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User: WolfWithoutAClause

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Comments · 2,844

  1. Re:Fairly straightforward on World's First "Unclonable" RFID Chip · · Score: 2, Insightful

    It's also completely broken if some organisation (for the sake of argument we'll call such an organisation 'a government') nobbles the manufacturer, so they ship chips that were made cloned at the factory.

  2. Re:Toxicity? on Liquid Metal CPU Heatsink Beats Water Cooling · · Score: 4, Interesting

    NaK melts at -13 C. It could be that in principle. It would burn if released, but in the intended use it should be safe enough.

  3. Re:Traffic shaping is ok on FCC Chief Clarifies His Statement On Comcast · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I think the dirty secret is that their previous strategy- deep pack inspection as a way to enforce non neutrality- doesn't work very well anyway.

    The problem is you have to keep fiddling with it- which costs money, and your customers always outnumber you, and usually outsmart you.

    Deep packet inspection works well if you're playing *with* the customers. So if it's a way for the customers to say- I value this packet particularly highly, and the ISP follows along- that's fine (and the ISP of course checks that you are only marking *some* of your packets high priority, according to some contractual agreement that the customer paid for, like so many hours VOIP high priority a month or whatever)

    It's if the ISP is deliberately shaping one particular protocol or class of protocols. In that case the customer will come up with ever-more-creative ways for one packet stream to look like another enitrely.

  4. NO IT IS THE RIGHT DOWNLOAD on Firefox Download Day To Start At 1 p.m. EST · · Score: 1

    According to the forum here:

    http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=23&p=3435575

    RC3/RC2 and the 3.0 release are all the SAME for windows and linux. It just got respun for OSX (only) for an OSX bug(!)

    So under windows the about: page should read:

    Build identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-GB; rv:1.9) Gecko/2008052906 Firefox/3.0

  5. Re:Confused? on Net Neutrality vs. Technical Reality · · Score: 1

    No, no, no.

    You already *do* pay for your connection. If you feel some percentage of your traffic is more important than other parts of your traffic, then there's *nothing* wrong with that being carried at high priority.

    But it should be of that part of your traffic that is *uncontended*. In other words, if you're on a 50:1 contention ratio, only 1/50 of your traffic should be high priority or whatever. If you want more of your traffic to be high priority, then you pay for 20:1 or 5:1 or whatever.

    That doesn't break *anything*, it doesn't slow *anybody* else down, and the ISP has already bought that much bandwidth for you.

  6. Re:It's not gonna happen, sadly. on Net Neutrality vs. Technical Reality · · Score: 1

    Actually, to be honest, they don't advertise contention ratios anymore, but they do quote a monthly peak-time budget, which comes to the same thing if you think about it.

    Peak time, provided you don't exceed the budget, it's full speed. If you exceed that, then they traffic shape you (peak time). If you repeatedly exceed the budget maybe 3 months in a row then they hassle you and suggest you upgrade to a better account. They provide tools so you can see in almost real time how much you've used.

    Off peak it's an all-you-can-eat though (they measure it, but nothing happens).

    It's not too bad. I'm actually on their second cheapest account, I practically never get shaped.

  7. Re:I hope he's not referring to QoS... on Net Neutrality vs. Technical Reality · · Score: 1

    Right. But for the wholesale ADSL (which essentially everyone can get) you have a fairly good choice of ISPs. It's the ISPs that determine whether you have network neutrality or not.

  8. Re:It's not gonna happen, sadly. on Net Neutrality vs. Technical Reality · · Score: 2, Interesting

    they'd have to make to make as much bandwidth as a customer bought available to them AT ALL TIMES

    You seem to be saying that if you have a 5M pipe, that you should be able to max that out 24x7.

    The thing is, I don't know about you, but I can't afford to pay for that amount of bandwidth.

    My ISP sells me a contended service, where I get to use about 1/50 of my max or so. I'm only actually using my pipe about that much, so I'm happy with that.

    If you want to use the pipe 24x7 you just have to pay more, you need a higher quality service, and they'll take your money just fine!

  9. Re:Confused? on Net Neutrality vs. Technical Reality · · Score: 1

    No, no. It needs to be a RIGHT for every user to transmit a percentage of their traffic as high priority or low jitter or whatever.

    Some services NEED high priority, but if you're accessing the web, then you don't need high priority. If you're VOIP or real time gaming you *do*.

  10. Re:I hope he's not referring to QoS... on Net Neutrality vs. Technical Reality · · Score: 1

    1. Deep packet inspection does work... mostly if carefully tuned. But it scales poorly, new protocols break it

    2. That's only true if you don't police the user's prioritisation. Contracts at all levels need to specify what percentage of packets over what period are allowed to be high priority. High priority makes *no* sense if you mark all of your packets high priority all the time (unless you *paid* lots of money for that and then the Isp can make provision to support it- and it will often be more expensive for them to do that). Any that are above the agreed percentage need to be downgraded.

    3. yeah ;-)

  11. Re:I hope he's not referring to QoS... on Net Neutrality vs. Technical Reality · · Score: 3, Insightful

    That's true in America maybe, but here in the UK there's no monopoly (you can switch ISPs fairly quickly and there's maybe a dozen or more to choose from) but they do usually still use QOS to reduce the amount of file sharing somewhat at peak times, but mainly to improve the VOIP and web performance.

    In other words they use it more or less for what it's supposed to be for- to *make* stuff *work* rather than deliberately breaking stuff.

    I think Richard Bennett thinks it's OK to break stuff if it allows the telecoms company to make money, he seems to think that they don't make enough or something, and he's quite happy for that to be at the expense of the users online experience

  12. Re:It's not reality, it's all a lie on Net Neutrality vs. Technical Reality · · Score: 4, Informative
  13. Re:It's not reality, it's all a lie on Net Neutrality vs. Technical Reality · · Score: 5, Informative

    LOL Richard Bennett is the guy that repeatedly spammed the wikipedia Network Neutrality article with his garbage, over a long, long period. He tried to rewrite the *definition* of network neutrality about a dozen times maybe in bizarre ways, he repeatedly deleted referenced material (usually describing them as 'lies' in his subject line), rewrote stuff, and in every possible way you can imagine tried to spin reality in ways that were self-evidently harmful to the balance of the wikipedia article.

    He even deliberately misquoted another engineer to say the exact opposite of what they said; to the point that they logged onto the wikipedia talk page to complain. This was even after it was pointed out they never said what he wrote them saying and that the references disagreed.

    He also thought that it was a good idea to get interviewed in articles in 'The Register' and then quoted himself in the wikipedia to 'prove' his points.

    Oh yeah, and he used 'sockpuppets' to continue to also push his point of view while temporarily banned.

    I could go on about this sleazebag for quite a while. When you even try to list the stunts he pulled it runs to several pages.

    I would also challenge some of his depth of understanding, for example, at least at one point in time he didn't seem to have the slightest clue what a contended service is, which is kinda... basic. Really, really basic.

    Really, he's just a bizarre guy, with bizarre views, and personality wise he's a total asshole.

    (See wikipedia RFC, which contains references to a small fraction of his 'work' in the wikipedia if you want to get a measure of the man).

  14. Broken DPI stuff Re:Changes since Beta 5? on Firefox 3 RC1 Out Now · · Score: 1

    Beta 5 has working DPI, but that's stopped in RC1. Most people won't notice, but I'm running a CRT at 1600x1200 and everything came up postage stamp (just barely readable if you squint). Changing the fonts helped a bit, but every new page had to be resized manually.

    I found that changing browser.screen_resolution in about:config mostly fixed it, but all the buttons and stuff at the top of the browser are still too small, and some pop up menus are tiny.

  15. Re:Still don't see the point of burning it into RO on Linux Desktop to Appear On Every Asus Motherboard · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I love, love, love the idea of a RO OS!!!

    Currently if I go to my banking site, I have no idea whether my system is currently owned, and some keystroke logger is busy sending off my bank passcode to somebody who is going to empty my account.

    With a RO OS, I can reboot, and I'm much more likely to be able to complete the transaction without it being subverted.

  16. Re:I've decided: this is evil. on 80 Gbps Deep Packet Inspection Hardware Announced · · Score: 1

    I think if you buy your connection from a decent Isp (if that is possible in your area), then the Isp will specify how much capacity you're supposed to use.

    The question then is, what happens when you exceed that?

    I think if you exceed it, then traffic shaping is reasonable (the alternative is to pay per byte- that's normally simply begging to be massively overcharged, don't do that).

    The question then is, what type of traffic shaping?

    I think that you should be given budgets, X high priority, Y low priority. And if you ask for too many high priority then they get turned into low priority, and if you have too many low priority then they get traffic shaped.

    If you think about it, that's *not* what deep packet inspection is. DPI is when your ISP tries to guess what your packets are, and tries to tell *you* how fast your traffic 'should' go, and they ignore what you say is important to you and what isn't, and they do it, independently of how much bandwidth they've sold you. If you want all your agreed bandwidth to be P2P- tough.

    DPI completely violates network neutrality and is evil, pure and simple.

  17. Re:ANYTHING that grows? on $1/Gallon "Green Gasoline" In Sight · · Score: 1

    Yup. Soylent green fuel is people.

  18. Re:Lawful reason on Laser Pointers Classed as Weapons in Australia · · Score: 1

    And cats! Are cats a "lawful reason"? For Finnagle sake think of the cats!

  19. Re:launch loops on Space Elevators Face Wobble Problem · · Score: 1

    Care to explain?

    There doesn't seem to be any published material that agrees with your view.

  20. Re:There is no space tourism industry on Space Tourism Industry Gains New Competitor · · Score: 1

    You mean people like Denis Tito?

  21. Re: *sigh* on UK's MI5 Wants Oyster Card Travel Data · · Score: 2, Funny

    You've got a slight mistake there. "We want to be able to spy on you even more. We are not sure why yet, but we'll probably think of something vaguely plausible sounding."

  22. American politics has no problem on Lessig On Corruption and Reform · · Score: 1

    America has the best politicians money can buy, and that's why there is never, ever any problem.

    There's just simply no way that, say, oil cartels would push the government into invading other countries, or Banana companies would organise assassinations or anything remotely like that.

    America is the best country, in the world, and the politicians, not the people are what made it that way!

  23. Re:compression removes watermarks Re:I don't reall on Digital Watermarks to Replace DRM · · Score: 1

    What use is a tracking technique that only tracks people that aren't breaking the law? None. It's the ones that are breaking the law they are interested in. And watermarks don't deliver, or only against the very stupid ones.

  24. compression removes watermarks Re:I don't really c on Digital Watermarks to Replace DRM · · Score: 1

    The thing is, if the watermark is imperceptible, then they are typically severely damaged by compression, since compression algorithms go out of their way to remove imperceptible features of media files. And other techniques like averaging multiple files degrade the watermark as well.

    With sufficient care, all watermarks are removable in practice.

  25. Re:Logic vs Faith on Science Text Attempts to Reconcile Religion and Science · · Score: 1

    I don't find that. Faith has logic, based on axioms such as the existence of God and so forth. The axioms are, in my opinion, completely stupid, but faith *is* logical. Wrong, but logical. :-)