If it was a macbook it would more likely be Skyhook, who mapped wifi networks before Google and I think they were used at least by the iPhone 3 before iPhones had GPS.
I can't test it as my router is not reachable from a public road but apparently Skyhook has (or had) an api for geolocating from a wifi AP's mac address.
So will the newly Alzheimers-free superbeings be simultaneously sterilised or will their offspring have to pay a license fee to Monsanto from cradle to grave?
For those customers wishing to purchase a Deluxe FootPath solution for a mall we have provided an indicative price list below. For example, a 55,000 square metre mall that was interested in purchasing a full FootPath solution with data year round (52 weeks) the price would be 69k euros per year. Included within that subscription is information on:
* Visitor traffic to the mall (by hour, day, month and year)
* Visitor dwell time at the mall (by day, month and year)
* Exposure to advertising within the mall
* Frequency of visit to the mall
* Shopper hours at the mall
* Traffic to each retailer within the mall
* Linkages between retailers in the mall
* Shopper flow around the mall
* Nationality of visitor to the mall
* Visitor traffic by level and zone across the mall * Interactions between the mall and neighbouring areas (such as adjacent town centres or competing centres)
So the data that the mall pays to gather from its customers without its customers informed consent is potentially used to aid the mall's competition?
s/Nationality/Probable country of residence/ A minor detail unless you happen to be an ex-pat working in $CountryRepresentingATerroristThreat
Back in the days when "Word Processors" were dedicated machines I worked for a company that worked in a submarine - related industry.
There was a story - possibly apocryphal - that the company came within in inch of sending a tender to a government agency full of references to "willow water"
"Art. L. 331-27. - When it is held that the subscriber has failed to recognize the obligation defined in article L 336-3 during the year following the reception of an injunction sent by the committee for protection of rights and accompanied by a receipted letter or any other method needed to establish proof of the date that the injunction was sent and that when the subscriber received it, the committee may, after a hearing, pronounce, as a result of the gravity of the violations and the use of access, one of the following sanctions:
"1 The suspension of access to service for a duration of two months to one year accompanied by making it impossible for the subscriber to subscribe during that period to another contract giving access to a public on line communication service with any operator;
"2 A warning to take, within a time it determines, measures to prevent the renewal of the accused violation, particularly a method of security found on the list defined in the second paragraph of article L. 331-32, and to inform the High Authority, if necessary under duress.
I heard somewhere that Item 2 hints at the possibility of putting some "Approved Software" on the subscribers' PC(s) which will monitor activity and stop the PC(s) infringing copyright. No doubt it would only run on Windows. However it is very hard to find any real information about this. The referenced article 331-32 looks like it might have some meat in it but alas no...
"Art. L. 331-32. - After consultating the creators of means of security intended to prevent illicit use of access to a public on line communication service, entities whose activity is to offer access to such a service, as well as companies governed by title II of this book and duly constituted professional societies, the High Authority makes public the functionally pertinent specifications presented by these means considered, in its view, as exonerating from responsibility the owners of such access under the conditions of article L. 336-3.
"In the course of a procedure of certified evaluation of their conformity to the specifications set forth in the first paragraph and their effectiveness, the High Authority establishes a list characterizing the methods of security whose use exonerates the owner of access of his responsibility with respect to article L. 336-3. This characterization is periodically reviewed.
"A decree of the Council of State specifies the evaluation procedure to characterize these methods of security.
Maybe the referenced Article L.336-3 will explain...
"Art. L. 336-3. - The owner of access to online public communication services has an obligation to watch that this access is not being used for purposes of reproduction, representation, making available or communication to the public of works or objects protected by right of authorship or a related right without permission of copyright holders when it is required as stated in books I and II.
"No sanction can be taken against the owner of the access in the following cases:
"1 If the owner of the access has secured his access through one of the means on the list mentioned in the second paragraph of article L. 331-32;
"2 If the rights infringement referred to in the first paragraph of this article is committed by a person who fraudulently used the access to online public communication service;
"3 In case of force majeure.
"The breaching of the obligation defined in the first paragraph by an access owner hasn't the effect of involving his penal reponsibility.
... and maybe not.
I also understand that the line remains in service and the subscriber is billed for it (unless she chooses to pay to terminate the connection) but only commercially
"Art. L. 331-30. - The suspension of access mentioned in articles L. 331-27 and L. 331-28 does not, in itself, affect paying the price of subscription to the service provider. Article L. 121-84 of the consumer code does not apply during the period of suspension.
"The costs of a possible closure of the subscription during the period of suspension are born by the subscriber.
"The suspension applies only to access to public on line communication services and to electronic communications. When this access service is purchased as part of commercial composite services including other types of services, such as telephone or television services, the decision of suspension does not apply to these services.
From the Wikipedia article on Michael Foot (British Politician and leader of the Labour Party in the early '80s):
In 1986, Foot was the subject of one of the best-known newspaper headlines of all time. The Times ran an article about Foot, who had been put in charge of a nuclear disarmament committee. The headline stated "Foot Heads Arms Body." Although originally written as a joke by editor Martyn Cornell, the paper ran it.
Of course some of us secretly wished that Mr Foot could find some evidence that the minister of defence was a supporter of the national front. (There was neither evidence nor even a suggestion that this could be true)
Please paraphrase "We support ACME Astoturf as a yard covering that encourages multiplicity of choice and interoperability giving us the ultimate consumer the choice. * recognizes that multiple standards are good for the economy and also for technical innovation and progress in the country, especially for smaller organizations like us, who require choice and innovation"
Please write about your work
Please paraphrase "*** also supports ACME Astroturf as this does not have any financial implications thus releasing our resources for welfare and development of society."
Thanks for having taken the time to respond to my post. It didn't quite correspond with my case, probably because I did not make myself sufficiently clear in my original post.
The thing that motivated me to work out how to make a live USB key was a severe distrust of other people's Windows installations and a fear of Conficker which was getting a lot of publicity at the time.
I wanted a way of transferring files to a potentially infected PC whose network connection may not be working without risking infecting my USB key and potentially having it pass infections on to other, clean machines.
/dev/sdc1 which is the LiveUSB partition has zero bytes free so hopefully viruses will not write anything to it, and/dev/sdc2 - which should be invisible to Windows - contains any files I may wish to transfer.
In theory I can use it to boot a windows PC into Linux, inspect the file system without worrying if a rootkit is hiding something, download drivers from the web or transfer files from the second partition on my USB key or even run an antivirus scan with clam.
In practice I do have some issues with drivers for PCs I have never seen before, and clam has signalled several false positives and has not detected any of the obscure viruses I keep in my archive of infections found, but I continue to add drivers as I need them and as they become available, and do find it was worth the effort to learn how to do this
My comments about being unable to see the contents of the LiveUSB home directory are because when I mount the LiveUSB partition without booting from it I see that it contains about 15 files in three directories. The files of interest to my post are:
squashfs.img (860 MB)
overlay-USB-2.6.30.9-90-7C22-C9F9 (just over a Gigabyte)
Between them these two files implement the file system when I boot from the LiveUSB but I have no idea how to mount them otherwise.
This is slightly off topic but you may find it interesting:
Once you have an up to date Fedora installation it is not much effort and not a huge learning curve to make your own Live USB key which is totally up to date.
I use a 4 gig key with two 2GB partitions: one is the Live USB, the other is where I keep data that I want to use with the live USB but which is not part of it (it is not obvious to me how to read the home directory of the live USB's file system when I have not booted from the live USB)
Today my Live USB key runs and installs kernel version 2.6.30.9-90.fc11 (same as my up to date notebook) and has current versions of all the software I selected with a kickstart file at creation time.
Without the 700MB limitation of a CD I can add the tools I use every day so I am currently running with an ISO file of about 850MB. The rest of the 2GB partition is used for non volatile storage.
Software installation and update works so I can update my LiveUSB just like I update any other Fedora PC.
Caveats:
1) I read somewhere that kernel updates don't work or require a custom script to do so. When a new kernel version appears in Software Updates I usually take that as an opportunity to create a new Live USB from scratch. This involves editing the kickstart file to add any new must-have tools and typing a couple of lines at the command prompt. This pulls down all the latest versions and builds a new ISO. Then there is a simple GUI interface to create the liveUSB. This process allows you to decide how much of the partition you wish to use for non-volatile storage.
2) I have encountered some PCs that would not recognise/boot from the Live USB and as they were not my PCs I have not had the opportunity to exhaustively find out why. Often the fix is to enable legacy USB support in the BIOS but this does not always work or the option is not always present in BIOS. Your mileage may vary
'Open the control panel, click on the hardware icon, open the driver panel, click on the devices tab, find small icon with the plus sign before it that reads audio devices, expand it, find the audio card in the expanded list, which would probably be the one that doesn't have the word codec in it, see if it has an exclamation mark before it, right click it and pick properties, go to the resources tab, write down all the values in the list of ports/interrupts en post them here'
... And when you've done that try doing it by telephone with someone in another country, hired for her accounting skills and for whom English is her third language. Ten years ago I wasted an hour trying and failing to find ways to put 'Drag the file from this window to that window' in English that she could understand. I had assumed that as she had a Hebrew keyboard the GUI would be easier than the command line. I was wrong.
It is most frustrating to work out the switch and port connected to the virused PC only to be told by the local site admin (who is on a different continent) that he doesn't know the physical location of the machine attached to that port and it would take hours to trace the wiring in his beautiful but undocumented wiring closet.
If your site is small and you know all the users and their PCs it's not such a big deal but once you have several hundreds of PCs in conjunction with managed switches it is totally irresponsible not to be able to locate a machine given the switch address and port number.
If each of your patch cables has the same unique identifier at both ends you can easily map (and then audit from time to time) your wiring closet's connections by noting the ID of the patch cable connected to each port of your switch and the ID of the patch cable connected to each port of the patchpanel connected to users' network outlets. (You DO have a map of where each of the users' network outlets are don't you?). If your cable labels are barcoded the job becomes almost a pleasure!
Once you know where the ends of all your patch cables are terminated your computer can tell you what the links are - I use a perl script but just using a text editor's search facility you can easily work out where any given port is connected.
Of course it's usually too late because the anonymous cables are already in place. In that case you can build up a map by noting the network names and locations of any PCs that you touch so you have a correspondence between PC name, location, and - hopefully - network outlet number.
Then download the arp table from your router, the Mac Address / Port assignments from your managed switches and (as original poster is in a Windows shop) run NBTSTAT -A for each IP address (NBTSTAT is built into windows. A faster way is to run nbtscan but last time I looked it was not a builtin. I seem to remember I needed to install cygwin when I installed it on a Windows PC). nbtstat / nbtscan give you the correspondence between the Windows PC's name and its MAC address. Alternatively get this information from your DHCP server.
Given that information you can work out the correspondence between switch port and location without touching a single patch cable. I use a perl script but I'm sure it can be done other ways. Hint: If you have multiple managed switches the same MAC address may appear on different switches. For most switches that will be the uplink port connecting it to other switches. The switch which is really connected to the device should just have the one mac address on its port, or if there is a miniswitch at the user's end it should have fewer mac addresses on that port than any other switch.
Last thing. Visio diagrams are beautiful and really handy for top level stuff. However my wiring maps are ugly spreadsheets which allow me to extract the data and process it programatically. Much more useful.
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.stealthbelt.com/
I just KNOW I'm going to regret having Googled this topic...
If it was a macbook it would more likely be Skyhook, who mapped wifi networks before Google and I think they were used at least by the iPhone 3 before iPhones had GPS.
I can't test it as my router is not reachable from a public road but apparently Skyhook has (or had) an api for geolocating from a wifi AP's mac address.
https://coderrr.wordpress.com/2008/09/10/get-the-physical-location-of-wireless-router-from-its-mac-address-bssid/
So will the newly Alzheimers-free superbeings be simultaneously sterilised or will their offspring have to pay a license fee to Monsanto from cradle to grave?
USB Low Speed 1.536 Mbit/s 192 kB/s
USB Full Speed 12 Mbit/s 1.5 MB/s
USB Hi-Speed (USB 2.0) 480 Mbit/s 60 MB/s
So call it the Full Size Array and wait for developments
For those customers wishing to purchase a Deluxe FootPath solution for a mall we have provided an indicative price list below. For example, a 55,000 square metre mall that was interested in purchasing a full FootPath solution with data year round (52 weeks) the price would be 69k euros per year. Included within that subscription is information on:
* Visitor traffic to the mall (by hour, day, month and year)
* Visitor dwell time at the mall (by day, month and year)
* Exposure to advertising within the mall
* Frequency of visit to the mall
* Shopper hours at the mall
* Traffic to each retailer within the mall
* Linkages between retailers in the mall
* Shopper flow around the mall
* Nationality of visitor to the mall
* Visitor traffic by level and zone across the mall
* Interactions between the mall and neighbouring areas (such as adjacent town centres or competing centres)
So the data that the mall pays to gather from its customers without its customers informed consent is potentially used to aid the mall's competition?
s/Nationality/Probable country of residence/ A minor detail unless you happen to be an ex-pat working in $CountryRepresentingATerroristThreat
Thanks for the useful link. It looks very informative and nothing like as large a download as I feared
(Not yet had my third coffee of the day, I assumed tldp stood for "too long; didn't print")
Any lawyer can tell you how to follow the spirit of the law. It takes a true scholar to use the letter of the law to subvert the spirit of the law.
Back in the days when "Word Processors" were dedicated machines I worked for a company that worked in a submarine - related industry.
There was a story - possibly apocryphal - that the company came within in inch of sending a tender to a government agency full of references to "willow water"
From the translation of the Hadopi law (provided here: http://www.laquadrature.net/wiki/HADOPI_full_translation
"Art. L. 331-27. - When it is held that the subscriber has failed to recognize the obligation defined in article L 336-3 during the year following the reception of an injunction sent by the committee for protection of rights and accompanied by a receipted letter or any other method needed to establish proof of the date that the injunction was sent and that when the subscriber received it, the committee may, after a hearing, pronounce, as a result of the gravity of the violations and the use of access, one of the following sanctions:
"1 The suspension of access to service for a duration of two months to one year accompanied by making it impossible for the subscriber to subscribe during that period to another contract giving access to a public on line communication service with any operator;
"2 A warning to take, within a time it determines, measures to prevent the renewal of the accused violation, particularly a method of security found on the list defined in the second paragraph of article L. 331-32, and to inform the High Authority, if necessary under duress.
I heard somewhere that Item 2 hints at the possibility of putting some "Approved Software" on the subscribers' PC(s) which will monitor activity and stop the PC(s) infringing copyright. No doubt it would only run on Windows. However it is very hard to find any real information about this. The referenced article 331-32 looks like it might have some meat in it but alas no...
"Art. L. 331-32. - After consultating the creators of means of security intended to prevent illicit use of access to a public on line communication service, entities whose activity is to offer access to such a service, as well as companies governed by title II of this book and duly constituted professional societies, the High Authority makes public the functionally pertinent specifications presented by these means considered, in its view, as exonerating from responsibility the owners of such access under the conditions of article L. 336-3.
"In the course of a procedure of certified evaluation of their conformity to the specifications set forth in the first paragraph and their effectiveness, the High Authority establishes a list characterizing the methods of security whose use exonerates the owner of access of his responsibility with respect to article L. 336-3. This characterization is periodically reviewed.
"A decree of the Council of State specifies the evaluation procedure to characterize these methods of security.
Maybe the referenced Article L.336-3 will explain...
"Art. L. 336-3. - The owner of access to online public communication services has an obligation to watch that this access is not being used for purposes of reproduction, representation, making available or communication to the public of works or objects protected by right of authorship or a related right without permission of copyright holders when it is required as stated in books I and II.
"No sanction can be taken against the owner of the access in the following cases:
"1 If the owner of the access has secured his access through one of the means on the list mentioned in the second paragraph of article L. 331-32 ;
"2 If the rights infringement referred to in the first paragraph of this article is committed by a person who fraudulently used the access to online public communication service;
"3 In case of force majeure.
"The breaching of the obligation defined in the first paragraph by an access owner hasn't the effect of involving his penal reponsibility.
... and maybe not.
I also understand that the line remains in service and the subscriber is billed for it (unless she chooses to pay to terminate the connection) but only commercially
From the translation of the Hadopi law (provided here: http://www.laquadrature.net/wiki/HADOPI_full_translation )
"Art. L. 331-30. - The suspension of access mentioned in articles L. 331-27 and L. 331-28 does not, in itself, affect paying the price of subscription to the service provider. Article L. 121-84 of the consumer code does not apply during the period of suspension.
"The costs of a possible closure of the subscription during the period of suspension are born by the subscriber.
"The suspension applies only to access to public on line communication services and to electronic communications. When this access service is purchased as part of commercial composite services including other types of services, such as telephone or television services, the decision of suspension does not apply to these services.
Hmmm... I thought I was logged in when I posted
5. Iraqi Head Seeks Arms
From the Wikipedia article on Michael Foot (British Politician and leader of the Labour Party in the early '80s):
Of course some of us secretly wished that Mr Foot could find some evidence that the minister of defence was a supporter of the national front. (There was neither evidence nor even a suggestion that this could be true)
Why did we wish this? Think of the headline -
Foot knows arms head backs Front muscle
Respected Sir
Please write a paragraph about your organization
Please paraphrase "We support ACME Astoturf as a yard covering that encourages multiplicity of choice and interoperability giving us the ultimate consumer the choice. * recognizes that multiple standards are good for the economy and also for technical innovation and progress in the country, especially for smaller organizations like us, who require choice and innovation"
Please write about your work
Please paraphrase "*** also supports ACME Astroturf as this does not have any financial implications thus releasing our resources for welfare and development of society."
Thanking You
Yours Faithfully
Name Designation
realityimpaired,
/dev/sdc1 which is the LiveUSB partition has zero bytes free so hopefully viruses will not write anything to it, and /dev/sdc2 - which should be invisible to Windows - contains any files I may wish to transfer.
Thanks for having taken the time to respond to my post. It didn't quite correspond with my case, probably because I did not make myself sufficiently clear in my original post.
The thing that motivated me to work out how to make a live USB key was a severe distrust of other people's Windows installations and a fear of Conficker which was getting a lot of publicity at the time.
I wanted a way of transferring files to a potentially infected PC whose network connection may not be working without risking infecting my USB key and potentially having it pass infections on to other, clean machines.
In theory I can use it to boot a windows PC into Linux, inspect the file system without worrying if a rootkit is hiding something, download drivers from the web or transfer files from the second partition on my USB key or even run an antivirus scan with clam.
In practice I do have some issues with drivers for PCs I have never seen before, and clam has signalled several false positives and has not detected any of the obscure viruses I keep in my archive of infections found, but I continue to add drivers as I need them and as they become available, and do find it was worth the effort to learn how to do this
My comments about being unable to see the contents of the LiveUSB home directory are because when I mount the LiveUSB partition without booting from it I see that it contains about 15 files in three directories. The files of interest to my post are:
squashfs.img (860 MB)
overlay-USB-2.6.30.9-90-7C22-C9F9 (just over a Gigabyte)
Between them these two files implement the file system when I boot from the LiveUSB but I have no idea how to mount them otherwise.
This is slightly off topic but you may find it interesting:
Once you have an up to date Fedora installation it is not much effort and not a huge learning curve to make your own Live USB key which is totally up to date.
I use a 4 gig key with two 2GB partitions: one is the Live USB, the other is where I keep data that I want to use with the live USB but which is not part of it (it is not obvious to me how to read the home directory of the live USB's file system when I have not booted from the live USB)
Today my Live USB key runs and installs kernel version 2.6.30.9-90.fc11 (same as my up to date notebook) and has current versions of all the software I selected with a kickstart file at creation time.
Without the 700MB limitation of a CD I can add the tools I use every day so I am currently running with an ISO file of about 850MB. The rest of the 2GB partition is used for non volatile storage.
Software installation and update works so I can update my LiveUSB just like I update any other Fedora PC.
Caveats:
1) I read somewhere that kernel updates don't work or require a custom script to do so. When a new kernel version appears in Software Updates I usually take that as an opportunity to create a new Live USB from scratch. This involves editing the kickstart file to add any new must-have tools and typing a couple of lines at the command prompt. This pulls down all the latest versions and builds a new ISO. Then there is a simple GUI interface to create the liveUSB. This process allows you to decide how much of the partition you wish to use for non-volatile storage.
2) I have encountered some PCs that would not recognise/boot from the Live USB and as they were not my PCs I have not had the opportunity to exhaustively find out why. Often the fix is to enable legacy USB support in the BIOS but this does not always work or the option is not always present in BIOS. Your mileage may vary
... I should add that she could hold a normal conversation in perfect English. She just didn't have a good vocabulary of computer terms.
'Open the control panel, click on the hardware icon, open the driver panel, click on the devices tab, find small icon with the plus sign before it that reads audio devices, expand it, find the audio card in the expanded list, which would probably be the one that doesn't have the word codec in it, see if it has an exclamation mark before it, right click it and pick properties, go to the resources tab, write down all the values in the list of ports/interrupts en post them here'
... And when you've done that try doing it by telephone with someone in another country, hired for her accounting skills and for whom English is her third language. Ten years ago I wasted an hour trying and failing to find ways to put 'Drag the file from this window to that window' in English that she could understand. I had assumed that as she had a Hebrew keyboard the GUI would be easier than the command line. I was wrong.
Label all your cables!
It is most frustrating to work out the switch and port connected to the virused PC only to be told by the local site admin (who is on a different continent) that he doesn't know the physical location of the machine attached to that port and it would take hours to trace the wiring in his beautiful but undocumented wiring closet.
If your site is small and you know all the users and their PCs it's not such a big deal but once you have several hundreds of PCs in conjunction with managed switches it is totally irresponsible not to be able to locate a machine given the switch address and port number.
If each of your patch cables has the same unique identifier at both ends you can easily map (and then audit from time to time) your wiring closet's connections by noting the ID of the patch cable connected to each port of your switch and the ID of the patch cable connected to each port of the patchpanel connected to users' network outlets. (You DO have a map of where each of the users' network outlets are don't you?).
If your cable labels are barcoded the job becomes almost a pleasure!
Once you know where the ends of all your patch cables are terminated your computer can tell you what the links are - I use a perl script but just using a text editor's search facility you can easily work out where any given port is connected.
Of course it's usually too late because the anonymous cables are already in place. In that case you can build up a map by noting the network names and locations of any PCs that you touch so you have a correspondence between PC name, location, and - hopefully - network outlet number.
Then download the arp table from your router, the Mac Address / Port assignments from your managed switches and (as original poster is in a Windows shop) run NBTSTAT -A for each IP address (NBTSTAT is built into windows. A faster way is to run nbtscan but last time I looked it was not a builtin. I seem to remember I needed to install cygwin when I installed it on a Windows PC). nbtstat / nbtscan give you the correspondence between the Windows PC's name and its MAC address. Alternatively get this information from your DHCP server.
Given that information you can work out the correspondence between switch port and location without touching a single patch cable. I use a perl script but I'm sure it can be done other ways. Hint: If you have multiple managed switches the same MAC address may appear on different switches. For most switches that will be the uplink port connecting it to other switches. The switch which is really connected to the device should just have the one mac address on its port, or if there is a miniswitch at the user's end it should have fewer mac addresses on that port than any other switch.
Last thing. Visio diagrams are beautiful and really handy for top level stuff. However my wiring maps are ugly spreadsheets which allow me to extract the data and process it programatically. Much more useful.