and tell your boss, as well as the IP attorneys working on it within/for your company, in a paper-trail-setting medium like email, dressed up as a question of an inquisitive techno-geek wanting to satisfy his curiosity:
"So, on this flux capacitor patent thing: What do you guys make of this Heisenberg compensator design I found at this URL here? I kind of derived my design from that, is that something that would go in the prior art list we talked about during the IP attorney meeting the other day?"
I mostly use it for the occasional Debian apt-get update/upgrade and sometimes to run backups. In general, tasks that don't require lots of input are fine. The E61i's QWERTY keyboard is pretty good, it's mostly the limited screen that makes longer tasks trickier.
An ssl page, especially if wikileaks sets up some sort of drop system with other domains so you aren't obviously submitting to wikileaks, is much harder to track because people use ssl pages all over the internet all the time. The problem with SSL, as implemented in browsers, is that there is a crapload of root certification authorities that are blindly trusted by default. On my Firefox browser for example I can see:
- AOL OK, I might trust them for something like an online forum login page, but not for online banking.
- TurkTrust Seems to be a Turkish quasi-government entity related to international trade. Since I'm not trading with any Turkish entities right now, this one went bye bye from the list.
- GoDaddy: Holy Fucking Shite! GoDaddy, of pullinng-your-domain-cause-we-feel-like-it infamy, is in a position of certifying my - and probably yours too - SSL sessions. No further comments needed.
You get the idea.
How safe should you feel relying on the certificate chain you [assume] is coming from Wikileaks' server? Any government/corporation that deploys a subpoena/national security letter can create a fake chain that enables a man-in-the-middle attack.
If I ever get the time to write a firefox extension, I'd like to write one that maintains a history of certificate chains indexed by domain, and enables widespread comparison/sharing of these among the users at large. This should make it much easier to automate alarm bells when an SSL site you trust suddenly "changes" certificate chain on you.
Of course, there are valid reasons for certificate chain changes - site certificates expiring being by far the most common. But there are heuristics that would probably help fine-tune alerts.
And it convinces me of the need to reevaluate the existence of the US Dept of Commerce-backed non-profit organisation that is ICANN. The current squabbles are petty compared to the diplomatic arguments that TLDs could cause. An international body like the UN would be a more appropriate overseer, surely?
As far as my own experience of the domain space goes, I got me an overseer already. It's called BIND and it runs on my server which, incidentally, is a dictatorship.
Well, my Adblock extension wasn't blocking customeracquisitionsite.com (I'm not using autoupdated block lists, perhaps I should). But, since CNET uses them to serve ads and they use cookies, they came to my attention and were added to my block list.
My laptop purchase algorithm automatically filters out laptops without an Intel wifi adapter (and Intel graphics, but that's another story).
Intel has a solid track record on Linux driver development done right, going back years. They just Get It, while most others don't. My current Thinkpad with a 3945 has worked, with WPA, networkmanager et al with virtually zero problems as soon as Kubuntu was installed.
Atheros' recent AR6K family may become an option in the not distant future, as they finally remove the need for the magic HAL in-kernel blob. However, given my many problems with AR5K-based adapters and Madwifi (kernel crashes galore, lack of in-official-tree drivers), I'm sticking with Intel unless they mess up.
I have Speakeasy and I'm also in the Puget Sound area. Once we decide whether we're moving or not (and whatever the result of that decision - depends on whether any rent increase is reasonable, i.e. <=5%) , I'm dropping Worst Buy and switching to Zhonka. They're based in Olympia and the only negative thing about them is that they use the Qwest racket, but I can just about live with that.
I have a specific goal in mind. OpenMoko just seems to say "tons of possibilities and it's open", but for people who have no clue about development, "tons of possibilities" just means "this is not for me".
A truly open platform's killer apps don't need to be entirely new ones. They just need to be unmolested by the legacy carriers' greed/stupidity/business models. For example, a true push email service - one which does alert you about new messages but doesn't kill your battery through polling - does not need to be a $$/month line item. With OpenMoko it can - and will - be "free" on top of one of the affordable data plans. Same deal with location-aware services, since there's no restricted API between the developer and the GPS functionality.
OpenMoko costs $450/$600. You can get a Symbian/WinMobile smart phone with open API for less than that.
Ah yes, open APIs and timely firmware updates. The joys of being a user of smartphone platforms dictated by operators.
Disclaimer: I have absolutely no pilot training, however I do write software for mobile phones as well as networking apps in general.
While you state that countless numbers of phones are left on during flights, this is not particularly dangerous. A phone ranging a tower is only actively transmitting for a very short period of time every 20 minutes or so at regular speeds.
With the "legacy" cell app - voice - that is true. However, with wireless broadband becoming more common and affordable, applications with more chatty idle-mode traffic patterns - email and IM for example - break this assumption.
This way an Exchange email download can still give you that nasty ILS deviation for a few critical seconds during a bumpy IMC approach.
That's probably your phone initially transmitting at a high power at the beginning of the call. Soon after the call is set up, the base station signals the phone that it can decrease its transmit power. That's because the base station measures the received signal quality and calculates that the phone can use less power and still be read OK.
If you just think it would be cool to see, it wouldn't 'enhance aviation safety' in anyway to release the details.
Even if the request is from an aeronautics student who, years later, might well be involved in the design of aircraft on which you or your descendants might fly?
You need to be able to browse real web sites, and for that you need 3G. A phone without 3G is just a phone
So it's not a laptop, but the first use case that comes to mind is that of a laptop? Interesting;-)
The kind of data applications that have most value in a mobile device when the user really is mobile - messaging, presence, navigation, location-based $foo - do not involve browsing web sites. They also have, for the most part, low bandwidth needs. They do however need connectivity that is cheap and - often missed in discussions of mobile data - reliable, i.e. not intentionally crippled. I'm talking primarily about no NAT or at least non-intentionally-crappy NAT.
To use the messaging example, you can see why cheap non-crappy data connectivity is unlikely to ever be offered by the established telcos. If MSN/AIM/Jabber was widely available and cheap on mobiles, what would happen to those fat text messaging margins?
3G is, therefore, irrelevant until/unless a provider happens to offer sane pricing. I'm not holding my breath.
I work for mobile phone operator. We have tried to push people to use data services on their mobile devices for years now. Why? Because we charge enormous amounts of money for data and it makes us a lot of money.
And that, right there, is why your data capacity is (collectively, as an industry) about 98% not utilized. That's the number I heard at the last Symbian Smartphone Show last October, coming from industry insiders. Things will probably not change much until your bosses bite the bullet and decide to sell their data capacity for prices that make sense.
I personally have given up on waiting for the legacy telcos to learn this lesson. I'd rather look for applications that are designed to work on cheap (WiFi) connectivity most of the time, with an auxiliary "Keep it short and absolutely necessary" mode when only racket connectivity is available. Therefore, 3G is of no value to me. Having said that, the iPhone is also a dead proposition as far as I'm concerned. I'm not paying serious money when all it gets me is a 100% Apple/Cingular-controlled applications sales delivery vehicle.
Even with all of that being true, I still say that I'd prefer Chavez because he's not spending my money to kill hundreds of thousands of innocent people. Bad music is one thing. Mass murder/genocide is quite another thing.
While Chavez isn't overseeing mass killings yet, he's certainly preparing.
BTW, googling for "arming chavistas" came up with lots of references. I chose to quote the one above because it made me smile; memories of foaming-at-the-mouth Communist Youth cadres from my younger days, aah...
if they don't think there's a market for it, they probably aren't buying the backhaul capacity to provide that level of service.
What's the lead time/quantum for backhaul orders? Are you implying that if not enough of a market for e.g. 100Mbit service materializes, all that backhaul would rot at the warehouse? I doubt it, since they could easily control the ramp-up of faster services and therefore schedule backhaul purchase in a way that limits their exposure.
I find it much more likely that they simply have the "advertise 100Mbps, deliver 2Mbps" part factored in their business model.
DVDJon and his company are not just circumventing DRM. They are eviscerating meta-DRM:
On one hand, they are circumventing FairPlay's copyright protection technology. Seems like a clear-cut violation of the DMCA, doesn't it?
However, as long as they don't publicize their circumvention method, but instead make it available under NDA to legitimate customers, they are providing an avenue for Apple's legitimate competitors to enter the iTMS market. Competition has been explicitly protected w.r.t. the DMCA.
DVDJon &co. are "crossing the streams" and make DRM itself the subject of competition. DMCA may make circumventing copyright protection illegal, but the 6th Circuit said that you can't use the DMCA to stifle competition. So, can you use the DMCA to stifle DRM competition?
If the court says that DVDJon can't [enable someone to] make a legitimate iPod clone, the DMCA is set up for a major anti-competitive argument, complete with precedent, all the way to the SCOTUS.
If, one way or another, competition (legitimate, not free "competition" from unauthorized downloads) is upheld over this meta-DRM that DVDJon is attacking, then any DRM moves closer to commodity status. That reduces the incentive for tech companies to invest in DRM - a Very Good Thing by itself. But it also opens holes to, hypothetically speaking, the MPAA members' wet dream of having your HD-DVD/Bluray player ask the mothership for permission before it plays the next episode of The Sopranos.
Slashdot Mirror
I call them my four horsemen of the adpocalypse:
Adblock Plus
NoScript
RequestPolicy
RefControl
Other than my Facebook-specific Firefox profile, it's as if Facebook doesn't exist.
and tell your boss, as well as the IP attorneys working on it within/for your company, in a paper-trail-setting medium like email, dressed up as a question of an inquisitive techno-geek wanting to satisfy his curiosity:
"So, on this flux capacitor patent thing: What do you guys make of this Heisenberg compensator design I found at this URL here? I kind of derived my design from that, is that something that would go in the prior art list we talked about during the IP attorney meeting the other day?"
Poison that well.
I mostly use it for the occasional Debian apt-get update/upgrade and sometimes to run backups. In general, tasks that don't require lots of input are fine. The E61i's QWERTY keyboard is pretty good, it's mostly the limited screen that makes longer tasks trickier.
- AOL
OK, I might trust them for something like an online forum login page, but not for online banking.
- TurkTrust
Seems to be a Turkish quasi-government entity related to international trade. Since I'm not trading with any Turkish entities right now, this one went bye bye from the list.
- GoDaddy: Holy Fucking Shite! GoDaddy, of pullinng-your-domain-cause-we-feel-like-it infamy, is in a position of certifying my - and probably yours too - SSL sessions. No further comments needed.
You get the idea.
How safe should you feel relying on the certificate chain you [assume] is coming from Wikileaks' server? Any government/corporation that deploys a subpoena/national security letter can create a fake chain that enables a man-in-the-middle attack.
If I ever get the time to write a firefox extension, I'd like to write one that maintains a history of certificate chains indexed by domain, and enables widespread comparison/sharing of these among the users at large. This should make it much easier to automate alarm bells when an SSL site you trust suddenly "changes" certificate chain on you.
Of course, there are valid reasons for certificate chain changes - site certificates expiring being by far the most common. But there are heuristics that would probably help fine-tune alerts.
Well, my Adblock extension wasn't blocking customeracquisitionsite.com (I'm not using autoupdated block lists, perhaps I should). But, since CNET uses them to serve ads and they use cookies, they came to my attention and were added to my block list.
Thank you CNET!
My laptop purchase algorithm automatically filters out laptops without an Intel wifi adapter (and Intel graphics, but that's another story).
Intel has a solid track record on Linux driver development done right, going back years. They just Get It, while most others don't. My current Thinkpad with a 3945 has worked, with WPA, networkmanager et al with virtually zero problems as soon as Kubuntu was installed.
Atheros' recent AR6K family may become an option in the not distant future, as they finally remove the need for the magic HAL in-kernel blob. However, given my many problems with AR5K-based adapters and Madwifi (kernel crashes galore, lack of in-official-tree drivers), I'm sticking with Intel unless they mess up.
I have Speakeasy and I'm also in the Puget Sound area. Once we decide whether we're moving or not (and whatever the result of that decision - depends on whether any rent increase is reasonable, i.e. <=5%) , I'm dropping Worst Buy and switching to Zhonka. They're based in Olympia and the only negative thing about them is that they use the Qwest racket, but I can just about live with that.
A truly open platform's killer apps don't need to be entirely new ones. They just need to be unmolested by the legacy carriers' greed/stupidity/business models. For example, a true push email service - one which does alert you about new messages but doesn't kill your battery through polling - does not need to be a $$/month line item. With OpenMoko it can - and will - be "free" on top of one of the affordable data plans. Same deal with location-aware services, since there's no restricted API between the developer and the GPS functionality.
Ah yes, open APIs and timely firmware updates. The joys of being a user of smartphone platforms dictated by operators.
Let's see, how often is my access point sending beacons out?
Check out this part of the discussion.
Disclaimer: I have absolutely no pilot training, however I do write software for mobile phones as well as networking apps in general.
With the "legacy" cell app - voice - that is true. However, with wireless broadband becoming more common and affordable, applications with more chatty idle-mode traffic patterns - email and IM for example - break this assumption.
This way an Exchange email download can still give you that nasty ILS deviation for a few critical seconds during a bumpy IMC approach.
That's probably your phone initially transmitting at a high power at the beginning of the call. Soon after the call is set up, the base station signals the phone that it can decrease its transmit power. That's because the base station measures the received signal quality and calculates that the phone can use less power and still be read OK.
It's Fidelito that's getting mildly concerned. He's a one-trick (crude) pony.
Even if the request is from an aeronautics student who, years later, might well be involved in the design of aircraft on which you or your descendants might fly?
Um, no. From
it does not follow that the Creator, whatever It might be, retains any authority over Its creations. Thanks for trying.
So it's not a laptop, but the first use case that comes to mind is that of a laptop? Interesting ;-)
The kind of data applications that have most value in a mobile device when the user really is mobile - messaging, presence, navigation, location-based $foo - do not involve browsing web sites. They also have, for the most part, low bandwidth needs. They do however need connectivity that is cheap and - often missed in discussions of mobile data - reliable, i.e. not intentionally crippled. I'm talking primarily about no NAT or at least non-intentionally-crappy NAT.
To use the messaging example, you can see why cheap non-crappy data connectivity is unlikely to ever be offered by the established telcos. If MSN/AIM/Jabber was widely available and cheap on mobiles, what would happen to those fat text messaging margins?
3G is, therefore, irrelevant until/unless a provider happens to offer sane pricing. I'm not holding my breath.
And that, right there, is why your data capacity is (collectively, as an industry) about 98% not utilized. That's the number I heard at the last Symbian Smartphone Show last October, coming from industry insiders. Things will probably not change much until your bosses bite the bullet and decide to sell their data capacity for prices that make sense.
I personally have given up on waiting for the legacy telcos to learn this lesson. I'd rather look for applications that are designed to work on cheap (WiFi) connectivity most of the time, with an auxiliary "Keep it short and absolutely necessary" mode when only racket connectivity is available. Therefore, 3G is of no value to me. Having said that, the iPhone is also a dead proposition as far as I'm concerned. I'm not paying serious money when all it gets me is a 100% Apple/Cingular-controlled applications sales delivery vehicle.
With Gates on the way out, isn't it time to retire the Borg icon? How about an airborne Aeron?
While Chavez isn't overseeing mass killings yet, he's certainly preparing.
BTW, googling for "arming chavistas" came up with lots of references. I chose to quote the one above because it made me smile; memories of foaming-at-the-mouth Communist Youth cadres from my younger days, aah...
Please, someone tell me! I don't want to be left out.
What's the lead time/quantum for backhaul orders? Are you implying that if not enough of a market for e.g. 100Mbit service materializes, all that backhaul would rot at the warehouse? I doubt it, since they could easily control the ramp-up of faster services and therefore schedule backhaul purchase in a way that limits their exposure.
I find it much more likely that they simply have the "advertise 100Mbps, deliver 2Mbps" part factored in their business model.
How about if someone sings it?
IANAL. However:
DVDJon and his company are not just circumventing DRM. They are eviscerating meta-DRM:
On one hand, they are circumventing FairPlay's copyright protection technology. Seems like a clear-cut violation of the DMCA, doesn't it?
However, as long as they don't publicize their circumvention method, but instead make it available under NDA to legitimate customers, they are providing an avenue for Apple's legitimate competitors to enter the iTMS market. Competition has been explicitly protected w.r.t. the DMCA.
DVDJon &co. are "crossing the streams" and make DRM itself the subject of competition. DMCA may make circumventing copyright protection illegal, but the 6th Circuit said that you can't use the DMCA to stifle competition. So, can you use the DMCA to stifle DRM competition?
If the court says that DVDJon can't [enable someone to] make a legitimate iPod clone, the DMCA is set up for a major anti-competitive argument, complete with precedent, all the way to the SCOTUS.
If, one way or another, competition (legitimate, not free "competition" from unauthorized downloads) is upheld over this meta-DRM that DVDJon is attacking, then any DRM moves closer to commodity status. That reduces the incentive for tech companies to invest in DRM - a Very Good Thing by itself. But it also opens holes to, hypothetically speaking, the MPAA members' wet dream of having your HD-DVD/Bluray player ask the mothership for permission before it plays the next episode of The Sopranos.
All in all, very well played.
what the subject said.