The scary part is that they may intentionally allow it (after a token cat & mouse game) in order to perform ISP-wide deep packet inspection. Then they find out who's using Tor, assume they're trying to bypass censorship, and charge them with crimes.
Always possible. Tor is a way of creating anonymity at the destination site. It wasn't designed to disguise its use. To do that, you'll need something more sophisticated and/or less popular. Personally, I'd use a high volume server that typically delivers binary data on a proprietary encrypted protocol, such as an MMO/gaming server. Then I'd use that as a proxy to tunnel my traffic through and rate limit it to be similar to the rate of other traffic to/from the server. Singular solution, nobody else knows about it -- server outside China. Problem solved.
It's hard though to create a whole P2P network of thousands of users with the same client, and then hide it.
Tor was blocked by China. They've since added bridges intended to bypass the firewall. It's always been a cat and mouse game with China. Always will be. But right now, Tor works in China. Tomorrow, who knows.
Duh, they just store it in the crystal as a README.
They saved the file in UTF-16. Also, in the future, the use of English is illegal. Historians believe that a catacalysmic nuclear event several thousand years ago was what caused the Great Warming. Records show a language known as "english" was prevalent in the worst-affected areas. It was retroactively banned by the 320th High Pope of the New New Pastarastafarian church. It's believed the language itself was what caused the problem. Your argument is invalid.
The scariest thing here is that you pretend to be informed enough to vote and one would assume you actually attempt the process. Politics being the same elsewhere is probably the closest truth in your post.
Well, I can provide citations for everything I've said, but I note other people elsewhere in this thread have already started doing so. climate change, conception...
The problem with long term data archival isn't just the storage medium -- it's being able to recreate the reader mechanism from scratch. Tomorrow world war 3 happens. We're bombed back to the stone age. Thousands of years from now, humanity has returned to the level it is today, but with no knowledge or intact examples of previous technology. How do you explain how to build something, when the language, the words, and the understanding of physics and technology are all different (and possibly wrong or incomplete)?
We've been trying for a long time to come up with a universal language; Partly in case we ever contact E.T., but also because of the problem of language fragmentation. Human language tends to diverge, not converge. How do you manage to tell someone how to construct a complex device from scratch, without any linguistic foundation and scientific understanding to build from?
Civilization in a bottle: Not as easy as it sounds.
The cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems.
We tried banning it, failed, and created modern organized crime and drug cartels. Even Hitler respected beer -- one of the few laws to survive his rule dealt with beer, specifically its importation and rules regarding its quality. You won't find Miller Lite being sold anywhere in Germany today as required by law. Sad how every historical tyrant let the population drink to their hearts content, but our country, thanks to religious intolerance, tried to screw with it and epic failed so hard that the rest of the world felt the impact.
The Bible says in the New Testament in 1 Corinthians 15 that the church's judgment is to be enforced only within the church. Even St. Paul the Apostle expressly denied that he had any authority to judge those who are outside of the church.
Likewise standing near a sun-warmed rock or a Scandinavian style tile oven/masonry heater which can keep a whole house warm all day with just a few handfuls of sticks - the folks who've been living with serious cold for centuries long ago figured out that heating the air is silly.
Speaking as someone who lives in Minnesota, the freezer of the continental United States, no... we haven't. We still have large, bulky furnaces that costs hundreds, sometimes thousands, of dollars per month to run in the wintertime. Thanks to environmental concerns and zoning regulations, it's very difficult, if not impossible, to get any kind of conventional wood burning stove installed in a residence. A stupidly simple double-barrel wood stove costs only $50 a month to run, and it can heat many thousands of square feet, even with minimal insulation.
I'd say that the use of electric or natural-gas furnaces is really a step in the wrong direction -- it may be more advanced technologically, but it's worse for the environment and your pocketbook. The only reason people use them is convenience and because it's illegal to use anything else. Also, because the modern man living in suburbia is stupid. Half of them can't even manage to start a fire without a ludicrous amount of matches and newspaper; Most of them get fire-starter bricks because they fail so hard. But I grew up in the country -- I can start a fire with just a napkin, two rocks, and two first-fulls of grass. The things people forget because of modern conveniences...
Politics is the same everywhere. I'm guessing it's an election year in Greece too. Politicians doing outlandish things they know will never hold up in any court is what we call "tuesday" across the pond. Conservatives over here have done things like pass laws forbidding global warming. Not research into it, or funding for it, but global warming itself. They've made being the Earth a crime. Elsewhere in America, there is a state now where, by law, every woman is pregnant. No, I'm not joking -- they legislated the definition of conception to be two weeks before sexual contact. No more virgins here, good sirs! Still no word on whether they're allowed to use the car pool lanes.
And those aren't even examples of religious non-sense, which makes the above examples look positively civil by comparison. *hugs* Greek citizens, we feel your pain too.
An article from March 19, 2012 shows that The Ban On Encryption is already a Work In Progress.
Good luck with that. Encryption keeps the cost of doing business on the internet low. Without it, transactions would have to be sent in the clear, which means they would be vulnerable to interception and manipulation. Realtime modification of IP packets (or recording of payload) is a trivial task -- most routers and managed switches have the ability to filter and mirror IP packets. If you make encryption illegal, you're handing even the dullest criminals carte blanche access to our financial accounts. Business online would become a very risky venture.
They'll never ban encryption. They will, however, probably engineer backdoors into encryption algorithms and equipment via things like the TPMs installed in people's computers, and add unique identifiers and such to assist in tracking. The more complex the system, the more likely it is to have a backdoor in it that will survive inspection.
Stop making sense, mellon. This is slashdot -- middle of the road, well-reasoned replies shouldn't happen here. You need more exclaimation points and profanity.
They could always use it to source new episodes of CSI. "Zoom in on that packet! Right there, between the 1 and the 0 -- enhance that. We found the killer's digital fingerprint inside this captured packet. Gear up, let's go get this dirtbag!" Kidding aside, you're right but only to a point. There are few people who would deny that the Allied power's interception and decryption of the Axis' communications during WWII was invaluable in helping win the war. What isn't known is that many of those communiques still haven't been read. Even back then, the amount of information intelligence services had to sort through was enormous.
The problem in the intelligence community today is not finding new ways of getting the data -- in fact, the technology to do that has been installed in every telco switch and every internet access point since not long after AT&T started replacing phone operators with banks of programmable relays. The effort required to get the data is trivial. The amount of resources required to store the data is less trivial, but we already have massive data centers sitting in remote parts of the United States doing nothing but storing said information for various law enforcement agencies -- not that they're hard to find, just look for images that have been cut and pasted from other locations on satellite imagery, if they bother to hide them at all.
However, making use of that information has always been problematic -- and most intelligence failures, including 9/11, Pearl Harbor, Oklahoma city, and a very long list of military intelligence SNAFUs in this country can trace their origins to the lack of analysis of the data. Converting raw digital data into actionable intelligence still requires a lot of man power. A substantial portion of the NSA, FBI, and CIA's budget is dedicated towards the very simple task of translating. As in, converting say, islamic into english. A more substantial portion is dedicated to people analyzing those translations, sorting through the massive amount of information, and compiling it into situation reports, which are then either posted internally to wiki-like data stores, or forwarded up the chain of command and assembled into briefings where management decides if its actionable. Only a small portion of their budget is dedicated to capturing and storing data -- and yes, that also includes all the birds they have orbiting.
Analysis of available information has always been the achilles heel of intelligence services. I doubt even 0.1% of the information stored in all those data centers is ever used. The rest just sits there, gathering dust, on the off-chance that someday, an analyst will push a button labelled "Tell me everything about X", and the drive with that information on it will spin up and spit it out into a report.
No, we don't need those data centers today. We don't need near instant access to caturday videos. The amount of reactionary nonsense here is depressing. If the article placed blame on anyone, it's users demanding unnecessary access to meaningless data. They did an excellent job of explaining how data centers get to be energy hogs and frankly this article could be the catalyst that convinces CIOs to move to virtualized data centers rather than the one server one application wastefulness that many places still employ today. Better tech is around the corner and this is how we shift thinking.
I'm going to have to take away your television, radio, bluray and dvd players, and block access to any access to entertainment websites, sir. In fact, I'm going to have to ask you to surrender your Slashdot account as well -- it's possible you could be using it to have fun. You have until 5pm, and then I'm sending the whale lovers after you, as well as the regulars in/b/ who post after midnight.
Clearly, Romney is an expert on these things, so I hope they take his input seriously in the design phase. We wouldn't want future astronauts dying from not being able to open their windows.
You missed the recommendation that magnets not be used in spacecraft, since nobody knows how they work... *cough* *sputter*
First, I'm not disagreeing with you. There will always be a core of people in any ideological movement that manage to achieve a measure of success, dedication, etc. And good for them; I happen to agree with a lot of the ideology of environmentalism. We should save and reuse, if only because much of our society runs on non-renewable resources, and those that don't can still benefit from reuse. But much of the green movement is about identity, not actuality, and it also makes unrealistic demands. I can live without plastic spoons; But asking me to give up plastic entirely is silly. I can live with a toilet that doesn't flush 8 gallons of water everytime I go pee; I am not going to do my business in a compost heap in an outhouse. There's a certain degree of "one-upsmanship" present in the movement, where people who drive electric cars are somehow better than those who drive regular ones. But when you look at the big picture -- the electric car isn't necessarily any better for the environment. Using less water doesn't necessarily translate to a better environment either -- a lot of cities treat their sewage, separating out the water, treating it, and then recycling it back into the drinking water. Most people don't want to consider the idea that the water they're drinking might have been pissed out only a week ago, but there it is. So using more water doesn't necessarily harm the environment.
I guess what I'm saying is I'm for realistic environmental regulation and ideology, not wishful thinking. And the NY Times article is mostly wishful thinking -- we needed those data centers today. In 5 years, they'll be more efficient, and use less electricity, because the equipment has reached end of life and been replaced. Asking them to do it now is silly. That's an example of environmentalism that's unrealistic.
Reporters are some of the most arrogant people on the planet and they are *sure* that they know more than the techs do. They're to arrogant to[sic] let someone with real knowledge look over their work and say whether it makes any sense.
Reporters aren't arrogant. Editors demand it. Ever since computers went mainstream, and gadget-collection became a "hip" thing to do, everybody (especially men) have been claiming to be tech-savvy. Apple stores stock "geniuses", there's massive age bias in our industry, and people use utility devices like cell phones as status symbols. The problem is not the reporters: The problem is our culture. Yes, we made our bona fides professionally. Yes, we can run circles around the idiots at the genius-bar, whose credentials include "fixed mom's computer that had that virus" and "member of the computer club in high school". Well, duh.
But let's be honest here: Most people consider themselves above-average drivers too. Is it any surprise the average person also has an inflated sense of understanding regarding IT? No, no it isn't. And when you're surrounded with egotistical asshats that are all saying "I'm Sparticus!" how is the average person supposed to separate the truly knowledgeable from the posers? See also: Every HR department you've applied for a job with.
It's kind of hard to hide massive power consumption and air conditioning boxes the size of garbage trucks on the roof or sides of the building. It's stupid to think you can hide a data center anymore than you can hide a power substation. They might not be on the map, but it's all right there in public records, and building plans are required to be filed with the local city its built in. Those are also public records.
Also, greenies have been complaining about anyone doing more than banging rocks together. Remember, 50 years ago, these same people were moving into communes and trying to live off-grid. Of course, as quick as they moved into the communes, they moved back out. Whenever I read someone complaining about electricity use, nuclear power, plastics, e-waste, etc., unless it's in the context of scientific research or a business analysis, I shit can it -- to me, they're no better than anti-vaxxers, climate change deniers, alternative medicine freaks, and those people that crash boats into the sides of other boats while chanting "save the whales". I care about the environment, I recycle, but I'm not going to advocate we abandon modern conveniences and run off to the communes to satisfy some sense of ideological purity regarding the environment. Data centers cost a lot of money -- the electricity and air conditioning often cost more than the computers. I trust that if there are ways to reduce those costs (instead of just offsetting them), businesses that own them are going to migrate to those technologies. It's just good business. It doesn't need a New York Times op-ed piece to shame them into doing it...
I appreciate your post, but you're either misinformed or woefully out of date. Comcast dropped Sandvine years ago.
Officially, yes. Unofficially, some people have reported problems. I ran the test here, along with others, on an otherwise idle connection; From about 5pm-1am local time during the week, and varying on the weekends, it's easy to trip the throttler -- simply loading a video on netflix, then quitting (as in, no active connections, confirmed with wireshark), waiting a minute, and running a bandwidth test, shows a 30% reduction in available bandwidth repeatedly with Speedtest.net, as well as test files downloaded from numerous FTP and HTTP sites. Total traffic transferred in the previous 30 minutes prior to each test was less than 5MB total, with a 30 minute cooldown after -- tests were run repeatedly and triggered off scripts automatically. All traffic was logged.
The incident is burned into the public psyche not because it was particularly horrorific, or because it was some example of bad design held up for criticism -- its notable for one reason only. It was the first case of broad media overhype. It was the great-grand-daddy of all the shit we see on the "news" today.
Actually, it was publicized for the same reason the Titanic sinking was -- a bunch of rich people died. There had been other airship accidents, and other naval accidents, but it wasn't newsworthy because nobody "important" had died... until then (respectively).
Comcast employs a rather complex quality of service system that isn't configured like any QoS system you've seen before. Essentially, it's designed to act fast for the casual user who rarely does anything but look at Facebook.
Many people have tried to research the system and find a pattern, but it varies by region and tier of service. There are some things that have been routinely found, however. Services like hulu (aka XFinity), Speedtest.net, and several others receive the highest priority. TCP/IP Traffic on port 80 and 443 get a bump, but only for the first 5MB of transfer per connection. Host-based filtering can pre-empt this however, like youtube.com, netflix.com, etc.; They receive no priority. UDP traffic receives a lower priority than TCP. Services like Skype and other services that compete directly with comcast get lumped into the lowest QoS tier -- any other connection on your line will max out, starving these out. It's the same story with SSL connections on any port other than 80 or 443.
There is also active interference with certain connection types; Trying to upload a torrent to a tracker (not seeding, actually creating a new torrent) results in a deluge of fakes reset packets. When a torrent completes and switches to seeding, the incoming connection count and amount of bandwidth drop instantly and significantly. This is due to their "sandvine" software being installed at their border routers. They also transparently proxy HTTP in some locations -- on popular sites like Facebook, data is cached and even after it's updated and live on the internet, anyone accessing it through plain HTTP will get a cached copy. It appears to be based only on the top 100 or so websites, though anecdotally, some people have reported other sites seem to get cached as well. Windows updates also get cached, which was only noticed when Microsoft deployed XP service pack 1, and then re-released it as 1a due to a serious bug -- the buggy version continued to propagate for almost a day after the update was posted onto comcast customers' systems.
In addition to all of this, comcast has massive buffers on all your IP traffic -- the classic case of buffer bloat. If you're using more than about 25% of your rated capacity, you're going to start seeing latency, and there are clear thresholds if you do TCP "pings" (rather than ICMP) with full payload packets (typically MTU = 1500). And then there's the clamping they do based purely on capacity used -- which is based both on the amount of traffic on your local segment AND the total rated speed for your tier of service, with the magic numbers being the "top 10%" for the former, and more than 75% for the latter. I put the previous in quotations because many report that throttling appears persistent, rather than transient, and may be based on billing cycle, despite customer services' assurances to the contrary. This is another one of those "region-specific" throttling problems.
As you can see, there's a reason the FCC chose Comcast first on the list of ISPs to try to enforce network neutrality on: They are by far the worst offender.
Trademarks don't require any of that stuff you mentioned. It simply requires you be the first to use it in your industry. That's it. Sum total of a trademark. I can trademark the word "I Am A Trademark" in times new roman for the "Internet Forum Posting" industry, and as long as nobody else has done it, it's mine. No need to examine prior art, prove novelty, etc. It's a stamp, a logo, a signature -- all it has to be is not used anywhere else prior to registration.
Slashdot Mirror
The scary part is that they may intentionally allow it (after a token cat & mouse game) in order to perform ISP-wide deep packet inspection. Then they find out who's using Tor, assume they're trying to bypass censorship, and charge them with crimes.
Always possible. Tor is a way of creating anonymity at the destination site. It wasn't designed to disguise its use. To do that, you'll need something more sophisticated and/or less popular. Personally, I'd use a high volume server that typically delivers binary data on a proprietary encrypted protocol, such as an MMO/gaming server. Then I'd use that as a proxy to tunnel my traffic through and rate limit it to be similar to the rate of other traffic to/from the server. Singular solution, nobody else knows about it -- server outside China. Problem solved.
It's hard though to create a whole P2P network of thousands of users with the same client, and then hide it.
Tor was blocked by China. They've since added bridges intended to bypass the firewall. It's always been a cat and mouse game with China. Always will be. But right now, Tor works in China. Tomorrow, who knows.
Don't ever try to write a Sci-Fi book, please.
Timey whimey, wibbly wobbley...
***DRM ERROR - Could Not Contact Authentication Server***
Assuming the person who finds it realizes its a storage device, and not just a pretty rock...
Duh, they just store it in the crystal as a README.
They saved the file in UTF-16. Also, in the future, the use of English is illegal. Historians believe that a catacalysmic nuclear event several thousand years ago was what caused the Great Warming. Records show a language known as "english" was prevalent in the worst-affected areas. It was retroactively banned by the 320th High Pope of the New New Pastarastafarian church. It's believed the language itself was what caused the problem. Your argument is invalid.
The scariest thing here is that you pretend to be informed enough to vote and one would assume you actually attempt the process. Politics being the same elsewhere is probably the closest truth in your post.
Well, I can provide citations for everything I've said, but I note other people elsewhere in this thread have already started doing so. climate change, conception...
The problem with long term data archival isn't just the storage medium -- it's being able to recreate the reader mechanism from scratch. Tomorrow world war 3 happens. We're bombed back to the stone age. Thousands of years from now, humanity has returned to the level it is today, but with no knowledge or intact examples of previous technology. How do you explain how to build something, when the language, the words, and the understanding of physics and technology are all different (and possibly wrong or incomplete)?
We've been trying for a long time to come up with a universal language; Partly in case we ever contact E.T., but also because of the problem of language fragmentation. Human language tends to diverge, not converge. How do you manage to tell someone how to construct a complex device from scratch, without any linguistic foundation and scientific understanding to build from?
Civilization in a bottle: Not as easy as it sounds.
The cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems.
We tried banning it, failed, and created modern organized crime and drug cartels. Even Hitler respected beer -- one of the few laws to survive his rule dealt with beer, specifically its importation and rules regarding its quality. You won't find Miller Lite being sold anywhere in Germany today as required by law. Sad how every historical tyrant let the population drink to their hearts content, but our country, thanks to religious intolerance, tried to screw with it and epic failed so hard that the rest of the world felt the impact.
The Bible says in the New Testament in 1 Corinthians 15 that the church's judgment is to be enforced only within the church. Even St. Paul the Apostle expressly denied that he had any authority to judge those who are outside of the church.
They didn't get the memo.
Likewise standing near a sun-warmed rock or a Scandinavian style tile oven/masonry heater which can keep a whole house warm all day with just a few handfuls of sticks - the folks who've been living with serious cold for centuries long ago figured out that heating the air is silly.
Speaking as someone who lives in Minnesota, the freezer of the continental United States, no... we haven't. We still have large, bulky furnaces that costs hundreds, sometimes thousands, of dollars per month to run in the wintertime. Thanks to environmental concerns and zoning regulations, it's very difficult, if not impossible, to get any kind of conventional wood burning stove installed in a residence. A stupidly simple double-barrel wood stove costs only $50 a month to run, and it can heat many thousands of square feet, even with minimal insulation.
I'd say that the use of electric or natural-gas furnaces is really a step in the wrong direction -- it may be more advanced technologically, but it's worse for the environment and your pocketbook. The only reason people use them is convenience and because it's illegal to use anything else. Also, because the modern man living in suburbia is stupid. Half of them can't even manage to start a fire without a ludicrous amount of matches and newspaper; Most of them get fire-starter bricks because they fail so hard. But I grew up in the country -- I can start a fire with just a napkin, two rocks, and two first-fulls of grass. The things people forget because of modern conveniences...
Politics is the same everywhere. I'm guessing it's an election year in Greece too. Politicians doing outlandish things they know will never hold up in any court is what we call "tuesday" across the pond. Conservatives over here have done things like pass laws forbidding global warming. Not research into it, or funding for it, but global warming itself. They've made being the Earth a crime. Elsewhere in America, there is a state now where, by law, every woman is pregnant. No, I'm not joking -- they legislated the definition of conception to be two weeks before sexual contact. No more virgins here, good sirs! Still no word on whether they're allowed to use the car pool lanes.
And those aren't even examples of religious non-sense, which makes the above examples look positively civil by comparison. *hugs* Greek citizens, we feel your pain too.
An article from March 19, 2012 shows that The Ban On Encryption is already a Work In Progress.
Good luck with that. Encryption keeps the cost of doing business on the internet low. Without it, transactions would have to be sent in the clear, which means they would be vulnerable to interception and manipulation. Realtime modification of IP packets (or recording of payload) is a trivial task -- most routers and managed switches have the ability to filter and mirror IP packets. If you make encryption illegal, you're handing even the dullest criminals carte blanche access to our financial accounts. Business online would become a very risky venture.
They'll never ban encryption. They will, however, probably engineer backdoors into encryption algorithms and equipment via things like the TPMs installed in people's computers, and add unique identifiers and such to assist in tracking. The more complex the system, the more likely it is to have a backdoor in it that will survive inspection.
Stop making sense, mellon. This is slashdot -- middle of the road, well-reasoned replies shouldn't happen here. You need more exclaimation points and profanity.
They could always use it to source new episodes of CSI. "Zoom in on that packet! Right there, between the 1 and the 0 -- enhance that. We found the killer's digital fingerprint inside this captured packet. Gear up, let's go get this dirtbag!" Kidding aside, you're right but only to a point. There are few people who would deny that the Allied power's interception and decryption of the Axis' communications during WWII was invaluable in helping win the war. What isn't known is that many of those communiques still haven't been read. Even back then, the amount of information intelligence services had to sort through was enormous.
The problem in the intelligence community today is not finding new ways of getting the data -- in fact, the technology to do that has been installed in every telco switch and every internet access point since not long after AT&T started replacing phone operators with banks of programmable relays. The effort required to get the data is trivial. The amount of resources required to store the data is less trivial, but we already have massive data centers sitting in remote parts of the United States doing nothing but storing said information for various law enforcement agencies -- not that they're hard to find, just look for images that have been cut and pasted from other locations on satellite imagery, if they bother to hide them at all.
However, making use of that information has always been problematic -- and most intelligence failures, including 9/11, Pearl Harbor, Oklahoma city, and a very long list of military intelligence SNAFUs in this country can trace their origins to the lack of analysis of the data. Converting raw digital data into actionable intelligence still requires a lot of man power. A substantial portion of the NSA, FBI, and CIA's budget is dedicated towards the very simple task of translating. As in, converting say, islamic into english. A more substantial portion is dedicated to people analyzing those translations, sorting through the massive amount of information, and compiling it into situation reports, which are then either posted internally to wiki-like data stores, or forwarded up the chain of command and assembled into briefings where management decides if its actionable. Only a small portion of their budget is dedicated to capturing and storing data -- and yes, that also includes all the birds they have orbiting.
Analysis of available information has always been the achilles heel of intelligence services. I doubt even 0.1% of the information stored in all those data centers is ever used. The rest just sits there, gathering dust, on the off-chance that someday, an analyst will push a button labelled "Tell me everything about X", and the drive with that information on it will spin up and spit it out into a report.
No, we don't need those data centers today. We don't need near instant access to caturday videos. The amount of reactionary nonsense here is depressing. If the article placed blame on anyone, it's users demanding unnecessary access to meaningless data. They did an excellent job of explaining how data centers get to be energy hogs and frankly this article could be the catalyst that convinces CIOs to move to virtualized data centers rather than the one server one application wastefulness that many places still employ today. Better tech is around the corner and this is how we shift thinking.
I'm going to have to take away your television, radio, bluray and dvd players, and block access to any access to entertainment websites, sir. In fact, I'm going to have to ask you to surrender your Slashdot account as well -- it's possible you could be using it to have fun. You have until 5pm, and then I'm sending the whale lovers after you, as well as the regulars in /b/ who post after midnight.
Clearly, Romney is an expert on these things, so I hope they take his input seriously in the design phase. We wouldn't want future astronauts dying from not being able to open their windows.
You missed the recommendation that magnets not be used in spacecraft, since nobody knows how they work... *cough* *sputter*
How am I to know if I am actually good at this when the people evaluating me is the average person?
When you stop caring what they think.
First, I'm not disagreeing with you. There will always be a core of people in any ideological movement that manage to achieve a measure of success, dedication, etc. And good for them; I happen to agree with a lot of the ideology of environmentalism. We should save and reuse, if only because much of our society runs on non-renewable resources, and those that don't can still benefit from reuse. But much of the green movement is about identity, not actuality, and it also makes unrealistic demands. I can live without plastic spoons; But asking me to give up plastic entirely is silly. I can live with a toilet that doesn't flush 8 gallons of water everytime I go pee; I am not going to do my business in a compost heap in an outhouse. There's a certain degree of "one-upsmanship" present in the movement, where people who drive electric cars are somehow better than those who drive regular ones. But when you look at the big picture -- the electric car isn't necessarily any better for the environment. Using less water doesn't necessarily translate to a better environment either -- a lot of cities treat their sewage, separating out the water, treating it, and then recycling it back into the drinking water. Most people don't want to consider the idea that the water they're drinking might have been pissed out only a week ago, but there it is. So using more water doesn't necessarily harm the environment.
I guess what I'm saying is I'm for realistic environmental regulation and ideology, not wishful thinking. And the NY Times article is mostly wishful thinking -- we needed those data centers today. In 5 years, they'll be more efficient, and use less electricity, because the equipment has reached end of life and been replaced. Asking them to do it now is silly. That's an example of environmentalism that's unrealistic.
Reporters are some of the most arrogant people on the planet and they are *sure* that they know more than the techs do. They're to arrogant to[sic] let someone with real knowledge look over their work and say whether it makes any sense.
Reporters aren't arrogant. Editors demand it. Ever since computers went mainstream, and gadget-collection became a "hip" thing to do, everybody (especially men) have been claiming to be tech-savvy. Apple stores stock "geniuses", there's massive age bias in our industry, and people use utility devices like cell phones as status symbols. The problem is not the reporters: The problem is our culture. Yes, we made our bona fides professionally. Yes, we can run circles around the idiots at the genius-bar, whose credentials include "fixed mom's computer that had that virus" and "member of the computer club in high school". Well, duh.
But let's be honest here: Most people consider themselves above-average drivers too. Is it any surprise the average person also has an inflated sense of understanding regarding IT? No, no it isn't. And when you're surrounded with egotistical asshats that are all saying "I'm Sparticus!" how is the average person supposed to separate the truly knowledgeable from the posers? See also: Every HR department you've applied for a job with.
Don't blame reporters for a societal problem.
It's kind of hard to hide massive power consumption and air conditioning boxes the size of garbage trucks on the roof or sides of the building. It's stupid to think you can hide a data center anymore than you can hide a power substation. They might not be on the map, but it's all right there in public records, and building plans are required to be filed with the local city its built in. Those are also public records.
Also, greenies have been complaining about anyone doing more than banging rocks together. Remember, 50 years ago, these same people were moving into communes and trying to live off-grid. Of course, as quick as they moved into the communes, they moved back out. Whenever I read someone complaining about electricity use, nuclear power, plastics, e-waste, etc., unless it's in the context of scientific research or a business analysis, I shit can it -- to me, they're no better than anti-vaxxers, climate change deniers, alternative medicine freaks, and those people that crash boats into the sides of other boats while chanting "save the whales". I care about the environment, I recycle, but I'm not going to advocate we abandon modern conveniences and run off to the communes to satisfy some sense of ideological purity regarding the environment. Data centers cost a lot of money -- the electricity and air conditioning often cost more than the computers. I trust that if there are ways to reduce those costs (instead of just offsetting them), businesses that own them are going to migrate to those technologies. It's just good business. It doesn't need a New York Times op-ed piece to shame them into doing it...
"Something is going on at Foxconn. Do any Slashdotters know of a good source for news about Chinese labor disputes?"
This is China. There won't be any news.
I appreciate your post, but you're either misinformed or woefully out of date. Comcast dropped Sandvine years ago.
Officially, yes. Unofficially, some people have reported problems. I ran the test here, along with others, on an otherwise idle connection; From about 5pm-1am local time during the week, and varying on the weekends, it's easy to trip the throttler -- simply loading a video on netflix, then quitting (as in, no active connections, confirmed with wireshark), waiting a minute, and running a bandwidth test, shows a 30% reduction in available bandwidth repeatedly with Speedtest.net, as well as test files downloaded from numerous FTP and HTTP sites. Total traffic transferred in the previous 30 minutes prior to each test was less than 5MB total, with a 30 minute cooldown after -- tests were run repeatedly and triggered off scripts automatically. All traffic was logged.
The incident is burned into the public psyche not because it was particularly horrorific, or because it was some example of bad design held up for criticism -- its notable for one reason only. It was the first case of broad media overhype. It was the great-grand-daddy of all the shit we see on the "news" today.
Actually, it was publicized for the same reason the Titanic sinking was -- a bunch of rich people died. There had been other airship accidents, and other naval accidents, but it wasn't newsworthy because nobody "important" had died... until then (respectively).
Web pages? super fast, but who cares?
Comcast employs a rather complex quality of service system that isn't configured like any QoS system you've seen before. Essentially, it's designed to act fast for the casual user who rarely does anything but look at Facebook.
Many people have tried to research the system and find a pattern, but it varies by region and tier of service. There are some things that have been routinely found, however. Services like hulu (aka XFinity), Speedtest.net, and several others receive the highest priority. TCP/IP Traffic on port 80 and 443 get a bump, but only for the first 5MB of transfer per connection. Host-based filtering can pre-empt this however, like youtube.com, netflix.com, etc.; They receive no priority. UDP traffic receives a lower priority than TCP. Services like Skype and other services that compete directly with comcast get lumped into the lowest QoS tier -- any other connection on your line will max out, starving these out. It's the same story with SSL connections on any port other than 80 or 443.
There is also active interference with certain connection types; Trying to upload a torrent to a tracker (not seeding, actually creating a new torrent) results in a deluge of fakes reset packets. When a torrent completes and switches to seeding, the incoming connection count and amount of bandwidth drop instantly and significantly. This is due to their "sandvine" software being installed at their border routers. They also transparently proxy HTTP in some locations -- on popular sites like Facebook, data is cached and even after it's updated and live on the internet, anyone accessing it through plain HTTP will get a cached copy. It appears to be based only on the top 100 or so websites, though anecdotally, some people have reported other sites seem to get cached as well. Windows updates also get cached, which was only noticed when Microsoft deployed XP service pack 1, and then re-released it as 1a due to a serious bug -- the buggy version continued to propagate for almost a day after the update was posted onto comcast customers' systems.
In addition to all of this, comcast has massive buffers on all your IP traffic -- the classic case of buffer bloat. If you're using more than about 25% of your rated capacity, you're going to start seeing latency, and there are clear thresholds if you do TCP "pings" (rather than ICMP) with full payload packets (typically MTU = 1500). And then there's the clamping they do based purely on capacity used -- which is based both on the amount of traffic on your local segment AND the total rated speed for your tier of service, with the magic numbers being the "top 10%" for the former, and more than 75% for the latter. I put the previous in quotations because many report that throttling appears persistent, rather than transient, and may be based on billing cycle, despite customer services' assurances to the contrary. This is another one of those "region-specific" throttling problems.
As you can see, there's a reason the FCC chose Comcast first on the list of ISPs to try to enforce network neutrality on: They are by far the worst offender.
Trademarks don't require any of that stuff you mentioned. It simply requires you be the first to use it in your industry. That's it. Sum total of a trademark. I can trademark the word "I Am A Trademark" in times new roman for the "Internet Forum Posting" industry, and as long as nobody else has done it, it's mine. No need to examine prior art, prove novelty, etc. It's a stamp, a logo, a signature -- all it has to be is not used anywhere else prior to registration.