And it's a dying and obsolete product category anyway.
Uhuh. Sure it is. Meanwhile, Echo and Direct are both moving their customer base over to DVRs as fast as they can, and cable companies have been rolling out DVRs to their customers for years and years.
Pro-tip: Just because you're a nerd who pirates all his content, doesn't mean everyone else is.
Massively broadcasting a show to everyone at a specific time and having a large number of them set up a machine to record that show to watch later is dumb. Hosting the same show on a server and having everyone download it (or stream it) and watch it whenever they feel like makes sense.
Bullshit. From a network management standpoint, it makes *far* more sense to broadcast (or even better, multicast) the content once and have the end-user store it for later retrieval, rather than having thousands or millions of people downloading the same content over and over again, wasting precious bandwidth on their backhaul network.
I love MythTV but, lets be honest, setting it up was a week's worth of intensive nerding...
Nah, with distros these days, it's no more than a day to get a basic system up, plus another day of noodling to fine tune things... well, assuming your hardware works cleanly out of the box (i.e., you don't have to fight with idiotic IRQ conflicts or similar issues, your video card is well supported by X, etc). Really, the hardest part is probably setting up a config for your remote control.
So, while it's true that it isn't especially easy, it's really not *that* hard, either.
It ain't perfect, but you can just go old-school and use analog capture + IR blasters. That's the setup I have for my dual-tuner config and it works brilliantly. And now that cheap analog HD capture is available, you can even capture HD content this way.
'course, at that point it's suddenly more work than what most people are willing to go through.
I don't mean to offend, but... are you even a programmer? There is no magic "verify data" algorithm. Supposing your scenario were to occur, you'd have to produce an algorithm that was specifically designed to either a) detect the specific form of noise you want to remove, or b) detect the signal you want to extract.
Well, the UK is fucked, we all know that.:) The second case wasn't over back in 2008. Do you know what the current state of that case is? And the third one... shit, the third one isn't even comparable. That was a *county-run system*. And, at least as far as I can tell, the county wasn't found liable by a court or anything. My reading is that they *chose* to shut the system down after some jackasses used it to break the law.
Sorry, that's bullshit. Try actually reading the act, rather than just reading scare stories on Slashdot or third-hand accounts:
(8) The term ``telecommunications carrier--
(A) means a person or entity engaged in the transmission or switching of wire or electronic communications as a common carrier for hire; and
(B) includes--
(i) a person or entity engaged in providing commercial mobile service (as defined in section 332(d) of the Communications Act of 1934 (47 U.S.C. 332(d))); or
(ii) a person or entity engaged in providing wire or electronic communication switching or transmission service to the extent that the Commission finds that such service is a replacement for a substantial portion of the local telephone exchange service and that it is in the public interest to deem such a person or entity to be a telecommunications carrier for purposes of this title; but
(C) does not include--
(i) persons or entities insofar as they are engaged in providing information services; and
(ii) any class or category of telecommunications carriers that the Commission exempts by rule after consultation with the Attorney General.
Given your average open WAP owner isn't providing "commercial mobile service", nor is a "common carrier for hire", and is actually explicitly exempt from the act, it's blatantly obvious that CALEA doesn't apply to them.
As an aside, I actually think the risk of your traffic being sniffed on your open WAP is far more of a concern than the whole child-porn boogeyman. Of course, that risk can be mitigated with proper precautions and the understanding that your WAP is *not* a secure connection if it's open. But it's still an issue, and I don't think most people really realize it.
The only evidence they had that would amount to probable cause is illicit traffic going to his IP. If you have illicit traffic going to your IP, that is probable cause for a search, whether you initiated the traffic or not.
Right. So they get a warrant, run a search, and find nothing. Ohnoes, what a hardship. Meanwhile, the chances of this happening are probably lower than being struck by lightening. So why concern yourself with it?
Not at all. Fortifying your home comes with significant cost. Securing your wifi comes with no cost at all. Someone breaking into your home is a lot more likely to be detected, so it's a lot less likely to be attempted. I don't think the risk benefit analysis works out the same.
Personally, I consider time and inconvenience a cost. I also feel that leaving my WAP open is a worthwhile service to provide others, and that removing that service is also a cost, specifically to my local neighbourhood.
But you're correct, my analogy isn't perfect. But it wasn't meant to be. The point is to illustrate that the percentage chance of someone using your WAP to download child porn is so fantastically low that it's simply not worth being concerned about. That same individual, of which there are very few, is *far* more likely to download said materials at, say, a coffee shop or a library, or they'll use Tor, or Freenet, or a myriad other options for anonymous internet browsing, than they are to wardrive down your street and piggyback on your connection. It's just not worth worrying about.
It's very convenient that you left out this little snippet of detail:
The FBI says it found CDs with child porn in Perez's room, the only one it searched. An open-and-shut case? No, because there's a twist: the Yahoo account used to send the message belonged to a Mr. Rob Ram, according to Yahoo's records. Perez had a roommate named Robert Ramos and an open WiFi connection, but that was not enough to convince a federal judge to keep the seized CDs from being used in his prosecution. Perez entered a conditional guilty plea to the charges and received a sentence of four years and nine months.
Now, granted, there are obvious flaws with this ruling. But the case was *not* ruled the way it was strictly because it rejected his reasoning that the WAP was open therefore it wasn't him. They ruled that way because they didn't buy his reasoning *combined* with the fact that he had child porn in his frickin' room.
Now I don't know about you, but having a search warrant against me, having my computers confiscated, and being in the news as a suspected child pornographer is pretty damn bad, even if I'm never charged. The chances of that are very small, but the consequences so bad that it adds up to a considerable risk.
I completely disagree. The chances aren't just small. They're miniscule. Open WAPs have been running for, what, a decade now? And in that entire time, you've managed to find a single case which is kinda sorta troubling. IMHO, that's just not worth worrying about. Heck, by this logic, I should put metal shutters on all the doors of my home and lock it down like a prison. After all, someone could just as easily break into my home and use my PC to download child porn, right? But I don't, because the odds are so fantastically low that it's not worth the inconvenience to protect myself from this "threat".
But seriously I agree with you. If you're in a fixed place like your home, it makes more sense to just plug into a nearby jack (in my case - a phone jack).
Sure... assuming you have ethernet jacks sprinkled about your walls everywhere. Oh, and an ethernet jack on your laptop. And carry ethernet cable around with you. And you don't plan to get up and move around anywhere.
So, yeah, assuming all that, wires make way more sense...
In the real world, it just opens up yourself to litigation if someone does something illegal over your network.
I suppose you have one, single, real-world example where this has actually happened? I mean, you wouldn't just be throwing out frightening hypotheticals, would you?
It's been a while since I've read the book as well, but IIRC, the Chinese received a warning shot across the bow before the Really Bad Stuff occurred.
No, they definitely did not (I've just started 3001, so this is fairly fresh).
*SPOILER ALERT*
As the joint US-Russian vessel Leonov was en route to rendezvous with Discovery, they got reports that China had secretly sent off their own mission to the Jupiter system, presumably to beat the US to the derelict vessel. The only problem was that it seemed to be a suicide mission, as there was no clear way they could return. Later, as Leonov approached Jupiter, they witnessed China complete their slingshot maneuver around Jupiter, and they assumed the point was to enter a trajectory to meet up with Discovery. However, it soon became clear that they actually aimed for Europa. At this point, the Leonov crew they realized that China's plan was actually to land on Europa and use it as a source of propellant, at which point they'd be able to explore the Jupiter system, including Discovery, and then return to earth.
Eventually China did land safely on Europa, and it seemed all was well. Unfortunately, the flood lights they used to illuminate the area around their ship attracted an undersea life form that resembled some sort of plant life. This life form pursued the Chinese vessel and destroyed it, leaving just one survivor who was able to radio back to Leonov to report the event before he died.
So at this stage it was clear that there was life on Europa, but that it was fairly primitive. At the end of 2010, the monolith replicated itself, surrounding Jupiter and forcing an implosion, which ignited Jupiter forming the star Lucifer, with the goal of creating an environment on Europa that would be conducive to the development of higher life forms. And just prior to the implosion, David Bowman instructed the now-reactivated Hal to send the famous message to Earth: "All these worlds are yours except Europa. Attempt no landings there." Hal was then "extracted" from the computer prior to the ship being destroyed, and he joined Bowman to wait until they were needed again.
Dude... "arg"? What kind of pirate says "arg"? Everyone knows it's "ARRRRR!" Other valid alternatives include: YARRRR, YUHARRR, or other variations therefore. A trailing G should only be used in cases of pain or discomfort. For example: "AAARG, I've been run through by ye blade!", or "ARRRG, I think that wench had ye crotch rot".
One of the most recent, well-known major successes before the recent "NoSQL" movement, in terms of a product that sacrificed ACID for performance as an alternative to databases providing ACID guarantees, was MySQL.
I said nothing about ACID compliance. I specifically mentioned non-relational datastores, and clearly MySQL isn't that. As such, it still forces the developer to work with a relational data model, and one of the main things these so-called "NoSQL" projects do is lift that requirement.
Aside from that, many of the "new alternatives" are non-relational, high-performance systems that are updated versions of non-relational, high-performance systems that have been around in large-scale production deployments and have continued to be maintained since before relational databases were widespread -- some even before the Codd's paper laying out the relational model was published in 1970. E.g., InterSystems Cache is a development of MUMPS, which has been continuously in use in large production installations since the late 1960s; a number of other of the recently--and amusingly--labelled "post-relational" databases are the products of decades of revisions -- with continuous production deployments -- from the similar MultiValue database included as part of the PICK operating system, also from the late 1960s.
Well bully for you having a chance to show off your obscure knowledge of non-relational data stores, I'm sure you must be very proud. But have any of those been targeted at modern enterprise application deployments? Not that I'm aware of. Which is why I asked the question "when was the last time you heard announced a mainstream, high-performance, non-relational data store that was intended to be an alternative to an RDBMS". Answer: there hasn't been. Rather, the RDBMS has, for decades, been considered the solution that should *replace* the types of systems you describe, because the RDBMS has been largely considered *the* answer for large-scale data management. This whole "NoSQL" (god I hate that name) trend, on the other hand, is a move away from relational models to ones that may be more appropriate for the kinds of applications people are building today.
Yeah, no kidding, it's called a filesystem. But when was the last time you heard announced a mainstream, high-performance, non-relational data store that was intended to be an alternative to an RDBMS (BTW, I'm intentionally discounting OODBMSes, as I think they and RDBMSes are intended to target largely the same application space)? I know I haven't. People simply rolled their own and moved on. But times are changing and that niche is finally being filled (in part because that niche isn't so niche anymore).
Except Google didn't try to kill bittorrent, come under a congressional investigation, and spark a row with the FCC over its use of "next generation networking technology". And while we're at it, how next generation is a network with a 250GB bandwidth cap?
Uhuh... and that disproves my point how, exactly?
The simple fact is that Comcast is rolling out next-gen technologies for the Internet before anyone else. Now, you may not like how they're trying to manage the bandwidth in their backhaul network, but that's an entirely separate issue.
Put another way, yes, believe it or not, some companies can do bad things *and* good things! Wow! What a crazy idea!
So please, take your zealotry elsewhere, as it's at best tangential, and quite frankly, I'm not interested.
No, the fact is that they lied about existing infrastructure when asked about it. The leak happening is a result of that lying, as if that infrastructure were known about, it could have been properly inspected.
In the case of placebo, in order for it to "work", the patient must believe that they are being treated, thus the doctor must CLAIM there will be a medicinal benefit. If the doctor tells the patient they are getting a placebo, it would likely have a dramatic effect on the potency of the placebo.
Ah, but there is one extremely important difference: A doctor, faced with a patient with a condition treatable with real medication would prescribe the medication, *not* a placebo, in order to cure the patient. A homeopath, however, would give the patient their "cure", take their money, and then run away, leaving the person still suffering with their treatable condition, and without their hard-earned cash. Of course, this might not be so bad if the patient was suffering from, say, eczema. But imagine we're dealing with leukemia, and I think it's clear why homeopathy needs to be stopped.
Slashdot Mirror
And it's a dying and obsolete product category anyway.
Uhuh. Sure it is. Meanwhile, Echo and Direct are both moving their customer base over to DVRs as fast as they can, and cable companies have been rolling out DVRs to their customers for years and years.
Pro-tip: Just because you're a nerd who pirates all his content, doesn't mean everyone else is.
Massively broadcasting a show to everyone at a specific time and having a large number of them set up a machine to record that show to watch later is dumb. Hosting the same show on a server and having everyone download it (or stream it) and watch it whenever they feel like makes sense.
Bullshit. From a network management standpoint, it makes *far* more sense to broadcast (or even better, multicast) the content once and have the end-user store it for later retrieval, rather than having thousands or millions of people downloading the same content over and over again, wasting precious bandwidth on their backhaul network.
I love MythTV but, lets be honest, setting it up was a week's worth of intensive nerding...
Nah, with distros these days, it's no more than a day to get a basic system up, plus another day of noodling to fine tune things... well, assuming your hardware works cleanly out of the box (i.e., you don't have to fight with idiotic IRQ conflicts or similar issues, your video card is well supported by X, etc). Really, the hardest part is probably setting up a config for your remote control.
So, while it's true that it isn't especially easy, it's really not *that* hard, either.
It ain't perfect, but you can just go old-school and use analog capture + IR blasters. That's the setup I have for my dual-tuner config and it works brilliantly. And now that cheap analog HD capture is available, you can even capture HD content this way.
'course, at that point it's suddenly more work than what most people are willing to go through.
I don't mean to offend, but... are you even a programmer? There is no magic "verify data" algorithm. Supposing your scenario were to occur, you'd have to produce an algorithm that was specifically designed to either a) detect the specific form of noise you want to remove, or b) detect the signal you want to extract.
I fiddled with Ubiquity for a while, but when I discovered Vimperator, I found I never used the darn thing.
Well, the UK is fucked, we all know that. :) The second case wasn't over back in 2008. Do you know what the current state of that case is? And the third one... shit, the third one isn't even comparable. That was a *county-run system*. And, at least as far as I can tell, the county wasn't found liable by a court or anything. My reading is that they *chose* to shut the system down after some jackasses used it to break the law.
No more free internet for those jerks.
Why not just identify their MAC and block it? Granted, that's a bit more work...
Actually, in the spirit of the article, identify their MAC, then redirect all their connections to a web page extolling their "virtues". :)
Because wifi == rifles?
Once again, a Slashdotter demonstrates just how askew their sense of proportion really is...
Sorry, that's bullshit. Try actually reading the act, rather than just reading scare stories on Slashdot or third-hand accounts:
Given your average open WAP owner isn't providing "commercial mobile service", nor is a "common carrier for hire", and is actually explicitly exempt from the act, it's blatantly obvious that CALEA doesn't apply to them.
As an aside, I actually think the risk of your traffic being sniffed on your open WAP is far more of a concern than the whole child-porn boogeyman. Of course, that risk can be mitigated with proper precautions and the understanding that your WAP is *not* a secure connection if it's open. But it's still an issue, and I don't think most people really realize it.
The only evidence they had that would amount to probable cause is illicit traffic going to his IP. If you have illicit traffic going to your IP, that is probable cause for a search, whether you initiated the traffic or not.
Right. So they get a warrant, run a search, and find nothing. Ohnoes, what a hardship. Meanwhile, the chances of this happening are probably lower than being struck by lightening. So why concern yourself with it?
Not at all. Fortifying your home comes with significant cost. Securing your wifi comes with no cost at all. Someone breaking into your home is a lot more likely to be detected, so it's a lot less likely to be attempted. I don't think the risk benefit analysis works out the same.
Personally, I consider time and inconvenience a cost. I also feel that leaving my WAP open is a worthwhile service to provide others, and that removing that service is also a cost, specifically to my local neighbourhood.
But you're correct, my analogy isn't perfect. But it wasn't meant to be. The point is to illustrate that the percentage chance of someone using your WAP to download child porn is so fantastically low that it's simply not worth being concerned about. That same individual, of which there are very few, is *far* more likely to download said materials at, say, a coffee shop or a library, or they'll use Tor, or Freenet, or a myriad other options for anonymous internet browsing, than they are to wardrive down your street and piggyback on your connection. It's just not worth worrying about.
It's very convenient that you left out this little snippet of detail:
Now, granted, there are obvious flaws with this ruling. But the case was *not* ruled the way it was strictly because it rejected his reasoning that the WAP was open therefore it wasn't him. They ruled that way because they didn't buy his reasoning *combined* with the fact that he had child porn in his frickin' room.
I completely disagree. The chances aren't just small. They're miniscule. Open WAPs have been running for, what, a decade now? And in that entire time, you've managed to find a single case which is kinda sorta troubling. IMHO, that's just not worth worrying about. Heck, by this logic, I should put metal shutters on all the doors of my home and lock it down like a prison. After all, someone could just as easily break into my home and use my PC to download child porn, right? But I don't, because the odds are so fantastically low that it's not worth the inconvenience to protect myself from this "threat".
As an aside, while I think your post is a little ridiculous :), flamebait it most certainly is not...
But seriously I agree with you. If you're in a fixed place like your home, it makes more sense to just plug into a nearby jack (in my case - a phone jack).
Sure... assuming you have ethernet jacks sprinkled about your walls everywhere. Oh, and an ethernet jack on your laptop. And carry ethernet cable around with you. And you don't plan to get up and move around anywhere.
So, yeah, assuming all that, wires make way more sense...
In the real world, it just opens up yourself to litigation if someone does something illegal over your network.
I suppose you have one, single, real-world example where this has actually happened? I mean, you wouldn't just be throwing out frightening hypotheticals, would you?
It's been a while since I've read the book as well, but IIRC, the Chinese received a warning shot across the bow before the Really Bad Stuff occurred.
No, they definitely did not (I've just started 3001, so this is fairly fresh).
*SPOILER ALERT*
As the joint US-Russian vessel Leonov was en route to rendezvous with Discovery, they got reports that China had secretly sent off their own mission to the Jupiter system, presumably to beat the US to the derelict vessel. The only problem was that it seemed to be a suicide mission, as there was no clear way they could return. Later, as Leonov approached Jupiter, they witnessed China complete their slingshot maneuver around Jupiter, and they assumed the point was to enter a trajectory to meet up with Discovery. However, it soon became clear that they actually aimed for Europa. At this point, the Leonov crew they realized that China's plan was actually to land on Europa and use it as a source of propellant, at which point they'd be able to explore the Jupiter system, including Discovery, and then return to earth.
Eventually China did land safely on Europa, and it seemed all was well. Unfortunately, the flood lights they used to illuminate the area around their ship attracted an undersea life form that resembled some sort of plant life. This life form pursued the Chinese vessel and destroyed it, leaving just one survivor who was able to radio back to Leonov to report the event before he died.
So at this stage it was clear that there was life on Europa, but that it was fairly primitive. At the end of 2010, the monolith replicated itself, surrounding Jupiter and forcing an implosion, which ignited Jupiter forming the star Lucifer, with the goal of creating an environment on Europa that would be conducive to the development of higher life forms. And just prior to the implosion, David Bowman instructed the now-reactivated Hal to send the famous message to Earth: "All these worlds are yours except Europa. Attempt no landings there." Hal was then "extracted" from the computer prior to the ship being destroyed, and he joined Bowman to wait until they were needed again.
Yeah, I know... gotta love weird typos only spotted after the Submit button is clicked. *sigh*
AARRGGG.
Dude... "arg"? What kind of pirate says "arg"? Everyone knows it's "ARRRRR!" Other valid alternatives include: YARRRR, YUHARRR, or other variations therefore. A trailing G should only be used in cases of pain or discomfort. For example: "AAARG, I've been run through by ye blade!", or "ARRRG, I think that wench had ye crotch rot".
One of the most recent, well-known major successes before the recent "NoSQL" movement, in terms of a product that sacrificed ACID for performance as an alternative to databases providing ACID guarantees, was MySQL.
I said nothing about ACID compliance. I specifically mentioned non-relational datastores, and clearly MySQL isn't that. As such, it still forces the developer to work with a relational data model, and one of the main things these so-called "NoSQL" projects do is lift that requirement.
Aside from that, many of the "new alternatives" are non-relational, high-performance systems that are updated versions of non-relational, high-performance systems that have been around in large-scale production deployments and have continued to be maintained since before relational databases were widespread -- some even before the Codd's paper laying out the relational model was published in 1970. E.g., InterSystems Cache is a development of MUMPS, which has been continuously in use in large production installations since the late 1960s; a number of other of the recently--and amusingly--labelled "post-relational" databases are the products of decades of revisions -- with continuous production deployments -- from the similar MultiValue database included as part of the PICK operating system, also from the late 1960s.
Well bully for you having a chance to show off your obscure knowledge of non-relational data stores, I'm sure you must be very proud. But have any of those been targeted at modern enterprise application deployments? Not that I'm aware of. Which is why I asked the question "when was the last time you heard announced a mainstream, high-performance, non-relational data store that was intended to be an alternative to an RDBMS". Answer: there hasn't been. Rather, the RDBMS has, for decades, been considered the solution that should *replace* the types of systems you describe, because the RDBMS has been largely considered *the* answer for large-scale data management. This whole "NoSQL" (god I hate that name) trend, on the other hand, is a move away from relational models to ones that may be more appropriate for the kinds of applications people are building today.
Yeah, no kidding, it's called a filesystem. But when was the last time you heard announced a mainstream, high-performance, non-relational data store that was intended to be an alternative to an RDBMS (BTW, I'm intentionally discounting OODBMSes, as I think they and RDBMSes are intended to target largely the same application space)? I know I haven't. People simply rolled their own and moved on. But times are changing and that niche is finally being filled (in part because that niche isn't so niche anymore).
Except Google didn't try to kill bittorrent, come under a congressional investigation, and spark a row with the FCC over its use of "next generation networking technology". And while we're at it, how next generation is a network with a 250GB bandwidth cap?
Uhuh... and that disproves my point how, exactly?
The simple fact is that Comcast is rolling out next-gen technologies for the Internet before anyone else. Now, you may not like how they're trying to manage the bandwidth in their backhaul network, but that's an entirely separate issue.
Put another way, yes, believe it or not, some companies can do bad things *and* good things! Wow! What a crazy idea!
So please, take your zealotry elsewhere, as it's at best tangential, and quite frankly, I'm not interested.
No, the fact is that they lied about existing infrastructure when asked about it. The leak happening is a result of that lying, as if that infrastructure were known about, it could have been properly inspected.
And that's, like... better, somehow?
Or: use the right tool for the job. The only difference is, now alternative tools actually exist.
In the case of placebo, in order for it to "work", the patient must believe that they are being treated, thus the doctor must CLAIM there will be a medicinal benefit. If the doctor tells the patient they are getting a placebo, it would likely have a dramatic effect on the potency of the placebo.
Ah, but there is one extremely important difference: A doctor, faced with a patient with a condition treatable with real medication would prescribe the medication, *not* a placebo, in order to cure the patient. A homeopath, however, would give the patient their "cure", take their money, and then run away, leaving the person still suffering with their treatable condition, and without their hard-earned cash. Of course, this might not be so bad if the patient was suffering from, say, eczema. But imagine we're dealing with leukemia, and I think it's clear why homeopathy needs to be stopped.