Any public S3 object can also be accessed as a BitTorrent, which is another way to mitigate high bandwidth charges on large, popular files.
Obviously, it's going to be difficult to allow folks to access the.torrent but not access the original file, but using long random names for things would probably work.
They also purposely blocked archive.org via a robots.txt exclusion, so the bloggers can't use that to try and recover some of their blogs.
This is just compound foolishness. I gather they did it in an attempt to control bandwidth costs since it's hard to imagine any other reason.
Umm, utter incompetence?
The same admin cocky enough to declare that their data is safe because it's stored in a RAID-1 is likely cocky enough to believe that archive.org and other scrapers are "stealing" the content of his website.
Limited anecdotal evidence suggests that mosquitoes are not attracted to LED flashlights they way they are to full-spectrum light. At least, Siberian mosquitoes weren't in July, 2006.
This is one area where a perceived failing of LEDs (lack of broad spectrum) is actually an asset.
SMS mostly goes away within a couple years of getting regional wireless broadband (whether that's provided by 3G network or Google or municipal wi-fi). As soon as phone software allows you to use the data channel to send short messages (IM, Google Talk, Twitter App, IRC) you aren't going to pay 20 cents per SMS if you can help it.
Our wireless overlords must realize this, and so they've jacked up the price now to make the most of it and help cover the cost of their 3G (and hopefully 4G) networks.
Of course, it's price fixing and also has a relatively greater impact on poor folks (who can't afford fancypants phones with data plans), but as long as we're all distracted by gay marriage and what kind of puppy the president has we won't actually care enough to do anything about it.
Personalization is a red herring. A Google search is outward-facing, casting a line into the full depth and breadth of all of the world's information. I'm the one who gets to decide what is relevant to me.
No, I think Neal Stephenson nailed it in Anathem: the future of search is putting real value on reputation. After hundreds of years of global internet crap has accumulated in the world's indexes, supplemented by the output of intelligent marketing- and disinformation-bots, the only way to search with confidence will be to use a reputation market to filter the results. The results that providers are most willing to back with hard currency are the results you can put the most faith in.
I also wish Google would focus a little bit more on timeliness. It's really frustrating to search on an emerging Linux issue and get bombarded with results from 2003. It's a completely different OS now, that stuff is ancient history.
I guess it'd have been too expensive to produce fully textured city levels like in the game, so they just went ahead and produced textureless levels.
The sunny, ultra-clean cityscapes are the main reason I bought Mirror's Edge. I was really looking forward to seeing how EA would flesh out the city and even create entirely new themed environments to run through: Tokyo, Berlin, Steam-punk London, Dubai...
To see them throw out the art design and go abstract on the first content pack is disappointing. Q*bert was fun, but it belongs on 8-bit processors.
Well it has worked ok for New Coke, and great for New York.
Given recent budget cuts due to Wall St. collapse, I think they're about to bring out York Classic and switch us back to the old-school flavors of graffiti and gun violence.
In a few years, you may not even be able to get New York any more.
Yeah, but how do you know the water plant isn't cheating and leaching water out of the atmosphere?
It's a great photo-op, and a nice setting to meet vendors, but it's not much of a test of how something would actually perform on the lunar surface, where it is much hotter (or much much colder) and a lot more dusty than anywhere on Earth.
It boggles my mind that all this time, we've been sending up tanks of drinking water instead of additional scientific or commercial payloads. WTF?
NASA astronauts are all ex-military, right? I'm pretty sure once you've been trained to kill people, you can stomach drinking filtered/purified wastewater. And I'm sure it tastes a lot better than the stuff sitting around in ISS's tank for the last 6 months.
According to the Register article, the method of attack was DOM manipulation. The code waits until it sees a login form from a targeted site, and then it injects markup that sends the credentials to the bad guys on submit.
We can speculate on whether that's true or not, but if it is then it should be fairly easy to use a bit more javascript (why not? heh.) to check the integrity of the DOM. Banks should also be randomizing the structure of their forms and the names/ids of form fields as a matter of course.
Of course the attacks will evolve, but as long as you're going to play the game you've got to keep moving.
What is the great compelling argument beyond "oh noes, we have no IPs left"?
For me? Multicast. Thousands or millions of clients watching a live sporting event or news event or some other bit of broadcast without each of them having to set up their own goddamn 1-to-1 connection to the origin server.
Easy multicast enables a whole new class of applications and mobile devices that could be very useful, but are very difficult to produce today.
But how is this any different from Rackspace or Dreamhost? Most people who berate cloud computing tend to have no idea how it actually works. The only difference between dedicated hosting and EC2 is that one charges you by the hour. How is that an invasion of your privacy or a dangerous lack of control?
It's true of any virtual hosting or virtual private server plan. EC2 gives you a virtual private server running on top of a host controlled by Amazon. Amazon has access to RAM and storage. They have access to your private keys.
The danger isn't new or different, but with all the hype over cloud solutions it's important to remind people of the security implications. EC2 gives you root on your own server instance, and folks might be tempted to think that root==privacy.
I'll take Amazon over Rackspace or even Dreamhost, but EC2 is inherently less secure than putting your own servers into a locked cabinet at a trusted data-center.
Yes indeed, for most small to medium sized businesses, or for anyone without a seriously privacy-sensitive application, Amazon is a great way to go. Much more secure than having a server sitting on your desk, or virtual host through a mom & pop isp.
But if you are paranoid, or you need to assure your boss/clients that the server is secure, then Amazon is exactly wrong for you. You have no control over, or insight into, the security of their infrastructure. You can't audit the source, you can't audit access logs, you really have no idea who or what is operating on their physical hosts.
Can an Amazon admin or script grep through your ram or storage? Of course they can. Can and admin or script snapshot your instance and save it somewhere else? Of course they can. This is likely what the OP meant by "creepy".
Yeah, I learned everything I needed to know about social software from TinyMUD. Bring people with similar interests together, and give them tools to build and shape their environment from within, and you will be rewarded with a thriving community... provided you can keep them from sucking up all of the available cpu cycles and bandwidth.
I still want to build virtual-world-building tools. I still get excited when I think about online theatrical performances. I still think that information should be organized in logically linked three-dimensional spaces.
I would still rather call an object factory a "vending machine". It just makes more sense.
HTTP cookies, not such a big deal because there is a limit to the amount of data that can be stored. They can, of course, be used to positively ID you as you move from site to site--this is what the big ad networks do--but that's almost okay because there are decent interfaces for cleaning them out of your browser cache.
Local storage objects, on the other hand... an unscrupulous person could pack a lot of kiddie-porn into a 100KB and try to blackmail you with it. Also, if you can't clean them out, they can be extremely effective in tracking you from site to site, or over a very long period of time.
Slashdot Mirror
Bad scientists are worried people will steal their ideas, good scientists are worried that people won't.
Yes! Yes! A thousand times yes!
Generations from now, the only traces of you that will be left are the ideas that others found worthy of sharing.
Well, that and your Google logs.
Any public S3 object can also be accessed as a BitTorrent, which is another way to mitigate high bandwidth charges on large, popular files.
Obviously, it's going to be difficult to allow folks to access the .torrent but not access the original file, but using long random names for things would probably work.
This is just compound foolishness. I gather they did it in an attempt to control bandwidth costs since it's hard to imagine any other reason.
Umm, utter incompetence?
The same admin cocky enough to declare that their data is safe because it's stored in a RAID-1 is likely cocky enough to believe that archive.org and other scrapers are "stealing" the content of his website.
Limited anecdotal evidence suggests that mosquitoes are not attracted to LED flashlights they way they are to full-spectrum light. At least, Siberian mosquitoes weren't in July, 2006.
This is one area where a perceived failing of LEDs (lack of broad spectrum) is actually an asset.
SMS mostly goes away within a couple years of getting regional wireless broadband (whether that's provided by 3G network or Google or municipal wi-fi). As soon as phone software allows you to use the data channel to send short messages (IM, Google Talk, Twitter App, IRC) you aren't going to pay 20 cents per SMS if you can help it.
Our wireless overlords must realize this, and so they've jacked up the price now to make the most of it and help cover the cost of their 3G (and hopefully 4G) networks.
Of course, it's price fixing and also has a relatively greater impact on poor folks (who can't afford fancypants phones with data plans), but as long as we're all distracted by gay marriage and what kind of puppy the president has we won't actually care enough to do anything about it.
Personalization is a red herring. A Google search is outward-facing, casting a line into the full depth and breadth of all of the world's information. I'm the one who gets to decide what is relevant to me.
No, I think Neal Stephenson nailed it in Anathem: the future of search is putting real value on reputation. After hundreds of years of global internet crap has accumulated in the world's indexes, supplemented by the output of intelligent marketing- and disinformation-bots, the only way to search with confidence will be to use a reputation market to filter the results. The results that providers are most willing to back with hard currency are the results you can put the most faith in.
I also wish Google would focus a little bit more on timeliness. It's really frustrating to search on an emerging Linux issue and get bombarded with results from 2003. It's a completely different OS now, that stuff is ancient history.
The mages in Dalaran were teleporting cities back when you were killing Scrawny Rats for coppers. You better smile when you hand them their wine.
And I have a lower UID than you do!
OMG, what have I just witnessed!?
Amazing.
I guess it'd have been too expensive to produce fully textured city levels like in the game, so they just went ahead and produced textureless levels.
The sunny, ultra-clean cityscapes are the main reason I bought Mirror's Edge. I was really looking forward to seeing how EA would flesh out the city and even create entirely new themed environments to run through: Tokyo, Berlin, Steam-punk London, Dubai...
To see them throw out the art design and go abstract on the first content pack is disappointing. Q*bert was fun, but it belongs on 8-bit processors.
Fascinating story. Thanks for posting that.
Well it has worked ok for New Coke, and great for New York.
Given recent budget cuts due to Wall St. collapse, I think they're about to bring out York Classic and switch us back to the old-school flavors of graffiti and gun violence.
In a few years, you may not even be able to get New York any more.
Obviously they're postponing trials because they are busy drafting a Federal bailout of the music industry.
The Govt. created the Internet, they owe the record companies some love. $30 Billion ought to do it.
Yeah, but how do you know the water plant isn't cheating and leaching water out of the atmosphere?
It's a great photo-op, and a nice setting to meet vendors, but it's not much of a test of how something would actually perform on the lunar surface, where it is much hotter (or much much colder) and a lot more dusty than anywhere on Earth.
Someone should take his /. card.
Seriously. He doesn't even know he HAS one.
It boggles my mind that all this time, we've been sending up tanks of drinking water instead of additional scientific or commercial payloads. WTF?
NASA astronauts are all ex-military, right? I'm pretty sure once you've been trained to kill people, you can stomach drinking filtered/purified wastewater. And I'm sure it tastes a lot better than the stuff sitting around in ISS's tank for the last 6 months.
> I don't quite understand the moral of the story.
If a Zen koan whooshes over the head of a /. reader, does it make a sound?
Otherwise known as "Too smart for your own good." That happened to me all the time while I was growing up.
Now people just think I'm a crank when I make non-linear associations like that.
Look, obviously TKIP is more secure, becuase it has more letters.
You geek types are always saying I should use a longer password, right? This is the same thing.
And anyway, they wouldn't make it an option if it wasn't secure.
According to the Register article, the method of attack was DOM manipulation. The code waits until it sees a login form from a targeted site, and then it injects markup that sends the credentials to the bad guys on submit.
We can speculate on whether that's true or not, but if it is then it should be fairly easy to use a bit more javascript (why not? heh.) to check the integrity of the DOM. Banks should also be randomizing the structure of their forms and the names/ids of form fields as a matter of course.
Of course the attacks will evolve, but as long as you're going to play the game you've got to keep moving.
What is the great compelling argument beyond "oh noes, we have no IPs left"?
For me? Multicast. Thousands or millions of clients watching a live sporting event or news event or some other bit of broadcast without each of them having to set up their own goddamn 1-to-1 connection to the origin server.
Easy multicast enables a whole new class of applications and mobile devices that could be very useful, but are very difficult to produce today.
I don't have a car to put gas in, and my bank just got bought by another bank, but man am I happy to be running IE6 on my Mac.
Now I can finally make all my websites work with that pos browser! Thanks, Codeweavers!
But how is this any different from Rackspace or Dreamhost? Most people who berate cloud computing tend to have no idea how it actually works. The only difference between dedicated hosting and EC2 is that one charges you by the hour. How is that an invasion of your privacy or a dangerous lack of control?
It's true of any virtual hosting or virtual private server plan. EC2 gives you a virtual private server running on top of a host controlled by Amazon. Amazon has access to RAM and storage. They have access to your private keys.
The danger isn't new or different, but with all the hype over cloud solutions it's important to remind people of the security implications. EC2 gives you root on your own server instance, and folks might be tempted to think that root==privacy.
I'll take Amazon over Rackspace or even Dreamhost, but EC2 is inherently less secure than putting your own servers into a locked cabinet at a trusted data-center.
Yes indeed, for most small to medium sized businesses, or for anyone without a seriously privacy-sensitive application, Amazon is a great way to go. Much more secure than having a server sitting on your desk, or virtual host through a mom & pop isp.
But if you are paranoid, or you need to assure your boss/clients that the server is secure, then Amazon is exactly wrong for you. You have no control over, or insight into, the security of their infrastructure. You can't audit the source, you can't audit access logs, you really have no idea who or what is operating on their physical hosts.
Can an Amazon admin or script grep through your ram or storage? Of course they can. Can and admin or script snapshot your instance and save it somewhere else? Of course they can. This is likely what the OP meant by "creepy".
Yeah, I learned everything I needed to know about social software from TinyMUD. Bring people with similar interests together, and give them tools to build and shape their environment from within, and you will be rewarded with a thriving community... provided you can keep them from sucking up all of the available cpu cycles and bandwidth.
I still want to build virtual-world-building tools. I still get excited when I think about online theatrical performances. I still think that information should be organized in logically linked three-dimensional spaces.
I would still rather call an object factory a "vending machine". It just makes more sense.
Agreed, I'd pay more for DRM-free too.
That idea is just sick and wrong enough to really go over well with the CEO and the board.
"So you mean they'll pay extra to avoid a rootkit? We should have thought of this before!"
HTTP cookies, not such a big deal because there is a limit to the amount of data that can be stored. They can, of course, be used to positively ID you as you move from site to site--this is what the big ad networks do--but that's almost okay because there are decent interfaces for cleaning them out of your browser cache.
Local storage objects, on the other hand... an unscrupulous person could pack a lot of kiddie-porn into a 100KB and try to blackmail you with it. Also, if you can't clean them out, they can be extremely effective in tracking you from site to site, or over a very long period of time.