A lot of readers post positive responses to doing audio or video conferencing over WiFi.
My guess is that their successes are due to having a monopoly over their signal.
With CSMA/CA, a single user is probably going to have success setting up VOIP over any of the 802.11x WiFi standards. However, for true shared-medium environments, you want something that's going to do TDM for media reservation.
I've done some tests with Trango's gear, and was able to shove 5+mbps of data through two of their 5ghz radios while simultaneously holding a call over the same two wireless links (a total of 7 miles one way incidentally). Would I try the same thing over 802.11b? Hell no.
I did basically the same thing. To take my mind off the miserable experience, I bought an Xbox and setup in my bedroom so that I could zone out on games for three days straight, never leaving my bed. That pretty much did the trick for me (200 days now of no nicotine, caffeine, alcohol or cannabis). I also took very frequent naps during those three days. It goes without saying that if you try this approach (quitting everything at once), you really really don't want to be around other people. It took some coordination to get the three day weekend, but it was worth it.
memepool linked to Tard Blog not long ago, which was started by Tucker. It looks like he's since handed it off to someone else. That's some of the funniest stories I've read in ages.
If cable or DSL were available, there wouldn't be a need for magnoliaroad.net et al....
Also, with T1 circuits, you are more important to the telco than a DSL, which is just a dry pair and billed much less. In rural areas this may be more important than you think... If you are not too far from a large city, the break-even point for doing a T1 is probably ~12 people willing to pay $50/month and who have Line of Sight to a central point. This doesn't include startup costs, just monthly recurring.
The Magnolia Road coop (from which I am posting this incidentally- I laugh at your puny/. effect) had outages last summer caused by lightning strikes[0] which took out the telco's repeaters.
A T1 outage will get a much faster repair time than average for DSL. With T1, you call up your provider and go through the food chain to get the telco dispatched. With frame relay (at least through Qwest) Enterprise Repair calls you to see if you are available for a dispatch (this is true even when Qwest is not the ISP per se, but just the FR circuit carrier). Frame relay pricing is also not distance-sensitive as T1 is (at least here in Qwest-land, YMMV). It turns out we get better customer service on a FR than T1, while loop costs on the latter are higher!
I mentioned this cam in another post just a few days ago. It looks at Thorodin Mountain, which is a central hub site for our network.
This is what latency looks like going across that mountain right now (worst time of five separate monitoring points). This is via two hops on 5Ghz Trango radios, ~ 14 miles round trip:
10 packets transmitted, 10 packets received, 0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/std-dev = 3.425/4.236/6.832/0.951 ms
One moral: stay away from 2.4Ghz as much as possible. Everyone and their brother has a 2.4ghz phone/mouse/x-10 cam that will cause interference. Those times above were in 100's of ms when the links were at 2.4Ghz. We still do end-user AP at 2.4, but channel crowding forced us to upgrade all of the point-to-point backhauls to 5.8Ghz
Mike
coyote at magnoliaroad dot net
[0] In one instance, lightning apparently entered a NOC via the T1, and fried a couple grand worth of equipment in one moment. We surmise it was the T1 because all of the radio gear was kicking. The catalyst switch was still semi-functional from the console, but was showing link on ports even after cables were removed:( In another instance, the same storm blew two different repeaters. Qwest managed to replace one of them and restored service for about ten minutes before the next one blew out (at which point I asked them to wait for the storm to pass). Enterprise repair is one of the few parts of Qwest which doesn't suck!
...only we're not looking for terrorists. Our neighborhood wireless internet coop has a couple webcams with great views of the Rocky Mountains:) Last year we had a record fire season, and used those cameras for smoke-spotting.
Last July we had a small fire on the closest ridge visible in this view. It was started by lightning on a small rocky outcropping, and burned just one tree. When the wind was blowing west, some of the smoke was just barely visible in the webcam. Unfortunately it was not enough to be noticeable in a single frame (a review of time lapses showed the smoke however).
So we've been wrestling with some way to automate detection of potential smoke. This is a very difficult proposition, because the potential for false positives is very high (due to fog/clouds, blowing snow, and blowing pine pollen which every summer creates these very cool clouds of greenish-yellow dust that blows off trees).
One thing that's clear from the incident last July, single frames may not be enough for our volunteers to watch. So I have written a simple perl script to build short-term timelapses (last 30 minutes) which can be reviewed periodically. Using libwww I can periodically pull a frame from wireless cams with built-in web servers (this is all a work in progress, we have just three cams so far and I have work to do before the fire season starts again!)
It can't be denied any longer. Back in the day the poor virus writer had to rely on his victims to carry the payload through meatspace on floppies.
M$ has been continually improving virus transmission methods, and now you might be infected just by moving your mouse.
But do we really need to worry? After all, how many kiddies are out there bragging that they '@dm1n1str@t0r3d' someone's XP box. No, it's just not as sexy as r00t3d.
Re:One little problem - reference system
on
Time Travel
·
· Score: 1
An article in Omni magazine years ago pointed out the reference problem of time travel.
The article pointed out flaws in various sci-fi concepts. The other two that I recall:
1) Becoming invisible would render you blind, since light could not be absorbed on your retina
2) Giant insects which are merely scaled-up versions of their normal counterparts would collapse under their own weight.
Under normal conditions light does age because all of it's possible movement is through spatial dimensions, and hence it's not really (or just barely) moving through time.
But with this new technique, light can now begin to age. I wonder if aliens somewhere have discovered this, or if we are the first beings to ever witness light growing old....
I picked this concept up in Brian Greene's "The Elegant Universe". Great book. The key to the idea that light doesn't age lies in Einstein's revelation that the speed of light is a constant, and can't be exceeded because we are *always* moving at that speed exactly! However, our motion is divided between space and time. The faster one moves through space, the slower throught time and vice versa.
Actually, as I have implemented this, I encrypt the whole thing, and *then* split it up. It's not great encryption, but it's good enough for the purpose. Even if someone decrypts my code, they still wouldn't be able to retrieve half the credit card without the other half.
Heh, not at all. I've followed this whole story, read nearly every one of the 10,000 posts to n.a.n.a.e. on the topic (including the attempted joe-job and "You suck" posts by the 'victimized spammers'). My observations:
1) I've been pissed enough at a spammer to start their own little web page. Had I the ability to track them down and post more personal info, I would have jumped at it.
2) I've twice done just this type of 'hack', albeit with a white hat. Ever hear of network.vbs? A simple little script that searches for unprotected win98 shared drives across random class C networks. Seeing this thing hit looks like an attack, and on two occasions when I caught it in progress, I "hacked" back. That is, using the Start->Find-->Computers-->IP I pulled up the remote machine and started browsing directories.
The first time I had the guy's name, home address, phone numbers, passwords (including bank account), all within 5 minutes of his 'scan' of our network. It was trivial, no special hacking/cracking skills needed. It took me a while to realize that he had been infected with a virus (I called, told him what I found and we looked at it together- my first thought was that he'd been compromised, but I couldn't see where network.vbs was sending it's data (it doesn't, just spreads and spreads)).
Anyway, both computers that I tracked back this way were running PCAnywhere. The 2nd one I found didn't have a password.... I connected and fired up the chat screen, in case someone was sitting around. Tried but no response (oh wait, it's 11pm Sat. night, these people must have a life which is why they got no sekurity;)
Ok, so now I can do pretty much whatever I want.... (including taking screen shots, searching her local network neighborhood for other computers, etc.)
I laughed at it all for a moment, then opened a remote browser window to the network.vbs listing at Symantec. Then I disabled file sharing, wrote a note explaining that it and PCAnywhere needed to have password protection, and then terminated PCAnywhere and my connection.
Always wanted to see the look on their faces when they found they'd been 'hacked'.
Anyway, the "Man in the Wilderness" seems very plausible to me, and could have been done without the benefit of any special 3l33t hax0ring skillz.
My one initial bit of disbelief came at seeing that he'd gotten so much data off of a dial-up. Then I remembered that the spammer has a factional T-1 and only used the AOL account for spam runs. So Man in the Wilderness probably got his initial access through AOL, but came back to the dedicated IP for the real goods.
Actually, the Quicktime movies of Aqua, the new GUI, look pretty slick (well, the ones that will play on my windoz box anyway.... some only display the top few pixels of the whole thing?) It's all a vicious plot to make M$ look lame I'm sure!
Slashdot Mirror
My guess is that their successes are due to having a monopoly over their signal.
With CSMA/CA, a single user is probably going to have success setting up VOIP over any of the 802.11x WiFi standards. However, for true shared-medium environments, you want something that's going to do TDM for media reservation.
I've done some tests with Trango's gear, and was able to shove 5+mbps of data through two of their 5ghz radios while simultaneously holding a call over the same two wireless links (a total of 7 miles one way incidentally). Would I try the same thing over 802.11b? Hell no.
cf "Harrison Bergeron" by Kurt Vonnegut
Take a look at the B612 Foundation. They have a solid plan for testing our ability to alter an asteroid's orbit.
I would have to say that the leatherman is more of a nerd tool than geek tool (not that they aren't handy..., but come on, look at the guy).
I did basically the same thing. To take my mind off the miserable experience, I bought an Xbox and setup in my bedroom so that I could zone out on games for three days straight, never leaving my bed. That pretty much did the trick for me (200 days now of no nicotine, caffeine, alcohol or cannabis). I also took very frequent naps during those three days. It goes without saying that if you try this approach (quitting everything at once), you really really don't want to be around other people. It took some coordination to get the three day weekend, but it was worth it.
Seriously, best current practices dictate that before a compromised machine is reconnected to the 'net you:
Getting the patches without a 'net connection is left as an exercise to the reader.
memepool linked to Tard Blog not long ago, which was started by Tucker. It looks like he's since handed it off to someone else. That's some of the funniest stories I've read in ages.
At peak times we see ~ 100 devices on the radio net.
This graph shows a snapshot I just took of our aggregate bandwidth usage for the core network (there is another discrete T1 not represented there).
Also, with T1 circuits, you are more important to the telco than a DSL, which is just a dry pair and billed much less. In rural areas this may be more important than you think... If you are not too far from a large city, the break-even point for doing a T1 is probably ~12 people willing to pay $50/month and who have Line of Sight to a central point. This doesn't include startup costs, just monthly recurring.
The Magnolia Road coop (from which I am posting this incidentally- I laugh at your puny /. effect) had outages last summer caused by lightning strikes[0] which took out the telco's repeaters.
A T1 outage will get a much faster repair time than average for DSL. With T1, you call up your provider and go through the food chain to get the telco dispatched. With frame relay (at least through Qwest) Enterprise Repair calls you to see if you are available for a dispatch (this is true even when Qwest is not the ISP per se, but just the FR circuit carrier). Frame relay pricing is also not distance-sensitive as T1 is (at least here in Qwest-land, YMMV). It turns out we get better customer service on a FR than T1, while loop costs on the latter are higher!
I mentioned this cam in another post just a few days ago. It looks at Thorodin Mountain, which is a central hub site for our network. This is what latency looks like going across that mountain right now (worst time of five separate monitoring points). This is via two hops on 5Ghz Trango radios, ~ 14 miles round trip:
10 packets transmitted, 10 packets received, 0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/std-dev = 3.425/4.236/6.832/0.951 ms
One moral: stay away from 2.4Ghz as much as possible. Everyone and their brother has a 2.4ghz phone/mouse/x-10 cam that will cause interference. Those times above were in 100's of ms when the links were at 2.4Ghz. We still do end-user AP at 2.4, but channel crowding forced us to upgrade all of the point-to-point backhauls to 5.8Ghz
Mike
coyote at magnoliaroad dot net
[0] In one instance, lightning apparently entered a NOC via the T1, and fried a couple grand worth of equipment in one moment. We surmise it was the T1 because all of the radio gear was kicking. The catalyst switch was still semi-functional from the console, but was showing link on ports even after cables were removed :( In another instance, the same storm blew two different repeaters. Qwest managed to replace one of them and restored service for about ten minutes before the next one blew out (at which point I asked them to wait for the storm to pass). Enterprise repair is one of the few parts of Qwest which doesn't suck!
Last July we had a small fire on the closest ridge visible in this view. It was started by lightning on a small rocky outcropping, and burned just one tree. When the wind was blowing west, some of the smoke was just barely visible in the webcam. Unfortunately it was not enough to be noticeable in a single frame (a review of time lapses showed the smoke however).
So we've been wrestling with some way to automate detection of potential smoke. This is a very difficult proposition, because the potential for false positives is very high (due to fog/clouds, blowing snow, and blowing pine pollen which every summer creates these very cool clouds of greenish-yellow dust that blows off trees).
One thing that's clear from the incident last July, single frames may not be enough for our volunteers to watch. So I have written a simple perl script to build short-term timelapses (last 30 minutes) which can be reviewed periodically. Using libwww I can periodically pull a frame from wireless cams with built-in web servers (this is all a work in progress, we have just three cams so far and I have work to do before the fire season starts again!)
Ditto for SuperScan. The link has copyright 2000, and I've known about it for approximately that long.
It can't be denied any longer. Back in the day the poor virus writer had to rely on his victims to carry the payload through meatspace on floppies.
M$ has been continually improving virus transmission methods, and now you might be infected just by moving your mouse.
But do we really need to worry? After all, how many kiddies are out there bragging that they '@dm1n1str@t0r3d' someone's XP box. No, it's just not as sexy as r00t3d.
An article in Omni magazine years ago pointed out the reference problem of time travel.
The article pointed out flaws in various sci-fi concepts. The other two that I recall:
1) Becoming invisible would render you blind, since light could not be absorbed on your retina
2) Giant insects which are merely scaled-up versions of their normal counterparts would collapse under their own weight.
Under normal conditions light does age because all of it's possible movement is through spatial dimensions, and hence it's not really (or just barely) moving through time.
But with this new technique, light can now begin to age. I wonder if aliens somewhere have discovered this, or if we are the first beings to ever witness light growing old....
I picked this concept up in Brian Greene's "The Elegant Universe". Great book. The key to the idea that light doesn't age lies in Einstein's revelation that the speed of light is a constant, and can't be exceeded because we are *always* moving at that speed exactly! However, our motion is divided between space and time. The faster one moves through space, the slower throught time and vice versa.
Actually, as I have implemented this, I encrypt the whole thing, and *then* split it up. It's not great encryption, but it's good enough for the purpose. Even if someone decrypts my code, they still wouldn't be able to retrieve half the credit card without the other half.
Store half the credit card number and half the expiration date in a cookie on the user's computer. Store the other half in the database, encrypted.
Even if someone cracks the server, the database itself will not yield valid CC's.
Heh, not at all. I've followed this whole story, read nearly every one of the 10,000 posts to n.a.n.a.e. on the topic (including the attempted joe-job and "You suck" posts by the 'victimized spammers'). My observations:
;)
1) I've been pissed enough at a spammer to start their own little web page. Had I the ability to track them down and post more personal info, I would have jumped at it.
2) I've twice done just this type of 'hack', albeit with a white hat. Ever hear of network.vbs? A simple little script that searches for unprotected win98 shared drives across random class C networks. Seeing this thing hit looks like an attack, and on two occasions when I caught it in progress, I "hacked" back. That is, using the Start->Find-->Computers-->IP I pulled up the remote machine and started browsing directories.
The first time I had the guy's name, home address, phone numbers, passwords (including bank account), all within 5 minutes of his 'scan' of our network. It was trivial, no special hacking/cracking skills needed. It took me a while to realize that he had been infected with a virus (I called, told him what I found and we looked at it together- my first thought was that he'd been compromised, but I couldn't see where network.vbs was sending it's data (it doesn't, just spreads and spreads)).
Anyway, both computers that I tracked back this way were running PCAnywhere. The 2nd one I found didn't have a password.... I connected and fired up the chat screen, in case someone was sitting around. Tried but no response (oh wait, it's 11pm Sat. night, these people must have a life which is why they got no sekurity
Ok, so now I can do pretty much whatever I want.... (including taking screen shots, searching her local network neighborhood for other computers, etc.)
I laughed at it all for a moment, then opened a remote browser window to the network.vbs listing at Symantec. Then I disabled file sharing, wrote a note explaining that it and PCAnywhere needed to have password protection, and then terminated PCAnywhere and my connection.
Always wanted to see the look on their faces when they found they'd been 'hacked'.
Anyway, the "Man in the Wilderness" seems very plausible to me, and could have been done without the benefit of any special 3l33t hax0ring skillz.
My one initial bit of disbelief came at seeing that he'd gotten so much data off of a dial-up. Then I remembered that the spammer has a factional T-1 and only used the AOL account for spam runs. So Man in the Wilderness probably got his initial access through AOL, but came back to the dedicated IP for the real goods.
-c0yest, inspired with a new greeting for his MTA
220 No spam. Trespassers will be violated.
-c0y
(as if a plot were needed)