Other than what's purported by the Rental stores and the price affect they claim, is it necesarily bad that DVD is classed as software? IE, as a consumer do you have any less rights vis-a-vis accessability/backups/etc. on DVD's that you own if it is classed as Software rather than a Film?
How is copyright law and consumer rights different between software and film?
In the UK in the situation you describe, possibly not. However, in the US, it's becoming remarkably popular, for the following reasons:
The (Bell) ILEC's suck at DSL and it's slow to roll out. It also requires equipment to be installed at your local CO, so it is easier to deploy wireless than outfit your CO with a DSLAM.
Cable modems require upgrades to the physical plant, which is also slow in being rolled out by the cable companies in some areas.
Wireless is very quick to deploy. There is a reason why wireless service was restored very quickly in NYC after Sept. 11. It's very nature makes it easy to deploy quickly.
To be fair however, there are some limitations/drawbacks to fixed wireless ( as pointed out above ):
Line of Sight/Multipath - Just about every current system requires line of sight or near line of sight to work properly. If you can't get line of sight, then you're out of luck. Trees are also the bane of fixed wireless in the 2-5 Ghz range as they serve to block signals very good.
Related to the first point, in order to saturate an area with coverage you'll need quite a few cells. You'll have to put up more cells to ensure good coverage, so while the cost of each cell is far less than equipping that CO with DSLAMs, you have to put up more of them.
CPE cost. ( Customer Premise Equipment ) It's still a new market and the volume isn't as high, so the cost of CPE equipment for fixed wireless is more than for DSL or Cable.
It's all changing rapidly, and with recent advances in technology it's just getting better. The way dialup was back in the 28.8/33.6 days and has grown to what it is now is similar with fixed wireless. The early adopters will get a head start on everyone else.
ObDisclaimer: I work for a fixed wireless provider, so I am a bit biased, but we also have done DSL and continue to do dialup access.
As for being economically viable, if you price it below your cost to deliver then it doesn't matter if it's DSL, Cable, Satellite, or Wireless. Good Technology != Good Business Model. If there is demand for high-speed access, then the market will determine what costs are acceptable. If it's not a commodity ( and I'd hazzard the supposition that fixed wireless is not yet a commodity ), then consumers will pay a premium for it. So yes, I will stake my claim and say that Fixed wireless can be economically viable, provided the business plan and pricing decisions are based in reality and derived from the actual "cost of goods" and not a made up number to attract VC or push an IPO.
And, with VOIP riding over a single line to each residence, you've accomplished exactly what?
Redundancy for the casual consumer is just not practical. In order to do it right, you need fully diverse cables and conduits to/from *each* residence, each entering the residence in different parts of the building, and terminating into different CO's. You want your phone costs to double? I don't.
If you are a hospital, gov't office ( police, fire,... ) you're phone service is on a priority restore. IE, anything that's not priority gets whacked until all critical service is restored.
It dosn't matter whenter you use voice over cowboy neal, if you haven't provided 100% diversity to every piece of the path between you and the phone switch, you are susceptible to exactly this type of catastrophe when something happens to the piece that isn't fully redundant.
For the business or really rich person who decides that they simply cannot afford to be down, even if a 757 hits their CO, you *can* get diversity. Be prepared to pay a lot of money for it, though, because it's not cheap. For the rest of us, between my POTS ( plain old telelphone service ) and my Cell, I'm comfortable that I've done pretty much all I can. Anything more and you're hitting the wall of diminishing returns for the money you're expending.
I'm one of the authors ( well, I contribute code and answer questions on the users mailing list ) for FreeRADIUS.
I do it because the equivalent commercial products suck. They are overpriced ( to the tunes of thousands of dollars ) and not as feature rich. Working for an ISP providing dialup services, having a functional Radius server that is scalable, reliable, and most of all, easily modified is paramount to the success of our business.
So, I get paid by my employer to write code that ends up under the GPL in the server. The entire world gets a killer server for a great price. And my employer gets the benefit of a larger array of "virtual programmers" who are constantly reviewing and improving the code. It's a shared development cost more than anything else.
Plus, I like writing code, and I've gotten to interact with people from all over the world as they use the server.
My 2 cents anyway. Others have probably said it better than I, but this is why *I* write code and give it away.:)
Actually, I do know Brian on a personal level. I've known him for a few years. I work for a national ISP based in the Chicago area, and have collaborated with him on some projects in the past, so I know who he is, what his convictions are, and he's certainly not guilty of anything malicious in this case. I'm not posting as an AC, so feel free to check me out as well, if you are convinced this a conspriacy to dupe the Slashdot community.
If he's guilty of anything perhaps it's a bit of overexuberance and a naive belief in the goodwill of others towards "Good Samaritans" in reporting the problem, but last I checked my moral compass, those aren't worth of a *FEDERAL FELONY* conviction.
I donated to Brian's cause, because a support technician for a local ISP in OK, he doesn't have thousands of dollars stashed away to cover the costs of a lawyer in a federal criminal case ( which this has suddenly become ).
If you don't believe in this case, donate to the EFF instead.
It's wonders what you can do when you also own the dark fiber/DWDM gear... Split a few lambdas off for yourself, sell the rest to cover your costs... Not too bad if you can afford it.
There is a difference between theoretically possible, possible in lab conditions with 0-day gear, and possible on the routing equipment that is deployed in the current real-world network.
Yes, equipment like Juniper is capable of doing linerate filtering and packet inspection ( headers though, not payload! ). Juniper equipment *is* deployed by major networks, but it's not everywhere. Cisco, which is
still a very large portion of the routing equipment deployed, has *ahem* issues at linerate filtering.
Attempting to deal with DDOS through ACL's is at best a very temporary patch more akin to the little dutch boy trying to stick his fingers in the leaking dyke. There needs to be support for ICMP traceback ( to allow you to quickly determine the source of an attack ) so that perpetrators can be tracked and prosecuted. There needs to be support for 'pushback' which recursively moves the filtering upstream until it reaches the source. Until this is done, ACLs or not, there is no easy way to combat DDOS.
The following contains pointers to some of the current work being done to help combat and detect
the current forms of DDOS as seen today. In an open and non "patent-pending" manner, too.:)
Unfortunately, inserting probes into the "exchange points where major networks interconnect" isn't going to accomplish much.
First of all, all of the major network do not exchange traffic directly over the exchange points, but rather through dedicated peering circuits.
Second of all:
By regularly sampling network traffic statistics, Arbor's technology establishes a dynamic profile of typical traffic patterns in different zones of the network. Sampling against this dynamic baseline allows the solution to flag anomalies.
How do they differentiate a DDOS attack or a site being slashdotted ( or does that qualify as a DDOS?:P )
And finally:
Finally, Arbor's DoS solution uses attack fingerprints to suggest access control list (ACL) entries and/or committed access rate (CAR) parameters, which a network engineer can implement to filter out the attack.
So all it does is spit out a sample configuration that has to be actively applied to the routers in question? Even if you place an ACL on the receiving side ( pretending that linerate OC-12 car/acl's is truly feasible ) you have done nothing to mitigate any of the affects on the peers network and the potentially full peering link between the two networks.
This assumes that the DDOS is going to be hitting the servers as well. In fact, several recent DDOS attacks have been not at servers ( since it is no longer usually a single server but many ) but at the infrastructure leading up to those servers.
I wish Arbor well in peddling their proprietary "patent-pending" technology, but don't expect to see this running on any major networks anytime soon.
On the face of it, I can't argue with your math there. It certainly does seem plausible. It's still wicked insane to think that this guy did what he did willingly over 40 years ago!
I don't know if I'd have had it in me to step off the edge of that platform looking down and seeing the clouds that far below.:)
Yes, I know, following up my own post, but you just have to see this picture of Air Force Capt. Joeseph Kittinger jumping from the gondola of a baloon at 102,800 feet. The Picture pretty much speaks for itself.
Uhmm, hate to burst their bubble, but this has already been accomplished.
In the 60's while testing Astronaut recovery/escape systems, the U.S. Air Force had someone jump from about that high up. He was testing a 3 stage parachute ( since it can't open all at once due the sheer force of the opening shock ) at the time. It was
done somewhere over Arizona. They used a helium balloon to lift him up. There is even a video from a camera fixed in the balloon showing it.
And yes, he did break the speed of sound on the way down. 714 mph! Wheeee.:)
1.BGP isn't working. Well, fortunately, there are a lot of other protocols out there to choose from.
Really, pray tell what these are? Apart from draft proposals, please tell me what these other protocols are? BGP does work. No, it is not perfect, but it works and it's failure modes are pretty well defined. The fact of no legitimate alternatives also poses a problem.:\
2.Routers will need "gigabits" of memory within two years.
Assuming cisco, which is pretty much the standard, you are going to have trouble fitting a full BGP table into less than 128 MB today.
So what? That doesn't mean the sky is falling.
3.In 6 years we went from 10,000 to 100,000 entries.
Yes, for a good statistical analysis of this growth please see:
http://www.telstra.net/ops/bgptable.html
http://www.employees.org/~tbates/cidr.hist.plot. html
Now, how did the number of end users on the "Internet" grow during the same period?
4.... Part of the reason the routing tables are growing so much is because IPv4 does not make routing tables very efficient.
Not the case at all. IPv6 is going to save nothing. Greater than 1/2 of the current routing table is announced as/24 or longer prefixes. Aggregation can cut the routing table size. Please see the CIDR report for the worst abusers of de-aggregation. The worst offender is announcing ~430 blocks when they could aggregate those into ~150 blocks, without losing any routing stability. The CIDR report is available at:
Well, looks like we have nothing to fear from Carnivore. According to the article a Security Focus:
In September 1998, the FBI network surveillance lab in Quantico launched a
project to move Omnivore from Sun's Solaris operating system to a Windows
NT platform.
It runs on NT! I feel much better now that I know it runs on an unstable platform.
Picture a group of frustrated FBI snoops staring at a BSOD instead of your email...
Anyone else remember the book _Andromedia_Strain_ by Michael Crichton? That was one of my favorite books growing up, so I couldn't help but notice some similarities to the current situation.
Let's take a look:
MIR
An unmanned space station returns uncontrolled to earth.
The space station is contaminated with a fungus.
The fungus weakens/destroys rubber and other materials.
...
Andromedia Strain
An unmanned satellite returns uncontrolled to earth.
The satellite is contaminated with a contagion.
The contagion weakens/destroys rubber and other materials.
No, not really, but thanks for pretending to know what you're talking about.
This in no way means that "ISPs will be held responsible for content flowing over their lines".
What this means is that ISPs do not meet the definition of a Common Carrier under the specific use in the 1934 Communications Act. The only impact of this is that it means the FCC is not responsible for regulating the ISP industry in the same manner that it regulates the Telecom industry.
AOL and other ISPs may certainly meet other definitions of a Common Carrier ( ala UPS, FedEx, etc. ). *That* has yet to be decided.
The most popular/newsworthy usual suspects made the list, but in terms of actual influence in shaping what we have today, there is one person who is commonly overlooked that yielded far greater influence than any of the people listed.
The original rfc editor, Dr. Jonathan B. Postel.
For those not familiar with his work, he is responsible for the foundations that the Internet is built on today. Such trivial little things that we take for granted:
How is this any different from the prepackaged binaries distributed by sunfreeware.com?
I can go to sunfreeware.com and download a precomiled version of just about any "opensource" software package. Yes, binaries that have been ported/precompiled for *gasp* Solaris.
How is that project different from this utility?
What this does is allow for better hardware support under Solaris. I fail to see how that is
a bad thing or in violation of the letter or spirit of the GPL.
Akamai will fix it not because of any filtering related issues, but because it bypasses the Akamai model of content delivery. Akamai relies on being able to transparently move you around to different servers so that you get served the Akamaized ( to use their term ) content very quickly. Accessing *any* URL via this method will cause traffic to flow in a way that Akamai doesn't want regardless of whether it might be something deemed to be filtered or not.
Akamai is right in their stance that they have nothing to fix. Every filtering product that I've seen used has been able to be bypassed by simply appending a "." or a "~" or some other utterly simplistic method to any filtered URL. The problem has been and always will be with the current way that the various filtering products on the market operate.
Akamai is the first to do large-scale content delivery in this manner, but they are not the only ones doing it, and it will only become more widespread. If the filter makers can't adapt, oh well, they should have had a better plan.
Right, and by relagating it to only a few high-end systems means it will stay overpriced ( in comparison to DDRRAM and SDRAM ).
The only hope for RAMBUS prices to drop was for it to be accepted and used in mainstream systems. As supply goes up, price goes down. Now that there is not looking to be a large number of systems using RAMBUS ( not debating whether that is good or not:P ), prices will remain high.
So, the system I bought using SDRAM, was "fixed" by converting it to RAMBUS which is not going to be practical for me to upgrade due to the high costs of RAMBUS.
By releasing the CC820 with the bad MTH, and then "fixing" it by replacing SDRAM with RAMBUS, Intel has screwed me over twice. Grrrr...:( ---------------------------------------------- --------------
Slashdot Mirror
How is copyright law and consumer rights different between software and film?
To be fair however, there are some limitations/drawbacks to fixed wireless ( as pointed out above ):
It's all changing rapidly, and with recent advances in technology it's just getting better. The way dialup was back in the 28.8/33.6 days and has grown to what it is now is similar with fixed wireless. The early adopters will get a head start on everyone else.
ObDisclaimer: I work for a fixed wireless provider, so I am a bit biased, but we also have done DSL and continue to do dialup access.
As for being economically viable, if you price it below your cost to deliver then it doesn't matter if it's DSL, Cable, Satellite, or Wireless. Good Technology != Good Business Model. If there is demand for high-speed access, then the market will determine what costs are acceptable. If it's not a commodity ( and I'd hazzard the supposition that fixed wireless is not yet a commodity ), then consumers will pay a premium for it. So yes, I will stake my claim and say that Fixed wireless can be economically viable, provided the business plan and pricing decisions are based in reality and derived from the actual "cost of goods" and not a made up number to attract VC or push an IPO.
Redundancy for the casual consumer is just not practical. In order to do it right, you need fully diverse cables and conduits to/from *each* residence, each entering the residence in different parts of the building, and terminating into different CO's. You want your phone costs to double? I don't.
If you are a hospital, gov't office ( police, fire, ... ) you're phone service is on a priority restore. IE, anything that's not priority gets whacked until all critical service is restored.
It dosn't matter whenter you use voice over cowboy neal, if you haven't provided 100% diversity to every piece of the path between you and the phone switch, you are susceptible to exactly this type of catastrophe when something happens to the piece that isn't fully redundant.
For the business or really rich person who decides that they simply cannot afford to be down, even if a 757 hits their CO, you *can* get diversity. Be prepared to pay a lot of money for it, though, because it's not cheap. For the rest of us, between my POTS ( plain old telelphone service ) and my Cell, I'm comfortable that I've done pretty much all I can. Anything more and you're hitting the wall of diminishing returns for the money you're expending.
Remember, buzzwords do not a problem solve.
I do it because the equivalent commercial products suck. They are overpriced ( to the tunes of thousands of dollars ) and not as feature rich. Working for an ISP providing dialup services, having a functional Radius server that is scalable, reliable, and most of all, easily modified is paramount to the success of our business.
So, I get paid by my employer to write code that ends up under the GPL in the server. The entire world gets a killer server for a great price. And my employer gets the benefit of a larger array of "virtual programmers" who are constantly reviewing and improving the code. It's a shared development cost more than anything else.
Plus, I like writing code, and I've gotten to interact with people from all over the world as they use the server.
My 2 cents anyway. Others have probably said it better than I, but this is why *I* write code and give it away. :)
If he's guilty of anything perhaps it's a bit of overexuberance and a naive belief in the goodwill of others towards "Good Samaritans" in reporting the problem, but last I checked my moral compass, those aren't worth of a *FEDERAL FELONY* conviction.
I donated to Brian's cause, because a support technician for a local ISP in OK, he doesn't have thousands of dollars stashed away to cover the costs of a lawyer in a federal criminal case ( which this has suddenly become ).
If you don't believe in this case, donate to the EFF instead.
http://www.amazon.com/paypage/P3EMCVKJQX404O
I just donated. You should too.
http://www.qwest.com/about/qwest/QwestCyberCenters /NA_IP_Network_map_large.jpg
http://www.above.net/network/index.html
It's wonders what you can do when you also own the dark fiber/DWDM gear... Split a few lambdas off for yourself, sell the rest to cover your costs... Not too bad if you can afford it.
- ------------
-----------------------------------------------
Yes, equipment like Juniper is capable of doing linerate filtering and packet inspection ( headers though, not payload! ). Juniper equipment *is* deployed by major networks, but it's not everywhere. Cisco, which is still a very large portion of the routing equipment deployed, has *ahem* issues at linerate filtering.
Attempting to deal with DDOS through ACL's is at best a very temporary patch more akin to the little dutch boy trying to stick his fingers in the leaking dyke. There needs to be support for ICMP traceback ( to allow you to quickly determine the source of an attack ) so that perpetrators can be tracked and prosecuted. There needs to be support for 'pushback' which recursively moves the filtering upstream until it reaches the source. Until this is done, ACLs or not, there is no easy way to combat DDOS.
Pretty scary, ain't it?
- ------------
-----------------------------------------------
The following contains pointers to some of the current work being done to help combat and detect the current forms of DDOS as seen today. In an open and non "patent-pending" manner, too. :)
http://www.aciri.org/pushback/
-----------------------------------------------
First of all, all of the major network do not exchange traffic directly over the exchange points, but rather through dedicated peering circuits.
Second of all:
How do they differentiate a DDOS attack or a site being slashdotted ( or does that qualify as a DDOS? :P )
And finally:
So all it does is spit out a sample configuration that has to be actively applied to the routers in question? Even if you place an ACL on the receiving side ( pretending that linerate OC-12 car/acl's is truly feasible ) you have done nothing to mitigate any of the affects on the peers network and the potentially full peering link between the two networks.
This assumes that the DDOS is going to be hitting the servers as well. In fact, several recent DDOS attacks have been not at servers ( since it is no longer usually a single server but many ) but at the infrastructure leading up to those servers.
I wish Arbor well in peddling their proprietary "patent-pending" technology, but don't expect to see this running on any major networks anytime soon.
- ------------
-----------------------------------------------
On the face of it, I can't argue with your math there. It certainly does seem plausible. It's still wicked insane to think that this guy did what he did willingly over 40 years ago!
I don't know if I'd have had it in me to step off the edge of that platform looking down and seeing the clouds that far below. :)
- ------------
-----------------------------------------------
He experienced temperatures as low as minus 94 degrees Fahrenheit and a maximum speed of 714 miles per hour, exceeding the speed of sound.
-----------------------------------------------
This guy had some serious intestinal fortitude.
- ------------
-----------------------------------------------
In the 60's while testing Astronaut recovery/escape systems, the U.S. Air Force had someone jump from about that high up. He was testing a 3 stage parachute ( since it can't open all at once due the sheer force of the opening shock ) at the time. It was done somewhere over Arizona. They used a helium balloon to lift him up. There is even a video from a camera fixed in the balloon showing it.
And yes, he did break the speed of sound on the way down. 714 mph! Wheeee. :)
The AF Site
- ------------
-----------------------------------------------
( Just kidding, btw )
-Erasei's Boss
P.S. Please disregard the photos on his website. I submit to being under the influence of Redbull at the time and claim temporary insanity.
- ------------
-----------------------------------------------
Really, pray tell what these are? Apart from draft proposals, please tell me what these other protocols are? BGP does work. No, it is not perfect, but it works and it's failure modes are pretty well defined. The fact of no legitimate alternatives also poses a problem. :\
2.Routers will need "gigabits" of memory within two years.
Assuming cisco, which is pretty much the standard, you are going to have trouble fitting a full BGP table into less than 128 MB today. So what? That doesn't mean the sky is falling.
3.In 6 years we went from 10,000 to 100,000 entries.
Yes, for a good statistical analysis of this growth please see:
- http://www.telstra.net/ops/bgptable.html
- http://www.employees.org/~tbates/cidr.hist.plot
. html
Now, how did the number of end users on the "Internet" grow during the same period?4. ... Part of the reason the routing tables are growing so much is because IPv4 does not make routing tables very efficient.
Not the case at all. IPv6 is going to save nothing. Greater than 1/2 of the current routing table is announced as /24 or longer prefixes. Aggregation can cut the routing table size. Please see the CIDR report for the worst abusers of de-aggregation. The worst offender is announcing ~430 blocks when they could aggregate those into ~150 blocks, without losing any routing stability. The CIDR report is available at:
CIDR Report
IPv4 has a long way to go still before we are in dire straights. Let's not forget what 2^32 gives us, and what we are using now out of that.
- ------------
-----------------------------------------------
In September 1998, the FBI network surveillance lab in Quantico launched a project to move Omnivore from Sun's Solaris operating system to a Windows NT platform.
It runs on NT! I feel much better now that I know it runs on an unstable platform.
Picture a group of frustrated FBI snoops staring at a BSOD instead of your email...
- ------------
-----------------------------------------------
Let's take a look:
MIR
Andromedia Strain
Makes you wonder just bit... :)
- ------------
-----------------------------------------------
This in no way means that "ISPs will be held responsible for content flowing over their lines". What this means is that ISPs do not meet the definition of a Common Carrier under the specific use in the 1934 Communications Act. The only impact of this is that it means the FCC is not responsible for regulating the ISP industry in the same manner that it regulates the Telecom industry.
AOL and other ISPs may certainly meet other definitions of a Common Carrier ( ala UPS, FedEx, etc. ). *That* has yet to be decided.
- ------------
-----------------------------------------------
The original rfc editor, Dr. Jonathan B. Postel.
For those not familiar with his work, he is responsible for the foundations that the Internet is built on today. Such trivial little things that we take for granted:
A good site with more links is here.
- ------------
-----------------------------------------------
I can go to sunfreeware.com and download a precomiled version of just about any "opensource" software package. Yes, binaries that have been ported/precompiled for *gasp* Solaris.
How is that project different from this utility?
What this does is allow for better hardware support under Solaris. I fail to see how that is a bad thing or in violation of the letter or spirit of the GPL.
- ------------
-----------------------------------------------
Time make copies of *all* your books/data/publications and move them to a data-haven. Yes, they aren't just for Neal Stephenson books any more. See:
-----------------------------------------------
Akamai is right in their stance that they have nothing to fix. Every filtering product that I've seen used has been able to be bypassed by simply appending a "." or a "~" or some other utterly simplistic method to any filtered URL. The problem has been and always will be with the current way that the various filtering products on the market operate.
Akamai is the first to do large-scale content delivery in this manner, but they are not the only ones doing it, and it will only become more widespread. If the filter makers can't adapt, oh well, they should have had a better plan.
My 2 cents, anyway.
-----------------------------------------------
Until it has these I'm stuck using other browsers.
For example:
It is faster than NS 4.7, but about the same as NS 6.0 PR2 ( though it has a much smaller footprint ).
I'll definitely be keeping my eye on this program, it has a lot of promise.- --------------------
---------------------------------------
The only hope for RAMBUS prices to drop was for it to be accepted and used in mainstream systems. As supply goes up, price goes down. Now that there is not looking to be a large number of systems using RAMBUS ( not debating whether that is good or not :P ), prices will remain high.
So, the system I bought using SDRAM, was "fixed" by converting it to RAMBUS which is not going to be practical for me to upgrade due to the high costs of RAMBUS.
By releasing the CC820 with the bad MTH, and then "fixing" it by replacing SDRAM with RAMBUS, Intel has screwed me over twice. Grrrr... :(- --------------
---------------------------------------------