One of the explicit requirements of several of these contracts is that there be NO LINKS TO EXTERNAL SITES, supposedly to prevent their users from downloading any infected programs or files.
Well, at least if they can't download programs on their machines, they can't download anything that installs TOPText, so it's only M$ XP installs that you need to worry about anyway:)
And you've used the right tag to suppress it already.
Nonetheless, in my mind both TopText and SmartTags are essentially deceptive advertising. You should not need to have to modify your site or otherwise opt out of them, since they both make it appear as if your site is endorsing the product and/or site being linked to... this is probably why they are considered to be so effective... and could definitely cause monetary and/or perceptional damage to any site they infest without permission.
It doesn't even come close to the defense that 3rdOpinion (post-it (TM) notes for websites) had that it was the user's choice to have the notes added - this definitely tries to sneak in "under the radar" so to speak, and present itself in a fraudulent manner.
I can't remember which high muk-a-muk at Sun said it, but "You have no privacy. Get over it".
Well, privacy was nice while it lasted. These databases exist, and will continue to exist, and their use will continue regardless of legality.
On the other hand, maybe the problem is there's too much privacy - for the police using the database. If every plate they ran, or person they looked up, it was public record of which officer accessed the information, complete with a verifiable reason for making the enquiry, then the supervisors that just give quiet slaps on the wrist for misuse of the database could face some repercussions themselves.
Regardless of the method, it is a expectation that police officers should be held to a much higher standard of integrity than the average citizen. (This is also legal expectation in many jurisdictions, though the standard is not frequently met in any.) But how can they be held to any standard without some accountability?
When you provide web content, it is free to be displayed in whatever form (with or without context sensitive links) the User desires.
But in this case, the problem isn't the links - it's the deception. By NOT telling the user that the links are NOT a part of your site, they are making it appear that you are recommending whatever it is they are linking to.
And that should fall squarely under the provisions for 'deceptive advertising'.
Now if they worked it on an 'opt in' basis for the sites that are having links put on them, complete with payments per clickthrough the same (or at better rates than) any other advertising that appeared on the site, this could actually become a valid advetising mode.
Are you sure? I thought the weight was due to glass needing to be thick for plain old mechanical strength. CRTs are evacuated. 14 pounds per square inch.
Did you ever notice how heavy the front of a monitor is compared to the back? The back of the picture tube still has to sustain the vacuum, but doesn't need as much shielding.
(And before somebody goes further, yes, flat screen CRT displays need thicker glass than the older curved front displays - this is a case of
synergy here, the extra shielding gives extra strength as well. And these new displays are going to be size limited for the same reasons as CRT displays - ever notice how large-tube [not projection] TVs have got such a huge bulge in the screen?.)
The solder used to electrically and mechanically connect component leads to the copper printed circuit board traces is about half lead and half tin.
It used to be 60/40 at one point, though there is a move to lead-free circuit boards, which I hope succeeds. But you are correct, though the total weight of circuit board solder is probably less than an ounce, and certainly far less than the "20 pounds of lead in a monitor" figure.
The material used as the dielectric in the several electrolytic capacitors can leak out and eat away the copper traces even while the unit is in use so it probably isn't something that you want leaching into the water supply either.
Errm. Have you ever seen a circuit board somebody spilled Jolt or CocaCola on? Then again, consider your point proven.
The various nasty chemicals used in the construction of the monitor and the parts that go into it are probably as great an evironmental hazard as is the monitor once it winds up in a landfill.
And here I agree with you.
Hmm. Since the circuit boards are about the same size in all monitors, could I use 'environmental concern' as an excuse to have my boss give me a bigger monitor?
Typical CRT monitors use 28 KV or so to drive the electron beam - that's almost directly translated to 28Kev x-rays. Some of those x-rays are what excites the phospor dot. Others continue and are hopefully stopped by the glass on the front of the screen.
Are you sure you aren't sitting too close to your monitor?:) Liquor
the June 18th hotfix *DOES* cover this vulnerability
A belated reply, but - I repeat, the June 18 hotfix does NOT necessarily prevent infection. This is not necessarily due to a problem in the patch itself, it's quite as likely that some (bleep) IT guy failed to reboot after applying the patch or some such similar idiocy. But the point remains that even M$ shops that apply all the released patches can still get caught out.
And those selfsame IT guys would believe that they were immune. (And yes, I have known about what the SecurityFocus site has to say about it since the day they posted the vulnerability. But I don't run the IT department.)
There is quite a bit of lead radiation shielding. This is why monitors have to be disposed of as toxic waste if they are not properly recycled.
Much of that lead is tied up in the glass itself, as lead 'crystal' - which is still glass, and one of the safest forms lead could possibly be disposed in. (Some monitors have a metallic lead shield around the sides of the tube mount, that could be easily removed and recycled, but this seems to be becoming less frequent.) The '20 pounds of lead' in a monitor cried out by the overly eco-aware is really a non-issue.
The exotic compounds used for the phospors, however, are not so safely disposed of, and will be exposed to the atmosphere once the tube is inevitably broken.
And that glass has to contain lead to cut down on the x-ray emmisions from the tube.
This new flat panel tech still uses high voltage electrons, so it's still going to emit x-rays, so theres going to be some irreducible amount of lead crystal glass for shielding purposes.
Less glass may mean lighter, but the need for shielding probably means that it won't be much lighter.
(Admittedly less glass is needed for structural purposes with the sandwich construction - but it's still a vacuum, and a lot of the weight of a current CRT is the lead crystal shielding at the front of the tube, which is thicker than is needed merely for strength, even for 'flat' displays.)
A lot of the weight in a CRT is the lead in the glass at the front of the tube that protects you from the x-rays that a color CRT tube would otherwise emit.
And this new technology would still need to have that shielding, 'cos you can't get the bright phosphors without the potential for x-rays.
So, these new displays are going to be much thinner - but I doubt very much that they'll actually be lighter.
According to some IT people I am dealing with, in some cases at least, the M$ patch issued on June18 does NOT prevent this worm from infecting the machines.
If the patch for the.ida flaw doesn't work properly, there's going to be a lot of people who think they are safe getting caught out by this worm. Liquor
Easiest way for it to work is to have the motherboard plug-and-pray report a new device - a "PhoenixNet" device - that needs no resources, just a driver - and when Windows whatever goes looking for the device driver, they provide one that will link the bios routines (which are not really necessary - but they do make it hard to patch) to the tray and icon applications.
What worries me is that Microsoft may approve of this because the drivers for this 'device' will be window only - It would be quite easy for an un-handled acpi request or similar 'keepalive' mechanism to make *nix systems crash without a driver installed. (And this would also prevent a Windows system from completely uninstalling their software, too.)
This may be as simple as the plug-n-pray bios reporting a new "device" - and when WIN whatever installs, it detects the device and installs the drivers. Fortunately, this will NOT work on other operating systems - yet.
Nonetheless, it's scary just how many consumers they are going to get their hooks into whether it is wanted or not.
And do you wan't to bet that if this IS the way it works, then Microsoft will include a default driver for the device that connects to MSN instead?
Errm. It only sped up SOME of the binaries. In other words, if you DON'T optimize it in the compiler, the 'translator' can do post-optimization.
And the speed-up is a breakthrough???
So it's just a new compiler - it's just that the source is binary code, and it doesn't have the optimizations turned off.
Nothing implies that it's really effective as profile based optimizer
For that matter, consider some of the software that was written for the Alpha - There was a compiler that used VAX assembly source and produced Alpha binaries - and don't forget the FX32 intel translation.
One last point, and this goes with some things that Dan mentioned. Is the GPL legally enforceable? If I were to write code that interacts directly with the GPL and shrink wrap it and make it only proprietary, but it does not use any GPL code itself, but links to GPL code. If I ship it without the GPL part, and just tell users to link it with a GPL library (not LGPL). Have I done anything legally wrong?
My understanding of this may be wrong, (I know, IANAL, IMO, etc.....)
The GPL itself says that if it's not packaged with the GPL code, then it isn't subject to the GPL. If it can be separated that much that there's NO code under the GPL in your distribution, then theres no problem with the licence. After all, your code will work with any library that happens to have the same API.
The papers dismissal of dark matter is based on uniform density. But I thought that it was fairly well established that the density of gas could well increase beyond the heliopause. Then you get two effects.
The first is simple drag from friction - the gas is not moving in the same direction as the probe, and the solar wind is no longer pushing from behind. (Heck of a disadvantage for solar sail powered craft there.) After all, the heliopause is supposedly where the pressure of the solar wind is matched by the extrasolar gas pressure. Planets (or anything massive) wouldn't be affected significantly by such a drag.
The second is as you mentioned - with the additional caveat that it is impossible to detect the gravitational effects of a hollow sphere from inside the sphere - so the slowing would increase as it started to pass through such a shell.
Funny, a misunderstanding of the heliopause was my first choice as well. If the kuiper belt objects are mainly frozen gasses that condensed out of gas at that distance, what's the expected vapour pressure at that distance and temperature for whatever didn't condense?
The reports indicate that the probes are slowing more than expected - a higher than expected gas density could easily cause the slowing measured.
The DeCSS challenge, while a good idea, and while it proved the system faulty, was not a good real-life test. To be a valid test of the technology, the RIAA would've had to allow people to submit their own samples for encoding.
Errm. I think you meant the SDMI challenge.
And watermarking won't prevent you from playing these MP3z or DIVX files unless they make all open source player applications illegal. (Then again, M$ seems to want to do that, anyway.)
messages should be propagated to the ISP of the traffic point of origine to not allow more than certain bandwidth to a certain address.
And this would help with the DoS packets with a faked source IP how? I mean, if a skiddy DoS's Guns-R-Us.com with a source address faked as AOL, couldn't this be just as effective to deny service to AOL customers wanting to visit Guns-R-Us as the original attack itself?
And gee, if the DoSer knows how to tell the source to limit traffic, why bother actually generating traceable traffic in the first place -
not to mention that the crude attacks are all _D_DoS - The packets don't have a single source.
Now if all ISPs made sure that spoofed packets couldn't leave or transit their networks, that would probably have more effect.
Unfortunately, if you own a bolt cutter, and for whatever reason the police know that you own one, then if somebody cuts off your neighbors lock - even if it was clearly hacksawed open - then there is a very good chance that you will be charged with 'possession of burglar tools'.
( As I understand it, both Canada and most U.S. states allow this sort of charge - it comes under the heading of presumed innocent unless the police think you did it - then they'll hit you with whatever will stick, regardless of appropriateness)
Drawing the obvious parallels (to possesion of a copy of any *n*x system) is left as an excercise in futility.
Sure the death of the internet is imminent - again!
Meanwhile, dumb devices (like the lightbulb on your porch????) don't need to be on the internet directly - and probably shouldn't be. You want the light to turn on when some newbie in Lower Slobbovia mis-types the URL for 'Naked Schmoos Live 2343988'? NAT on gateways can concentrate an awful lot of dumb (and not-so-dumb) devices into a single IP.
And a core router needs gigabytes of memory? So what? The cost of the memory is negligible compared to the cost of the core-capable routers. Besides - a direct (i.e. one entry per possible IPV4 address) routing table would only need 4G entries, and be faster than a heirarchichal lookup anyway. If you have less than 256 ports on the router, then thats under 5GB memory. And if you just route on the first 24 bits, it's only just over 16MB.
Ok, so that won't work with current routers - but they'll need to be upgraded or replaced for IPV6 anyway.
And if a router ends up handling dual duty IPV4/IPV6, then IPV6, with it's built in heirarchy of address bits and closer coupling between address bits and routing, is hopefully going to require fewer routing resources than IPV4. (Or an IPV6 network running on IPV4 tunnels could use the existing routers just to access the bandwidth).
Meanwhile, as more and more home users connect, we're going to see more ISPs putting them ALL on a single IP address (Can you say NAT, Mr Newbie?) for two reasons: 1), a firewall and web proxy at their gateway lets them use fewer IP addressses and bandwidth, and 2) the customers can't run "unauthorized servers".
Hmm. The entire @home network moved onto a single class C network address? Nahh.. But possible. (Even more possible in the future if they provide a tunnel to an IPV6 router?).
But 'The death of the Internet' again? Hardly. Saturation? Maybe. And I'll bet that until it DOES saturate, nobody's going to be offering IPV6 connections for quite a while.
[snip] I also believe that it would be EXTREMELY difficult to get a "trojan horse" that could do anything useful. The microcode is _so_ low level, and accomplishing any kind of useful trickery would need to be done at a very high level.
To actually install virus code in the processor microcode is indeed improbable - but, what about
changing the way certain instructions operate? Say for example, that you could make a trap instruction take it's new context from user space?
It's not necessary for an entire virus to be implemented in the microcode, just something that facilitates that virus' behaviour.
Or how about something really simple - using some uncommon instruction (FDIV? F00F?) would unlock the PIII serial number?
Slashdot Mirror
One of the explicit requirements of several of these contracts is that there be NO LINKS TO EXTERNAL SITES, supposedly to prevent their users from downloading any infected programs or files.
:)
... this is probably why they are considered to be so effective ... and could definitely cause monetary and/or perceptional damage to any site they infest without permission.
Well, at least if they can't download programs on their machines, they can't download anything that installs TOPText, so it's only M$ XP installs that you need to worry about anyway
And you've used the right tag to suppress it already.
Nonetheless, in my mind both TopText and SmartTags are essentially deceptive advertising. You should not need to have to modify your site or otherwise opt out of them, since they both make it appear as if your site is endorsing the product and/or site being linked to
It doesn't even come close to the defense that 3rdOpinion (post-it (TM) notes for websites) had that it was the user's choice to have the notes added - this definitely tries to sneak in "under the radar" so to speak, and present itself in a fraudulent manner.
Liquor
I can't remember which high muk-a-muk at Sun said it, but "You have no privacy. Get over it".
Well, privacy was nice while it lasted. These databases exist, and will continue to exist, and their use will continue regardless of legality.
On the other hand, maybe the problem is there's too much privacy - for the police using the database. If every plate they ran, or person they looked up, it was public record of which officer accessed the information, complete with a verifiable reason for making the enquiry, then the supervisors that just give quiet slaps on the wrist for misuse of the database could face some repercussions themselves.
Regardless of the method, it is a expectation that police officers should be held to a much higher standard of integrity than the average citizen. (This is also legal expectation in many jurisdictions, though the standard is not frequently met in any.) But how can they be held to any standard without some accountability?
Liquor
When you provide web content, it is free to be displayed in whatever form (with or without context sensitive links) the User desires.
But in this case, the problem isn't the links - it's the deception. By NOT telling the user that the links are NOT a part of your site, they are making it appear that you are recommending whatever it is they are linking to.
And that should fall squarely under the provisions for 'deceptive advertising'.
Now if they worked it on an 'opt in' basis for the sites that are having links put on them, complete with payments per clickthrough the same (or at better rates than) any other advertising that appeared on the site, this could actually become a valid advetising mode.
Liquor
We atheists have our own OS now?
:)
Not exactly - The name hints that there's just not enough people who believe in it yet.
If it prospers, it may grow up to become embroilled in some OS 'holy wars' some day.
Liquor
Are you sure? I thought the weight was due to glass needing to be thick for plain old mechanical strength. CRTs are evacuated. 14 pounds per square inch.
Did you ever notice how heavy the front of a monitor is compared to the back? The back of the picture tube still has to sustain the vacuum, but doesn't need as much shielding.
(And before somebody goes further, yes, flat screen CRT displays need thicker glass than the older curved front displays - this is a case of
synergy here, the extra shielding gives extra strength as well. And these new displays are going to be size limited for the same reasons as CRT displays - ever notice how large-tube [not projection] TVs have got such a huge bulge in the screen?.)
Liquor
The solder used to electrically and mechanically connect component leads to the copper printed circuit board traces is about half lead and half tin.
It used to be 60/40 at one point, though there is a move to lead-free circuit boards, which I hope succeeds. But you are correct, though the total weight of circuit board solder is probably less than an ounce, and certainly far less than the "20 pounds of lead in a monitor" figure.
The material used as the dielectric in the several electrolytic capacitors can leak out and eat away the copper traces even while the unit is in use so it probably isn't something that you want leaching into the water supply either.
Errm. Have you ever seen a circuit board somebody spilled Jolt or CocaCola on? Then again, consider your point proven.
The various nasty chemicals used in the construction of the monitor and the parts that go into it are probably as great an evironmental hazard as is the monitor once it winds up in a landfill.
And here I agree with you.
Hmm. Since the circuit boards are about the same size in all monitors, could I use 'environmental concern' as an excuse to have my boss give me a bigger monitor?
Liquor
Is there really that much energy in a CRT?
:)
Typical CRT monitors use 28 KV or so to drive the electron beam - that's almost directly translated to 28Kev x-rays. Some of those x-rays are what excites the phospor dot. Others continue and are hopefully stopped by the glass on the front of the screen.
Are you sure you aren't sitting too close to your monitor?
Liquor
the June 18th hotfix *DOES* cover this vulnerability
A belated reply, but - I repeat, the June 18 hotfix does NOT necessarily prevent infection. This is not necessarily due to a problem in the patch itself, it's quite as likely that some (bleep) IT guy failed to reboot after applying the patch or some such similar idiocy. But the point remains that even M$ shops that apply all the released patches can still get caught out.
And those selfsame IT guys would believe that they were immune. (And yes, I have known about what the SecurityFocus site has to say about it since the day they posted the vulnerability. But I don't run the IT department.)
Liquor
There is quite a bit of lead radiation shielding. This is why monitors have to be disposed of as toxic waste if they are not properly recycled.
Much of that lead is tied up in the glass itself, as lead 'crystal' - which is still glass, and one of the safest forms lead could possibly be disposed in. (Some monitors have a metallic lead shield around the sides of the tube mount, that could be easily removed and recycled, but this seems to be becoming less frequent.) The '20 pounds of lead' in a monitor cried out by the overly eco-aware is really a non-issue.
The exotic compounds used for the phospors, however, are not so safely disposed of, and will be exposed to the atmosphere once the tube is inevitably broken.
Liquor
And that glass has to contain lead to cut down on the x-ray emmisions from the tube.
This new flat panel tech still uses high voltage electrons, so it's still going to emit x-rays, so theres going to be some irreducible amount of lead crystal glass for shielding purposes.
Less glass may mean lighter, but the need for shielding probably means that it won't be much lighter.
(Admittedly less glass is needed for structural purposes with the sandwich construction - but it's still a vacuum, and a lot of the weight of a current CRT is the lead crystal shielding at the front of the tube, which is thicker than is needed merely for strength, even for 'flat' displays.)
Liquor
A lot of the weight in a CRT is the lead in the glass at the front of the tube that protects you from the x-rays that a color CRT tube would otherwise emit.
And this new technology would still need to have that shielding, 'cos you can't get the bright phosphors without the potential for x-rays.
So, these new displays are going to be much thinner - but I doubt very much that they'll actually be lighter.
Liquor
According to some IT people I am dealing with, in some cases at least, the M$ patch issued on June18 does NOT prevent this worm from infecting the machines.
.ida flaw doesn't work properly, there's going to be a lot of people who think they are safe getting caught out by this worm.
If the patch for the
Liquor
Easiest way for it to work is to have the motherboard plug-and-pray report a new device - a "PhoenixNet" device - that needs no resources, just a driver - and when Windows whatever goes looking for the device driver, they provide one that will link the bios routines (which are not really necessary - but they do make it hard to patch) to the tray and icon applications.
What worries me is that Microsoft may approve of this because the drivers for this 'device' will be window only - It would be quite easy for an un-handled acpi request or similar 'keepalive' mechanism to make *nix systems crash without a driver installed. (And this would also prevent a Windows system from completely uninstalling their software, too.)
Liquor
This may be as simple as the plug-n-pray bios reporting a new "device" - and when WIN whatever installs, it detects the device and installs the drivers. Fortunately, this will NOT work on other operating systems - yet.
Nonetheless, it's scary just how many consumers they are going to get their hooks into whether it is wanted or not.
And do you wan't to bet that if this IS the way it works, then Microsoft will include a default driver for the device that connects to MSN instead?
Liquor
Guess what? Award is made by Phoenix, and will have the spyware.
But this does sound like a promising business opportunity for AMI.
Liquor
using various optimization levels,
Errm. It only sped up SOME of the binaries. In other words, if you DON'T optimize it in the compiler, the 'translator' can do post-optimization.
And the speed-up is a breakthrough???
So it's just a new compiler - it's just that the source is binary code, and it doesn't have the optimizations turned off.
Nothing implies that it's really effective as profile based optimizer
For that matter, consider some of the software that was written for the Alpha - There was a compiler that used VAX assembly source and produced Alpha binaries - and don't forget the FX32 intel translation.
Liquor
One last point, and this goes with some things that Dan mentioned. Is the GPL legally enforceable? If I were to write code that interacts directly with the GPL and shrink wrap it and make it only proprietary, but it does not use any GPL code itself, but links to GPL code. If I ship it without the GPL part, and just tell users to link it with a GPL library (not LGPL). Have I done anything legally wrong?
My understanding of this may be wrong, (I know, IANAL, IMO, etc.....)
The GPL itself says that if it's not packaged with the GPL code, then it isn't subject to the GPL. If it can be separated that much that there's NO code under the GPL in your distribution, then theres no problem with the licence. After all, your code will work with any library that happens to have the same API.
Liquor
power goes out cables get warm, power comes back, cables goes boom
Well, there's probably a cable temperature interlock.
Power goes out, cables get warm, breaker trips on cable overtemp, power stays out....
Liquor
The papers dismissal of dark matter is based on uniform density. But I thought that it was fairly well established that the density of gas could well increase beyond the heliopause. Then you get two effects.
The first is simple drag from friction - the gas is not moving in the same direction as the probe, and the solar wind is no longer pushing from behind. (Heck of a disadvantage for solar sail powered craft there.) After all, the heliopause is supposedly where the pressure of the solar wind is matched by the extrasolar gas pressure. Planets (or anything massive) wouldn't be affected significantly by such a drag.
The second is as you mentioned - with the additional caveat that it is impossible to detect the gravitational effects of a hollow sphere from inside the sphere - so the slowing would increase as it started to pass through such a shell.
Liquor
Funny, a misunderstanding of the heliopause was my first choice as well. If the kuiper belt objects are mainly frozen gasses that condensed out of gas at that distance, what's the expected vapour pressure at that distance and temperature for whatever didn't condense?
The reports indicate that the probes are slowing more than expected - a higher than expected gas density could easily cause the slowing measured.
Liquor
The DeCSS challenge, while a good idea, and while it proved the system faulty, was not a good real-life test. To be a valid test of the technology, the RIAA would've had to allow people to submit their own samples for encoding.
Errm. I think you meant the SDMI challenge.
And watermarking won't prevent you from playing these MP3z or DIVX files unless they make all open source player applications illegal. (Then again, M$ seems to want to do that, anyway.)
Liquor
messages should be propagated to the ISP of the traffic point of origine to not allow more than certain bandwidth to a certain address.
And this would help with the DoS packets with a faked source IP how? I mean, if a skiddy DoS's Guns-R-Us.com with a source address faked as AOL, couldn't this be just as effective to deny service to AOL customers wanting to visit Guns-R-Us as the original attack itself?
And gee, if the DoSer knows how to tell the source to limit traffic, why bother actually generating traceable traffic in the first place - not to mention that the crude attacks are all _D_DoS - The packets don't have a single source. Now if all ISPs made sure that spoofed packets couldn't leave or transit their networks, that would probably have more effect.
Liquor
Unfortunately, if you own a bolt cutter, and for whatever reason the police know that you own one, then if somebody cuts off your neighbors lock - even if it was clearly hacksawed open - then there is a very good chance that you will be charged with 'possession of burglar tools'.
( As I understand it, both Canada and most U.S. states allow this sort of charge - it comes under the heading of presumed innocent unless the police think you did it - then they'll hit you with whatever will stick, regardless of appropriateness)
Drawing the obvious parallels (to possesion of a copy of any *n*x system) is left as an excercise in futility.
Liquor
Sure the death of the internet is imminent - again!
Meanwhile, dumb devices (like the lightbulb on your porch????) don't need to be on the internet directly - and probably shouldn't be. You want the light to turn on when some newbie in Lower Slobbovia mis-types the URL for 'Naked Schmoos Live 2343988'? NAT on gateways can concentrate an awful lot of dumb (and not-so-dumb) devices into a single IP.
And a core router needs gigabytes of memory? So what? The cost of the memory is negligible compared to the cost of the core-capable routers. Besides - a direct (i.e. one entry per possible IPV4 address) routing table would only need 4G entries, and be faster than a heirarchichal lookup anyway. If you have less than 256 ports on the router, then thats under 5GB memory. And if you just route on the first 24 bits, it's only just over 16MB.
Ok, so that won't work with current routers - but they'll need to be upgraded or replaced for IPV6 anyway.
And if a router ends up handling dual duty IPV4/IPV6, then IPV6, with it's built in heirarchy of address bits and closer coupling between address bits and routing, is hopefully going to require fewer routing resources than IPV4. (Or an IPV6 network running on IPV4 tunnels could use the existing routers just to access the bandwidth).
Meanwhile, as more and more home users connect, we're going to see more ISPs putting them ALL on a single IP address (Can you say NAT, Mr Newbie?) for two reasons: 1), a firewall and web proxy at their gateway lets them use fewer IP addressses and bandwidth, and 2) the customers can't run "unauthorized servers".
Hmm. The entire @home network moved onto a single class C network address? Nahh.. But possible. (Even more possible in the future if they provide a tunnel to an IPV6 router?).
But 'The death of the Internet' again? Hardly. Saturation? Maybe. And I'll bet that until it DOES saturate, nobody's going to be offering IPV6 connections for quite a while.
Liquor
[snip] I also believe that it would be EXTREMELY difficult to get a "trojan horse" that could do anything useful. The microcode is _so_ low level, and accomplishing any kind of useful trickery would need to be done at a very high level.
To actually install virus code in the processor microcode is indeed improbable - but, what about
changing the way certain instructions operate? Say for example, that you could make a trap instruction take it's new context from user space?
It's not necessary for an entire virus to be implemented in the microcode, just something that facilitates that virus' behaviour.
Or how about something really simple - using some uncommon instruction (FDIV? F00F?) would unlock the PIII serial number?
Liquor