Robin and I went to see it last night. We read a
couple reviews, 1 star, so we had a couple drinks at dinner, and we stopped by a bar next to the theater for a couple more.
No amount of drinking (short of passing out) could have made up for the suckiness of the file!
The one tiny amusing part, at least for me, as the No Honor Among Thieves bit, reminding me of that little picture somewhere in the old books I played from oh-so-long-ago.
I agree, there's a lot of personal pages that
have a lot of really valuable info (will list
some below). My personal
pages have been on the net since Sept '95,
originally hosted at OSU, but for
the last couple years with
my own domain name. I've put a lot of work into them, and
at least for their specialized topics, I think
they're at least reasonable, perhaps better than
a good portion of the more mainstream commercial
sites I've seen.
Having worked so much on my personal pages, and
having seen others that are really great, it's
a bit distubing to hear an attitude like "all
of the best of the Internet... NO porn or
personal websites".
There certainly are a lot of cases of personal
sites that are arguably better than a good portion
of their commercial counterparts.
Phil's Photo.net comes easily to mind. Jakob Nielsen's Useit.com is probably another well known
example. How about mp3projects.com, which is hosted on freeservers.com.
So I'm wondering what is it, exactly, that makes
a personal website, well, a personal site that
they're above indexing?
Contact info for the author, instead of a
generic webmaster@ ??
Having the tilde ("~") in the URL?
Authored by a real person who cared instead of a by-the-hour web consulting firm?
Not selling any products?
Not being a company or institution (w/ a logo)?
A main page lacking over-done graphical design and/or flash-based intro?
Black-n-Yellow "Under Construction" signs?
Of course, what I'm really wondering is
if my little site will be countable? I just tried
their submit url page, so maybe I'll find out if
I count for anything. I submitted the url for
my 8051 microcontroller page, so maybe that'll
not-personal enough for them?
Still, the attitude expressed about personal
websites is a bit disturbing. You'd think folks
building an index of the net would know a bit
more about some the truely great personal sites.
seichert writes: If a bunch of bureacratic slimy corporations
do not provide what I am looking for I can
buy something from a small business.
How right you are. Indeed in the PC software
business (with no gov't regulation) when you've
been hit by a macro virus and dangerous executable
email attachment, and you've had it with that
slimey corporation's lack of security features, and you're frustrated with their continued
denial that they have nothing wrong in the
design of their product,
the free market forces are ready to serve. Just
go out any buy one of those many competing
(viable) office and email/contact software packages!
A couple months ago, slashdot linked to my site,
at this
page, from
this slashdot article. I actually had a few emails back and
forth with Rob (CmdrTaco) in the week before
the link, and I asked him to avoid linking until
I could get all the images over to a faster
vitual hosted site, and I was still putting a lot
of work into overhauling the page and writing
the latest info (I had just finished a new board design for the player).
Well, the slashdot effect was indeed mighty, and
my poor little site served up about 40000 hits,
which appears to have been less than 1 in every
5 attempts, perhaps even less, I'll never know.
A couple people posted links to the google cached page, which was actually
this older version of the project... not at all the same thing, and certainly not the one that
the slashdot article was about.
So based on my real experience, a sample of one, the google cache was not only ineffective, but it did more harm than good. Rob linked to the page right after new content was posted (a common scenario of a news site), and the google cache had an older (totally different) version that led many readers to find material older, but similar enough that they could not tell the difference.
xant asks: if you're not planning to use more features, why would you upgrade your software?
Because the earlier version is so damn unstable and crashes too much (netscape 4.73).
Now, there is one browser feature that I'd upgrade for, even if it meant a lot of bloat....
What I really want in a browser (aside from speed, stability and correct rendering) is a little toggle button (that stays pressed until I un-press it) that stops all animation and disallows javascript to write to the screen in response to timer events, and absolutely never allows a popup window to be created, and locks out any refresh directives that would reload the page or go to another page automatically, and freezes <blink> text, and does whatever else is needed to prevent any unexpected changes to the rendering of the page (filling in images or re-flowing as the image sizes or more text appears is probably excusable), so I can do what I came to the page to do, read the damn text without being distracted by annoying eye-grabbing animated/blinking/distracting advertising. Now, it's imaginable to be able to control these things individually, on a per-site basis (eg, never execute javascript at geocities).... but I'll settle for a simple single toggle button. Many, many times I've considered grabbing the mozilla code and trying to make this a weekend project (even if it turns out to be a really ugly hack). I'm doing a lot of other cool weekend project work (trying hard to avoid a shameless plug, the website's at the top of this post)... but someday I may just get frustrated enough to grab that damn NPL licensed code and hack away until I can browse is peace!
Insofar as SDMI players playing only "clean" originals, that would make SDMI players far to costly to build. Consumer-level hardware just isn't reliable enough to "refuse to play" because you have some tiny skip in the CD-ROM readback.
It simply happens too frequently.
Too costly.... here's a little reality
check, in case you haven't been keeping up
with technology for the last several years...
You can afford to design in a 40 second
playback buffer (at 174 kbytes/sec, that's
about 7 megs), and in the case of MP3, a
DSP capable of the 32 multiply/accumulate
operations per sample for the polyphase filter,
and even more for the IMDCT, and lots of data
shuffling and other code for the complexity
of the MP3 bitstream. That's at
least 3M MACs/sec for 44.1 kHz stereo
sampling. In practice, DSP's running at about
25 MHz seem to be about the lower limit for
MP3 playback. If you've got enough computational
power to decode MP3 (remember, in the PC world
that's at least a faster 486)... you've probably
got plenty of hardware to check a watermark. We
can't know for sure, since they haven't published
the algorithms, but even if the watermark takes
a lot more CPU power, you can do the work before
you start decoding.... the user expects a second
or two of silent time between tracks anyways, and
they'll wait a bit longer if needed.
Tiny skips in the stream from the CD hardly
seem like a problem... you've got memory for
buffering, and you can always read it again,
since deciding wether to play is not a real-time
process like maintaining in-progress playback.
Watermarks are designed to be resiliant to
attack.... they can certainly withstand small
gaps in the audio, due to scratches or skips.
In the event there is no watermark, playback
is allowed, so the failure mode is "safe".
(apparantly the wont-play condition is the
custom watermark added by a different player)
Even if it fails 30% of the time (allowing
playback of otherwise restricted input), 70%
success is plenty to annoy the holder of the
(presumably illegal) to spend some effort to
get a cleaner copy, or maybe buy an original.
It's hardly DIVX, which was an invasion of
privacy. With DIVX, information about what
you watched and when was transmitted back
to a central server. DIVX felt like Big
Brother was watching. Nobody wanted to leave
the player plugged in to their phone line.
DIVX also caused discs that had been purchased,
to not play just two days after the initial
viewing. Consumers rejected having to pay
twice, and not being allowed to play a disc
that they had already paid (admittedly very
little) for. Consumers buy a piece of media,
they expect to own it and use it as much as
they like whenever they like.
People may not like registering their players,
but if it's easy (like activating a cell phone),
they'll probably just do it and forget about
it. It won't feel like they're been spyed
upon, like DIVX. SDMI won't make the discs
you've purchased stop playing, like DIVX did.
They may not like not being allowed to play a
copy on their friend's player, but it won't feel
like they're being cheated out of something they
paid for with their own money, as DIVX did.
If SMDI works like "sdo1" described, I doubt it'll
even be important to have all the players registered. As long as the output from one won't
play on any others, it'll put enough barrier in
front of most consumers that they'll just go pay
for a legit copy. If non-SDMI software exists,
but portable hardware doesn't, it may be the best
situation, as consumers could sample on their PCs,
but not listen on any SDMI-compliant CD player,
thereby causing them to pay for when they've
already got for free (illegally) on the computer!
If the registration step isn't required, it's
unlikely most consumers will even notice until
they try to copy with their friends... both of whom
already own the SDMI-compliant players at that point.
As far as
getting consumers to boycott SDMI, it's be a lot
harder sell than the invasion-of-privacy (Big
Brother is watching) and
cant-play-your-own-disc
(they're ripping you off) and hassle (your
house has a phone jack next to the TV, right?) associated with DIVX.
modemboy says: if you can listen to it you can copy it. They'll never develop an effective copy
protection scheme
It all depends on the meaning of the word
effective. It looks like Lumpy already
brought up the macrovision example I was thinking
of when I started this post. You can watch your
video, and determined consumers can copy using
older VCRs or special boxes that remove the
crap from the retrace time. If effective means
preventing absolutely all copies, then no, but
I'd say that effective could mean causing lots
of consumers to buy the tape or DVD for about
$20 instead of renting for $3 and taking the
time to copy onto a $2 blank.
Macrovision only
works because the VCR manufacturers use a faster
response AGC circuit (than used in the TV). With
the world of open source, it seems like it'll be
a bigger problem to get all recording devices to
respect a dont-copy-me signal, but again, if
winamp, microsoft media player, and most of the
hardware devices at best buy respect such a
signal, perhaps it gets 95% of listeners to pay.
Sure, anyone greedy would want the last 5%, but
it becomes expensive, and any business man with a brain(or a cost accountant) will take the path that
is most profitable.
Part of my initial reaction, honestly, is more
along the lines of "totally unprotected MP3 with
p2p file sharing is just damn cool", followed
by "it sucks that they're trying to foul it up".
I suspect that's the emotional response behind
a bunch of the "It'll never work, you dumb..."
responses here and elsewhere on the net.
Now the part that is "going too far", is an
attempt to outlaw MP3 players without SDMI
features. The RIAA has already tried to do
this (and won in the first round, but ultimately
lost against the Diamond Rio).
As long as it's not illegal to make non-SDMI
MP3 players, someone will. I know that to be
an absolute fact, because I will! (trying
really hard to resist a shameless plug/link
to my website). As long as there are legal
Free/Open-Source (GPL'd I hope) MP3 players,
there will be relatively easy ways around
SDMI protection.... but if these players are
a small portion of the whole (mine's about as
tiny as you can get, next to student projects),
SDMI might be effective in allowing the
recoding industry to continue its profitability,
even if it's not at all effective at stopping
anyone determined to copy.
medicthree spoke: Can we please drop this already? Bringing it up again and again isn't doing any good.
Posting it here again is indeed preaching to
the choir. There's a good reason for this,
which you'd know if you'd been following.
As I recall reading, it goes something about like this:
Slashdot and Katz's inbox get flooded with these messages
Katz really wants to help improve this
rather nasty and abusive situation, and
it's an uphill battle, because the mainsteam
"common wisdom" is to "crack down" on geeks,
and target video games, movies, etc. Katz wants
to spread the word, somehow...
Katz assembles them together and wants to publish in print, to reach a wider audience,
hoping that maybe it'll find its way to teachers
and parents and maybe, just maybe, they'll get
a wake up call.
People flame Katz for reprinting without permission, claiming that many authors were
anonymous and under age, and all who posted
would only have intended their words to be
publically visiable on slashdot.
Katz backs off, and says he'll post the
chapters to slashdot (the original forum where
the authors intended their words to appear).
He says it'll be at the bottom the the slashback
articles, so that only people who really are
interested will scroll down to it. Katz
publically requests that people who posted
anonymously keep an eye out for their words and
send him an email if they do or don't approve
of reprinting.
More flames directed at Katz, because its
redundant, old news, opening old wounds, etc, etc, etc.
Katz, if you're reading this, I hope it's not
getting to you. I know you get flamed a lot
(I've done it from time to time, but not for
lame-ass reasons like this).
Maybe for Hellmouth Part 5, you should add a
little reminder of the history behind the
assembly of these articles into the book, like
you did for part 1.
It's been 12 years since I was in high school,
but I can clearly recall the hostility. I can
also recall a whole lot of teachers, admins,
and parents turning a blind eye, blissfully
ignorant. I can recall some making efforts, but
ultimately giving up and more or less forgetting
they ever knew anything nasty was occuring, on
a daily basis, all around them.
Teachers, admins and parents need a wake-up call.
They need these Hellmouth stories shoved in their
faces. They need to be constantly reminded.
This is a tough problem, and the best way to
never make progress is to be unaware of the
problems and, believe it or not, ignore and
misunderstand them even when they turn into
unimaginable violence.
The Hellmouth articles, in a printed paperback,
sitting on the nightstands of teachers and
parents across the country is a worthwhile persuit.
Maybe, just maybe, these well intentioned, but
ignorant folks will crack the book open every
now and then, read a hald dozens messages, and
the next day open their eye to the hateful and
often violent behavior that's all around them.
Katz, I certainly hope you manage to get these
words into a paperback for the net-illiterate
folks out there. It's a long shot, but maybe
they can learn to see what's been going on for
many many years, they they've been too blind to see.
Maybe someday these hostile social circumstances
will be diffused. Maybe someday schools will
have an environment were mean and nasty behavior
is rare or non-existant. Maybe there are
solutions or ways to improve the situation. All
these Maybes today are somewhere between Unlikely
to Impossible, because the truth is that most of
the players involved are ignorant and blind to
what's around them.
With some luck the Hellmouth in printed and
widely published form can help overcome the
ignorance and just might lead, eventually, to
some improvement.
It looks like anything you find is likely to
be DSP chips running the encoder. For example,
here's a little announcement that at first
looks like a custom encoder chip, but actually
turns out to be a Texas Instruments TMS320C1500
DSP chip. Even the dedicated decoder chips
(MAS3507D and STA013) are just DSPs packaged up
with built-in firmware. I recall seeing a board
with a few DSP chips on it a couple years ago,
that could do real-time (back when no PC could).
Obviously that's obsolete... maybe that's why
I couldn't find the page again.
It looks like PCs are hard to beat.
Here's a claim of a
Fraunhofer encoder at 10X real
time on a 500 MHz Pentium3. Maybe it's vapor,
but if it's real it's certainly a lot faster than
LAME 3.87 (beta) when I tried it on a 800 MHz machine (Lame ran at approx 2X using "-V 3"). I recall
hearing claims of LAME doing real time on a 266
MHz PC... maybe it does with different settings.
One more thing, that I should have mentioned
in the post I just submitted a moment ago...
If the relative ease of breaking into unsecure
Windows computers and remotely controlling
them as well as you could a linux box is news to you,
maybe this is a good time to check if your
box is wide-open to attack. The days of
"they can't get me because my OS doesn't network"
ended in DOS (maybe Win 3.1).
There are many many ways to do this, but small
company where I know someone has a
very easy-to-use free port scan,
that will check if you've got any of the really
obvious problems. There are some others available
on the net, but this one will check a lot of other
services besides just the usual Windoze problems.
Unfortunately, Secure Design
has seen increasing costs in running this service,
main to respond to threats from network admins
who detect the scans (due to a request from one
of their users), and their free port scan, which
is probably the best of the simple free web-based
scans, may be coming to an end. Oh well.
Indeed it is a tall tale
(this site)... it was covered
right here on slashdot several
months ago. This article is old enough that
slashdot seems to have only a static page with
comments with mod >= 1.
But as the AC pointed out:
the ability to get a screen capture via a sudden-notice attack on a Windows box (Win9x? WinNT?) seems very unlikely. There's reason to be skeptical.
You can certainly read through the comments from
the time is was discussed here on slashdot, but
I'll boil it down a bit. There seems to be
three schools of though (more or less).
It's gotta be a fake, windoze doesn't have
remote login and nobody could have done that
hacking. (as our AC above pointed out)
It's real... it'd be very hard and a lot
of work to fake so much data.
The spammers were running windows file
sharing wide-open, and they used PC Anywhere, so
their systems were very easy to attack (many
people provided details of how to do it). The
(very long) ICQ chat logs show them asking
script kiddies for help setting up their networking, and there's conversations about
how they liked PC Anywhere so they could lay in
bed while "working".
The data is real, but the "hacker" is someone
who had physical access and stole the disks or
otherwise made a copy with physical access.
You'll also notice, if you read the slashdot
discussion from June 7th, that several slashdot
readers who spent their days chasing after
spammers found their older email addresses on
the list of anti-spam activists (that they
avoided). Others verified some misc facts, but
wether it's real or a fake is still not
conclusive.
Maybe it's all a hoax, but as many folks posted,
the remote windows screen capture is apparantly
a simple trick if the target has unsecure windows
file sharing. The
Back Orifice
tool is certainly not a hoax.
So if it really was a hoax, I'd like to see some
real evidence that it's a hoax...
remembering that remote windoze screen
capture being a relatively easy thing if file
sharing is unsecure, and not even all that hard
if you can trick the user into running some code
in one of many ways pointed out in the June 7th
discussion. A thing like this is much easier
to prove to be a hoax than to confirm.
It may indeed be a hoax, so AC, if you're reading
this, take a moment to post anything you can
find to discredit the story, other than you don't
believe the hack was possible because it's
beyond your knowledge/paradigm. The hack is easy
and many people have explained how to do it.
Re:Spammers cheat, this will not work
on
Spambot Poisoner
·
· Score: 5
Thus wrote "bleh-of-the-huns":
...so whether he has a db of 1000000 real
addresses, or 1000000 addresses that are
crap without 20 real addresses by luck,
he does not care.
Nowadays, there are an awful lot of people who
are working to fight spam, which makes is quite
a bit harder for a spammer. With cool services
like Spam Cop (you copy-n-paste the spam w/ headers, and they
track the spammer and stop that account, often
within minutes),
anyone can easily contribute to getting whatever
account a spammer is abusing shut down as
rapidly as possible.
It works. I've tried spamcop several times, and
every time the result was that someone had already
beat me to it and the ISP had already shut down
the account that was being abused. The spammer
wasn't caught, but they were delayed and their
job was made harder.
This forces spammers to work harder, so the cost
of sending a message is not zero. An an example,
take a look at the
material a hacker stole from spammer Premier Marketing, Inc. It's clear that they had to
use multiple people and a never-ending supply of
stolen dialup accounts. They went to a lot of
trouble to compile a giant list of know anti-spam
activists who used services like Spam Cop (or
read the headers themselves and called ISPs), so
that their stolen dialups would hold out a little
longer.
It's easy to just throw your hands up in the
air and accept spam as a fact of life. It's
easy to feel like spammers are unstoppable.
The truth is that these anti-spam countermeasures
do make things harder for spammers. They increase
the cost, from virtually nothing, to something.
Admittedly, not much, but it doesn't take much
to make some of the really lame-ass scams these
folks spew unprofitable.
There's also hope for the world in the kick-ass
efforts of
Paul F. Pete Wellborn III,
the lawyer who's taken down a couple big-time
spammers, most recently that annoying printer
supplies guy!
So don't give up. Even if you just press delete
without a second though, don't discourage others.
There is hope.
A lot of people are working against spam, and
as more things like this come on-line, the cost
and risk of sending spam will continue to slowly
rise. A very Good Thing!
I can't believe segmented memory isn't on the
list. Apparantly the original 8088 databook
is a collector's item, with text written by
intel about how "efficient" segemented memory
management would be, because nobody would write
a program or store a set of data larger than
64k... and even if you did, you got the "extra"
segment for another 64k!
I've been toying with an idea for P2P filesharing,
which involves a truely decentralized reputation
tracking system. The idea is similar to PGP's
"web of trust", which you "know" others based
on their public key, and people you know give
certifications of others by signing their public
keys.
What good is all that... well, a host could make
decisions about which queries to route and which
to discard based on any information about the
reputation of the originator. Hosts would allow
faster sends to downloaders with good reputation.
Abusive hosts (Spammers, DoS attacks, etc) would
ruin their reputation quickly (or keep recreating
new keys all with no reputation).
Reputation in such a system would be very
valuable. Somewhat like slashdot karma, it would
appeal to many individuals, who would likely go
out of their way to gain reputation signatures,
perhaps by providing or mirroring lots of high
quality files, attaching good meta-data descriptions to files, etc.
The client software would need to have ways for
everyone to do moderation on files and users...
but unlike slashdot, there would be no universal
score, only lots of keys/reputation scores, signed
by other users. The software could also
automatically detect certain behaviors (files
available for download, on-line for long times) of other
hosts, and issue reputation points.
The idea is that a reputation score is to have
a way to allocate the available resources
(mainly bandwidth), to establish an incentive
for users to share files and act in ways that
benefit the network, and of course to make
the network resiliant to abuse.
Now, for a system like this to scale, each host
will need a LOT of disk space, to store a giant
database of keys and signatures on them, and it
would ultimately act like a giant cache. Each
host would obviously collect the most positive
signatures... the initial communication would
be similar to boasting, the requester would send
several of the best moderation signatures, hoping
that the remote host already knows those people
who signed and will therefore offer faster
transfers, propagate a query farther, etc.
Maybe this ultimately works out to be the same
as digital cash in MojoNation. I believe it is
a different idea, in that it's based on an
assumption of abundance.... everybody can win.
You can get a great reputation without someone
else giving up anything. In a cash system, when
you get cash (mojo), someone else gives it up,
and the overall philosophy is of scarcity.
If you have any ideas or thoughts to add to this,
please post. Am I totally out in left field
here, or does this seem like a reasonable idea?
Does the Pentium 4 have a chance or is it doomed from the start? What will become of the Pentium III?
Haven't we heard this same old line, over and
over again, every time Intel releases a new
generation of microprocessor.
The PPro (now Pentium 3) was doomed to a server
nitch market, likewise the original Pentium, and
even statements for the 486 and 386. Each one, very expensive and running much hotter than those
before it, and so far the story ends up the same
every time. You'd think people would get used
to the idea of Moore's Law and, come on now, six
generations of x86 processors, it's a lot more
like clockwork.... but I suppose the ordinary
doesn't make for interesting headlines.
Just because the software vendors offer upgrades
to existing customers doesn't set a requirement
for the music or movie industries.
My (limited) understanding of copyright is
that the protection is provides is linked to
the media. As I have been led to believe...
You bought the media. You own that copy.
That's how it is with music, books, movies,
newspapers, etc. There is the first sale
doctrine which says that you own that copy and
the copyright holder only had the exclusive
rights to the first sale of that particular
piece of media.
now I could be wrong (of course, IANAL), but
from what I've read from many separate sources
who seem to be the experts, is that what you're
buying with music, books, movies is the media.
You are buying one copy of the work, that
you own.
Software seems strange, in that you agree to a
restrictive contract. Most of the commercial
licenses I've seen prohibit transfer to a third
party, which would otherwise be your right if
the first sale doctrine would apply.
I believe the only reason software vendors offer
lower cost upgrades is that it fits the market
and extracts the most money that the market will
bear. I've not seen any reason that they must
do this. Existing users have less incentive to
switch to a competing product, and they get an
incentive to upgrade when they very well may have
just kept using the older version.
Just because the software vendors offer upgrades
to existing customers doesn't set a requirement
for the music or movie industries.
Here is the big question I have, where can I find a list of ISP's that have Carnivore installed? ...
I can see it now, advertisements for ISP's who's big selling point is not having Carnivore installed.
As I recall, the planned usage was to obtain
a warrant and then temporarily install is at
the suspect's ISP. Your ISP could be
Carnivore-free the day you sign up, and tommorrow
some judge issues a warrant
(or the ISP cooperates without a warrant), just
because the FBI suspects anyone connecting with
your ISP, and all of a sudden big brother will
be watching.
If you really have something to hide, or you just
want to increase the ratio of envelopes to post
cards (thereby helping others who have something
to hide), PGP sounds like the answer.
Looking over the comments you've posted (from
your user info page), you're obviously involved
in the Mozilla development. Now I'm a bit
frustrated with the slow progress on the
relicensing, but it's understandable.
Now I know everyone working on Mozilla/Netscape
has probably been frustrated with lots of criticism over features vs memory/bloat and standards compliance vs
delivery dates. I know that is gets difficult
when it comes from "all directions" with conflicting opinions, where the only common theme
is everyone is upset. Please try to understand
the viewpoint of anyone waiting and trying to
make plans to integrate mozilla code into a GPL'd
project.
Without access to the newsgroup, the relicense
process appears to be at a standstill.
The FAQ says "Yes, as more questions are
asked, updates will be made to this page",
but there been no update in three months.
The answers are vauge and provide no real
information that anyone planning to work with
the code together with other GPL'd code could
use to plan their future activities. There is
no estimate of when the contributors will be
contacted, how long they have to reply, or any
other time oriented info. In fact, there isn't
even an indication of when these things may be
known and added to the page. There is no indication of what parts of the project the staff of mozilla.org can speak for, and say with certainty that they will be dual licensed.
I know there's a limited number of hours in a day,
and a limited number of people to work on any
project. You need to work on the most important
things first. I can agree that standards
compliance and bug fixing has been a well
chosen high priority.
The flip side of the coin is that, judging from
the
Mozilla Relicensing FAQ
it would appear that the dual licensing to GPL
has completely fallen off the radar. In fact,
there may be someone working dilligently on it,
but anyone considering using mozilla in a GPL'd
setting can't know that from a FAQ with vauge
answers, claiming it will be updated, but has in
fact not been updated in three months.
Now maybe I'm the only one who doesn't get
n.p.m.license, but I doubt it. If there really
is work being done on the relicense AND if the
mozilla team really is interested in people
using the code in GPL'd projects, it'd probably
be worth the 15-20 minutes to update the FAQ
page, linked right from the main mozilla.org,
so that folks working on GPL'd projects could
plan accordingly. Judging from what I can
actually see (the FAQ), the only plans I could
realistically make ammount to "it looks like
they've completely forgotten about it (so I'll
have to look at XmHTML, XDE, etc, instead of
waiting just a little longer)".
Does anyone know when/if mozilla will really
be GPL'd. The
Mozilla Relicensing FAQ hasn't
been updated since August 16th, any basically it
says the following:
We don't know how much will be GPL'd
We need to contact lots of contributors
We won't say how long this will take
There's a newsgroup (not available on my NTTP server)
Does anyone here get this newsgroup and/or have
any real info about when the world can expect
to see a GPL'd mozilla source distribution.
I'd really like to play around with the code, but
not until it's GPL'd.
I have two ISPs. One is a 128kbps frame relay,
and the other is a radio link and a 33.6k modem.
The radio link is approx 2 Mbit/sec with a
reasonable latency, about 50 ms. The frame
relay circuit has 20 ms latency. The modem
just plain sucks, slow and high latency. The
modem isn't even plugged in. I use use the
radio receiver as a one-way link.
If all spoofed packets were illegal, then it'd
probably be illegal for me to send packets up
the frame relay line, with the IP number belonging
to the radio link. The ISP providing the upstream
for the frame line says "we don't mind and we
won't stop you unless someone starts abusing our
network, and we'd probably have to upgrade
the router to do it".
The ISP providing the radio link
doesn't really know... it's hard to actually
get to talk to anyone there that knows anything...
but from what I can tell, their scarce resource
is the pool of inbound modems, they have more
bandwidth than they know what to do with on the
radio link.
It's a pretty sweet setup, and it's all possible
due to asymetric routing (linux) and that my
upstream provider lets me send spoofed packets!
I just took a look at the Mozilla site.
According to their
Mozilla Relicensing FAQ
it still isn't GPL'd and there's no indication
of when it will be. Does anyone know?
I think it'd be fun to play with the code,
but there's no way I'm going to put my time
into it until it's GPL'd and I can mix-n-match
with other GPL'd code.
Slashdot Mirror
No amount of drinking (short of passing out) could have made up for the suckiness of the file!
The one tiny amusing part, at least for me, as the No Honor Among Thieves bit, reminding me of that little picture somewhere in the old books I played from oh-so-long-ago.
Having worked so much on my personal pages, and having seen others that are really great, it's a bit distubing to hear an attitude like "all of the best of the Internet ... NO porn or
personal websites".
There certainly are a lot of cases of personal sites that are arguably better than a good portion of their commercial counterparts. Phil's Photo.net comes easily to mind. Jakob Nielsen's Useit.com is probably another well known example. How about mp3projects.com, which is hosted on freeservers.com.
So I'm wondering what is it, exactly, that makes a personal website, well, a personal site that they're above indexing?
- Contact info for the author, instead of a
generic webmaster@ ??
- Having the tilde ("~") in the URL?
- Authored by a real person who cared instead of a by-the-hour web consulting firm?
- Not selling any products?
- Not being a company or institution (w/ a logo)?
- A main page lacking over-done graphical design and/or flash-based intro?
- Black-n-Yellow "Under Construction" signs?
Of course, what I'm really wondering is if my little site will be countable? I just tried their submit url page, so maybe I'll find out if I count for anything. I submitted the url for my 8051 microcontroller page, so maybe that'll not-personal enough for them?Still, the attitude expressed about personal websites is a bit disturbing. You'd think folks building an index of the net would know a bit more about some the truely great personal sites.
If a bunch of bureacratic slimy corporations do not provide what I am looking for I can buy something from a small business.
How right you are. Indeed in the PC software business (with no gov't regulation) when you've been hit by a macro virus and dangerous executable email attachment, and you've had it with that slimey corporation's lack of security features, and you're frustrated with their continued denial that they have nothing wrong in the design of their product, the free market forces are ready to serve. Just go out any buy one of those many competing (viable) office and email/contact software packages!
A couple months ago, slashdot linked to my site, at this page, from this slashdot article. I actually had a few emails back and forth with Rob (CmdrTaco) in the week before the link, and I asked him to avoid linking until I could get all the images over to a faster vitual hosted site, and I was still putting a lot of work into overhauling the page and writing the latest info (I had just finished a new board design for the player).
Well, the slashdot effect was indeed mighty, and my poor little site served up about 40000 hits, which appears to have been less than 1 in every 5 attempts, perhaps even less, I'll never know.
A couple people posted links to the google cached page, which was actually this older version of the project... not at all the same thing, and certainly not the one that the slashdot article was about.
So based on my real experience, a sample of one, the google cache was not only ineffective, but it did more harm than good. Rob linked to the page right after new content was posted (a common scenario of a news site), and the google cache had an older (totally different) version that led many readers to find material older, but similar enough that they could not tell the difference.
if you're not planning to use more features, why would you upgrade your software?
Because the earlier version is so damn unstable and crashes too much (netscape 4.73).
Now, there is one browser feature that I'd upgrade for, even if it meant a lot of bloat....
What I really want in a browser (aside from speed, stability and correct rendering) is a little toggle button (that stays pressed until I un-press it) that stops all animation and disallows javascript to write to the screen in response to timer events, and absolutely never allows a popup window to be created, and locks out any refresh directives that would reload the page or go to another page automatically, and freezes <blink> text, and does whatever else is needed to prevent any unexpected changes to the rendering of the page (filling in images or re-flowing as the image sizes or more text appears is probably excusable), so I can do what I came to the page to do, read the damn text without being distracted by annoying eye-grabbing animated/blinking/distracting advertising. Now, it's imaginable to be able to control these things individually, on a per-site basis (eg, never execute javascript at geocities).... but I'll settle for a simple single toggle button. Many, many times I've considered grabbing the mozilla code and trying to make this a weekend project (even if it turns out to be a really ugly hack). I'm doing a lot of other cool weekend project work (trying hard to avoid a shameless plug, the website's at the top of this post)... but someday I may just get frustrated enough to grab that damn NPL licensed code and hack away until I can browse is peace!
Too costly.... here's a little reality check, in case you haven't been keeping up with technology for the last several years...
You can afford to design in a 40 second playback buffer (at 174 kbytes/sec, that's about 7 megs), and in the case of MP3, a DSP capable of the 32 multiply/accumulate operations per sample for the polyphase filter, and even more for the IMDCT, and lots of data shuffling and other code for the complexity of the MP3 bitstream. That's at least 3M MACs/sec for 44.1 kHz stereo sampling. In practice, DSP's running at about 25 MHz seem to be about the lower limit for MP3 playback. If you've got enough computational power to decode MP3 (remember, in the PC world that's at least a faster 486)... you've probably got plenty of hardware to check a watermark. We can't know for sure, since they haven't published the algorithms, but even if the watermark takes a lot more CPU power, you can do the work before you start decoding.... the user expects a second or two of silent time between tracks anyways, and they'll wait a bit longer if needed.
Tiny skips in the stream from the CD hardly seem like a problem... you've got memory for buffering, and you can always read it again, since deciding wether to play is not a real-time process like maintaining in-progress playback. Watermarks are designed to be resiliant to attack.... they can certainly withstand small gaps in the audio, due to scratches or skips.
In the event there is no watermark, playback is allowed, so the failure mode is "safe". (apparantly the wont-play condition is the custom watermark added by a different player) Even if it fails 30% of the time (allowing playback of otherwise restricted input), 70% success is plenty to annoy the holder of the (presumably illegal) to spend some effort to get a cleaner copy, or maybe buy an original.
DIVX also caused discs that had been purchased, to not play just two days after the initial viewing. Consumers rejected having to pay twice, and not being allowed to play a disc that they had already paid (admittedly very little) for. Consumers buy a piece of media, they expect to own it and use it as much as they like whenever they like.
People may not like registering their players, but if it's easy (like activating a cell phone), they'll probably just do it and forget about it. It won't feel like they're been spyed upon, like DIVX. SDMI won't make the discs you've purchased stop playing, like DIVX did. They may not like not being allowed to play a copy on their friend's player, but it won't feel like they're being cheated out of something they paid for with their own money, as DIVX did.
If SMDI works like "sdo1" described, I doubt it'll even be important to have all the players registered. As long as the output from one won't play on any others, it'll put enough barrier in front of most consumers that they'll just go pay for a legit copy. If non-SDMI software exists, but portable hardware doesn't, it may be the best situation, as consumers could sample on their PCs, but not listen on any SDMI-compliant CD player, thereby causing them to pay for when they've already got for free (illegally) on the computer! If the registration step isn't required, it's unlikely most consumers will even notice until they try to copy with their friends... both of whom already own the SDMI-compliant players at that point.
As far as getting consumers to boycott SDMI, it's be a lot harder sell than the invasion-of-privacy (Big Brother is watching) and cant-play-your-own-disc (they're ripping you off) and hassle (your house has a phone jack next to the TV, right?) associated with DIVX.
if you can listen to it you can copy it. They'll never develop an effective copy protection scheme
It all depends on the meaning of the word effective. It looks like Lumpy already brought up the macrovision example I was thinking of when I started this post. You can watch your video, and determined consumers can copy using older VCRs or special boxes that remove the crap from the retrace time. If effective means preventing absolutely all copies, then no, but I'd say that effective could mean causing lots of consumers to buy the tape or DVD for about $20 instead of renting for $3 and taking the time to copy onto a $2 blank.
Macrovision only works because the VCR manufacturers use a faster response AGC circuit (than used in the TV). With the world of open source, it seems like it'll be a bigger problem to get all recording devices to respect a dont-copy-me signal, but again, if winamp, microsoft media player, and most of the hardware devices at best buy respect such a signal, perhaps it gets 95% of listeners to pay. Sure, anyone greedy would want the last 5%, but it becomes expensive, and any business man with a brain(or a cost accountant) will take the path that is most profitable.
Part of my initial reaction, honestly, is more along the lines of "totally unprotected MP3 with p2p file sharing is just damn cool", followed by "it sucks that they're trying to foul it up". I suspect that's the emotional response behind a bunch of the "It'll never work, you dumb..." responses here and elsewhere on the net.
Now the part that is "going too far", is an attempt to outlaw MP3 players without SDMI features. The RIAA has already tried to do this (and won in the first round, but ultimately lost against the Diamond Rio).
As long as it's not illegal to make non-SDMI MP3 players, someone will. I know that to be an absolute fact, because I will! (trying really hard to resist a shameless plug/link to my website). As long as there are legal Free/Open-Source (GPL'd I hope) MP3 players, there will be relatively easy ways around SDMI protection.... but if these players are a small portion of the whole (mine's about as tiny as you can get, next to student projects), SDMI might be effective in allowing the recoding industry to continue its profitability, even if it's not at all effective at stopping anyone determined to copy.
Can we please drop this already? Bringing it up again and again isn't doing any good.
Posting it here again is indeed preaching to the choir. There's a good reason for this, which you'd know if you'd been following.
As I recall reading, it goes something about like this:
- Slashdot and Katz's inbox get flooded with these messages
- Katz really wants to help improve this
rather nasty and abusive situation, and
it's an uphill battle, because the mainsteam
"common wisdom" is to "crack down" on geeks,
and target video games, movies, etc. Katz wants
to spread the word, somehow...
- Katz assembles them together and wants to publish in print, to reach a wider audience,
hoping that maybe it'll find its way to teachers
and parents and maybe, just maybe, they'll get
a wake up call.
- People flame Katz for reprinting without permission, claiming that many authors were
anonymous and under age, and all who posted
would only have intended their words to be
publically visiable on slashdot.
- Katz backs off, and says he'll post the
chapters to slashdot (the original forum where
the authors intended their words to appear).
He says it'll be at the bottom the the slashback
articles, so that only people who really are
interested will scroll down to it. Katz
publically requests that people who posted
anonymously keep an eye out for their words and
send him an email if they do or don't approve
of reprinting.
- More flames directed at Katz, because its
redundant, old news, opening old wounds, etc, etc, etc.
Katz, if you're reading this, I hope it's not getting to you. I know you get flamed a lot (I've done it from time to time, but not for lame-ass reasons like this).Maybe for Hellmouth Part 5, you should add a little reminder of the history behind the assembly of these articles into the book, like you did for part 1.
It's been 12 years since I was in high school, but I can clearly recall the hostility. I can also recall a whole lot of teachers, admins, and parents turning a blind eye, blissfully ignorant. I can recall some making efforts, but ultimately giving up and more or less forgetting they ever knew anything nasty was occuring, on a daily basis, all around them.
Teachers, admins and parents need a wake-up call. They need these Hellmouth stories shoved in their faces. They need to be constantly reminded. This is a tough problem, and the best way to never make progress is to be unaware of the problems and, believe it or not, ignore and misunderstand them even when they turn into unimaginable violence.
The Hellmouth articles, in a printed paperback, sitting on the nightstands of teachers and parents across the country is a worthwhile persuit. Maybe, just maybe, these well intentioned, but ignorant folks will crack the book open every now and then, read a hald dozens messages, and the next day open their eye to the hateful and often violent behavior that's all around them.
Katz, I certainly hope you manage to get these words into a paperback for the net-illiterate folks out there. It's a long shot, but maybe they can learn to see what's been going on for many many years, they they've been too blind to see.
Maybe someday these hostile social circumstances will be diffused. Maybe someday schools will have an environment were mean and nasty behavior is rare or non-existant. Maybe there are solutions or ways to improve the situation. All these Maybes today are somewhere between Unlikely to Impossible, because the truth is that most of the players involved are ignorant and blind to what's around them.
With some luck the Hellmouth in printed and widely published form can help overcome the ignorance and just might lead, eventually, to some improvement.
It looks like PCs are hard to beat. Here's a claim of a Fraunhofer encoder at 10X real time on a 500 MHz Pentium3. Maybe it's vapor, but if it's real it's certainly a lot faster than LAME 3.87 (beta) when I tried it on a 800 MHz machine (Lame ran at approx 2X using "-V 3"). I recall hearing claims of LAME doing real time on a 266 MHz PC... maybe it does with different settings.
If the relative ease of breaking into unsecure Windows computers and remotely controlling them as well as you could a linux box is news to you, maybe this is a good time to check if your box is wide-open to attack. The days of "they can't get me because my OS doesn't network" ended in DOS (maybe Win 3.1).
There are many many ways to do this, but small company where I know someone has a very easy-to-use free port scan, that will check if you've got any of the really obvious problems. There are some others available on the net, but this one will check a lot of other services besides just the usual Windoze problems.
Unfortunately, Secure Design has seen increasing costs in running this service, main to respond to threats from network admins who detect the scans (due to a request from one of their users), and their free port scan, which is probably the best of the simple free web-based scans, may be coming to an end. Oh well.
But as the AC pointed out:
the ability to get a screen capture via a sudden-notice attack on a Windows box (Win9x? WinNT?) seems very unlikely. There's reason to be skeptical.
You can certainly read through the comments from the time is was discussed here on slashdot, but I'll boil it down a bit. There seems to be three schools of though (more or less).
- It's gotta be a fake, windoze doesn't have
remote login and nobody could have done that
hacking. (as our AC above pointed out)
- It's real... it'd be very hard and a lot
of work to fake so much data.
The spammers were running windows file
sharing wide-open, and they used PC Anywhere, so
their systems were very easy to attack (many
people provided details of how to do it). The
(very long) ICQ chat logs show them asking
script kiddies for help setting up their networking, and there's conversations about
how they liked PC Anywhere so they could lay in
bed while "working".
- The data is real, but the "hacker" is someone
who had physical access and stole the disks or
otherwise made a copy with physical access.
You'll also notice, if you read the slashdot discussion from June 7th, that several slashdot readers who spent their days chasing after spammers found their older email addresses on the list of anti-spam activists (that they avoided). Others verified some misc facts, but wether it's real or a fake is still not conclusive.Maybe it's all a hoax, but as many folks posted, the remote windows screen capture is apparantly a simple trick if the target has unsecure windows file sharing. The Back Orifice tool is certainly not a hoax.
So if it really was a hoax, I'd like to see some real evidence that it's a hoax... remembering that remote windoze screen capture being a relatively easy thing if file sharing is unsecure, and not even all that hard if you can trick the user into running some code in one of many ways pointed out in the June 7th discussion. A thing like this is much easier to prove to be a hoax than to confirm.
It may indeed be a hoax, so AC, if you're reading this, take a moment to post anything you can find to discredit the story, other than you don't believe the hack was possible because it's beyond your knowledge/paradigm. The hack is easy and many people have explained how to do it.
Nowadays, there are an awful lot of people who are working to fight spam, which makes is quite a bit harder for a spammer. With cool services like Spam Cop (you copy-n-paste the spam w/ headers, and they track the spammer and stop that account, often within minutes), anyone can easily contribute to getting whatever account a spammer is abusing shut down as rapidly as possible.
It works. I've tried spamcop several times, and every time the result was that someone had already beat me to it and the ISP had already shut down the account that was being abused. The spammer wasn't caught, but they were delayed and their job was made harder.
This forces spammers to work harder, so the cost of sending a message is not zero. An an example, take a look at the material a hacker stole from spammer Premier Marketing, Inc. It's clear that they had to use multiple people and a never-ending supply of stolen dialup accounts. They went to a lot of trouble to compile a giant list of know anti-spam activists who used services like Spam Cop (or read the headers themselves and called ISPs), so that their stolen dialups would hold out a little longer.
It's easy to just throw your hands up in the air and accept spam as a fact of life. It's easy to feel like spammers are unstoppable. The truth is that these anti-spam countermeasures do make things harder for spammers. They increase the cost, from virtually nothing, to something. Admittedly, not much, but it doesn't take much to make some of the really lame-ass scams these folks spew unprofitable.
There's also hope for the world in the kick-ass efforts of Paul F. Pete Wellborn III, the lawyer who's taken down a couple big-time spammers, most recently that annoying printer supplies guy!
So don't give up. Even if you just press delete without a second though, don't discourage others. There is hope. A lot of people are working against spam, and as more things like this come on-line, the cost and risk of sending spam will continue to slowly rise. A very Good Thing!
I can't believe segmented memory isn't on the list. Apparantly the original 8088 databook is a collector's item, with text written by intel about how "efficient" segemented memory management would be, because nobody would write a program or store a set of data larger than 64k... and even if you did, you got the "extra" segment for another 64k!
What good is all that... well, a host could make decisions about which queries to route and which to discard based on any information about the reputation of the originator. Hosts would allow faster sends to downloaders with good reputation. Abusive hosts (Spammers, DoS attacks, etc) would ruin their reputation quickly (or keep recreating new keys all with no reputation).
Reputation in such a system would be very valuable. Somewhat like slashdot karma, it would appeal to many individuals, who would likely go out of their way to gain reputation signatures, perhaps by providing or mirroring lots of high quality files, attaching good meta-data descriptions to files, etc. The client software would need to have ways for everyone to do moderation on files and users... but unlike slashdot, there would be no universal score, only lots of keys/reputation scores, signed by other users. The software could also automatically detect certain behaviors (files available for download, on-line for long times) of other hosts, and issue reputation points. The idea is that a reputation score is to have a way to allocate the available resources (mainly bandwidth), to establish an incentive for users to share files and act in ways that benefit the network, and of course to make the network resiliant to abuse.
Now, for a system like this to scale, each host will need a LOT of disk space, to store a giant database of keys and signatures on them, and it would ultimately act like a giant cache. Each host would obviously collect the most positive signatures... the initial communication would be similar to boasting, the requester would send several of the best moderation signatures, hoping that the remote host already knows those people who signed and will therefore offer faster transfers, propagate a query farther, etc.
Maybe this ultimately works out to be the same as digital cash in MojoNation. I believe it is a different idea, in that it's based on an assumption of abundance.... everybody can win. You can get a great reputation without someone else giving up anything. In a cash system, when you get cash (mojo), someone else gives it up, and the overall philosophy is of scarcity.
If you have any ideas or thoughts to add to this, please post. Am I totally out in left field here, or does this seem like a reasonable idea?
Apparantly BT has a really strong monopoly.
Haven't we heard this same old line, over and over again, every time Intel releases a new generation of microprocessor.
The PPro (now Pentium 3) was doomed to a server nitch market, likewise the original Pentium, and even statements for the 486 and 386. Each one, very expensive and running much hotter than those before it, and so far the story ends up the same every time. You'd think people would get used to the idea of Moore's Law and, come on now, six generations of x86 processors, it's a lot more like clockwork.... but I suppose the ordinary doesn't make for interesting headlines.
My (limited) understanding of copyright is that the protection is provides is linked to the media. As I have been led to believe...
You bought the media. You own that copy. That's how it is with music, books, movies, newspapers, etc. There is the first sale doctrine which says that you own that copy and the copyright holder only had the exclusive rights to the first sale of that particular piece of media.
now I could be wrong (of course, IANAL), but from what I've read from many separate sources who seem to be the experts, is that what you're buying with music, books, movies is the media. You are buying one copy of the work, that you own.
Software seems strange, in that you agree to a restrictive contract. Most of the commercial licenses I've seen prohibit transfer to a third party, which would otherwise be your right if the first sale doctrine would apply.
I believe the only reason software vendors offer lower cost upgrades is that it fits the market and extracts the most money that the market will bear. I've not seen any reason that they must do this. Existing users have less incentive to switch to a competing product, and they get an incentive to upgrade when they very well may have just kept using the older version.
Just because the software vendors offer upgrades to existing customers doesn't set a requirement for the music or movie industries.
I can see it now, advertisements for ISP's who's big selling point is not having Carnivore installed.
As I recall, the planned usage was to obtain a warrant and then temporarily install is at the suspect's ISP. Your ISP could be Carnivore-free the day you sign up, and tommorrow some judge issues a warrant (or the ISP cooperates without a warrant), just because the FBI suspects anyone connecting with your ISP, and all of a sudden big brother will be watching.
If you really have something to hide, or you just want to increase the ratio of envelopes to post cards (thereby helping others who have something to hide), PGP sounds like the answer.
They are indeed different. They have different port numbers.
Can you say "one click shopping patent"? Knew ya could...
Looking over the comments you've posted (from your user info page), you're obviously involved in the Mozilla development. Now I'm a bit frustrated with the slow progress on the relicensing, but it's understandable.
Now I know everyone working on Mozilla/Netscape has probably been frustrated with lots of criticism over features vs memory/bloat and standards compliance vs delivery dates. I know that is gets difficult when it comes from "all directions" with conflicting opinions, where the only common theme is everyone is upset. Please try to understand the viewpoint of anyone waiting and trying to make plans to integrate mozilla code into a GPL'd project.
Without access to the newsgroup, the relicense process appears to be at a standstill.
The FAQ says "Yes, as more questions are asked, updates will be made to this page", but there been no update in three months. The answers are vauge and provide no real information that anyone planning to work with the code together with other GPL'd code could use to plan their future activities. There is no estimate of when the contributors will be contacted, how long they have to reply, or any other time oriented info. In fact, there isn't even an indication of when these things may be known and added to the page. There is no indication of what parts of the project the staff of mozilla.org can speak for, and say with certainty that they will be dual licensed.
I know there's a limited number of hours in a day, and a limited number of people to work on any project. You need to work on the most important things first. I can agree that standards compliance and bug fixing has been a well chosen high priority.
The flip side of the coin is that, judging from the Mozilla Relicensing FAQ it would appear that the dual licensing to GPL has completely fallen off the radar. In fact, there may be someone working dilligently on it, but anyone considering using mozilla in a GPL'd setting can't know that from a FAQ with vauge answers, claiming it will be updated, but has in fact not been updated in three months.
Now maybe I'm the only one who doesn't get n.p.m.license, but I doubt it. If there really is work being done on the relicense AND if the mozilla team really is interested in people using the code in GPL'd projects, it'd probably be worth the 15-20 minutes to update the FAQ page, linked right from the main mozilla.org, so that folks working on GPL'd projects could plan accordingly. Judging from what I can actually see (the FAQ), the only plans I could realistically make ammount to "it looks like they've completely forgotten about it (so I'll have to look at XmHTML, XDE, etc, instead of waiting just a little longer)".
Ok, enough complaining and whining.
Does anyone here get this newsgroup and/or have any real info about when the world can expect to see a GPL'd mozilla source distribution.
I'd really like to play around with the code, but not until it's GPL'd.
What about asymetric routing?
I have two ISPs. One is a 128kbps frame relay, and the other is a radio link and a 33.6k modem. The radio link is approx 2 Mbit/sec with a reasonable latency, about 50 ms. The frame relay circuit has 20 ms latency. The modem just plain sucks, slow and high latency. The modem isn't even plugged in. I use use the radio receiver as a one-way link.
If all spoofed packets were illegal, then it'd probably be illegal for me to send packets up the frame relay line, with the IP number belonging to the radio link. The ISP providing the upstream for the frame line says "we don't mind and we won't stop you unless someone starts abusing our network, and we'd probably have to upgrade the router to do it". The ISP providing the radio link doesn't really know... it's hard to actually get to talk to anyone there that knows anything... but from what I can tell, their scarce resource is the pool of inbound modems, they have more bandwidth than they know what to do with on the radio link.
It's a pretty sweet setup, and it's all possible due to asymetric routing (linux) and that my upstream provider lets me send spoofed packets!
I think it'd be fun to play with the code, but there's no way I'm going to put my time into it until it's GPL'd and I can mix-n-match with other GPL'd code.