It takes a large amount of hardware and coordination to do that for even a relatively small bitstream... trying to do it to everybody and everything would require more resources than the human race currently possess.
o_O Already exists in Europe: It's called the Data Retention Directive. This exists now. Today. And it requires very much less than "all the resources of the human race". In fact, it merely requires an extra 1U unit here and there at the border routers for major ISPs, and sometimes an extra fiber link to duplicate traffic.
Second, it *is* possible to use secure protocols that make this technique useless.
The protocols aren't the problem. Latency is the problem; To defeat traffic analysis, you need to continually send the same amount of traffic regardless of how much data you actually need to transmit... and at the same interval. And every participant in the network needs to do the same.
When I say "not even theoretically", I mean unless you actually have monitoring equipment between EVERY computer in the network, and monitor the traffic in realtime.
You seem to have very little grounding in network engineering. You don't have to monitor all the computers. You just have to monitor the border routers. And you don't have to story all the traffic, you just need to store the 40 byte IP headers... and if you bother to write a sniffer that stores and compresses that data intelligently... it'll actually be quite a bit less since most of the data is redundant. You only have to record the content of the packets once; Either at the first hop, or the last. Everything in between you just need the headers... and you can reconstruct the datastream bit by bit, step by step.
You aren't understanding how the Internet works. If you had taps on all nodes at the same time and the data was encrypted end to end, then you would still be able to "see" who sent what when. You are assuming that "the network" is a cloud. It isn't. "cloud" doesn't exist.
Are you retarded? Every router, switch, etc., has port mirroring capability. Most of those pass through telecommunications equipment. That telecommunications equipment has taps built into it. That's what most of the internet is built on. They can tap it. They do tap it. They're building a nationwide infrastructure to capture all the IP header data at each point where it enters a telecommunications network. YES, THEY CAN DO THIS. THEY ALREADY HAVE DONE THIS. THEY DO THIS ALL THE TIME. Am I getting through your neanderthal skullmeats?
It's still just extra obfusciation. You can't hide the fact that data leaves and arrives at certain times, and each node forwards data as it receives it... if you can monitor the traffic, you can derive from that who's talking to who, whether you know what the traffic is or not. And somewhere, either at the source, or the destination, is a decrypted copy. Since the US government already monitors all traffic that occurs domestically, this kind of analysis is already practical and being used right now.
Don't assume that just because you can't do it, nobody can do it. That's arrogant, and it will come back to haunt you.
Encrypt all you want. Traffic analysis still screws you every time. The network tries to keep latencies low, so it forwards whatever it receives onto the next hop as soon as it gets it. If you're monitoring the source and the destination, then when it gets decrypted at the destination, you can correlate that with the traversal time through the 'black box' of Tor, Freenet, or whatever... and viola, you know who sent it, when, and what it was.
This is a known problem. It's discussed at length on EFF's website. If your connections are made in bulk, at regular intervals, instead of interactively, then it's a lot harder to do traffic analysis if all the other nodes exhibit the same behavior. But as long as you're trying to be anonymous by simply using a series of proxies that are set to store-and-forward... you're still screwed.
It's not supposed to be easy. If it were easy, there'd be a healthy criminal underground taking advantage of it. The legal system isn't designed to be easily co-opted; It takes time, showing up in person, and proving your identity... and that's just to get your foot in the door. You look at court orders and lawyers as a problem, but they aren't -- they're the solution.
But go ahead and put your faith in technological solutions that require no human interaction and grant full access to everything you own, love, and are. I'm sure nothing bad will happen.
Encryption is when you want to keep people out. In the scenario you've outlined, you need to let people in, but only certain people. That screams physical security. Your online passwords and all that crap can all be bypassed by a court order, which would be issued to the executor of your estate, authorizing the holder(s) of your assets to grant access to them. You don't need to keep a record of your passwords anywhere... once you're dead, they can just reset them. The rest might have value to you, but it is unlikely to have value to anyone else. Nobody's going to care about your licensed copy of Microsoft Office, or need to decrypt your secret collection of porn, music, and videos.
This is not a technical problem. This is a legal problem. This is the wrong forum to answer those kind of questions. You need to make a list of what assets you want (it's called a will) to pass on, and then simply make sure those assets are accessible. Call the companies up that maintain your online stuff and ask them. You don't have to worry about banks, mortgages, or physical assets: That's the executor of estate's job to sort out. Your Will provides all the legal power necessary.
True, but the longer the timeframe, the more justifiable opportunity to use nuclear weapons. While the proliferation of nuclear weapons has reduced the frequency of major wars, it has also increased the severity of such a war; And if it happens once, that might also be the last war that is ever fought. A quote widely-attributed to Einstein is, "I don't know how world war 3 will be fought, but I know how world war 4 will be: With sticks and stones."
That isn't to say we should dismantle our nuclear stockpile; but we should be aware that as the timeframe increases, the probability of a nuclear weapon being used again approaches 1. That means the probability of two nation states which possess nuclear weapons entering into a nuclear war also approaches 1, though over a longer timeframe than the first case. Sooner or later, nuclear weapons will kill us all. There is peace today -- tomorrow, there might be nothing left to remember that, however.
Because civilian aircraft and many other mission-critical functions depend on selective availability not being enabled, it's highly unlikely they'd use it domestically.
The other argument against SA is that there are severalmethods of interpolating the GPS signals to achieve a lock that don't require decoding anything but the almanac. So mucking up the signal intentionally doesn't have to affect equipment, as long as it is designed to use the more sophisticated methods of acquiring a lock. So if you're a terrorist trying to build a missile that flies by GPS, you're in business, you'll just have to design the circuit board yourself, not use COTS equipment. Because of that, any regular use of SA would eliminate its primary function -- any hostile force would simply adapt their equipment.
GPS jamming on the other hand, there is not much anyone can do about. The signal is actually below the noise floor, and it requires LOS because of the very low signal strength. All GPS satellites also use the same narrow frequency band, so it's trivial to build a jammer that can knock out any signals to the horizon on a modest budget. The many sensor model would be more resiliant to this kind of narrow-band emission, but because the database (by necessity) has to be public, you can tune a jammer to selectively block many frequencies for a modest power level bump. And don't forget that you can still create a high power broad-spectrum emitter using very simple equipment; a tesla coil with an RF component is sufficient to screw with electronics for miles around, even those without a discrete RF component (like cable tv).
Simply put, civilian equipment will be vulnerable to jamming for a long time to come yet; only rapid frequency shift cognitive radio (which is what the military uses) can be said to be jam-resistant. You don't have the budget for that kind of equipment, and even if you did, the FPGAs you would need for the front-end are classified as munitions and cannot be exported, and only the government right now can purchase them, or special licenses available only to companies. But hey, if you have a chip fab plant, and a team of engineers, you might be able to put something together. Maybe.
It would seem that to use this technology, the client would need to have a much larger datastore than with GPS: Whereas only the positions of the GPS satellites need to be known to make a calculation, the dataset here is in the many thousands to millions. In addition to the data required for map storage, it would seem any implimentation of this would require an internet connection to download the data in a geographically-restricted fashion. This opens the door to privacy issues that standalone GPS clients do not have.
How do you plan on addressing the privacy issue with your product?
Ah, the burdens of increasing marketshare: You're now statistically significant enough for the criminal element to take an interest. In every other part of IT, 'ease of use' is almost diametrically opposed to 'secure'. Until recently, mac users refused to believe this piece of wisdom, pointing to the lack of viruses and malware, and (erroneously) concluding that it was because their OS of choice was somehow more resiliant to such attacks.
It will probably take more evidence to convince the hardcore (like their computer suddenly talking in latin and shooting flames at their face), but the average mac user will likely be more sensible. I hope.
This just in: End to end encryption which does not form trust via a third party (like a certificate authority) still the best way of securing communications. The certificate authority system has been flawed from day one. IPSEC is still the way to go, along with secure DNS, but as you will note... companies and governments have been dragging their feet on it. A good indication that something is secure is that laws are passed against its use.
You're a company. The fact that any constitutional rights apply to you is because of dirty lawmaking. Kindly screw off. I *hope* you can only piss off the people so much before they realize "Hey, that's pretty dumb."
You. Noun. Meaning person. If you're going to take on corporate personhood, it might help if you not refer to them as 'they', 'them', 'you', or other words which confer personhood. The word you are looking for is 'it'.
Verizon isn't for or against free speech. It is, however, sitting on an antiquidated nationwide infrastructure of oversubscribed, overutilized, and underdeveloped cell phone towers and backhauls that it has steadfastly refused to upgrade because it would impact quarterly profits. Now that other cell service providers (AT&T, Sprint, etc.) have been upgrading their networks for about two years, Verizon's data service is looking really stale and with new devices continuing to roll off the production line, and nobody with a hot new phone wanting to get exclusive with Verizon, their subscribers are starting to bail as their contracts expire.
So, like all american businesses do, they've decided to try their luck with the legal system, and hopes they'll give them some options to hide the stinking fetid data service behind aggressive QoS control, painfully limiting bandwidth caps, and Terms of Service that are printed in negative point fonts so as to not alert the customer that they're basically signing up for a two year contract with a guaranteed service level of 'zero'.
I wish people would stop thinking service providers give a damn about free speech... it's always been about the benjamins. It's like people who insist RIAA and the MPAA are behind bandwidth caps instead of aging infrastructure and short-term thinking. Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by stupidity.
Any Slashdot readers planning on giving it a shot?
No. They still think they have a chance with Natalie Portman and are spending the holiday building creepy shrines in their basements to unrequited love. I only know this because I've seen numerous trails of stale cheetoes leading away from supermarkets and gas stations in the past few days. There's also been an uptick in empty bottles of hipster drinks and refillable starbucks... but I'm pretty sure that's only because it's really hot outside and they're sweating balls in their trendy skinny jeans and huge horn-rimmed glasses. Cattle mutilations are also up this week... just sayin'.
Slashdot's editors are actually AIs that battle each other deep inside the Gibson. The stories are chosen by the one that survives 17 rounds of gruelling competition. If you listen carefully, you can almost hear the crunch of cheetos and the pounding techno music as hot girls in glowing costumes introduce the contenders. Malda didn't retire, he just returned to userspace.
And what Laws would those be, considering that IBM has already achieved storing 1 bit in just 12 atoms, which would just take 10^-6 cm3 to store a petabyte?
Because you're forgetting the biggest problem with mobile devices: The battery. Without energy, it doesn't matter how much whiz-bang you can do. It's still just a paperweight.
But it won't faze ThePirateBay in the least. Until somebody can come up with a solution to that one, the problem isn't likely to get solved.
Get the founders arrested after passing a new law specifically targeting them. Or extradite them to another country, like the United States, have a show trial, and then disappear them. Not hard to solve one website.
Longer term though, the bandwidth caps are going to do more to curb the problem on the Internet than anything law enforcement could ever do.
No it won't. People use more bandwidth on Netflix than piracy. And bandwidth caps are the result of antiquidated infrastructure, which in turn was caused by government-assisted monopoly and short-term thinking. Caps aren't happening to combat piracy; If that was the thinking, we'd all be on dial-up.
Eventually we will rediscover the bandwidth of sneakernet. Not much to be done about that one. And it gets worse.
Yeah. For one, they'd have to leave mom's basement. Not gonna happen. And as far as 'rediscovering the bandwidth' of sneakernet goes... Most college kids already know this. How do you think they turn in their homework?
Ponder this one 'content industry'... How much storage would it take to store every popular song?
You'll have to define 'popular', for one. For two, you'd have to know how many songs have been written. Ever. For shits and giggles, let's say 1 billion songs, each 6MB in size... *thumbs calculator*... 5.7 petabytes. That's chump-change.
All somebody needs to add is a P2P phone app that works over WiFi to continually sync new songs in as people socialize.
o_O Mobile phones can't generally make adhoc connections. That leaves bluetooth. Which on a good day with fair winds from the west can do a few hundred kilobytes per second. And it'll suck your battery dry in less than the time it takes you to have dinner with your friends.
Somebody really serious about peeing in the industry's corn flake could solve the problems and post 'an app for that.'
We already have that: It's called ignoring them.
We are getting close to carrying around enough storage so that every kid could just expect to have 'everything' ever released on a major label sitting in their mobile device.
My mobile device is close to having petabytes of local storage? Cool! Hangon... I just got a phone call on my new upgraded to petabytes phone. Wait. Two calls. The first one is for you... it's The Laws of Physics, and they are suing you for defamation. The other is AT&T, who's charging me 82 trillion dollars in overage charges.
How much longer until the same thing happens with TV & movies? Forget the cloud and monthly fees or paying by the minute, just have every movie or tv show ever made riding around on every phone.
This may be a stupid question, but isn't there a way to collect massive amounts of CO2 from the atmosphere, compress the carbon into some sort of solid composite, and store it somewhere where it's land-locked (similar to how trees store carbon in wood)?
Yeah. It's called an ocean. But it runs on its own timetable. Geological time, to be exact.
Slashdot Mirror
It takes a large amount of hardware and coordination to do that for even a relatively small bitstream... trying to do it to everybody and everything would require more resources than the human race currently possess.
o_O Already exists in Europe: It's called the Data Retention Directive. This exists now. Today. And it requires very much less than "all the resources of the human race". In fact, it merely requires an extra 1U unit here and there at the border routers for major ISPs, and sometimes an extra fiber link to duplicate traffic.
Second, it *is* possible to use secure protocols that make this technique useless.
The protocols aren't the problem. Latency is the problem; To defeat traffic analysis, you need to continually send the same amount of traffic regardless of how much data you actually need to transmit... and at the same interval. And every participant in the network needs to do the same.
When I say "not even theoretically", I mean unless you actually have monitoring equipment between EVERY computer in the network, and monitor the traffic in realtime.
You seem to have very little grounding in network engineering. You don't have to monitor all the computers. You just have to monitor the border routers. And you don't have to story all the traffic, you just need to store the 40 byte IP headers... and if you bother to write a sniffer that stores and compresses that data intelligently... it'll actually be quite a bit less since most of the data is redundant. You only have to record the content of the packets once; Either at the first hop, or the last. Everything in between you just need the headers... and you can reconstruct the datastream bit by bit, step by step.
You aren't understanding how the Internet works. If you had taps on all nodes at the same time and the data was encrypted end to end, then you would still be able to "see" who sent what when. You are assuming that "the network" is a cloud. It isn't. "cloud" doesn't exist.
Are you retarded? Every router, switch, etc., has port mirroring capability. Most of those pass through telecommunications equipment. That telecommunications equipment has taps built into it. That's what most of the internet is built on. They can tap it. They do tap it. They're building a nationwide infrastructure to capture all the IP header data at each point where it enters a telecommunications network. YES, THEY CAN DO THIS. THEY ALREADY HAVE DONE THIS. THEY DO THIS ALL THE TIME. Am I getting through your neanderthal skullmeats?
It's still just extra obfusciation. You can't hide the fact that data leaves and arrives at certain times, and each node forwards data as it receives it... if you can monitor the traffic, you can derive from that who's talking to who, whether you know what the traffic is or not. And somewhere, either at the source, or the destination, is a decrypted copy. Since the US government already monitors all traffic that occurs domestically, this kind of analysis is already practical and being used right now.
Don't assume that just because you can't do it, nobody can do it. That's arrogant, and it will come back to haunt you.
You're about two years too late. Look up patent 20100003911, "Passive Cooling Systems for Network Cabinet", issued to Panduit corporation. -_-
How? I can't imagine that any of these P2P applications include such functionality.
They don't. This guy might be a programmer, but he's got bricks for brains when it comes to proper terminology.
Try tracking us there.
Encrypt all you want. Traffic analysis still screws you every time. The network tries to keep latencies low, so it forwards whatever it receives onto the next hop as soon as it gets it. If you're monitoring the source and the destination, then when it gets decrypted at the destination, you can correlate that with the traversal time through the 'black box' of Tor, Freenet, or whatever... and viola, you know who sent it, when, and what it was.
This is a known problem. It's discussed at length on EFF's website. If your connections are made in bulk, at regular intervals, instead of interactively, then it's a lot harder to do traffic analysis if all the other nodes exhibit the same behavior. But as long as you're trying to be anonymous by simply using a series of proxies that are set to store-and-forward... you're still screwed.
It's not supposed to be easy. If it were easy, there'd be a healthy criminal underground taking advantage of it. The legal system isn't designed to be easily co-opted; It takes time, showing up in person, and proving your identity... and that's just to get your foot in the door. You look at court orders and lawyers as a problem, but they aren't -- they're the solution.
But go ahead and put your faith in technological solutions that require no human interaction and grant full access to everything you own, love, and are. I'm sure nothing bad will happen.
A barbarian with lots of money is STILL a barbarian.
No, a barbarian with a lot of money is called a CEO.
Encryption is when you want to keep people out. In the scenario you've outlined, you need to let people in, but only certain people. That screams physical security. Your online passwords and all that crap can all be bypassed by a court order, which would be issued to the executor of your estate, authorizing the holder(s) of your assets to grant access to them. You don't need to keep a record of your passwords anywhere... once you're dead, they can just reset them. The rest might have value to you, but it is unlikely to have value to anyone else. Nobody's going to care about your licensed copy of Microsoft Office, or need to decrypt your secret collection of porn, music, and videos.
This is not a technical problem. This is a legal problem. This is the wrong forum to answer those kind of questions. You need to make a list of what assets you want (it's called a will) to pass on, and then simply make sure those assets are accessible. Call the companies up that maintain your online stuff and ask them. You don't have to worry about banks, mortgages, or physical assets: That's the executor of estate's job to sort out. Your Will provides all the legal power necessary.
True, but the longer the timeframe, the more justifiable opportunity to use nuclear weapons. While the proliferation of nuclear weapons has reduced the frequency of major wars, it has also increased the severity of such a war; And if it happens once, that might also be the last war that is ever fought. A quote widely-attributed to Einstein is, "I don't know how world war 3 will be fought, but I know how world war 4 will be: With sticks and stones."
That isn't to say we should dismantle our nuclear stockpile; but we should be aware that as the timeframe increases, the probability of a nuclear weapon being used again approaches 1. That means the probability of two nation states which possess nuclear weapons entering into a nuclear war also approaches 1, though over a longer timeframe than the first case. Sooner or later, nuclear weapons will kill us all. There is peace today -- tomorrow, there might be nothing left to remember that, however.
Because civilian aircraft and many other mission-critical functions depend on selective availability not being enabled, it's highly unlikely they'd use it domestically.
The other argument against SA is that there are severalmethods of interpolating the GPS signals to achieve a lock that don't require decoding anything but the almanac. So mucking up the signal intentionally doesn't have to affect equipment, as long as it is designed to use the more sophisticated methods of acquiring a lock. So if you're a terrorist trying to build a missile that flies by GPS, you're in business, you'll just have to design the circuit board yourself, not use COTS equipment. Because of that, any regular use of SA would eliminate its primary function -- any hostile force would simply adapt their equipment.
GPS jamming on the other hand, there is not much anyone can do about. The signal is actually below the noise floor, and it requires LOS because of the very low signal strength. All GPS satellites also use the same narrow frequency band, so it's trivial to build a jammer that can knock out any signals to the horizon on a modest budget. The many sensor model would be more resiliant to this kind of narrow-band emission, but because the database (by necessity) has to be public, you can tune a jammer to selectively block many frequencies for a modest power level bump. And don't forget that you can still create a high power broad-spectrum emitter using very simple equipment; a tesla coil with an RF component is sufficient to screw with electronics for miles around, even those without a discrete RF component (like cable tv).
Simply put, civilian equipment will be vulnerable to jamming for a long time to come yet; only rapid frequency shift cognitive radio (which is what the military uses) can be said to be jam-resistant. You don't have the budget for that kind of equipment, and even if you did, the FPGAs you would need for the front-end are classified as munitions and cannot be exported, and only the government right now can purchase them, or special licenses available only to companies. But hey, if you have a chip fab plant, and a team of engineers, you might be able to put something together. Maybe.
It would seem that to use this technology, the client would need to have a much larger datastore than with GPS: Whereas only the positions of the GPS satellites need to be known to make a calculation, the dataset here is in the many thousands to millions. In addition to the data required for map storage, it would seem any implimentation of this would require an internet connection to download the data in a geographically-restricted fashion. This opens the door to privacy issues that standalone GPS clients do not have.
How do you plan on addressing the privacy issue with your product?
"But many tenants are here not so much for the cheap rent â" $40 a night â" as for the camaraderie and idea-swapping."
Lots of hackers homes in close proximity? Cue federal wiretaps and police thuggery to attack the terrorists and downloaders in 5...4...3... :(
Ah, the burdens of increasing marketshare: You're now statistically significant enough for the criminal element to take an interest. In every other part of IT, 'ease of use' is almost diametrically opposed to 'secure'. Until recently, mac users refused to believe this piece of wisdom, pointing to the lack of viruses and malware, and (erroneously) concluding that it was because their OS of choice was somehow more resiliant to such attacks.
It will probably take more evidence to convince the hardcore (like their computer suddenly talking in latin and shooting flames at their face), but the average mac user will likely be more sensible. I hope.
Translation: What could possibly go wrong?
So... FOX News was the prototype for this?
"You" is actually a pronoun.
All pronouns are nouns. All nouns are not pronouns. Moving on....
This just in: End to end encryption which does not form trust via a third party (like a certificate authority) still the best way of securing communications. The certificate authority system has been flawed from day one. IPSEC is still the way to go, along with secure DNS, but as you will note... companies and governments have been dragging their feet on it. A good indication that something is secure is that laws are passed against its use.
You're a company. The fact that any constitutional rights apply to you is because of dirty lawmaking. Kindly screw off. I *hope* you can only piss off the people so much before they realize "Hey, that's pretty dumb."
You. Noun. Meaning person. If you're going to take on corporate personhood, it might help if you not refer to them as 'they', 'them', 'you', or other words which confer personhood. The word you are looking for is 'it'.
Verizon isn't for or against free speech. It is, however, sitting on an antiquidated nationwide infrastructure of oversubscribed, overutilized, and underdeveloped cell phone towers and backhauls that it has steadfastly refused to upgrade because it would impact quarterly profits. Now that other cell service providers (AT&T, Sprint, etc.) have been upgrading their networks for about two years, Verizon's data service is looking really stale and with new devices continuing to roll off the production line, and nobody with a hot new phone wanting to get exclusive with Verizon, their subscribers are starting to bail as their contracts expire.
So, like all american businesses do, they've decided to try their luck with the legal system, and hopes they'll give them some options to hide the stinking fetid data service behind aggressive QoS control, painfully limiting bandwidth caps, and Terms of Service that are printed in negative point fonts so as to not alert the customer that they're basically signing up for a two year contract with a guaranteed service level of 'zero'.
I wish people would stop thinking service providers give a damn about free speech... it's always been about the benjamins. It's like people who insist RIAA and the MPAA are behind bandwidth caps instead of aging infrastructure and short-term thinking. Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by stupidity.
Any Slashdot readers planning on giving it a shot?
No. They still think they have a chance with Natalie Portman and are spending the holiday building creepy shrines in their basements to unrequited love. I only know this because I've seen numerous trails of stale cheetoes leading away from supermarkets and gas stations in the past few days. There's also been an uptick in empty bottles of hipster drinks and refillable starbucks... but I'm pretty sure that's only because it's really hot outside and they're sweating balls in their trendy skinny jeans and huge horn-rimmed glasses. Cattle mutilations are also up this week... just sayin'.
No, it's a sign that /. needs editors.
Slashdot's editors are actually AIs that battle each other deep inside the Gibson. The stories are chosen by the one that survives 17 rounds of gruelling competition. If you listen carefully, you can almost hear the crunch of cheetos and the pounding techno music as hot girls in glowing costumes introduce the contenders. Malda didn't retire, he just returned to userspace.
Mobile computing is the future -- just ignore the battery life.
And what Laws would those be, considering that IBM has already achieved storing 1 bit in just 12 atoms, which would just take 10^-6 cm3 to store a petabyte?
Because you're forgetting the biggest problem with mobile devices: The battery. Without energy, it doesn't matter how much whiz-bang you can do. It's still just a paperweight.
But it won't faze ThePirateBay in the least. Until somebody can come up with a solution to that one, the problem isn't likely to get solved.
Get the founders arrested after passing a new law specifically targeting them. Or extradite them to another country, like the United States, have a show trial, and then disappear them. Not hard to solve one website.
Longer term though, the bandwidth caps are going to do more to curb the problem on the Internet than anything law enforcement could ever do.
No it won't. People use more bandwidth on Netflix than piracy. And bandwidth caps are the result of antiquidated infrastructure, which in turn was caused by government-assisted monopoly and short-term thinking. Caps aren't happening to combat piracy; If that was the thinking, we'd all be on dial-up.
Eventually we will rediscover the bandwidth of sneakernet. Not much to be done about that one. And it gets worse.
Yeah. For one, they'd have to leave mom's basement. Not gonna happen. And as far as 'rediscovering the bandwidth' of sneakernet goes... Most college kids already know this. How do you think they turn in their homework?
Ponder this one 'content industry'... How much storage would it take to store every popular song?
You'll have to define 'popular', for one. For two, you'd have to know how many songs have been written. Ever. For shits and giggles, let's say 1 billion songs, each 6MB in size... *thumbs calculator*... 5.7 petabytes. That's chump-change.
All somebody needs to add is a P2P phone app that works over WiFi to continually sync new songs in as people socialize.
o_O Mobile phones can't generally make adhoc connections. That leaves bluetooth. Which on a good day with fair winds from the west can do a few hundred kilobytes per second. And it'll suck your battery dry in less than the time it takes you to have dinner with your friends.
Somebody really serious about peeing in the industry's corn flake could solve the problems and post 'an app for that.'
We already have that: It's called ignoring them.
We are getting close to carrying around enough storage so that every kid could just expect to have 'everything' ever released on a major label sitting in their mobile device.
My mobile device is close to having petabytes of local storage? Cool! Hangon... I just got a phone call on my new upgraded to petabytes phone. Wait. Two calls. The first one is for you... it's The Laws of Physics, and they are suing you for defamation. The other is AT&T, who's charging me 82 trillion dollars in overage charges.
How much longer until the same thing happens with TV & movies? Forget the cloud and monthly fees or paying by the minute, just have every movie or tv show ever made riding around on every phone.
While we're at it, can I get my flying car?
This may be a stupid question, but isn't there a way to collect massive amounts of CO2 from the atmosphere, compress the carbon into some sort of solid composite, and store it somewhere where it's land-locked (similar to how trees store carbon in wood)?
Yeah. It's called an ocean. But it runs on its own timetable. Geological time, to be exact.