That's seems like a little oversight on somebodies part. They have Akamai do a great job of providing a distributed cache of the files. Then, put the mirrors.xml file on a local server that goes down when the load gets too high. Argh. What's the point of mirrors if I can't find out where they are?
No, really, you should run to the library and look up LBJ on a list of presidents. Next, get a calculator and subtract 60 from 2001. Then come back and report what you find...
Personally, I don't mind a bit if the broadcast TV model goes belly-up. Quite frankly, I think it provides very little that's positive to society. Television is basically a narcotic, and I don't see any reason why it should be subsidized with free radio spectrum. I don't think it should be illegal, but let it pay it's own way via cable and DSS subscription fees. None of the networks are even close to holding up their end of the "public service" agreement with society. Even with their huge public subsidy in the form of free spectrum, their business model is going to collapse. Bunch of losers, let the market eat them.
I'm wondering if Intel's dogged pursuit of MHz above all else isn't going to come back and bite them. Eventually, they might actually try to start shipping Itanium systems to the general public. Right now, Intel's FAQ on the Itanium state that it will start shipping at 733MHz and 800MHz. On one hand, their marketing department is saying that you need to pay big bucks for a P4, and look how fast it is! 1.6GHz! Then marketing has to turn around and tell another group of people that they should pay even more money for an Itanium running at half the clock speed! Maybe they just figure that the unwashed consumer masses will buy the "more MHz is better" line, and the people who will buy Itanium's are smart enough to realize that Intel marketing is full of it when they sell to the masses.
A firewall won't hack it. It is trivial for an application to find a way to connect out thru your firewall. Or do you not allow outbound DNS and HTTP? That's what I thought.
When my web browser connect to port 80 somewhere, I don't really care. When my new email program or game tries to connect to some third world server with no DNS info, I care. The only place that you have any hope of controlling this is in the kernel.
I would love to have this kind of flexibility. Netscape: port 80 only. Mail: 25 and 110. New binary-only game I'm trying out: nothing
Is this guy for real, or is this just an amazingly skilled troll? Any how does he find time to post this stuff? Shouldn't he be in the kitchen beating his barefoot and pregnant wife?
Where should I start with this? Poor spelling invalidates any claim to being human? OK, whatever. Does that mean we can round up and slaughter all the poor spellers?
The "liberals" are responsible for Ruby Ridge? The shooting occured on August 22nd, 1992. Pray tell, who was president then? That would be George Bush, wouldn't it?
Women have "nothing to offer an employer"? That's because they should be at home it the kitchen, barefoot and pregnant, right? I hope you didn't vote for Bush Jr. You must be sorely disappointed at all of the "unproductive dead weight" he has working for him at the White House. Judging by your rant, I'm guessing that you voted for Buchannan.
Anyway, if any moderaters see my post, please mark it -1 offtopic, along with the sexist white supremacist post I'm replying to.
I found some references. It is not possible to set arbitrary sequences. According to Breezecom (cached version here):
---quote---
For FHSS systems IEEE 802.11 defines 79 different hops for the carrier frequency. Using these 79 frequencies, IEEE 802.11 defines 78 hopping sequences (each with 79 hops) grouped in three sets of 26 sequences each. Sequences from same set encounter minimum collisions and they may be allocated to collocated systems. Theoretically, 26 FHSS systems may be collocated. However, as synchronization among independent systems is forbidden (synchronization would eliminate collisions), the actual number of systems that can be collocated is around 15.
---end quote---
I assume the three sequences are the ones I originally listed. If I'm not mistaken, it's considered a different "sequence" if you start in a different place. So:
1-5-9 is different from 5-9-1 and 1-5-9. So, an evesdropper would not be trying to guess a random sequence, he would just camp on one frequency, listen, and if a signal showed up he would start hopping. In other words, the 26 seqences vary only in time, so an eavesdropper only has to listen for a few seconds on one frequency to "check" all 26 sequences based on that set. Is that a fair assumption?
I also found a reference to an algorithm for determining which country you are in by checking which frequencies the AP broadcasts beacons on. In order for this to work, it requires the hop sequences to be well known for a given country. It's here
So, given this little bit of research, I still believe the claim that FHSS 802.11 is somehow more secure than DSSS 802.11 is basically crap. I would love to be proven otherwise.
But can you do that for 802.11 gear? How am I supposed to connect to the WLAN if I don't know the hopping sequence? The book I referenced also specifically says that the sequences were carefully chosen, and makes no mention of user-generated sequences. I have also never seen any reference to an actual configuration parameter for an 802.11 client to specify the hop sequence.
I have no doubt that with some other gear you can change it to whatever you want. But, I have never seen anybody produce a reference to an 802.11 parameter to change the hop sequence. If you can produce a link, I would love to see it.
I don't know where you make this stuff up from. There are exactly three hop sequences defined for use in North America and most of Europe.
From "The IEEE 802.11 Handbook: A designers Companion":
Set 1:(0,3,6,9,12...75)
Set 2:(1,4,7,10,13...76)
Set 3:(2,5,8,11,14...77)
Unless I am misreading something, there are only three sets of hopping numbers. Not exactly a difficult thing to guess if you need to.
Your insistance that DSSS is somehow easier to eavsdrop on FHSS is just a bunch of crap. Neither technology was designed with any resistance to eavesdropping in mind at all. You can't specify your own hopping sequence for FHSS, and you can't specify your own Barker sequence for spreading DSSS. Had the 802.11 folks cared at all about making eavsdropping hard, they would have let you do these. Of course, they probably wouldn't have gotten FCC approval, but what the hell.
So, just drop it. What little security you have is based entirely on the WEP, and not at all on your choice of slow FHSS vs fast DSSS.
I would claim that you sir, have "no fucking clue" when it comes to 802.11b. Let's look at your claims: DSSS has a maximum theoretical thruput of 4-5Mbps? I don't think so. I have personally run performance tests of Aironet and Lucent 802.11b cards, and have acheived thruput of 7.6Mbps. 50% higher than your "maximum". Results are right here.
You also claim that WEP adds zero overhead becuase it is a "hash" done in hardware. WEP is not a hash. It is RC5 encryption, a stream cipher not a hash. Moreover, many products do not implement the cipher in hardware. Specifically, Lucent uses software and takes a 20% performance hit when WEP is enabled. The Aironet cards use hardwar and take no performance hit. See the above URL for details.
The reason DSSS is marketed above FHSS is because it is faster. The fastest FHSS 802.11 hardware runs at 2Mbps, and is in fact cheaper than DSSS hardware. 802.11b is winning because it is flat out the fastest afordable wireless ethernet technology on the market.
So, I ask, if we are "fucking stupid idiots" for buying 802.11b, what would you recommed? 2Mbps FHSS gear? Non-existant HomeRF that even Intel abandoning? Please, o wise one, enlighten us "fucking stupid idiots"
Microsoft is very dependant on steadily growing profits. That's what keeps Wall Street happy, and is necessary for their stock prices to go up (although clearly not sufficient as recent prices prove.) Since they have largely saturated their primary market, they have two options. One is to expand into new markets (ala X-Box) to increase profits. The other is to extract ever-increasing amounts of money from current customers. That's why the screws are being tightened now. In the past, the OS market was growing fast enough that they could let quite a bit of stuff slip and keep the train rolling. Now, they are losing steam profit-wise, and need generate more pressure. This also explains why they want to move to a subscription-based model. Guaranteed revenue. No more of these slackers (like me) running Win98 and Office97, denying M$ it's "rightful" profit from Win2K and Office2K. When they need more money, they will just up the monthly fee, and instant cash. Any suckers still trapped in their clutches is going to really start feeling the pain then.
If you want to support GMO's, thats great. But don't use this lame excuse to try to justify it. Genetic engineering allows you to create organisms which you would never ever be able to produce via selective breeding.
The clearest example of this is a new type of tomato which has genes from a certain fish in it. The result is a tomato which keeps longer and is resistant to freezing. Now, pray tell, how long would it take you to use "selective breeding" between a tomato and a fish? The fact is you will never get it to work.
I've even heard propronents of GMO's both admit and deny that genetic engineering is just like selective breeding in the same interview. First they say, "of course it's safe. It's the same thing people have been doing for thousands of years: selective and cross breeding." Then later, "Genetic engineering is important because it lets us create things that would be impossible to make via any other method". Well, which one is it? A powerful new tool which makes the impossible possible? Or just a sped up verion of a old tool? It can't be both. The two options are mutually exclusive.
Personally, I think genetic engineering is a great new tool. But, I also think that we barely know how to use it. The current situation is that we are honing are skills using our food supply as a guinea pig and releasing the newly made creatures into the wild were they will propogate on their own. All of this with basically no regulation or testing. Stupid and foolhardy both.
Actually, Samba does an excellent job of making ext2 partitions available to Windows. In fact, that is it's primary purpose. I myself became quite familiar with it when one of our uses ran the Plan Columbia VB worm on their Win98 desktop and promptly nuked every JPEG file on our Solaris web server.
True, only a moron would let Samba users mount/bin or something equally sensitive. But, don't pretend that Windows machines having access to file on a Linux system is anything but a common occurance. It would be quite easy to, for example, infect any files in your ~/bin/ directory via a Samba mount.
They aren't monitoring your traffic, that would probably be illegal without a court order, and would require a hugh amount of cooperation from ISPs. All they are doing is watching which songs people make available. By seeing new songs appear in your shared directory, they can guess that you just downloaded that song. I can't really see any legitimate complaints about them monitoring in this way. After all, you are making the songs available to anybody who asks, with no authentication or authorization at all. Can you really complain if the copyright holders stop by to see what you are sharing? It's like claiming that you can setup a sidewalk stand giving pirated cassettes away to the public, but RIAA employees should avert their eyes as they pass.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not a fan of the RIAA. But all they are doing is looking for people who are illegally making copyrighted works available to the public. If you want to create "junk" info for them, you could share a whole bunch of files with junk contents and suggestive names. But, if you do this, it not only confuses their software but other Napster users, which is a bit like burning the villiage in order to save it. In fact, I'm suprised that the RIAA hasn't hired consultants to start polluting the Napster and Gnutella services with junk files, broken links, and anything else they can think of to make the systems unreliable and hard to use. Anyway, my point is it's foolish to expect that you can offer an illegal service (not Napster in general, but the specific act of distributing copyrighted works without authorization) to an anonymous public and not have the "authorities" check up on you.
How do things like this even get posted? It's crazy to think that open-minded people like myself would intentionally limit the ideas we are exposed to just because we don't like them. Thank god Slashdot lets me choose which stories make it to my personalized front page. I think it's about time I stopped letting Katz on my Slashdot page so I don't have to see his lame theories and rants anymore.
Just a note, the review never calls the GBA flimsy. It calls the unit light, thin, and comfortable. But not flimsy. I think you misread "It too is tiny, and light, and thin" as "It is too tiny, light, and thin." Big difference.
What are you smoking? Do you really think there is some federal regulation which requires Georgia Tech to give a LAN connection to anybody who happens to be walking down the street? Because that is exactly what you are doing if you don't implement some sort of security on your 802.11 LAN. This stuff can go up to 25 miles with the right antennas. If you really think that this is the case, well that's well and good. But I would be very suprised if you could find any documentation for this claim that libraries are required to provide free ISP access to anybody in the general geographic area.
The government is not the one leading the charge on this sort of thing. It's those of us in the trenches trying to run the network that are trying to figure out how to deal with the problem. It's not the big hits against Yahoo which drive this sort of thing. It's the almost daily low-level DoS attacks which are the problem. Speaking as somebody who helps engineer and run a multi-OC3 gigapop for several universities, I can tell you that this sort of thing is a real pain.
A week doesn't go by that some well connected 3l33t 5h1th3ad doesn't decide to send 100Mbps of crap at some residence hall computer and soak up all of our bandwidth. Why? Who knows. Maybe they're trying to take over some lame IRC channel. Maybe they are tired of getting fragged in Q3. I don't know, and I don't care. The reality is that we have to deal with the problem. When it happens, in some cases for us it takes literally 10's of thousands of students off of the network.
As much as I think the Internet should be open to all, without strict filters checking every packet you source, that reality is going to quickly go away because of this type of behavior. Real crackers and criminals have little to no impact on the operation of the network. However, the DoS kiddies do have a real impact on our ability to keep the network running smoothly and reliably. The problem has to be dealt with, and the solutions are not pretty. Imagine strict filters which control how much traffic you can send and how many outbound connections you can initiate. Imagine those filters applied to every dorm connection, @home connection, and DSL connection. Imagine having to pay big bucks if you want a "server" class connection. These restrictions and more are coming to a broadband connection near you unless the 'l33t shitheads get the message and start behaving like adults. It won't take a law to make it happen. The network engineers aren't going to have any choice if the problem keeps growing.
It's possible for the developer of a free client to get a license to use the commercial server. You just have to agree to this itty bitty license. All 14 paragraphs and four schedules of it. If anybody can figure out how to write a Linux client that adheres to this monster of a license is truely a master of both code and law.
You need to write to your congresscritter and let them know that UCITA is actually hostile to the interests of business. Or rather, it would benefit the minority of businesses (the ones who license software) at the expense of all other businesses (the licenscees of the aforementioned software). According to the article, Phillips Petroleum is one of the companies lobbying against the passage of UCITA. Does Texas have any large software firms that will benefit greatly from UCITA? Does Texas have any large petroleum companies which stand to get screwed if UCITA passes? Make sure your congressman knows who butter's his bread.
The issue of rentals, however, is a thorny one. The existance of a rental market implies that there is some impediment to you making a copy of the thing you rented. If it is trivial to make the copy, then the rental market is likely to destroy the purchase market. Imagine for a moment that Blockbuster rented audio CD's for $1.00 a day or something. What do you think it would do to the market for CD's? It would probably completely destroy it. Some people would still buy the CD for the printed materials. But, a lot of folks would rent the CD and rip it to MP3 for a buck instead.
So what is the tradeoff that needs to be made here? One answer is that manufacturers should be allowed to employ copy protection in their products ala Macrovision. This would probably lead to most media products having some form of copy protection. This road seems to be where we are headed at the moment. Unfortunately, this path seems to result in a loss of fair use rights on the part of the consumer.
Another possibility is to only allow copy protection on products which are produced for rental purposes. So, the tape you rent from the video store has macrovision, but if you buy it from a retail outlet you get an unprotected version. This seems like it could be an OK balance. Unfortunately, it could lead to products which are not available or are prohibitivly expensive in their non-rental form. I can see the media giants moving all of their inventory into some sort of "rental" scheme and dropping the non-copy protected purchase version entirely. I'm not sure I like that possibility.
The third possibility is to ban copy protection which in any way infriges on fair-use rights. Works which are released in a form which denies fair-use rights have, IMNHSO, no right to any protection under copyright law. This would probably have the effect of prohibiting all copy protection because, as others have mentioned, it is possibly (probably?) impossible to mechanically determine if a copy is a fair use copy.
Of these three, I myself prefer the third. But that's because I'm largly a consumer of IP, not a producer or distributer. The reality is that option 3 is not going to come to pass unless something is done to reassure the media giants that they are getting something out of it. The question is, what could they be offered? We have to realize that the best we can hope for is that our Congress-critters will listen to both sides in the debate. One possibility would be to allow and encourage the watermarking of media files with serial numbers. The watermarks couldn't be used to prevent copying. But, if a song was being distributed illegally the watermark could be used to try and track down the original purchaser. Another idea would be to make it easier to track down and prosecute anyone who was making copyrighted material available illegally. Perhaps a light but significant fine could be levied against people who put Metallica songs up on Napster. Sort of like photo-radar driving tickets. Pay your $50 or whatever if you get caught leaving your Dr. Dre songs on your anonymous FTP server.
So, I ask everyone, what is the tradeoff that we are willing to make? We can't really expect the media giants to give up anything if we aren't willing to give up something also.
If you haven't checked it out, www.opensecrets.org is a great reference for these things. For the 1999-2000 election cycle, RIAA contributed $46,888 to the Republicrats. The breakdown is 51% to the Republican half, and 49% to the Democratic half.
OpenSecrets groups 24 entertainment PACs under the heading TV/Movies/Music. I don't know that all of these companies / PAC's are DMCA fans, but some of them certainly are (MPAA, ASCAP, Sony, Disney, MGM, and Time Warner for sure are fans.) The group as a whole gave $3,288,367 to the Republicrats (split D's 43% R's 57%).
If you ever had any doubts that most political contributions are for the exclusive purpose of buying influence with both parties (AKA bribery) as opposed to offering support to the one party that they actually want to win, here is proof. Some of the companies actually give money to only one party. This accounts for a whopping $55,000 out of the $3 million given. The rest of the money was contributed by companies and PAC's who are giving significant sums to both parties. The most even split in the Movie/TV/Music category is Disney. R's:$141,071 D's:$140,500. Disgusting.
Apple part number T2587LL/A Harmon Kardon SoundSticks. These are USB speakers. Which, as if to prove my point, have the caveat Older G3's with hardware-based DVDs running DVD 1.3 software will not work with Soundsticks. They require newer, software-based DVD's running DVD 2.x
That's the obvious tact. A more costly tactic is to purchase a Safeaudio CD, take it home, and when you find out it won't play return it for an exchange. They'll give you another one which also won't work. Pretty soon, all of the stores inventory will have been opened and can no longer be sold as "new". Almost certainly, all of the opened CD's will get shipped back to the RIAA member who published all the defective CD's in the first place.
While some CD players will play the "Safeaudio" CD's, I can almost guarantee that some of them won't. New Mac's for example have digital USB speakers. There is no way for new Mac's to play CD's except by ripping the audio off of them. It is perfectly legitimate for the people who own these systems to buy the "protected" CD's and return them as defective.
I'm sure some troll is going to respond saying how immoral it is to intentionally buy CD's you know you are going to return. To that I respond, is it moral to knowingly sell defective products to your customers? Because that's what these CD's are. Plain and simple. They are defective products which do not meet the Redbook CD audio standards. I wonder if they will even be allowed to use the "CD" logo on them?
Now, we just need to find out where they are going to release these CD's first. If their initial public tests results in significant losses due to returns, that will get the program scrapped early.
Ahhh, the old troll about evil Intel coaxing Be into dropping PPC support. Be still supports the older PowerMacs which they have the hardware specs to. They don't support any newer Mac's because Apple won't release the specs.
Yes, I am quite aware that the LinuxPPC folks have maintained decent compatability. But, Linux has (unfortunately) always had to deal with hardware whose vendors are either neutral or hostile towards providing Linux developers with the needed information. That's fine. Linux users understand that that is part of the bargain if you want to run it. WinModems, decent 3D accelleration, decent sound support. The list of x86 hardware with poor support is significant.
Be, however, is shipping a commercial product for which they offer support. They had to make a business decision about whether or not it was worth their while to support hardware for which they did not have access to the specs. Had they chosen to support it, they would want to be able to know that they could support this years G4's. Something which LinuxPPC doesn't know yet. Hardware wise: "Any models with and ATI RADEON... are currently incompatabile with Linux", "The dual processor model are currently somewhat unstable", "We are still waiting for information about the 2001 G4 models", "current kernels don't handle more memory than 660MB", 2000 PowerBook has no sound support.
So you can troll away with your lie that "the LinuxPPC guys have had NO problem keeping up", but the simple fact is that they have had problems. Be made the choice to avoid the support headaches that go along with trying to support undocumented hardware. Maybe the Intel investment did play a part in their decision, but the fact is that Apple made it clear to Be that they were not wanted and had Be stayed on the PPC they would almost certainly be facing the same hardware problems that the LinuxPPC folks are facing.
Slashdot Mirror
That's seems like a little oversight on somebodies part. They have Akamai do a great job of providing a distributed cache of the files. Then, put the mirrors.xml file on a local server that goes down when the load gets too high. Argh. What's the point of mirrors if I can't find out where they are?
No, really, you should run to the library and look up LBJ on a list of presidents. Next, get a calculator and subtract 60 from 2001. Then come back and report what you find...
Personally, I don't mind a bit if the broadcast TV model goes belly-up. Quite frankly, I think it provides very little that's positive to society. Television is basically a narcotic, and I don't see any reason why it should be subsidized with free radio spectrum. I don't think it should be illegal, but let it pay it's own way via cable and DSS subscription fees. None of the networks are even close to holding up their end of the "public service" agreement with society. Even with their huge public subsidy in the form of free spectrum, their business model is going to collapse. Bunch of losers, let the market eat them.
I'm wondering if Intel's dogged pursuit of MHz above all else isn't going to come back and bite them. Eventually, they might actually try to start shipping Itanium systems to the general public. Right now, Intel's FAQ on the Itanium state that it will start shipping at 733MHz and 800MHz. On one hand, their marketing department is saying that you need to pay big bucks for a P4, and look how fast it is! 1.6GHz! Then marketing has to turn around and tell another group of people that they should pay even more money for an Itanium running at half the clock speed! Maybe they just figure that the unwashed consumer masses will buy the "more MHz is better" line, and the people who will buy Itanium's are smart enough to realize that Intel marketing is full of it when they sell to the masses.
A firewall won't hack it. It is trivial for an application to find a way to connect out thru your firewall. Or do you not allow outbound DNS and HTTP? That's what I thought.
When my web browser connect to port 80 somewhere, I don't really care. When my new email program or game tries to connect to some third world server with no DNS info, I care. The only place that you have any hope of controlling this is in the kernel.
I would love to have this kind of flexibility. Netscape: port 80 only. Mail: 25 and 110. New binary-only game I'm trying out: nothing
Is this guy for real, or is this just an amazingly skilled troll? Any how does he find time to post this stuff? Shouldn't he be in the kitchen beating his barefoot and pregnant wife?
Where should I start with this? Poor spelling invalidates any claim to being human? OK, whatever. Does that mean we can round up and slaughter all the poor spellers?
The "liberals" are responsible for Ruby Ridge? The shooting occured on August 22nd, 1992. Pray tell, who was president then? That would be George Bush, wouldn't it?
Women have "nothing to offer an employer"? That's because they should be at home it the kitchen, barefoot and pregnant, right? I hope you didn't vote for Bush Jr. You must be sorely disappointed at all of the "unproductive dead weight" he has working for him at the White House. Judging by your rant, I'm guessing that you voted for Buchannan.
Anyway, if any moderaters see my post, please mark it -1 offtopic, along with the sexist white supremacist post I'm replying to.
I found some references. It is not possible to set arbitrary sequences. According to Breezecom (cached version here):
---quote---
For FHSS systems IEEE 802.11 defines 79 different hops for the carrier frequency. Using these 79 frequencies, IEEE 802.11 defines 78 hopping sequences (each with 79 hops) grouped in three sets of 26 sequences each. Sequences from same set encounter minimum collisions and they may be allocated to collocated systems. Theoretically, 26 FHSS systems may be collocated. However, as synchronization among independent systems is forbidden (synchronization would eliminate collisions), the actual number of systems that can be collocated is around 15.
---end quote---
I assume the three sequences are the ones I originally listed. If I'm not mistaken, it's considered a different "sequence" if you start in a different place. So:
1-5-9 is different from 5-9-1 and 1-5-9. So, an evesdropper would not be trying to guess a random sequence, he would just camp on one frequency, listen, and if a signal showed up he would start hopping. In other words, the 26 seqences vary only in time, so an eavesdropper only has to listen for a few seconds on one frequency to "check" all 26 sequences based on that set. Is that a fair assumption?
I also found a reference to an algorithm for determining which country you are in by checking which frequencies the AP broadcasts beacons on. In order for this to work, it requires the hop sequences to be well known for a given country. It's here
So, given this little bit of research, I still believe the claim that FHSS 802.11 is somehow more secure than DSSS 802.11 is basically crap. I would love to be proven otherwise.
But can you do that for 802.11 gear? How am I supposed to connect to the WLAN if I don't know the hopping sequence? The book I referenced also specifically says that the sequences were carefully chosen, and makes no mention of user-generated sequences. I have also never seen any reference to an actual configuration parameter for an 802.11 client to specify the hop sequence.
I have no doubt that with some other gear you can change it to whatever you want. But, I have never seen anybody produce a reference to an 802.11 parameter to change the hop sequence. If you can produce a link, I would love to see it.
I don't know where you make this stuff up from. There are exactly three hop sequences defined for use in North America and most of Europe.
From "The IEEE 802.11 Handbook: A designers Companion":
Set 1:(0,3,6,9,12...75)
Set 2:(1,4,7,10,13...76)
Set 3:(2,5,8,11,14...77)
Unless I am misreading something, there are only three sets of hopping numbers. Not exactly a difficult thing to guess if you need to.
Your insistance that DSSS is somehow easier to eavsdrop on FHSS is just a bunch of crap. Neither technology was designed with any resistance to eavesdropping in mind at all. You can't specify your own hopping sequence for FHSS, and you can't specify your own Barker sequence for spreading DSSS. Had the 802.11 folks cared at all about making eavsdropping hard, they would have let you do these. Of course, they probably wouldn't have gotten FCC approval, but what the hell.
So, just drop it. What little security you have is based entirely on the WEP, and not at all on your choice of slow FHSS vs fast DSSS.
I would claim that you sir, have "no fucking clue" when it comes to 802.11b. Let's look at your claims: DSSS has a maximum theoretical thruput of 4-5Mbps? I don't think so. I have personally run performance tests of Aironet and Lucent 802.11b cards, and have acheived thruput of 7.6Mbps. 50% higher than your "maximum". Results are right here.
You also claim that WEP adds zero overhead becuase it is a "hash" done in hardware. WEP is not a hash. It is RC5 encryption, a stream cipher not a hash. Moreover, many products do not implement the cipher in hardware. Specifically, Lucent uses software and takes a 20% performance hit when WEP is enabled. The Aironet cards use hardwar and take no performance hit. See the above URL for details.
The reason DSSS is marketed above FHSS is because it is faster. The fastest FHSS 802.11 hardware runs at 2Mbps, and is in fact cheaper than DSSS hardware. 802.11b is winning because it is flat out the fastest afordable wireless ethernet technology on the market.
So, I ask, if we are "fucking stupid idiots" for buying 802.11b, what would you recommed? 2Mbps FHSS gear? Non-existant HomeRF that even Intel abandoning? Please, o wise one, enlighten us "fucking stupid idiots"
Microsoft is very dependant on steadily growing profits. That's what keeps Wall Street happy, and is necessary for their stock prices to go up (although clearly not sufficient as recent prices prove.) Since they have largely saturated their primary market, they have two options. One is to expand into new markets (ala X-Box) to increase profits. The other is to extract ever-increasing amounts of money from current customers. That's why the screws are being tightened now. In the past, the OS market was growing fast enough that they could let quite a bit of stuff slip and keep the train rolling. Now, they are losing steam profit-wise, and need generate more pressure. This also explains why they want to move to a subscription-based model. Guaranteed revenue. No more of these slackers (like me) running Win98 and Office97, denying M$ it's "rightful" profit from Win2K and Office2K. When they need more money, they will just up the monthly fee, and instant cash. Any suckers still trapped in their clutches is going to really start feeling the pain then.
If you want to support GMO's, thats great. But don't use this lame excuse to try to justify it. Genetic engineering allows you to create organisms which you would never ever be able to produce via selective breeding.
The clearest example of this is a new type of tomato which has genes from a certain fish in it. The result is a tomato which keeps longer and is resistant to freezing. Now, pray tell, how long would it take you to use "selective breeding" between a tomato and a fish? The fact is you will never get it to work.
I've even heard propronents of GMO's both admit and deny that genetic engineering is just like selective breeding in the same interview. First they say, "of course it's safe. It's the same thing people have been doing for thousands of years: selective and cross breeding." Then later, "Genetic engineering is important because it lets us create things that would be impossible to make via any other method". Well, which one is it? A powerful new tool which makes the impossible possible? Or just a sped up verion of a old tool? It can't be both. The two options are mutually exclusive.
Personally, I think genetic engineering is a great new tool. But, I also think that we barely know how to use it. The current situation is that we are honing are skills using our food supply as a guinea pig and releasing the newly made creatures into the wild were they will propogate on their own. All of this with basically no regulation or testing. Stupid and foolhardy both.
Actually, Samba does an excellent job of making ext2 partitions available to Windows. In fact, that is it's primary purpose. I myself became quite familiar with it when one of our uses ran the Plan Columbia VB worm on their Win98 desktop and promptly nuked every JPEG file on our Solaris web server.
/bin or something equally sensitive. But, don't pretend that Windows machines having access to file on a Linux system is anything but a common occurance. It would be quite easy to, for example, infect any files in your ~/bin/ directory via a Samba mount.
True, only a moron would let Samba users mount
They aren't monitoring your traffic, that would probably be illegal without a court order, and would require a hugh amount of cooperation from ISPs. All they are doing is watching which songs people make available. By seeing new songs appear in your shared directory, they can guess that you just downloaded that song. I can't really see any legitimate complaints about them monitoring in this way. After all, you are making the songs available to anybody who asks, with no authentication or authorization at all. Can you really complain if the copyright holders stop by to see what you are sharing? It's like claiming that you can setup a sidewalk stand giving pirated cassettes away to the public, but RIAA employees should avert their eyes as they pass.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not a fan of the RIAA. But all they are doing is looking for people who are illegally making copyrighted works available to the public. If you want to create "junk" info for them, you could share a whole bunch of files with junk contents and suggestive names. But, if you do this, it not only confuses their software but other Napster users, which is a bit like burning the villiage in order to save it. In fact, I'm suprised that the RIAA hasn't hired consultants to start polluting the Napster and Gnutella services with junk files, broken links, and anything else they can think of to make the systems unreliable and hard to use. Anyway, my point is it's foolish to expect that you can offer an illegal service (not Napster in general, but the specific act of distributing copyrighted works without authorization) to an anonymous public and not have the "authorities" check up on you.
How do things like this even get posted? It's crazy to think that open-minded people like myself would intentionally limit the ideas we are exposed to just because we don't like them. Thank god Slashdot lets me choose which stories make it to my personalized front page. I think it's about time I stopped letting Katz on my Slashdot page so I don't have to see his lame theories and rants anymore.
Just a note, the review never calls the GBA flimsy. It calls the unit light, thin, and comfortable. But not flimsy. I think you misread "It too is tiny, and light, and thin" as "It is too tiny, light, and thin." Big difference.
What are you smoking? Do you really think there is some federal regulation which requires Georgia Tech to give a LAN connection to anybody who happens to be walking down the street? Because that is exactly what you are doing if you don't implement some sort of security on your 802.11 LAN. This stuff can go up to 25 miles with the right antennas. If you really think that this is the case, well that's well and good. But I would be very suprised if you could find any documentation for this claim that libraries are required to provide free ISP access to anybody in the general geographic area.
The government is not the one leading the charge on this sort of thing. It's those of us in the trenches trying to run the network that are trying to figure out how to deal with the problem. It's not the big hits against Yahoo which drive this sort of thing. It's the almost daily low-level DoS attacks which are the problem. Speaking as somebody who helps engineer and run a multi-OC3 gigapop for several universities, I can tell you that this sort of thing is a real pain.
A week doesn't go by that some well connected 3l33t 5h1th3ad doesn't decide to send 100Mbps of crap at some residence hall computer and soak up all of our bandwidth. Why? Who knows. Maybe they're trying to take over some lame IRC channel. Maybe they are tired of getting fragged in Q3. I don't know, and I don't care. The reality is that we have to deal with the problem. When it happens, in some cases for us it takes literally 10's of thousands of students off of the network.
As much as I think the Internet should be open to all, without strict filters checking every packet you source, that reality is going to quickly go away because of this type of behavior. Real crackers and criminals have little to no impact on the operation of the network. However, the DoS kiddies do have a real impact on our ability to keep the network running smoothly and reliably. The problem has to be dealt with, and the solutions are not pretty. Imagine strict filters which control how much traffic you can send and how many outbound connections you can initiate. Imagine those filters applied to every dorm connection, @home connection, and DSL connection. Imagine having to pay big bucks if you want a "server" class connection. These restrictions and more are coming to a broadband connection near you unless the 'l33t shitheads get the message and start behaving like adults. It won't take a law to make it happen. The network engineers aren't going to have any choice if the problem keeps growing.
It's possible for the developer of a free client to get a license to use the commercial server. You just have to agree to this itty bitty license. All 14 paragraphs and four schedules of it. If anybody can figure out how to write a Linux client that adheres to this monster of a license is truely a master of both code and law.
You need to write to your congresscritter and let them know that UCITA is actually hostile to the interests of business. Or rather, it would benefit the minority of businesses (the ones who license software) at the expense of all other businesses (the licenscees of the aforementioned software). According to the article, Phillips Petroleum is one of the companies lobbying against the passage of UCITA. Does Texas have any large software firms that will benefit greatly from UCITA? Does Texas have any large petroleum companies which stand to get screwed if UCITA passes? Make sure your congressman knows who butter's his bread.
The issue of rentals, however, is a thorny one. The existance of a rental market implies that there is some impediment to you making a copy of the thing you rented. If it is trivial to make the copy, then the rental market is likely to destroy the purchase market. Imagine for a moment that Blockbuster rented audio CD's for $1.00 a day or something. What do you think it would do to the market for CD's? It would probably completely destroy it. Some people would still buy the CD for the printed materials. But, a lot of folks would rent the CD and rip it to MP3 for a buck instead.
So what is the tradeoff that needs to be made here? One answer is that manufacturers should be allowed to employ copy protection in their products ala Macrovision. This would probably lead to most media products having some form of copy protection. This road seems to be where we are headed at the moment. Unfortunately, this path seems to result in a loss of fair use rights on the part of the consumer.
Another possibility is to only allow copy protection on products which are produced for rental purposes. So, the tape you rent from the video store has macrovision, but if you buy it from a retail outlet you get an unprotected version. This seems like it could be an OK balance. Unfortunately, it could lead to products which are not available or are prohibitivly expensive in their non-rental form. I can see the media giants moving all of their inventory into some sort of "rental" scheme and dropping the non-copy protected purchase version entirely. I'm not sure I like that possibility.
The third possibility is to ban copy protection which in any way infriges on fair-use rights. Works which are released in a form which denies fair-use rights have, IMNHSO, no right to any protection under copyright law. This would probably have the effect of prohibiting all copy protection because, as others have mentioned, it is possibly (probably?) impossible to mechanically determine if a copy is a fair use copy.
Of these three, I myself prefer the third. But that's because I'm largly a consumer of IP, not a producer or distributer. The reality is that option 3 is not going to come to pass unless something is done to reassure the media giants that they are getting something out of it. The question is, what could they be offered? We have to realize that the best we can hope for is that our Congress-critters will listen to both sides in the debate. One possibility would be to allow and encourage the watermarking of media files with serial numbers. The watermarks couldn't be used to prevent copying. But, if a song was being distributed illegally the watermark could be used to try and track down the original purchaser. Another idea would be to make it easier to track down and prosecute anyone who was making copyrighted material available illegally. Perhaps a light but significant fine could be levied against people who put Metallica songs up on Napster. Sort of like photo-radar driving tickets. Pay your $50 or whatever if you get caught leaving your Dr. Dre songs on your anonymous FTP server.
So, I ask everyone, what is the tradeoff that we are willing to make? We can't really expect the media giants to give up anything if we aren't willing to give up something also.
If you haven't checked it out, www.opensecrets.org is a great reference for these things. For the 1999-2000 election cycle, RIAA contributed $46,888 to the Republicrats. The breakdown is 51% to the Republican half, and 49% to the Democratic half.
OpenSecrets groups 24 entertainment PACs under the heading TV/Movies/Music. I don't know that all of these companies / PAC's are DMCA fans, but some of them certainly are (MPAA, ASCAP, Sony, Disney, MGM, and Time Warner for sure are fans.) The group as a whole gave $3,288,367 to the Republicrats (split D's 43% R's 57%).
If you ever had any doubts that most political contributions are for the exclusive purpose of buying influence with both parties (AKA bribery) as opposed to offering support to the one party that they actually want to win, here is proof. Some of the companies actually give money to only one party. This accounts for a whopping $55,000 out of the $3 million given. The rest of the money was contributed by companies and PAC's who are giving significant sums to both parties. The most even split in the Movie/TV/Music category is Disney. R's:$141,071 D's:$140,500. Disgusting.
Ummm. Before you go calling people idiots...
Apple part number T2587LL/A Harmon Kardon SoundSticks. These are USB speakers. Which, as if to prove my point, have the caveat Older G3's with hardware-based DVDs running DVD 1.3 software will not work with Soundsticks. They require newer, software-based DVD's running DVD 2.x
That's the obvious tact. A more costly tactic is to purchase a Safeaudio CD, take it home, and when you find out it won't play return it for an exchange. They'll give you another one which also won't work. Pretty soon, all of the stores inventory will have been opened and can no longer be sold as "new". Almost certainly, all of the opened CD's will get shipped back to the RIAA member who published all the defective CD's in the first place.
While some CD players will play the "Safeaudio" CD's, I can almost guarantee that some of them won't. New Mac's for example have digital USB speakers. There is no way for new Mac's to play CD's except by ripping the audio off of them. It is perfectly legitimate for the people who own these systems to buy the "protected" CD's and return them as defective.
I'm sure some troll is going to respond saying how immoral it is to intentionally buy CD's you know you are going to return. To that I respond, is it moral to knowingly sell defective products to your customers? Because that's what these CD's are. Plain and simple. They are defective products which do not meet the Redbook CD audio standards. I wonder if they will even be allowed to use the "CD" logo on them?
Now, we just need to find out where they are going to release these CD's first. If their initial public tests results in significant losses due to returns, that will get the program scrapped early.
Ahhh, the old troll about evil Intel coaxing Be into dropping PPC support. Be still supports the older PowerMacs which they have the hardware specs to. They don't support any newer Mac's because Apple won't release the specs.
... are currently incompatabile with Linux", "The dual processor model are currently somewhat unstable", "We are still waiting for information about the 2001 G4 models", "current kernels don't handle more memory than 660MB", 2000 PowerBook has no sound support.
Yes, I am quite aware that the LinuxPPC folks have maintained decent compatability. But, Linux has (unfortunately) always had to deal with hardware whose vendors are either neutral or hostile towards providing Linux developers with the needed information. That's fine. Linux users understand that that is part of the bargain if you want to run it. WinModems, decent 3D accelleration, decent sound support. The list of x86 hardware with poor support is significant.
Be, however, is shipping a commercial product for which they offer support. They had to make a business decision about whether or not it was worth their while to support hardware for which they did not have access to the specs. Had they chosen to support it, they would want to be able to know that they could support this years G4's. Something which LinuxPPC doesn't know yet. Hardware wise: "Any models with and ATI RADEON
So you can troll away with your lie that "the LinuxPPC guys have had NO problem keeping up", but the simple fact is that they have had problems. Be made the choice to avoid the support headaches that go along with trying to support undocumented hardware. Maybe the Intel investment did play a part in their decision, but the fact is that Apple made it clear to Be that they were not wanted and had Be stayed on the PPC they would almost certainly be facing the same hardware problems that the LinuxPPC folks are facing.