...Is the EFF suggesting that I need to provide a series of power outlets outside my house, so that people can share that?...
I have an electric bike and do have an extension cord outside my house extending to the bike to charge it overnight. My bicycle s shaped like a scooter and cannot be brought indoors.
I have a neighbor who also owns an electric bicycle. He parks next to me and uses my extension cord. I used to charge him $5 a month for electricity... until I got an outlet measuring device from Hope Depot and discovered he was using about 1 1/2 pennies per day. ie: 45 cents per month!!! So I stopped charging (since he pre-paid for years of electricity) and he occasionally gives me a free beer. All in all it is a good arrangement. Note: this is not communism for you frightened Capitalists. But for the record: communism looks like the winner, see China as an example.
I for one really do wish everyone who owned an electric bike would put out an extension cord. I sure wouldn't mind seeing a bike or someone using there cell phone or laptop off my electricity. After all we are talking about a fraction of a penny for most needs and the added benefit of emergency or convenient electricity would be a real benefit to anyone carrying portable electric devices (ie: me, you, everyone)
It's not socially responsible to suggest that it's OK for people to use Internet connectivity they don't know anything about, like who the man in the middle might be. It's not socially responsible to allow unknown third parties to rile though your personal belongings, like those tax returns you left on that unsecured windows share.
Do you realize that the Internet is essentially a large untrusted network? I mean you typically don't know the path by which your Internet requests/responses take. In this way you should always assume that the "man-in-the-middle" attack exists. If you don't understand how to mitigate this risk already while using the Internet.. like using SSL for important/private communication, PGP or similar encryption for private email and OTR for chat... then you are already at risk for man-in-the-middle and should research best practices to avoid this while using the Internet.
As far as unsecured windows shares. This is a problem that the user needs to fix and is not reason to throws out the concept of sharing bandwidth. You probably shouldn't have open shares without any protection at all. Besides, the author clearly describes a potential protocol that isolates the open Internet connections from the local network.
I agree totally with the article and believe free/open wifi should be easy to setup securely. But I think Local/City Wireless Networks would have great value regardless of whether they provide a direct connection to the Internet or not.
I live in Vancouver and right now, from my home I currently "see" 12 neighboring routers. When I walk around town I rarely "see" less then 5 routers within range from any location but usually i see 20 OR MORE routers all the time. If I can see all these routers with my portable device as I travel on the bus... then all of these routers can "see" each other and potentially relay information amongst one another. This could pass peer-to-peer services directly between two devices anywhere in the city without ever interfering with the users Internet bandwidth limitations or effecting their ISP agreement. I could see such a network covering a city and other populated areas quite easily and providing free services to anyone in the city such as: free voice calls, free chat service, free access to your home network, content broadcasting (by local radio, tv), file-sharing programs, media streaming one's owned content between self, friends and family and free access to any other sites/services connected to this network. Regardless of whether there is a mechanism for this network to provide access to the greater "Internet" as a whole is irrelevant. Although... one could imagine that it would be quite possible to proxy across this network through your home router and out to the Internet at large for oneself... even if this user doesn't want to share their bandwidth to the public at large.
With such a community based network and a large portion of participants... most of my phone calls, and chat sessions with friends and family could use this technology totally free. Local services such as banks, government services, police offices, tourist information and libraries could all "hook-up" their existing networks to this city wide free network as well to provide access to services and content. Commercial entities and other local services could join in as well and make their network content available for city use for free. All without touching some users precious Internet connection or having participants worry about what there ISP might think about this "sharing of bandwidth".
But the most interesting part would/will be the lack of control. Since there is no longer an ISP agreement about how the network is to be used, every user would have the ability to implement their own services. So everyone can configure their home servers to provide a range of services, from email, chat and web page hosting, to legal media sharing to publishing and broadcasting... all directly from home.
Some may read this and complain how this network will never support streaming or wont handle this or that. My response: "so be it". It doesn't matter. The network will deliver what it is capable of and that is the service it will provide. It is not intended to be 100% reliable... just near 100% coverage. If we demand more from it... then it will simply not deliver to our expectations and then demand will generally decrease. But remember: wireless IS FAST. Faster then your Internet connection and faster then the latency of transferring between multiple hops to gather content from across the globe. As an example, I have streamed 2 full hi-definition (1080i 8Gb/hr) broadcast programs across my home 802.11n wifi at the same time to 2 different televisions. I cannot stream this quantity/quality directly across my ISP's connection. I have tried to do so, using a neighbors PC that was connected to the same ISP through a different IP. It couldn't even properly put through a single HD signal. So if the content is being shared between neighbors or only a couple hops... I expect the speed will be far greater then what you are currently accustom to. And sharing will be far more convenient between close community members.
IMO, making the protocol force the user to become both a client and a repeater/router in orde
I've been using 11.04 beta on my netbook for a couple of weeks. I have experienced a couple of lock ups. But again I was using the "beta".
I find the interface alright looking and fairly easy to understand after a couple hours of playing and a day of usage. But sometimes the overlay menu wont appear when I move the mouse to request it. And sometimes the overlay gets stuck on the page even when I am not wanting it and click on the application.
Now these issues may actual be some "feature" that I dont understand and cant control yet. However, I find the old Ubuntu interface was more intuitive. But then again... it was pretty much like windows.
Now, instead of using columns and words for the menus, all menu options appear as icons. In this way, I found the interface to appear more touch-screen compatible then Gnome. I suspect that these visual changes could make the Ubuntu interface more compatible with smart phones and pad touch controls. So in this way... I think it is a good move.
I have no first hand experience with Gnome Shell, so I am only comparing against 10.04/10 Gnome window manager with or without Compiz.
I for one am glad for this article.
I have been following Hotz legal issues here on slashdot... and when I heard the PSN was hacked I did draw a possible connection in some manner in my mind. I found this useful to here a report that Hotz is clearly rejecting an involvement. Thanks.
I bought a cheapie netbook. I'm trying this out now with Ubuntu Alternate. Should be interesting on the Atom based piggie.
I've done what you describe and would like to share my experience.
I've been running ubuntu with a luks encrypted root drive on an atom netbook for over a year on several systems. I've installed luks on internal HD's, external HD's, SD cards and USB sticks. Also I did experiment with further encryption of home directories using ecryptfs.
Using luks does slow your computer and each additional level of encryption adds to this delay. I have no real measurements but I could "feel" the lag and estimate it to be 10%. Running ecryptfs on top of luks appeared to cause "brown outs" or times when the netbooks would not respond for about 10-30 seconds. My suggestion is to only use ecryptfs for user home directory encryption if you plan to share this netbook with other users (multiple login accounts)... or you wish to provide a guest account.
But luks is reliable for me so far. I have never run into a situation where luks failed and the drive was unusable. I however, made mistakes like overwriting the keys and such and if that happens to you.. just format the drive, because all is gone. Consider this a lesson and backup your luks keys onto USB and throw into your bank deposit box. luks has never let me down... even during improper shutdown and filesystem corruption, ubuntu is able to check/repair the drive and still access the drive just as you would see on a non-luks encrypted drive. I have also used luks disk encryption at work and never lost any data or was unable to access my drive. At this point I trust a luks partition as much as any other non encrypted partition type.
Funny story: I once showed a bunch of managers how easily I could access their own hard drive data simply by booting from my own Ubuntu USB stick on a computer which was protected by a user password that I didn't know. I expressed how full disk encryption would solve the gaping hole in protecting our business data/resources. They were impressed, but came up with their own solution... they removed the ability to boot from USB in the BIOS settings of all work PC's. At first that sounds ideal except it does nothing to prevent the HD from being moved into another PC and allowing full access to data once again. It made me think these managers were more disturbed by the demonstration and wished to prevent me from showing that how weak our current security policy was then actually fixing the issue properly. Lesson: don't be silly like these managers. Install full disk encryption (luks) and you can be sure your data is safe if/when you lose your netbook.
Except a Ford GT will fill the tank up in 2 minutes. The Tesla takes many hours to fill up. That was the real reason they pointed out the lack of range.
The good news is that after you purchase your Tesla, you effectively have your own gas (fuel) station via a plug in the garage.
So although it may take longer to refuel, it may actual reduce the time you take to refill it.
If your daily usage is covered by the battery range, then the refuelling time is effectively reduced to zero. As you will only need mere few seconds to connect the plug to your Tesla after you park at home. Electric refuelling will continue unattended. This is significantly less refuelling time than would be required for any gasoline vehicle... which I remind you would be MUCH longer then 2 minutes in any real world usage (unless you got a pit crew of your own).
It would be interesting if anyone knows the statistics for how long people spend on average per month stopping at gas stations. I would like to see how much real time I will save in my life by moving to electric.
- remove Ahmadinejad - recognize Mousavi as president
This suggestion is not democracy at all. Ahmadinejad won the election according to the results. From what I have seen, the Mousavi party is not meeting the legal requirements to protest the results and is instead encouraging people to protest directly through civil disobedience. One would have to guess that this is because Mousavi knows he lost and the correct process would prove that.
As a democratic country the courts should decide where recounts are appropriate and whether fraud may have been committed.
After all... according to this guys logic, we should have had Gore in office 9 years ago instead of Bush. I mean that whole thing went through the US supreme courts and they came to the correct decision (didn't they?)
The problem I see with most opinions on this whole thing is that our opinions are formed on the reports from Euro/America media sources. There is a definite dislike for Ahmadinejad due to the negative and embarassing comments from him about the West. But in my opinion, the majority of what he says (in english at least) is entirely correct. Most of what I hear about Ahmadinejad comes not from his mouth, but from summarize of what others reporters say he said. Then when I hear his point of view... it is entirely different and taken out of context.
I don't know who should be in office over there. But to assume we know what the majority of people in Iran want just because one leader suits our taste more then the other is ignorant. To pretend that you know and act upon it is to support the US propaganda machine.
Additionally: throwing rocks at the car of someone who's political views you do not like... that is not terrorism. Although expanding the scope of 'terrorist' is a fun past-time.
Slashdot Mirror
...Is the EFF suggesting that I need to provide a series of power outlets outside my house, so that people can share that?...
I have an electric bike and do have an extension cord outside my house extending to the bike to charge it overnight. My bicycle s shaped like a scooter and cannot be brought indoors.
I have a neighbor who also owns an electric bicycle. He parks next to me and uses my extension cord. I used to charge him $5 a month for electricity... until I got an outlet measuring device from Hope Depot and discovered he was using about 1 1/2 pennies per day. ie: 45 cents per month!!! So I stopped charging (since he pre-paid for years of electricity) and he occasionally gives me a free beer. All in all it is a good arrangement. Note: this is not communism for you frightened Capitalists. But for the record: communism looks like the winner, see China as an example.
I for one really do wish everyone who owned an electric bike would put out an extension cord. I sure wouldn't mind seeing a bike or someone using there cell phone or laptop off my electricity. After all we are talking about a fraction of a penny for most needs and the added benefit of emergency or convenient electricity would be a real benefit to anyone carrying portable electric devices (ie: me, you, everyone)
It's not socially responsible to suggest that it's OK for people to use Internet connectivity they don't know anything about, like who the man in the middle might be. It's not socially responsible to allow unknown third parties to rile though your personal belongings, like those tax returns you left on that unsecured windows share.
Do you realize that the Internet is essentially a large untrusted network? I mean you typically don't know the path by which your Internet requests/responses take. In this way you should always assume that the "man-in-the-middle" attack exists. If you don't understand how to mitigate this risk already while using the Internet.. like using SSL for important/private communication, PGP or similar encryption for private email and OTR for chat... then you are already at risk for man-in-the-middle and should research best practices to avoid this while using the Internet.
As far as unsecured windows shares. This is a problem that the user needs to fix and is not reason to throws out the concept of sharing bandwidth. You probably shouldn't have open shares without any protection at all. Besides, the author clearly describes a potential protocol that isolates the open Internet connections from the local network.
I agree totally with the article and believe free/open wifi should be easy to setup securely. But I think Local/City Wireless Networks would have great value regardless of whether they provide a direct connection to the Internet or not.
I live in Vancouver and right now, from my home I currently "see" 12 neighboring routers. When I walk around town I rarely "see" less then 5 routers within range from any location but usually i see 20 OR MORE routers all the time. If I can see all these routers with my portable device as I travel on the bus... then all of these routers can "see" each other and potentially relay information amongst one another. This could pass peer-to-peer services directly between two devices anywhere in the city without ever interfering with the users Internet bandwidth limitations or effecting their ISP agreement. I could see such a network covering a city and other populated areas quite easily and providing free services to anyone in the city such as: free voice calls, free chat service, free access to your home network, content broadcasting (by local radio, tv), file-sharing programs, media streaming one's owned content between self, friends and family and free access to any other sites/services connected to this network. Regardless of whether there is a mechanism for this network to provide access to the greater "Internet" as a whole is irrelevant. Although... one could imagine that it would be quite possible to proxy across this network through your home router and out to the Internet at large for oneself... even if this user doesn't want to share their bandwidth to the public at large.
With such a community based network and a large portion of participants... most of my phone calls, and chat sessions with friends and family could use this technology totally free. Local services such as banks, government services, police offices, tourist information and libraries could all "hook-up" their existing networks to this city wide free network as well to provide access to services and content. Commercial entities and other local services could join in as well and make their network content available for city use for free. All without touching some users precious Internet connection or having participants worry about what there ISP might think about this "sharing of bandwidth".
But the most interesting part would/will be the lack of control. Since there is no longer an ISP agreement about how the network is to be used, every user would have the ability to implement their own services. So everyone can configure their home servers to provide a range of services, from email, chat and web page hosting, to legal media sharing to publishing and broadcasting... all directly from home.
Some may read this and complain how this network will never support streaming or wont handle this or that. My response: "so be it". It doesn't matter. The network will deliver what it is capable of and that is the service it will provide. It is not intended to be 100% reliable... just near 100% coverage. If we demand more from it... then it will simply not deliver to our expectations and then demand will generally decrease. But remember: wireless IS FAST. Faster then your Internet connection and faster then the latency of transferring between multiple hops to gather content from across the globe. As an example, I have streamed 2 full hi-definition (1080i 8Gb/hr) broadcast programs across my home 802.11n wifi at the same time to 2 different televisions. I cannot stream this quantity/quality directly across my ISP's connection. I have tried to do so, using a neighbors PC that was connected to the same ISP through a different IP. It couldn't even properly put through a single HD signal. So if the content is being shared between neighbors or only a couple hops... I expect the speed will be far greater then what you are currently accustom to. And sharing will be far more convenient between close community members.
IMO, making the protocol force the user to become both a client and a repeater/router in orde
I've been using 11.04 beta on my netbook for a couple of weeks. I have experienced a couple of lock ups. But again I was using the "beta".
I find the interface alright looking and fairly easy to understand after a couple hours of playing and a day of usage. But sometimes the overlay menu wont appear when I move the mouse to request it. And sometimes the overlay gets stuck on the page even when I am not wanting it and click on the application.
Now these issues may actual be some "feature" that I dont understand and cant control yet. However, I find the old Ubuntu interface was more intuitive. But then again... it was pretty much like windows.
Now, instead of using columns and words for the menus, all menu options appear as icons. In this way, I found the interface to appear more touch-screen compatible then Gnome. I suspect that these visual changes could make the Ubuntu interface more compatible with smart phones and pad touch controls. So in this way... I think it is a good move.
I have no first hand experience with Gnome Shell, so I am only comparing against 10.04/10 Gnome window manager with or without Compiz.
I for one am glad for this article. I have been following Hotz legal issues here on slashdot... and when I heard the PSN was hacked I did draw a possible connection in some manner in my mind. I found this useful to here a report that Hotz is clearly rejecting an involvement. Thanks.
I bought a cheapie netbook. I'm trying this out now with Ubuntu Alternate. Should be interesting on the Atom based piggie.
I've done what you describe and would like to share my experience. I've been running ubuntu with a luks encrypted root drive on an atom netbook for over a year on several systems. I've installed luks on internal HD's, external HD's, SD cards and USB sticks. Also I did experiment with further encryption of home directories using ecryptfs.
Using luks does slow your computer and each additional level of encryption adds to this delay. I have no real measurements but I could "feel" the lag and estimate it to be 10%. Running ecryptfs on top of luks appeared to cause "brown outs" or times when the netbooks would not respond for about 10-30 seconds. My suggestion is to only use ecryptfs for user home directory encryption if you plan to share this netbook with other users (multiple login accounts)... or you wish to provide a guest account.
But luks is reliable for me so far. I have never run into a situation where luks failed and the drive was unusable. I however, made mistakes like overwriting the keys and such and if that happens to you.. just format the drive, because all is gone. Consider this a lesson and backup your luks keys onto USB and throw into your bank deposit box. luks has never let me down... even during improper shutdown and filesystem corruption, ubuntu is able to check/repair the drive and still access the drive just as you would see on a non-luks encrypted drive. I have also used luks disk encryption at work and never lost any data or was unable to access my drive. At this point I trust a luks partition as much as any other non encrypted partition type.
Funny story: I once showed a bunch of managers how easily I could access their own hard drive data simply by booting from my own Ubuntu USB stick on a computer which was protected by a user password that I didn't know. I expressed how full disk encryption would solve the gaping hole in protecting our business data/resources. They were impressed, but came up with their own solution... they removed the ability to boot from USB in the BIOS settings of all work PC's. At first that sounds ideal except it does nothing to prevent the HD from being moved into another PC and allowing full access to data once again. It made me think these managers were more disturbed by the demonstration and wished to prevent me from showing that how weak our current security policy was then actually fixing the issue properly. Lesson: don't be silly like these managers. Install full disk encryption (luks) and you can be sure your data is safe if/when you lose your netbook.
Except a Ford GT will fill the tank up in 2 minutes. The Tesla takes many hours to fill up. That was the real reason they pointed out the lack of range.
The good news is that after you purchase your Tesla, you effectively have your own gas (fuel) station via a plug in the garage. So although it may take longer to refuel, it may actual reduce the time you take to refill it. If your daily usage is covered by the battery range, then the refuelling time is effectively reduced to zero. As you will only need mere few seconds to connect the plug to your Tesla after you park at home. Electric refuelling will continue unattended. This is significantly less refuelling time than would be required for any gasoline vehicle... which I remind you would be MUCH longer then 2 minutes in any real world usage (unless you got a pit crew of your own). It would be interesting if anyone knows the statistics for how long people spend on average per month stopping at gas stations. I would like to see how much real time I will save in my life by moving to electric.
The link provided says Iran should do this:
- remove Ahmadinejad
- recognize Mousavi as president
This suggestion is not democracy at all. Ahmadinejad won the election according to the results.
From what I have seen, the Mousavi party is not meeting the legal requirements to protest the results and is instead encouraging people to protest directly through civil disobedience. One would have to guess that this is because Mousavi knows he lost and the correct process would prove that.
As a democratic country the courts should decide where recounts are appropriate and whether fraud may have been committed.
After all... according to this guys logic, we should have had Gore in office 9 years ago instead of Bush. I mean that whole thing went through the US supreme courts and they came to the correct decision (didn't they?)
The problem I see with most opinions on this whole thing is that our opinions are formed on the reports from Euro/America media sources. There is a definite dislike for Ahmadinejad due to the negative and embarassing comments from him about the West. But in my opinion, the majority of what he says (in english at least) is entirely correct. Most of what I hear about Ahmadinejad comes not from his mouth, but from summarize of what others reporters say he said. Then when I hear his point of view... it is entirely different and taken out of context.
I don't know who should be in office over there. But to assume we know what the majority of people in Iran want just because one leader suits our taste more then the other is ignorant. To pretend that you know and act upon it is to support the US propaganda machine.
Additionally: throwing rocks at the car of someone who's political views you do not like... that is not terrorism. Although expanding the scope of 'terrorist' is a fun past-time.