This thread is long since dead, but my point was completely missed so I feel compelled to respond to the void. I worked in one of the more specialized environments you named, not some random secure vault.
What I was attempting to say is that you are incorrect in implying that using couriers carrying hard drives to transmit data is preferred in classified environments. In my own personal experience in such an environment, that was a failover to network links. That is all I was trying to say.
On the topic of the theaters, I was completely willing to acknoweldge that hard drives might be a better way to go. At the same time though, I am pretty darned sure that the demonstration that was being given was using a dedicated leased line. A VPN over the internet would not have made sense for what they were trying to show. I would also guess they were using a T3. That is all I was trying to say about the theaters, I was not trying to argue that it was a cost effective means of delivery because I agree it is not, currently.
I am not sure what you are trying to get at when you talk about projectionists copying decrypted transmissions. If I was trying to argue against HDD delivery (which I'm not), I could just say 'how much do you think the black market would pay for a projectionist to copy the HDD to a second HDD?' I'm also not sure why you are talking about tapping DLS lines if we are assuming they are encrypted in the first place.
It is sort of odd to me that people are talking about this issue in terms of 'Open Source'. Coming from the network world, it is fairly plain to me that the issue here is whether or not the format that the content is saved in is an open standard or not.
Fortunately, in the networking arena, customers value whether or not the products they are buying support open standards. That way they know that the switch they buy from Foo Inc. will be able to talk to switches from Bar Corp. in case Foo Inc. goes out of business.
This is not to say that there are not proprietary formats used in networking. There certainly are. However, proprietary functionality in the networking world usually comes in the form of additional features that are built on top of existing standards. If you have devices from Foo and Bar talking to each other, they just won't be able to use those extra features that Foo devices provide rather than causing the entire system to break.
In the case of word processors, we have a much different situation. None of the proprietary document formats are supersets of an open standard format. This means that in order to have absolute confidence that you will be able to read data saved by M$, you better have a M$ reader.
Network device providers of course have more of an incentive to follow standards because network admins can't take 20 minutes with every packet editing them by hand to convert from the Foo to the Bar format.;)
Yes, the IETF requires two implementations to ratify a RFC. What I am talking about is the fact that we have been seeing two different RFCs coming out about the same time that address what is essentially the same networking problem. VPN protocols are a good example.
I would frankly rather see a limitation on the number of domains (not TLDs) that any single entity (person/company) can register. It drives me up a wall to see companies getting.com,.org, and.net, all with the same first name. Don't even get me started on the ones that ate all kind of good names in order to sell them, or to allow people to have a variety of email addresses (e.g. see iName.)
My suspicion is that if TLDs are added, the companies will just start blanket registering in the new spaces and nothing useful will be accomplished. I know/. folks hate to hear this, but I think domains need to be handled by a heavy handed single entity (while allowing countries to manage stuff inside their own country TLDs).
A lot of these companies that do background checks (aside from the government ones), as well as collection agencies, are really sloppy.
I have discovered that if I do not tell the phone company my middle initial when I get a new phone number after moving, I will get a call within three days from a collection agency looking for someone with the same first and last name who seems to have a habit of financing jewelrey then not paying for it.
I'm not sure if this is the same guy or not, but I also sometimes get messages from a girl to tell me that she named the baby after me and that she just thought I should know and that she doesn't need money from me or anything. That's a great one to explain to the parents when they get it when you are away at school.
It might be interesting to look at the IETF as a possible model for what happens to an open environment when commercial companies become involved in the process. What was once a standards body comprised mainly of higher education, research labs, and government now has a lot of commercial interests involved with their own agendas.
The main trend I have noticed from this is that the number of RFC's produced has increased dramatically, and there are now competing RFCs and drafts sponsored by different commercial interests that are intended to handle basically the same problem. This is in part because some of the companies in question use the fact that there is an RFC for their implementation as a marketing tool.
The upside is of course there are a lot more resources devoted to working on problems. I would imagine that the situation with Open Source software will be better than that in the IETF because GPL is not (yet?) a sticker that can be put on something to make it more marketable.
They weren't talking about shutter goggles. They were talking about wearing two polarized lenses and having the monitor refreshing quickly to show separate polarized images for each eye. Sort of like Captain Eo at Disneyland.
CAVEs and Imersadesks are pretty nifty, but last time I checked, each screen (3 in a CAVE, 1 for the desk) required an SGI Onyx to drive it. To get a monitor to do that you would need a monster refresh rate, probably like 120 Hz minimum (60 for each eye).
Is it illegal to put someone else's return address on a letter in the US mail? I have gotten a couple pieces of junk mail that have had 'Internal Revenue Service' in the upper left corner, which compelled me to open the things.
If that's not illegal, I think the forgery charge in this case is bogus. I do think that ibm.net would be in the right to sue for any material damages that resulted from that batch of spammail, but an actual charge of forgery is a different ballgame.
Properly encrypted transmission over data lines permits a high degree of security, but shipping a special HDD unit with *hardware* protection may be more secure from certain attacks. This is the method preferred for transfer of government and high level financial secrets -- and a blockbuster film has comparable dollar value!
I have worked in a secure government environment, and this is simply not the case. Dedicated encrypted network links are preferred for data transmissions. Courier service is a failover solution, and rarely uses anything other than paper.
That said, the government likely has more money to spend on transmission than movie theaters. Or at least one would hope so. The government is also more concerned with delivering data in a timely fashion that might have been produced shortly before it needs to be received - theaters can build physical delivery time into their schedules without having to worry about people dying if it gets there late.
Maybe internet traffic won't lag every release day, when 2000 copies of a 50GB film (100 Terabytes) go out over the Net. Maybe they'll build additional secure capacity specifically for teh 50+ major studio movie releases each year (bandwidth which can be used for other things between releases) On maybe not...
If the theaters have one iota of intelligence they are leasing dedicated lines for this and not just trying to use VPNs over the Internet. Dedicated lines can be encrypted at either end. Your comment about the traffic and how it relates to the Internet is fairly irrevelant.
Could you/. article posters put a little more information in about Linux topics? I personally use Solaris as my work and home UNIX environment, and don't know what the hell some of these Linux specific things are.
Just a little line like 'Mandrake is a package of the Linux environment that is geared towards friendly home and office use, see www.mandrake.org for details.' would be real nice for a change.
/. is supposed to be news for nerds, not news for Linux-only nerds.:-) Many of us non-Linux geeks will recognize things like Red Hat, Debian, and sometimes Suse, but that is generally the extent.
Look at the companies that they are selling good links to. They are all in the business of providing redundant data servers for their clients in order to minimize transfer times, and distribute the load. It makes perfect sense for Akamai and the others to buy presences on large ISPs like @Home as many of the users who download from Akamai's clients are @Home users. This should mean @Home users will see better service from sites that use Akamai, and the same service from other sites. The article did not say that these reserved links were going to eat into the existing Internet uplinks from @Home.
/. should start a fund to contribute to Sam Rami (or whoever owns the rights to the Army of Darkness script) so they can sue Apogee for ripping them off. I can't believe Apogee has the audacity to actually claim they have some sort of copyright on "Come get some" and "Hail to the King".
Uh. (a) Where are you getting that a PIII would outperform an Ultrasparc? The MHz rating? (b) It is extremely lame to compare a distributed system with a parallel system as if the number of processes is going to be the only factor that affects performance. You are forgetting about the fact that memory and disk information passing has to happen over a network rather than within a high speed bus like you find in a parallel computer. This causes a lot of slowdown. The reason to go distributed is cost, but I would personally guess that an E6500 with 20 processors would be equivalent to something more on the order of 40 or 50 Intel boxes that are in a cluster. There are ways to reduce the impact of the clustering, but it will never be better than a parallel computer.
ipf(ilter) is also the only freely available NAT for Solaris. It's an awesome firewall/NAT combo, and even already supports IPv6 for Solaris 8 (and I believe for the current BSD build).
On a slight tangent, Moby made an interesting comment while doing a live webcast on checkout.com a couple weeks back. He said that (after disclaiming that it was not the opinion of his label or checkout.com) in his own experience with Napster was that users tended to get singles from it, and if they liked them it made them more likely to go out and buy the actual album. He believed that Napster was actually increasing record sales (or at least focusing them).
Colleges and universities are never going to be convinced to pay what is necessary for a good sysadmin. This is the way my the CS department at my college (a fairly major engineering/science school) dealt with this problem for their network and unix shop.
The CS department would hire a clueful sysadmin who was just out of college and did not have an impressive enough resume to get a full sysadmin job elsewhere, but had personal experience. They would place the SA underneath the professor who was a cluefull researcher in the area of networking and operating systems. My college also maintained a staff of part time student sysadmins who performed tasks for the lead sysadmin, and could help a new lead grow accustomed to the environment. Some of these students stayed over the summer to research and to do admin tasks that couldn't be done during the school year, and this is when the new lead was trained.
After a couple years, the lead would get a new job for twice what he was making for my college, and we would start looking for a new lead. This worked quite well for everyone involved, and the college didn't need to be convinced to pay real money.
"as morally ambiguous as an online RPG" RPG's are like computers: AMORAL. How does your conscience allow you communicate via a soulless, amoral machine? It's illogical, moronic, bible-thumping fools like you that caused the computer revolution to happen in the 20th century instead of the 17th century.
The paper books are printed on and the ink they are printed with are not 'moral', they are simply objects. However, the human act of parsing the information presented by the paper and ink can translate into moral statements (both obvious and subtle). I doubt you would argue that books can not influence a person morally.
I would contend that any piece of software running on a computer that presents something to a human can also contain moral content. Your argument is extremely flawed; just because the messenger is 'amoral' does not mean the message is.
--Another anonymous person because you seem like the sort of person who is easily baited.
Sounds like that's OC-12 (or maybe just packet over SONET), I heard about people doing that with OC-3 (155 mbit/sec) a couple years back.
This reminds me of a story a friend of mine in Australia told me once. He managed the networks of (one of?) their university system down there. A link that they had was microwave between two campuses that were only a few miles apart.
One night there was a big lightning storm. There wasn't a lighting rod on the roof of the building, but there were these big microwave sending and receiving dishes. Lightning hit one of the sending dishes, was channeled through it (not damaging the sender, strangely), turned into a pencil thin beam of electricity arcing across the sky, and slagged the receiver dish at the other campus. This turned into one of the more unusual causes for a network outage that my friend had ever experienced.
Needles to say, the university bought lighting rods for the roofs.
As has been said previously, the government can not legally force MSFT to open source windows, or to even publish their source code. There would also difficulties with MSFT doing it themselves (if they wanted to for whatever reason) due to the fact that many companies have contributed to it. Sun is running into the same problem as it tries to publish the Solaris 2.8 source - there's about 200 companies that have given code to Solaris over the years and some of them don't even exist anymore.
This gets me thinking about the Windows APIs though -- isn't it true that one of the complaints that has come up is that the MSFT office products sometimes take advantage of undocumented features in the Windows API that competitors can't use? This seems like the sort of thing the governemnt can and should force MSFT to publish. Please correct me if I'm off base, as I'm not a Windows developer.
Operating systems are a tricky legal space. They usually get treated like software, but they really should be treated more like hardware, IMO. How the OS works and how you can hook into it directly relates to how easy it is for software companies to compete with each other. If some companies have information others have no way of accessing, they have an unfair advantage.
That all depends where the degree comes from. If the school had a good CS program, you will end up with someone who should be able to pick just about anything up and learn it quickly because they have a good background in theory. If the school had a bad CS program, they learned how to program well in one language on one platform and will be unable to learn anything else since they do not understand the underlying theory.
Perhaps I'm biased because I think my own CS degree has been extremely helpful in my career. I have worked in a research job as well as a development job and been successful in each.
I know this is going to be an unpopular opinion given the other posts, but here I go:
* The person hosting the site that was linked to was convicted of a criminal act in japan by hosting the site, before the person linking to it was taken to court. Reading the article, it is clear that the linker would not have been taken to court if the first lawsuit did not go through.
* The link was only part of the legal argument against the linker. The linker provided a tool to allow the porn site to commit a crime, and advertising in the form of a link so that the site's crime could reach a wider audience. It was clear that the intent of the tool was to facilitate a crime.
This does not seem to set a drastic precedent - it was clear that it was the intent of the site to aid criminal acts, and the site provided a tool that made criminal acts possible that would have otherwise been impossible. This could be compared to a site that provides the address of and blueprints of a house and security alarm codes to break in. If someone used the information and tools (the codes) to break in, then the site would have aided and abetted a criminal act.
Slashdot Mirror
SCI = Sensitive Compartmented Information (intel)
ORCON = dissemination and extraction of information controlled by originator (e.g. not open source ;-) )
What I was attempting to say is that you are incorrect in implying that using couriers carrying hard drives to transmit data is preferred in classified environments. In my own personal experience in such an environment, that was a failover to network links. That is all I was trying to say.
On the topic of the theaters, I was completely willing to acknoweldge that hard drives might be a better way to go. At the same time though, I am pretty darned sure that the demonstration that was being given was using a dedicated leased line. A VPN over the internet would not have made sense for what they were trying to show. I would also guess they were using a T3. That is all I was trying to say about the theaters, I was not trying to argue that it was a cost effective means of delivery because I agree it is not, currently.
I am not sure what you are trying to get at when you talk about projectionists copying decrypted transmissions. If I was trying to argue against HDD delivery (which I'm not), I could just say 'how much do you think the black market would pay for a projectionist to copy the HDD to a second HDD?' I'm also not sure why you are talking about tapping DLS lines if we are assuming they are encrypted in the first place.
Fortunately, in the networking arena, customers value whether or not the products they are buying support open standards. That way they know that the switch they buy from Foo Inc. will be able to talk to switches from Bar Corp. in case Foo Inc. goes out of business.
This is not to say that there are not proprietary formats used in networking. There certainly are. However, proprietary functionality in the networking world usually comes in the form of additional features that are built on top of existing standards. If you have devices from Foo and Bar talking to each other, they just won't be able to use those extra features that Foo devices provide rather than causing the entire system to break.
In the case of word processors, we have a much different situation. None of the proprietary document formats are supersets of an open standard format. This means that in order to have absolute confidence that you will be able to read data saved by M$, you better have a M$ reader.
Network device providers of course have more of an incentive to follow standards because network admins can't take 20 minutes with every packet editing them by hand to convert from the Foo to the Bar format. ;)
Yes, the IETF requires two implementations to ratify a RFC. What I am talking about is the fact that we have been seeing two different RFCs coming out about the same time that address what is essentially the same networking problem. VPN protocols are a good example.
My suspicion is that if TLDs are added, the companies will just start blanket registering in the new spaces and nothing useful will be accomplished. I know /. folks hate to hear this, but I think domains need to be handled by a heavy handed single entity (while allowing countries to manage stuff inside their own country TLDs).
I have discovered that if I do not tell the phone company my middle initial when I get a new phone number after moving, I will get a call within three days from a collection agency looking for someone with the same first and last name who seems to have a habit of financing jewelrey then not paying for it.
I'm not sure if this is the same guy or not, but I also sometimes get messages from a girl to tell me that she named the baby after me and that she just thought I should know and that she doesn't need money from me or anything. That's a great one to explain to the parents when they get it when you are away at school.
The main trend I have noticed from this is that the number of RFC's produced has increased dramatically, and there are now competing RFCs and drafts sponsored by different commercial interests that are intended to handle basically the same problem. This is in part because some of the companies in question use the fact that there is an RFC for their implementation as a marketing tool.
The upside is of course there are a lot more resources devoted to working on problems. I would imagine that the situation with Open Source software will be better than that in the IETF because GPL is not (yet?) a sticker that can be put on something to make it more marketable.
* What is the air-speed velocity of an unladen swallow?
* Is Jeeves gay?
(Hm, unfortunately it looks like the second one is slightly broken now.)
They weren't talking about shutter goggles. They were talking about wearing two polarized lenses and having the monitor refreshing quickly to show separate polarized images for each eye. Sort of like Captain Eo at Disneyland.
CAVEs and Imersadesks are pretty nifty, but last time I checked, each screen (3 in a CAVE, 1 for the desk) required an SGI Onyx to drive it. To get a monitor to do that you would need a monster refresh rate, probably like 120 Hz minimum (60 for each eye).
If that's not illegal, I think the forgery charge in this case is bogus. I do think that ibm.net would be in the right to sue for any material damages that resulted from that batch of spammail, but an actual charge of forgery is a different ballgame.
I have worked in a secure government environment, and this is simply not the case. Dedicated encrypted network links are preferred for data transmissions. Courier service is a failover solution, and rarely uses anything other than paper.
That said, the government likely has more money to spend on transmission than movie theaters. Or at least one would hope so. The government is also more concerned with delivering data in a timely fashion that might have been produced shortly before it needs to be received - theaters can build physical delivery time into their schedules without having to worry about people dying if it gets there late.
Maybe internet traffic won't lag every release day, when 2000 copies of a 50GB film (100 Terabytes) go out over the Net. Maybe they'll build additional secure capacity specifically for teh 50+ major studio movie releases each year (bandwidth which can be used for other things between releases) On maybe not...
If the theaters have one iota of intelligence they are leasing dedicated lines for this and not just trying to use VPNs over the Internet. Dedicated lines can be encrypted at either end. Your comment about the traffic and how it relates to the Internet is fairly irrevelant.
Oh yeah, I'm surprised I forgot that one. It has the coolest name. Although 'Debian' is kind of catchy, too.
Could you /. article posters put a little more information in about Linux topics? I personally use Solaris as my work and home UNIX environment, and don't know what the hell some of these Linux specific things are.
:-) Many of us non-Linux geeks will recognize things like Red Hat, Debian, and sometimes Suse, but that is generally the extent.
Just a little line like 'Mandrake is a package of the Linux environment that is geared towards friendly home and office use, see www.mandrake.org for details.' would be real nice for a change.
/. is supposed to be news for nerds, not news for Linux-only nerds.
Look at the companies that they are selling good links to. They are all in the business of providing redundant data servers for their clients in order to minimize transfer times, and distribute the load. It makes perfect sense for Akamai and the others to buy presences on large ISPs like @Home as many of the users who download from Akamai's clients are @Home users. This should mean @Home users will see better service from sites that use Akamai, and the same service from other sites. The article did not say that these reserved links were going to eat into the existing Internet uplinks from @Home.
/. should start a fund to contribute to Sam Rami (or whoever owns the rights to the Army of Darkness script) so they can sue Apogee for ripping them off. I can't believe Apogee has the audacity to actually claim they have some sort of copyright on "Come get some" and "Hail to the King".
Uh. (a) Where are you getting that a PIII would outperform an Ultrasparc? The MHz rating? (b) It is extremely lame to compare a distributed system with a parallel system as if the number of processes is going to be the only factor that affects performance. You are forgetting about the fact that memory and disk information passing has to happen over a network rather than within a high speed bus like you find in a parallel computer. This causes a lot of slowdown. The reason to go distributed is cost, but I would personally guess that an E6500 with 20 processors would be equivalent to something more on the order of 40 or 50 Intel boxes that are in a cluster. There are ways to reduce the impact of the clustering, but it will never be better than a parallel computer.
LSD tabs are traditionally 1/4" on each side. Or so I've heard.
ipf(ilter) is also the only freely available NAT for Solaris. It's an awesome firewall/NAT combo, and even already supports IPv6 for Solaris 8 (and I believe for the current BSD build).
On a slight tangent, Moby made an interesting comment while doing a live webcast on checkout.com a couple weeks back. He said that (after disclaiming that it was not the opinion of his label or checkout.com) in his own experience with Napster was that users tended to get singles from it, and if they liked them it made them more likely to go out and buy the actual album. He believed that Napster was actually increasing record sales (or at least focusing them).
Colleges and universities are never going to be convinced to pay what is necessary for a good sysadmin. This is the way my the CS department at my college (a fairly major engineering/science school) dealt with this problem for their network and unix shop.
The CS department would hire a clueful sysadmin who was just out of college and did not have an impressive enough resume to get a full sysadmin job elsewhere, but had personal experience. They would place the SA underneath the professor who was a cluefull researcher in the area of networking and operating systems. My college also maintained a staff of part time student sysadmins who performed tasks for the lead sysadmin, and could help a new lead grow accustomed to the environment. Some of these students stayed over the summer to research and to do admin tasks that couldn't be done during the school year, and this is when the new lead was trained.
After a couple years, the lead would get a new job for twice what he was making for my college, and we would start looking for a new lead. This worked quite well for everyone involved, and the college didn't need to be convinced to pay real money.
The paper books are printed on and the ink they are printed with are not 'moral', they are simply objects. However, the human act of parsing the information presented by the paper and ink can translate into moral statements (both obvious and subtle). I doubt you would argue that books can not influence a person morally.
I would contend that any piece of software running on a computer that presents something to a human can also contain moral content. Your argument is extremely flawed; just because the messenger is 'amoral' does not mean the message is.
--Another anonymous person because you seem like the sort of person who is easily baited.
This reminds me of a story a friend of mine in Australia told me once. He managed the networks of (one of?) their university system down there. A link that they had was microwave between two campuses that were only a few miles apart.
One night there was a big lightning storm. There wasn't a lighting rod on the roof of the building, but there were these big microwave sending and receiving dishes. Lightning hit one of the sending dishes, was channeled through it (not damaging the sender, strangely), turned into a pencil thin beam of electricity arcing across the sky, and slagged the receiver dish at the other campus. This turned into one of the more unusual causes for a network outage that my friend had ever experienced.
Needles to say, the university bought lighting rods for the roofs.
This gets me thinking about the Windows APIs though -- isn't it true that one of the complaints that has come up is that the MSFT office products sometimes take advantage of undocumented features in the Windows API that competitors can't use? This seems like the sort of thing the governemnt can and should force MSFT to publish. Please correct me if I'm off base, as I'm not a Windows developer.
Operating systems are a tricky legal space. They usually get treated like software, but they really should be treated more like hardware, IMO. How the OS works and how you can hook into it directly relates to how easy it is for software companies to compete with each other. If some companies have information others have no way of accessing, they have an unfair advantage.
That all depends where the degree comes from. If the school had a good CS program, you will end up with someone who should be able to pick just about anything up and learn it quickly because they have a good background in theory. If the school had a bad CS program, they learned how to program well in one language on one platform and will be unable to learn anything else since they do not understand the underlying theory.
Perhaps I'm biased because I think my own CS degree has been extremely helpful in my career. I have worked in a research job as well as a development job and been successful in each.
I know this is going to be an unpopular opinion given the other posts, but here I go:
* The person hosting the site that was linked to was convicted of a criminal act in japan by hosting the site, before the person linking to it was taken to court. Reading the article, it is clear that the linker would not have been taken to court if the first lawsuit did not go through.
* The link was only part of the legal argument against the linker. The linker provided a tool to allow the porn site to commit a crime, and advertising in the form of a link so that the site's crime could reach a wider audience. It was clear that the intent of the tool was to facilitate a crime.
This does not seem to set a drastic precedent - it was clear that it was the intent of the site to aid criminal acts, and the site provided a tool that made criminal acts possible that would have otherwise been impossible. This could be compared to a site that provides the address of and blueprints of a house and security alarm codes to break in. If someone used the information and tools (the codes) to break in, then the site would have aided and abetted a criminal act.