putting Windows on the computers, I would consider installing something like SteadyState, or give them a DVD and instructions that they can use to easily reimage the computer. If it's a PC that many people will be using, it will probably be spyware'd in no time, so you want them to have a method for getting it back to a working state.
Unfortunately this is all too accurate. The company I work for goes to a trade show every year in Orlando, and the convention center there has facilities stuff right on the order form. I.E. wireless, ethernet, phone lines, etc. They charge you a flat rate for an ethernet drop (I think it's something like $200-300 a day) and then if you want more than a meg or two of bandwidth, that's an optional upgrade fee.
It's be interesting to see what those places make on bandwidth sales - I'm betting they make more than some smaller datacenters do.
Mod parent up. He's hit the nail right on the head. A friend of mine that I've known since elementary school (20+ years) makes about $30k, has two kids and a wife that doesn't work. He has horrible credit and tons of debt from student loans (dropped out) and credit cards. After he pays rent / bills, he typically has about $20 per paycheck left over as discretionary income, but you better believe he has Cable TV, DVR, broadband, HDTV, Bluray, 360, two iPhone 4s, a Boxee box and lots of other gadgets. Once a year when he gets his income tax refund (usually about $4-5k after the tax advance place takes their 10% because he won't wait a month to get the check) they go on a shopping spree and buy as much as they possibly can and are broke again in 2 weeks.
This is a lifestyle choice that people choose. So I agree with the poster above - the average lower middle class already have Internet access, either at home or on their cell phones, or both. Homeless people, that's another story, but again, if you're homeless, you'd be better off with a netbook that you can use on unsecured wifi connections.
I'm not saying that $10/mo for 1.5 Mbps is a bad thing, but most folks in this demographic would probably still pay the $40-50/mo to have the normal speed tier of 8-15 Mbps so they can continue to download their torrents.
I'll probably get flamed into oblivion for recommending a MSFT product on slashdot, oh well...
Exchange is actually pretty straightforward to install and administer. It has built-in webmail, calendaring, shared folders, etc. It also has out of the box mobile synchronization via ActiveSync which works with iPhone / Android, etc. I think Blackberry may even support ActiveSync now via BIS.
Active Directory is also very nice for centralized permissions, etc (assuming you're using Windows clients). I hear HomeGroup in Win7 goes a long way to improve this, but have not personally used it.
Exchange is especially good if you have multiple folks at home and you want to use calendaring, etc to organize your life. All of your PCs and mobile devices can stay synced pretty effortlessly which is a big win in my book.
Downside is obviously that you have the cost of buying Windows, Exchange and Outlook, plus an SSL cert and a static IP, and probably some sort of spam filtering solution such as Postini, however there are various ways to get MS software cheap and/or free (i.e. academic programs, action pack, etc).
I don't do this because I am put off by the cost of running a server at home (power, etc), the additional cost for a static IP, and the reliability issues that come with running a server off of a consumer grade Internet connection. However, if I had a colo or VPS that I was already paying for, I'd be inclined to set up a VM running Exchange there.
Budget plans don't give you a dedicated IP, so SSL is a moot point.
Those with the need to host multiple SSL websites are probably not using budget plans anyway. A VPS with a dedicated IP is what, $40/month or less? Doing what I suggested with that is more than feasible.
You can work around this problem with an SSL-enabled reverse proxy. Let's say you have three websites Web1.com, Web2.com and Web3.com and you want to SSL them. Just set up secure.yourdomain.com and reverse proxy the three sites through it..I.E. secure.yourdomain.com/web1/ would pull the content from web1.com, encrypt it and send it to the user. It's not ideal, but it does work when you are IP constrained.
Slashdot Mirror
The Borg vs anything Star Wars has got. Game over. If you don't believe me, then substitute Q for the Borg...game's over before it begins.
...is that folks still continue to download illegal stuff using connections in their name even after being told what can happen to them. Most folks that don't read slashdot or other tech blogs (read: 95% of the population) don't believe that this could ever happen to them. I've been down this path before, but it wasn't with a roommate, it was with a partner in a small business. He would download crap from our office which was in the company's name, and he and I were the two officers of the company, so we would probably both be screwed. In the end, I realized there was nothing I could really do since he wasn't interested in stopping, and I couldn't force him to stop. I just came to grips with the fact that if they ever came knocking, I could let them sift through my PC which had various code and other uninteresting and totally legal stuff on it, and then point them to his (personally owned) PC which was full of illegal crap and let them decide who did the downloading.
Put the ISP account in his name, that way any infringement notices will go to him. Or get your own ISP that you pay for and share with no one and let the others work it out amongst themselves. That way you don't have to worry about it.
There's something wrong with your project process. In normal organizations, these questions would need to be answered well in advance of the "in two weeks we get to play with 1200 shiny new servers!" moment. It seems as though one or both of the following must be true. A) you're related to the project in some ancillary, not really important way and are just trying to help out the people really running the project, or B) your company has more money than they know what to do with and are dying to spend it on anything you ask for. If it's the latter, are you hiring?
So...the summary states "they've reworked their DNS servers so that they forward the first three octets of your IP address to the target web service". Uh, doesn't my browser send my WHOLE ip address to the web service when I make a HTTP request anyway? How is this different/better?
/24 requests www.itunesdownload.akamai.net, then that specific IP should be cached for all requests from the same /24 for the TTL specified by the site operator, but for all other sites that will probably not have been hit recently, and thus not cached, I only see this adding more latency.
If what they meant to say is that the resolver sends the first three octets of my ip address to the destination's name servers when doing a recursive lookup, then how is this any better than using any old DNS? In other words, the big advantage to Google DNS for example is that it's free and fast. If their DNS server now has to ignore any cached records and do a recursive lookup for EVERY request, doesn't that negate the speed advantage? Obviously once someone in my
They should just do it in the web stack instead of trying to do it down in layer 4. User navigates to the download page, then the webserver has your full IP, geolocates you and redirects you to a download from a local server.
You forget about the large market of pre-pubescent teens with access to their parent's credit cards. Your product does not have to make financial or functional sense as long as you can convince said teens that they need it. See Furby, Tickle me Elmo, etc. Incredibly overpriced but parents buy them because it makes the kids happy. $2800 for a year's worth of the kid spending time playing games instead of getting into trouble or doing other annoying stuff is not a stretch.
There are plenty of kids with rich parents who will buy them pretty much whatever they want if they pout long enough.
Well, no....you couldn't. I'm not aware of any CPE in common use today that supports connections that fast. If you have a terabit of bandwidth available at your DC or NOC or whatever place where you peer with the rest of the Internet you can say that you have a terabit of bandwidth, but you can't tell your customers they can get "up to" a terabit of bandwidth if their CPE maxes out at 50 mbps. It's all semantics, and I understand your point, but you have to be careful about how you word it. If the CPE can do 50 meg, you can say "up to 50 meg". But of course you also have to content with the notion of "50 meg to the node" vs "50 meg to the Internet". You could have your entire network of let's say 10000 subscribers in a given city, each with a connection into your network at 50 meg, and your entire network is linked to the 'net at 20 meg. Obviously, nobody is ever going to get more than 20 meg to the Internet, and most folks will struggle to do anything at all with their connection because the uplink will be so overloaded, but you could still say you're giving them a 50 meg connection. It's just 50 meg to your network, which says nothing about how fast they can actually connect to the Internet at large.
One of Anonymous' purposes was to act as a check on douchebag companies that do stuff like this. Suing a guy for providing a link to some infringing works he had nothing to do with creating? That's pretty douchbag-ish in my book. That'd be like the RIAA suing me for saying, hey, you know what - there's this protocol called BitTorrent and with it you can download pretty much anything you want. I think some retribution would be in order in both cases.
...if Twitter's not been using SSL for authentication why has nobody called them out on it this whole time? After all, they're a major social network and they don't protect login credentials? WTF??
Windows 7 by itself was a huge improvement over the file copying in XP. I didn't bother with VIsta, so maybe that's when it got better. I don't know.
You know, I'm surprised someone in congress hasn't proposed this yet. After all, when your company is drowning in debt, you just cut it loose and start another one. Why not with a country? Of course, that would nullify all of our treaties and such, and give the current government a chance to rewrite the constitution which would probably be a really bad thing. Probably not worth the current debt.
I agree. This is all spelled out very clearly in the agreement for service. Does it suck? Yes. Is it shady or illegal? I'd have to say no. The issue here is that Americans are so used to blindly signing anything put in front of them without reading it. When I bought my house and it came time to sign the mortgage paperwork which consisted of probably no less than 20 signatures, the girl they sent to my office with the paperwork was annoyed that I wanted to actually read it before signing. I told her if she didn't want to wait, she could take it back and tell her boss to send me a copy for review like I originally requested, and we could reschedule the closing. That shut her up pronto.
But seriously, Americans in general believe that most companies have their best interests at heart and don't believe that what's in the TOS actually applies to them. All the way to the collections department.
Agreed - wired "just works". Trying to adopt a wireless-only network is a much tougher proposition. And let's not forget that 95% of those IP phones businesses are so in love with ain't gonna work without wired ethernet. The other 5% that can work without it are all gonna require wall warts because wireless means no PoE. The only area I see a wireless-only network making any kind of sense is in the home, very small offices with only a handful of computers, and temporary workspaces. Everywhere else you're better off paying to run wire. Just about any office space you can buy ought to already have some sort of wired network in place. If you're building something, it definitely makes sense to wire it since it's so insanely cheap compared to doing it after the fact.
Your analogy is flawed. Hotels that provide free wifi do indeed spend next to nothing on maintaining that infrastructure - and it shows. As the network guy for a major organization (we probably have 85% household name recognition in the US, probably higher in Europe/Asia) that has 20% of its staff spending >200 nights/year in hotel rooms, I can tell you that hotel wifi coverage leaves much to be desired. About 50% of hotels with free wifi will have one of the following: A) coverage that makes it unusable in half the rooms, B) restrictive/broken firewalls, or C) a lack of bandwidth to the point of being useless for getting any work done. Try using a network like that in your place of business and see how long it takes management to cave on running cat5. Not long is my guess.
They already have a wifi system. Why are they replacing it?
The audio quality of an FM transmitter is horrible. I'd use a cassette adapter over one any day.
Sorry, I thought it was obvious that I meant only compatible with AirPlay in the context of streaming music from mobile devices, since the article was about the headphone jack, which is the primary method folks use to get their tunes from their phone into their car stereo at present, but I can see how that could be confusing.
Why not just use WiFi/Bluetooth or some other type of PAN? I've got AirPlay at home and don't have to plug my phone in to play music from it, so why hasn't Apple been beating automakers to death to get them to include it in their vehicles? I think that would be a huge selling point for Apple - if the car is only compatible with AirPlay, that'll make people think twice before buying an Android phone.
How often do folks really reach out to Microsoft for support anyway? Typically support calls go either to an on staff IT person or a local consultant, so the fact that the OS is no longer supported doesn't really make much of a difference.
I would stick with whatever the latest version of Windows the systems can run. If they can run Win7 then I would definitely recommend going that route, but if they can only run XP, that should be fine. Remember that most folks will have no clue what Linux is so when it won't run their Windows software they'll assume there is something wrong with the computer.
Same thing for Office - yes OpenOffice or similar may get the job done, but the folks using it probably won't understand what it is, and if the computer will be used by folks trying to learn about computers in order to get a job, or by kids trying to do school work, you'll really be doing them a disservice if they don't have access to MS Office, since that's what they'll probably use at work and/or school. Does that suck? Potentially, yes, but unfortunately that's just how it is.
If you end up putting Windows on the computers, I would consider installing something like SteadyState, or give them a DVD and instructions that they can use to easily reimage the computer. If it's a PC that many people will be using, it will probably be spyware'd in no time, so you want them to have a method for getting it back to a working state.
Will it blend?
Unfortunately this is all too accurate. The company I work for goes to a trade show every year in Orlando, and the convention center there has facilities stuff right on the order form. I.E. wireless, ethernet, phone lines, etc. They charge you a flat rate for an ethernet drop (I think it's something like $200-300 a day) and then if you want more than a meg or two of bandwidth, that's an optional upgrade fee. It's be interesting to see what those places make on bandwidth sales - I'm betting they make more than some smaller datacenters do.
Mod parent up. He's hit the nail right on the head. A friend of mine that I've known since elementary school (20+ years) makes about $30k, has two kids and a wife that doesn't work. He has horrible credit and tons of debt from student loans (dropped out) and credit cards. After he pays rent / bills, he typically has about $20 per paycheck left over as discretionary income, but you better believe he has Cable TV, DVR, broadband, HDTV, Bluray, 360, two iPhone 4s, a Boxee box and lots of other gadgets. Once a year when he gets his income tax refund (usually about $4-5k after the tax advance place takes their 10% because he won't wait a month to get the check) they go on a shopping spree and buy as much as they possibly can and are broke again in 2 weeks.
This is a lifestyle choice that people choose. So I agree with the poster above - the average lower middle class already have Internet access, either at home or on their cell phones, or both. Homeless people, that's another story, but again, if you're homeless, you'd be better off with a netbook that you can use on unsecured wifi connections.
I'm not saying that $10/mo for 1.5 Mbps is a bad thing, but most folks in this demographic would probably still pay the $40-50/mo to have the normal speed tier of 8-15 Mbps so they can continue to download their torrents.
I'll probably get flamed into oblivion for recommending a MSFT product on slashdot, oh well...
Exchange is actually pretty straightforward to install and administer. It has built-in webmail, calendaring, shared folders, etc. It also has out of the box mobile synchronization via ActiveSync which works with iPhone / Android, etc. I think Blackberry may even support ActiveSync now via BIS.
Active Directory is also very nice for centralized permissions, etc (assuming you're using Windows clients). I hear HomeGroup in Win7 goes a long way to improve this, but have not personally used it.
Exchange is especially good if you have multiple folks at home and you want to use calendaring, etc to organize your life. All of your PCs and mobile devices can stay synced pretty effortlessly which is a big win in my book.
Downside is obviously that you have the cost of buying Windows, Exchange and Outlook, plus an SSL cert and a static IP, and probably some sort of spam filtering solution such as Postini, however there are various ways to get MS software cheap and/or free (i.e. academic programs, action pack, etc).
I don't do this because I am put off by the cost of running a server at home (power, etc), the additional cost for a static IP, and the reliability issues that come with running a server off of a consumer grade Internet connection. However, if I had a colo or VPS that I was already paying for, I'd be inclined to set up a VM running Exchange there.
Budget plans don't give you a dedicated IP, so SSL is a moot point. Those with the need to host multiple SSL websites are probably not using budget plans anyway. A VPS with a dedicated IP is what, $40/month or less? Doing what I suggested with that is more than feasible.
You can work around this problem with an SSL-enabled reverse proxy. Let's say you have three websites Web1.com, Web2.com and Web3.com and you want to SSL them. Just set up secure.yourdomain.com and reverse proxy the three sites through it..I.E. secure.yourdomain.com/web1/ would pull the content from web1.com, encrypt it and send it to the user. It's not ideal, but it does work when you are IP constrained.