*Looks through tax returns for the past five years*
Nope. No phone company tax.
Check your phone bill. There are a ton of taxes that have been added, but Just because it is not itemized on your tax bill doesn't mean it ain't there. I don't see a tax for a stadium in my hometown either, but it was paid for with taxes.
As for being built by governments, I indicated that the means for this installation were provided by government. They were allowed to build infrastructure on private land under the auspices of a government. Do you believe that the phone or power companies OWN the land behind your house that the phone lines run over? No, they were granted a right-of-way by the government.
All these guys are trying to do is use the same right-of-way.
Umm..no. Taxes would be a "guaranteed profit". When I shut off my phone service for about a year and a half. SBC didn't get any "guaranteed profits" from me.
umm..yes. The phone companies were guaranteed a profit, just like the power companies. ATT and later Bell Atlantic or whomever, came to the PSC and said, "our costs have risen, so we would like to raise our prices so that we can make a X% profit" PSC responds affirmatively and your price goes up. If you cancelled your phone, I am certain that it never made it to their bottom line...
Same with the cable company.
True. Well, 1 out of 4 points ain't bad. Better luck next time.
Is that they have built their networks on our dime. They would have you believe that they built these huge networks out of their own pocket and that they took a huge risk in doing so.
The truth is that these infrastructures were built by government and given to them for maintainence. Perhaps not literally, but certainly financially. The phone company does not have emminent domain rights to my property to erect poles (snicker) or dig a trench, but for that power allowed them by the government. If they had to pay anything, it was small, and it didn't matter anyway, since they were nurtured by guaranteed profits by Public Service Commissions.
To have these guys behave in this way now disgusts me. There are 'real' companies taking 'real' risks these days without any guarantees of success or profit and they end up paying through the nose for communications lawyers just to get the chance to compete. I don't know if you have had to deal with a baby bell trouble ticket recently, but it wouldn't be hard to beat them in service.
The way I see it, the baby bells are only winning this race because we gave them a 75 year headstart.
They could block the number from calling them, and perhaps even press charges based on Caller ID, but the do not call registry has absolutely nothing to do with this.
This is the solution to all of our troubles. Spam as a DOS attack.
I think this is a pretty stupid way to regulate spam. I had a freind that simply set up a dialer to dial the 800 number in the spam 24 hours a day. This seems like a better disincentive to me.
I could see this being useful in an airplane if you wanted to game with friends or collaborate with coworkers on the same flight. Of course, it would also probably screw up the avionics and redirect the flight to Tibet. But at least you would be able to get some work or enjoyment for the long flight...
Or it would be useful for simple impromptu networking for a quick and dirty network situations where power is at a premium (like a natural disaster). Granted, that wouldn't involve Internet access, but a small easily powered AP is somewhat useful.
I recently had a similar issue. I was visiting a friend in Germany and his win2k machine had been infected a few weeks earlier. He had a cousin rebuild it, but the cousin hadn't run windowsupdate. The way that my friend connected to the Internet was directly with ISDN. He would literally be compromised in 5 minutes unless I had Norton running. Then there wasn't enough memory left to run windowsupdate without crashing.
If you can get the thing off of the Internet directly, through a router or something (anything) and you can pull it off, but the direct connection is just WAY too dangerous and counter-productive.
Oh, and trying to read error messages in a foreign language hurts your brain too.
I think what we are looking at here is some sort of economic evolution. You will notice that Microsoft's most mature products (office and Windows) are profit leaders. However, loss leaders will be products that some day (maybe 5 years) will bear the fruit grown in the soil rich with competitor's blood. Once all of the competition for browsers, or Database servers are dead, they can crank up the profit margin on those products, as all of the competition has been swallowed, killed, or discredited by FUD.
The real unanswered question is whether this is a death knell or call to arms.
For the point of this article, I think this is irrelevant anyway. If the victim can get a couple IP addresses and exact times (probably from an intermediate SMTP host to ensure accuracy) the ISP, if they are cooperative and competent, can probably (with considerable work) get the CID data.
It is not a considerable amount of work. It's almost trivial. The key will be to convince the ISP that you are who you say you are and are looking for the info that you say you are looking for. But if I was the ISP and you asked me, I'd tell you to pound sand.
Suppose that I give you the info and you go over and kill the guy for drinking your beer. I am now liable for that murder. IANAL, but I think the the bad guys family can sue me for wrongful death.
I would call the ISP ASAP and ask them to cull the data and save it for the police. Then call the police and tell them that you have their crook, they just have to go pick him up.
Third - Much of the land is covered in permafrost. In order to build anything on it that will last, you have to dig to bedrock and fill with some other material. (Permafrost melts into a mud/jello-like substance in the summer. Outside Fairbanks you can see roofs of sunken houses that were built on it by foolish settlers.)
Actually, perma-frost doesn't melt, thus the "perma" prefix. The permaforst layer is about 6 feet down (perhaps more) and it never melts, unless you run a locomotive through it.:)
Isn't this a fairly active volcanic area? I know I wouldn't want to be in the middle of the 23 mile stretch when a little one hits, let alone the big one.
Is doubleclick really so horrible that you have to go out of your way to kill websites with your ad-filtering proxies and your mutated hosts files?
Sadly, yes it is. There is a great deal of information can be gleaned by services like doubleclick regarding your habits. It is all a matter of what you are willing to give up to get to the content. What does doubleclick do with the information? They can, with proper market penetration, follow your every move and manipulate your browsing experience to suit their needs, not yours.
One must be wary of a company whose strategy includes invisible links to their site for tracking purposes.
If we don't fight THE MAN(tm) now, we will forever be relegated to the status of consumer, not a person.
Now multiply that time by thousands of hits per second. How much of your routers' time is being dedicated to filtering this minor annoyance in a given day? Sadly, a few ms does matter in the ISP biz. Any low ping bastards out there? How about good ping times on Napster? If you were able to detect any difference, it's too much. Besides where would you route these things? certainly it isn't being advertised in your BGP announcements, it's not in your OSPF routing tables. It will likely live a short life anyway.
That is fine. Certainly it would be nice if they dropped the private addresses, but that is their perogative. If the bandwidth is being saturated by private addresses I'll go somewhere that has better bandwidth. But when you compare the overhead associated with running every packet that enters the network have to pass through 3 seperate tests v. having a few random misplaced packets, I'll take the random packets. I'll race you to the pr0n.
My question is why would we want the ISP's to do this. What I expect from my ISP is bandwidth. I want a clear channel to the great ether, come what may attack-wise. Protecting my network is my job, not an ISP's.
Since an ip phone has a fixed ip address, it can log in to the server from anywhere on the network, and have the same settings.
Actually the real beauty is that it DOESN'T need a fixed IP address. It gets an IP address and registers with a server on the net. The server then makes a dynamic association between that IP address and and the phone number for that phone. Now you can take your phone with you from the NY office to the Dallas office, plug in, and you are receiving all of your calls again. Of course it can also do toll bypass, where you make a call from NY to Dallas and it appears on the PSTN in Dallas as a local call from the dallas office. Cool stuff.
Re:Bandwidth Constraints and other barriers.
on
VDSL Demoed
·
· Score: 1
The costs can certainly be controlled. In the next two years we will learn a lot about xDSL technologies. As it is rolled out in the next 12-24 months, you should expect the prices to drop and the competition to rise.
The real sticking point with VDSL is the distance sensitive nature of it. It will make sense in large apartment buildings first. This would permit you to surf the net, talk on the phone and watch "every movie ever made in every language" or whatever (probably more like all the porn that you can take from every conceivable angle).
However, we may see that people that don't have ADSL now will be MORE likely to get VDSL. VDSL will involve putting some environmentally hardened equipment out at some box in your neighborhood and being fed by fiber back to the central office. People that are far away from the central offices are already (in many cases) fed by fiber. being fed by fiber prevents ADSL from working, but will ensure that those people will be served by VDSL.
Slashdot Mirror
It is free as in beer, not as in speech. The source will not be opened from what the article says.
*Looks through tax returns for the past five years*
Nope. No phone company tax.
Check your phone bill. There are a ton of taxes that have been added, but Just because it is not itemized on your tax bill doesn't mean it ain't there. I don't see a tax for a stadium in my hometown either, but it was paid for with taxes.
As for being built by governments, I indicated that the means for this installation were provided by government. They were allowed to build infrastructure on private land under the auspices of a government. Do you believe that the phone or power companies OWN the land behind your house that the phone lines run over? No, they were granted a right-of-way by the government.
All these guys are trying to do is use the same right-of-way.
Umm..no. Taxes would be a "guaranteed profit". When I shut off my phone service for about a year and a half. SBC didn't get any "guaranteed profits" from me.
umm..yes. The phone companies were guaranteed a profit, just like the power companies. ATT and later Bell Atlantic or whomever, came to the PSC and said, "our costs have risen, so we would like to raise our prices so that we can make a X% profit" PSC responds affirmatively and your price goes up. If you cancelled your phone, I am certain that it never made it to their bottom line...
Same with the cable company.
True. Well, 1 out of 4 points ain't bad. Better luck next time.
Is that they have built their networks on our dime. They would have you believe that they built these huge networks out of their own pocket and that they took a huge risk in doing so.
The truth is that these infrastructures were built by government and given to them for maintainence. Perhaps not literally, but certainly financially. The phone company does not have emminent domain rights to my property to erect poles (snicker) or dig a trench, but for that power allowed them by the government. If they had to pay anything, it was small, and it didn't matter anyway, since they were nurtured by guaranteed profits by Public Service Commissions.
To have these guys behave in this way now disgusts me. There are 'real' companies taking 'real' risks these days without any guarantees of success or profit and they end up paying through the nose for communications lawyers just to get the chance to compete. I don't know if you have had to deal with a baby bell trouble ticket recently, but it wouldn't be hard to beat them in service.
The way I see it, the baby bells are only winning this race because we gave them a 75 year headstart.
splice in shots at random times showing Jar Jar being horribly tortured.
produced by Lucas, directed by Mel Gibson...
The Passion of Jar-Jar.
"Whysa yousa forsake me-sa?"
Uh..No.
They could block the number from calling them, and perhaps even press charges based on Caller ID, but the do not call registry has absolutely nothing to do with this.
Thanks for playing.
This is the solution to all of our troubles. Spam as a DOS attack.
I think this is a pretty stupid way to regulate spam. I had a freind that simply set up a dialer to dial the 800 number in the spam 24 hours a day. This seems like a better disincentive to me.
I could see this being useful in an airplane if you wanted to game with friends or collaborate with coworkers on the same flight. Of course, it would also probably screw up the avionics and redirect the flight to Tibet. But at least you would be able to get some work or enjoyment for the long flight...
Or it would be useful for simple impromptu networking for a quick and dirty network situations where power is at a premium (like a natural disaster). Granted, that wouldn't involve Internet access, but a small easily powered AP is somewhat useful.
I recently had a similar issue. I was visiting a friend in Germany and his win2k machine had been infected a few weeks earlier. He had a cousin rebuild it, but the cousin hadn't run windowsupdate. The way that my friend connected to the Internet was directly with ISDN. He would literally be compromised in 5 minutes unless I had Norton running. Then there wasn't enough memory left to run windowsupdate without crashing.
If you can get the thing off of the Internet directly, through a router or something (anything) and you can pull it off, but the direct connection is just WAY too dangerous and counter-productive.
Oh, and trying to read error messages in a foreign language hurts your brain too.
I think what we are looking at here is some sort of economic evolution. You will notice that Microsoft's most mature products (office and Windows) are profit leaders. However, loss leaders will be products that some day (maybe 5 years) will bear the fruit grown in the soil rich with competitor's blood. Once all of the competition for browsers, or Database servers are dead, they can crank up the profit margin on those products, as all of the competition has been swallowed, killed, or discredited by FUD.
The real unanswered question is whether this is a death knell or call to arms.
For the point of this article, I think this is irrelevant anyway. If the victim can get a couple IP addresses and exact times (probably from an intermediate SMTP host to ensure accuracy) the ISP, if they are cooperative and competent, can probably (with considerable work) get the CID data.
It is not a considerable amount of work. It's almost trivial. The key will be to convince the ISP that you are who you say you are and are looking for the info that you say you are looking for. But if I was the ISP and you asked me, I'd tell you to pound sand.
Suppose that I give you the info and you go over and kill the guy for drinking your beer. I am now liable for that murder. IANAL, but I think the the bad guys family can sue me for wrongful death.
I would call the ISP ASAP and ask them to cull the data and save it for the police. Then call the police and tell them that you have their crook, they just have to go pick him up.
Third - Much of the land is covered in permafrost. In order to build anything on it that will last, you have to dig to bedrock and fill with some other material. (Permafrost melts into a mud/jello-like substance in the summer. Outside Fairbanks you can see roofs of sunken houses that were built on it by foolish settlers.)
:)
Actually, perma-frost doesn't melt, thus the "perma" prefix. The permaforst layer is about 6 feet down (perhaps more) and it never melts, unless you run a locomotive through it.
Isn't this a fairly active volcanic area? I know I wouldn't want to be in the middle of the 23 mile stretch when a little one hits, let alone the big one.
Is doubleclick really so horrible that you have to go out of your way to kill websites with your ad-filtering proxies and your mutated hosts files?
Sadly, yes it is. There is a great deal of information can be gleaned by services like doubleclick regarding your habits. It is all a matter of what you are willing to give up to get to the content. What does doubleclick do with the information? They can, with proper market penetration, follow your every move and manipulate your browsing experience to suit their needs, not yours.
One must be wary of a company whose strategy includes invisible links to their site for tracking purposes.
If we don't fight THE MAN(tm) now, we will forever be relegated to the status of consumer, not a person.
Now multiply that time by thousands of hits per second. How much of your routers' time is being dedicated to filtering this minor annoyance in a given day? Sadly, a few ms does matter in the ISP biz. Any low ping bastards out there? How about good ping times on Napster? If you were able to detect any difference, it's too much.
Besides where would you route these things? certainly it isn't being advertised in your BGP announcements, it's not in your OSPF routing tables. It will likely live a short life anyway.
VMMV
That is fine. Certainly it would be nice if they dropped the private addresses, but that is their perogative. If the bandwidth is being saturated by private addresses I'll go somewhere that has better bandwidth. But when you compare the overhead associated with running every packet that enters the network have to pass through 3 seperate tests v. having a few random misplaced packets, I'll take the random packets. I'll race you to the pr0n.
My question is why would we want the ISP's to do this. What I expect from my ISP is bandwidth. I want a clear channel to the great ether, come what may attack-wise. Protecting my network is my job, not an ISP's.
YMMV
Since an ip phone has a fixed ip address, it can log in to the server from anywhere on the network, and have the same settings.
Actually the real beauty is that it DOESN'T need a fixed IP address. It gets an IP address and registers with a server on the net. The server then makes a dynamic association between that IP address and and the phone number for that phone. Now you can take your phone with you from the NY office to the Dallas office, plug in, and you are receiving all of your calls again. Of course it can also do toll bypass, where you make a call from NY to Dallas and it appears on the PSTN in Dallas as a local call from the dallas office. Cool stuff.
The costs can certainly be controlled. In the next two years we will learn a lot about xDSL technologies. As it is rolled out in the next 12-24 months, you should expect the prices to drop and the competition to rise.
The real sticking point with VDSL is the distance sensitive nature of it. It will make sense in large apartment buildings first. This would permit you to surf the net, talk on the phone and watch "every movie ever made in every language" or whatever (probably more like all the porn that you can take from every conceivable angle).
However, we may see that people that don't have ADSL now will be MORE likely to get VDSL. VDSL will involve putting some environmentally hardened equipment out at some box in your neighborhood and being fed by fiber back to the central office. People that are far away from the central offices are already (in many cases) fed by fiber. being fed by fiber prevents ADSL from working, but will ensure that those people will be served by VDSL.
DW