One proposed use of DNSSEC is to publish an SSL certificate public key -- then no Certificate Authorities are required!
I have felt that this is a good idea for a very long, long, long time. The thing on the Internet that tells you where to go to get to a domain name is the DNS server. Thus, the owner of the DNS server really should be the source of the certificate public keys, not some random 3rd party whose true interests lie in selling certificates more cheaply and doing just enough certification that they aren't actually deemed to be insecure.
It's a race to the bottom. DNSSEC, on the other hand, allows the owners of a domain to determine just how much they take security properly.
Nothing sucks balls worse that being forced to use a shitty-ass DNS lookup server hosted by a shitty-ass ISP in the middle of nowhere.
This is what we'd call a first world problem.... I can think of quite a few things more unpleasant than being forced to use a DNS server hosted out in the middle of nowhere...
I see a similar thing here. We're a small software company and we're providing top notch enterprise-scale solutions as fast as we can bang them out. It almost seems that our attempts to slow things down by raising prices only increases demand and we're gasping to keep up.
Apparently, you have a pretty crappy phone, then. I have a Moto Droid2 which easily lasts through the day with normal smartphone use. If I use it as a straight up mini-tablet, it lasts a few hours.
If I use it as a phone, occasional email, with wifi and GPS off, it pretty much lasts about 2.5 days. If I'm using driving directions with realtime GPS, it lasts an hour or less. (but who uses Navigation with turn-by-turn without a car charger handy?)
You are about as typical as a red-headed, left-handed Tuvaluan cabbage farmer with one blue eye and one brown and 3 fingers on the left hand. People like you represent the majority like a butterfly represents lead-based life forms. Do you actually live with your mother in her mother's basement?
You can't use your experience to reflect the norm in any sense of the word.
$120/year two year contract, so sorry your "gift" actually cost you about three grand over the next two years
Let's see... 120 * 2 = 240. Where does the other $2,760 come into play?
Did you mean $120/month? And if so, who pays anything like that for a smartphone? Even Verizon has options for unlimited data plans at around $30/month, and in this case, you pay no different for the voice plans as you would pay for a "feature" phone. Their most expensive unlimited data AND unlimited talking phone plan is still less than $100/month.
I guess you missed the point that as a small(ish) hosting provider, I don't care at all about 240 volt power systems! I have small cage with a few 42u racks to manage, and companies approximately this size and smaller represent a very significant percent of the colo marketplace, perhaps even a majority of the colo marketplace.
At this size and scale, we don't care about green, we care about whether or not it works. Even if we were to cut 75% of the power usage, the money saved would pale compared to our other costs and the relatively high cost of experimenting with power saving solutions is a terrible investment of time and resources.
Which is why I said that the Chinese are on the right track. By creating industry-wide standards for efficient power consumption, China establishes a clear signal to the marketplace for what to do in order to produce power-efficient solutions for the myriad of smaller clients who (like me) don't want to invest lots of time to save power but are happy and willing to buy it if available.
It's really what we need to do here as well. It's important for the industry to sort this out. But it's not reasonable to ask customers (especially smaller customers) to sort this out.
From a regulatory standpoint, the most important thing isn't the effectiveness, it's the standards used to gauge effectiveness. If you want the right answer, you have to start by asking the right questions.
Is datacenter efficiency important? Doesn't appear to be so from where I sit. We host a significant number of servers in a local (Sacramento) colo, and we buy contracts for bandwidth and power. The charges we pay are rather small given the size of our company, the actual power costs are infinitesimal compared to the other costs that we have to do business. I care not a whit about power costs, given that our marginal costs are so low compared to the value we present.
Is it important? Sure! But in the USA, we have no operational standards for what constitutes "green" data center technologies. If there was an actual standard for DC power, I'd consider buying servers with DC power inputs, etc...
Well then, perhaps you'd like to suggest something that you've used for this purpose. Something that will easily capture the entire screen's output and audio input, in to a format that is readily usable for things like uploading to Youtube or feeding to an NLE.
Please understand I'm not talking theoretically here. I work for a university, part of my job is media, and I've used WME9 to capture lectures. The professors like it because it is easy to use (they just run the profile I give them and hit go) and it generates a file that we can host on the web directly if we want, upload to Youtube, convert to something else, whatever. It is simple and low effort.
That's why I'm suggesting it. Because I have seen it work, many times. If you have an alternate suggestion that you've actually tried then I'm sure the person who asked the question would love to hear it. I would too, in fact, I'm always up for new technology.
Sounds like our experiences with CamStudio! (which is free)
Well by putting their system reqs at frankly ludicrously low levels what you ended up with is OEMs slapping Linux on machines that frankly would have had trouble running Win98 without hanging and gave Linux a worse view from those that don't know about specs and just look at price. i mean a 366Mhz CPU?
To be fair, I have a 400 Mhz P3 that has performed admirably for a decade or so with effectively zero downtime as a dev server and network monitor for a production server cluster. To say that you can't get significant use from such comparatively scant resources is simply wrong. I manage my expectations... I am not expecting a responsive, HD flash video experience, nor am I expecting to render expressive graphics with a "snappy" experience.
Look at this as a research project: how do you get a good experience at a reduced power level? You aren't going to get a good experience at 366 Mhz, but given just two Moore's law doublings, you are up to 1.5 GHz, roughly in line with today's midline tablet processors. That's just 4 to 6 years away, depending on how you interpret Moore's law.
The lessons learned today will result in a much better experience for future users of both "low end" and more mainstream processors.
Also, strangely, the need for additional IP addresses is also on the decline, as the ability to manage NAT traversal improves. Using technologies such as wildcard SSL certs with subdomains rather than individual certs for each IP address, SSL/TLS for HTTP, STUN for VOIP traffic, and so on gradually ease pressure on the need for public IP addresses.
I'm not saying that IPV6 is DOA, but the cost of IP addresses will grow slowly enough that the transition will take a very, very long time. Our colo hasn't yet announced IPV6 capability, though they are expected to sometime this year. As soon as they support it, we'll roll out support for all our products shortly thereafter even though initial demand is almost nonexistent.
My phone isn't really "mine" while my company is paying for it. But as soon as the 3 years is up and I get a new one, you can be sure as anything it will be running cyanogenmod's latest and I'll have it hacked every way from Sunday.
For all the grandstanding about Verizon and "nothing works", the truth is that Verizon did manage to put together one of the best wireless networks out there. Perhaps that's more of a comment on the *other* carriers, but the other carriers DO use CarrierIQ.
My beef with Verizon isn't their network, or their phones, but their billing department. If they could somehow manage to not make up stuff to put on their bills for me to pay, I might consider using them again. Alas, they couldn't get a bill to me to save their lives that was anything like accurate.
And so, while my business cell phone is Verizon, my personal (family) cell phones are all Metro PCS, which provides acceptable service at not only good prices, but more importantly, consistent prices.
Maybe so, but the meme is there because it's real. My wife got a virus from looking at facebook. She's very conservative and still got eaten by the fake A/V thing going around. Same happened to one of my employees the other day, and the only cure was a wipe/reload. It's rare for me to see a Windows computer last more than a year or so in "real use".
Oh, and playing cracked games doesn't count as "real use" in my book.
As CTO, I design our networks so that individual computers do not matter and all important data is stored on locked down, monitored, backed up, and regularly patched Linux servers.
They *are* held up to vigorous external audits. However, the audits are based on accountancy principles (See SAS 70) and are performed under the guidelines of "reasonable" which provides a lot of wiggle room.
I did some research for a SAS 70 audit to become a CA some years ago. In anticipation, I designed a certificate exchange system with not a single operation performed "in the clear", where even with full compromise of any stage in the process, a certificate couldn't be invalidly given!
When I presented my plan to the auditor, he pretty much threw it out because he didn't want to bother with it. Mostly he wanted to check off the boxes of requirements for the audit.
Lots of the requirements are pretty straightforward. For example "two factor authentication" required for physical access to the machine. So, you lock it in a cage (which we already had), with both key lock and a combo lock. We already have the key lock, so the total cost: $6 for the padlocks and $5 in parts at the local Home Depot.
We found that SATA SSDs weren't just faster than 15k SCSI drives, but dramatically so in database servers. We saw at least 10x performance boost despite being "only" SATA drives.
Smash-n-grab theft is a crime of opportunity. The bad guy
A) sees your valuable stuff B) takes it fast, and C) runs.
The weak link is in step A.
Drive a crappy-looking car! Maybe a little rust, discolored paint, with door handles missing, maybe a hubcap or two, etc. And keep your laptop out of plain sight. They will not give you any trouble.
Also, you get to save lots of money on the monthly car payment!
I had trouble with my bike getting stolen until I bought a bike that was a few years old, had dings and nicks, bad paint job. I called it my "butt ugly". It was a high quality bike, but appearances were enough that I rode it for years without issue before getting something else.
Certain, I'm going to get modded to oblivion for this, but....
Brother I hear your music! PHP is highly underrated! It's a language flexible enough to allow you to just stick a date stamp in the middle of a random webpage, and also write a highly complex, object-oriented application framework with gorgeous abstractions.
Performance is decent, sources are open and don't require compiling, and it's compatible with every webhost and platform out there. It scales well with it's "share nothing" approach, and is one of the most stable software packages I've ever seen. Oh, and the Documentation is excellent.
Sure, it has it's warts: dynamic typing means that in the right contexts, 1==0, and a few others, but these are edge cases in every situation that matters. Most of the problems with OOP in PHP4 have been fixed with the now-almost-universal PHP5.
I can do c, c++, Python, Perl, Javascript, Java, etc. but PHP is my favorite as the Chrysler K-car that doesn't win any looks contests, but always starts and gets you where you want to go, even if only at the legal speed limit.
The Dunning-Kruger effect is perhaps the most useful effect to use when trying to make sense of modern politics. Listen to any die-hard politico, and the more sure they are of their response, the more certain you can be of how inexperienced they are.
In today's politics, a sure, unwavering certainty is almost a sure sign of success: a "flip flopper" will get nowhere, (Mitt Romney, John Kerry take note) while idiots who never change their opinions (EG: George Bush Jr) get lots of press for "holding true" despite all the evidence to the contrary.
So, the loudest political advocates are either the idiots, or somewhat less loudly, those who actually have some idea what's going on. For those who just want to "do the right thing", without a lot of effort, it's damnably difficult to tell the difference.
But Google won't kill funding unless they are VERY stupid, they'll just cut the hell out of it, but even that is iffy, why? Microsoft. MSFT wants in the search game B.A.D and by buying the default search engine from FF they could gain a nice boost...
The money Google gives to FF is paltry given the stakes involved. We *are* talking about 20% of the search business, that's very, very significant.
Google will renew the contract under fairly favorable terms - they'd be stupid not to. They're getting what they want, why change anything so long as it's working?!?!
It's easy to get an embarrassing amount of processing power if you go with white box equipment. I have 8 8-way 1-U servers with 32 GB of RAM serving a heavy, database driven app. The amount of stuff that gets done with that relatively small value-priced cluster is impressive.
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I guess you didn't notice the logical disparity between "API people write apps for" and "legacy Windows apps" ?
In case it still isn't clear, a "legacy" app is one that was written years ago, while a "new" app is one that people are writing now. *cough*
One proposed use of DNSSEC is to publish an SSL certificate public key -- then no Certificate Authorities are required!
I have felt that this is a good idea for a very long, long, long time. The thing on the Internet that tells you where to go to get to a domain name is the DNS server. Thus, the owner of the DNS server really should be the source of the certificate public keys, not some random 3rd party whose true interests lie in selling certificates more cheaply and doing just enough certification that they aren't actually deemed to be insecure.
It's a race to the bottom. DNSSEC, on the other hand, allows the owners of a domain to determine just how much they take security properly.
Nothing sucks balls worse that being forced to use a shitty-ass DNS lookup server hosted by a shitty-ass ISP in the middle of nowhere.
This is what we'd call a first world problem.... I can think of quite a few things more unpleasant than being forced to use a DNS server hosted out in the middle of nowhere...
I see a similar thing here. We're a small software company and we're providing top notch enterprise-scale solutions as fast as we can bang them out. It almost seems that our attempts to slow things down by raising prices only increases demand and we're gasping to keep up.
Apparently, you have a pretty crappy phone, then. I have a Moto Droid2 which easily lasts through the day with normal smartphone use. If I use it as a straight up mini-tablet, it lasts a few hours.
If I use it as a phone, occasional email, with wifi and GPS off, it pretty much lasts about 2.5 days. If I'm using driving directions with realtime GPS, it lasts an hour or less. (but who uses Navigation with turn-by-turn without a car charger handy?)
You are about as typical as a red-headed, left-handed Tuvaluan cabbage farmer with one blue eye and one brown and 3 fingers on the left hand. People like you represent the majority like a butterfly represents lead-based life forms. Do you actually live with your mother in her mother's basement?
You can't use your experience to reflect the norm in any sense of the word.
$120/year two year contract, so sorry your "gift" actually cost you about three grand over the next two years
Let's see... 120 * 2 = 240. Where does the other $2,760 come into play?
Did you mean $120/month? And if so, who pays anything like that for a smartphone? Even Verizon has options for unlimited data plans at around $30/month, and in this case, you pay no different for the voice plans as you would pay for a "feature" phone. Their most expensive unlimited data AND unlimited talking phone plan is still less than $100/month.
I guess you missed the point that as a small(ish) hosting provider, I don't care at all about 240 volt power systems! I have small cage with a few 42u racks to manage, and companies approximately this size and smaller represent a very significant percent of the colo marketplace, perhaps even a majority of the colo marketplace.
At this size and scale, we don't care about green, we care about whether or not it works. Even if we were to cut 75% of the power usage, the money saved would pale compared to our other costs and the relatively high cost of experimenting with power saving solutions is a terrible investment of time and resources.
Which is why I said that the Chinese are on the right track. By creating industry-wide standards for efficient power consumption, China establishes a clear signal to the marketplace for what to do in order to produce power-efficient solutions for the myriad of smaller clients who (like me) don't want to invest lots of time to save power but are happy and willing to buy it if available.
It's really what we need to do here as well. It's important for the industry to sort this out. But it's not reasonable to ask customers (especially smaller customers) to sort this out.
From a regulatory standpoint, the most important thing isn't the effectiveness, it's the standards used to gauge effectiveness. If you want the right answer, you have to start by asking the right questions.
Is datacenter efficiency important? Doesn't appear to be so from where I sit. We host a significant number of servers in a local (Sacramento) colo, and we buy contracts for bandwidth and power. The charges we pay are rather small given the size of our company, the actual power costs are infinitesimal compared to the other costs that we have to do business. I care not a whit about power costs, given that our marginal costs are so low compared to the value we present.
Is it important? Sure! But in the USA, we have no operational standards for what constitutes "green" data center technologies. If there was an actual standard for DC power, I'd consider buying servers with DC power inputs, etc...
Well then, perhaps you'd like to suggest something that you've used for this purpose. Something that will easily capture the entire screen's output and audio input, in to a format that is readily usable for things like uploading to Youtube or feeding to an NLE.
Like... CamStudio?
Please understand I'm not talking theoretically here. I work for a university, part of my job is media, and I've used WME9 to capture lectures. The professors like it because it is easy to use (they just run the profile I give them and hit go) and it generates a file that we can host on the web directly if we want, upload to Youtube, convert to something else, whatever. It is simple and low effort.
Sorta like CamStudio?
That's why I'm suggesting it. Because I have seen it work, many times. If you have an alternate suggestion that you've actually tried then I'm sure the person who asked the question would love to hear it. I would too, in fact, I'm always up for new technology.
Sounds like our experiences with CamStudio! (which is free)
Well by putting their system reqs at frankly ludicrously low levels what you ended up with is OEMs slapping Linux on machines that frankly would have had trouble running Win98 without hanging and gave Linux a worse view from those that don't know about specs and just look at price. i mean a 366Mhz CPU?
To be fair, I have a 400 Mhz P3 that has performed admirably for a decade or so with effectively zero downtime as a dev server and network monitor for a production server cluster. To say that you can't get significant use from such comparatively scant resources is simply wrong. I manage my expectations... I am not expecting a responsive, HD flash video experience, nor am I expecting to render expressive graphics with a "snappy" experience.
Look at this as a research project: how do you get a good experience at a reduced power level? You aren't going to get a good experience at 366 Mhz, but given just two Moore's law doublings, you are up to 1.5 GHz, roughly in line with today's midline tablet processors. That's just 4 to 6 years away, depending on how you interpret Moore's law.
The lessons learned today will result in a much better experience for future users of both "low end" and more mainstream processors.
Also, strangely, the need for additional IP addresses is also on the decline, as the ability to manage NAT traversal improves. Using technologies such as wildcard SSL certs with subdomains rather than individual certs for each IP address, SSL/TLS for HTTP, STUN for VOIP traffic, and so on gradually ease pressure on the need for public IP addresses.
I'm not saying that IPV6 is DOA, but the cost of IP addresses will grow slowly enough that the transition will take a very, very long time. Our colo hasn't yet announced IPV6 capability, though they are expected to sometime this year. As soon as they support it, we'll roll out support for all our products shortly thereafter even though initial demand is almost nonexistent.
My phone isn't really "mine" while my company is paying for it. But as soon as the 3 years is up and I get a new one, you can be sure as anything it will be running cyanogenmod's latest and I'll have it hacked every way from Sunday.
For all the grandstanding about Verizon and "nothing works", the truth is that Verizon did manage to put together one of the best wireless networks out there. Perhaps that's more of a comment on the *other* carriers, but the other carriers DO use CarrierIQ.
My beef with Verizon isn't their network, or their phones, but their billing department. If they could somehow manage to not make up stuff to put on their bills for me to pay, I might consider using them again. Alas, they couldn't get a bill to me to save their lives that was anything like accurate.
And so, while my business cell phone is Verizon, my personal (family) cell phones are all Metro PCS, which provides acceptable service at not only good prices, but more importantly, consistent prices.
Maybe so, but the meme is there because it's real. My wife got a virus from looking at facebook. She's very conservative and still got eaten by the fake A/V thing going around. Same happened to one of my employees the other day, and the only cure was a wipe/reload. It's rare for me to see a Windows computer last more than a year or so in "real use".
Oh, and playing cracked games doesn't count as "real use" in my book.
As CTO, I design our networks so that individual computers do not matter and all important data is stored on locked down, monitored, backed up, and regularly patched Linux servers.
They *are* held up to vigorous external audits. However, the audits are based on accountancy principles (See SAS 70) and are performed under the guidelines of "reasonable" which provides a lot of wiggle room.
I did some research for a SAS 70 audit to become a CA some years ago. In anticipation, I designed a certificate exchange system with not a single operation performed "in the clear", where even with full compromise of any stage in the process, a certificate couldn't be invalidly given!
When I presented my plan to the auditor, he pretty much threw it out because he didn't want to bother with it. Mostly he wanted to check off the boxes of requirements for the audit.
Lots of the requirements are pretty straightforward. For example "two factor authentication" required for physical access to the machine. So, you lock it in a cage (which we already had), with both key lock and a combo lock. We already have the key lock, so the total cost: $6 for the padlocks and $5 in parts at the local Home Depot.
Somehow, this brings to mind this comic...
We found that SATA SSDs weren't just faster than 15k SCSI drives, but dramatically so in database servers. We saw at least 10x performance boost despite being "only" SATA drives.
I wonder if you've considered this route?
This was done a *long* time ago. Years? Old news is old.
Smash-n-grab theft is a crime of opportunity. The bad guy
A) sees your valuable stuff
B) takes it fast, and
C) runs.
The weak link is in step A.
Drive a crappy-looking car! Maybe a little rust, discolored paint, with door handles missing, maybe a hubcap or two, etc. And keep your laptop out of plain sight. They will not give you any trouble.
Also, you get to save lots of money on the monthly car payment!
I had trouble with my bike getting stolen until I bought a bike that was a few years old, had dings and nicks, bad paint job. I called it my "butt ugly". It was a high quality bike, but appearances were enough that I rode it for years without issue before getting something else.
Certain, I'm going to get modded to oblivion for this, but....
Brother I hear your music! PHP is highly underrated! It's a language flexible enough to allow you to just stick a date stamp in the middle of a random webpage, and also write a highly complex, object-oriented application framework with gorgeous abstractions.
Performance is decent, sources are open and don't require compiling, and it's compatible with every webhost and platform out there. It scales well with it's "share nothing" approach, and is one of the most stable software packages I've ever seen. Oh, and the Documentation is excellent.
Sure, it has it's warts: dynamic typing means that in the right contexts, 1==0, and a few others, but these are edge cases in every situation that matters. Most of the problems with OOP in PHP4 have been fixed with the now-almost-universal PHP5.
I can do c, c++, Python, Perl, Javascript, Java, etc. but PHP is my favorite as the Chrysler K-car that doesn't win any looks contests, but always starts and gets you where you want to go, even if only at the legal speed limit.
The Dunning-Kruger effect is perhaps the most useful effect to use when trying to make sense of modern politics. Listen to any die-hard politico, and the more sure they are of their response, the more certain you can be of how inexperienced they are.
In today's politics, a sure, unwavering certainty is almost a sure sign of success: a "flip flopper" will get nowhere, (Mitt Romney, John Kerry take note) while idiots who never change their opinions (EG: George Bush Jr) get lots of press for "holding true" despite all the evidence to the contrary.
So, the loudest political advocates are either the idiots, or somewhat less loudly, those who actually have some idea what's going on. For those who just want to "do the right thing", without a lot of effort, it's damnably difficult to tell the difference.
But Google won't kill funding unless they are VERY stupid, they'll just cut the hell out of it, but even that is iffy, why? Microsoft. MSFT wants in the search game B.A.D and by buying the default search engine from FF they could gain a nice boost...
The money Google gives to FF is paltry given the stakes involved. We *are* talking about 20% of the search business, that's very, very significant.
Google will renew the contract under fairly favorable terms - they'd be stupid not to. They're getting what they want, why change anything so long as it's working?!?!
It's easy to get an embarrassing amount of processing power if you go with white box equipment. I have 8 8-way 1-U servers with 32 GB of RAM serving a heavy, database driven app. The amount of stuff that gets done with that relatively small value-priced cluster is impressive.
Stephen Wolfram: is that you?
Sadly, your country doesn't have the strong privacy laws like we have in the United States *cough* Patriot Act *cough* so this is not a possibility.