I can't say about BTs, but Virgins one is built to that exact design too. Conveniently, it actually forwards *all* web traffic. You can configure it as a proxy in your browser and it will work fine. I've put that to use a few times in forum-trolling to get around IP bans.
Except that the DPI is only needed for partial blocking - denying access to one file on a website, or one vhost on a server. If the objective is just to block *a* server, completly, no exceptions, then all that need be done is one IP blocking rule. You don't need to mess with cleanfeed - the admin just needs to look at his network map, find the border routers, ssh in and add a single line to each one*. Bypassing that would require the use of a proxy or VPN. Doable, but inconvenient. Most of the affected users will just move to a torrent site. It's only when all the good torrent sites are blocked that they'll start working around the filtering.
*It'd probably take a bit longer, because this being an ISP there will be a change management process to go through to make sure no-one typos an address and breaks the internet. Still, no special equipment or software needed.
We have the choice of many, many ISPs here in the UK, but really they all come down to three options:
1. Virgin Media, cable internet. The only cable ISP, as they own the cable and brought up all other cable providers. 2. DSL. There are a lot of providers, but they all operate over BTs infrastructure. BT owns the phone lines. Although required by regulation to make them available to competing ISPs, that does mean they all offer much the same service and all suffer the same problems with contention. 3. Mobile. Good on the go, but the laws of physics are a harsh constraint on wireless internet. Bandwidth sucks, latency sucks, and the transfer quotas are pittiful. Forget piracy - download one legitimate game on Steam and the penalty fees will be a lot more than just buying it on disc.
I use Freenet. The overheads are nasty, it's slow, content is limited... but for the paranoid, it's as anonymous as networking can get. There are a few pirate sites there, but the network isn't made for distributing really large files.
The average listener doesn't care that much. No-one just listens to music any more - it's something you have in the background. As long as the beat comes through, it will do.
MP3 should be obsolete, but it stuck now as the only format with universial support. There are several potential successors, but as every company involved is desperatly trying to promote their own patented codec over all others there is little prospect of any one reaching the critical marketshare needed to trigger a transition.
Mythbusters actually tried it. Busted. After multible filterings, the apparent taste of the vodka was slightly improved for the professional taster judge... but still nowhere near the quality of a more expensive vodka, plus it cost a lot in filters.
I work in IT support, and as 'the guys with the soldering iron' we get to fix anything that has a light on. We have display TVs, three of them. Two of them blew out caps.
We've also blown up six of our eight Apple G5s, but that isn't due to any design flaw in them. It's because that building is on a grumbling, smoke-belching diesel generator for power, and tends to explode anything plugged in. We're moving building in a year, and it's cheaper to rent a diesel to power the interim structure than to upgrade the substation.
They certainly *look* like lightsabres. Shorter, yes. But still distinctively glowy. I don't recall the films specifying them to be special training sabres (All glow, no slicy) but it might just be part of the extended universe works.
Whenever I read about these stories from china, I wonder... how much is true? It's sourced from a Chinese paper, which means it could very easily be a government plant. An effort to scare the people away from western MMORPGs and the internet in general, where they may be exposed to non-Chinese culture. It wouldn't be the first case of a government creating a moral panic for political reasons, and when it comes to manipulating media and population China has perhaps more skill than any other government.
The lightsabres cut through flesh and bone like a hot knife through butter. The surprising thing isn't that hands get chopped off, it's that anyone finishes the training with all their limbs still attached. How many corpses get thrown out the back of the Jedi academy for each one who graduates? They don't even use training swords - right from the time they are barely old enough to walk they are using the omni-slicer.
Doing some back-of-the-envelope calculations here... assuming that there are seven notes in a repeating theme, and that a theme may span one octave (On the grounds that anything shifted up or down an integral number of octaves would probably be considered identical for legal purposes), and twelve semitones per octave, that's 12^7 possible songs... 36 million. Now how many pieces of music have been written over the course of history? If you include all the amateurs, talentless wannabes, medieval minstrals, probably several million at least. So collisions are going to happen. Birthday thing. Exactly how may would take better math than my - I greatly simplified the concept of music to just determine, completly ignoring the issue of different genres, instruments, variable legal concepts of simularity and the relative size of the subset of that music which might actually be pleasant to listen to.
The 'threatened to sue them' sounds plausible. Paypal is a company - their first duty is to their shareholders, not any ideological campaign. They probably just calculated the cost of fighting potential legal action verses the profit they can gain from possibly pirate websites and decided it'd be more economical to avoid the legal problems.
Not all of it. Just that which has been recently accessed. Enough for most purposes, as usually only a tiny bit of the stored data is ever needed at once. Doesn't hold up well in some scientific and engineering uses though, and if you need fast response times even on files that haven't been accessed in weeks then it becomes a potential problem.
Windows server is configured to be secure by default. The other versions are certainly not. There is always a tradeoff between security and convenience for the user. MS sides with security on the server default, and convenience on the non-server default. This can be seen in hundreds of tiny little decisions.
To name just one random example, Windows Media Player can run scripts embedded in WMA/WMV/ASF files, and does by default - a feature intended to allow for DRMed files to fetch licence information from a website, but in practice used mostly by p2p-propagated viruses and malware. On the non-server versions of windows, playing a.mp3 file (As WMP doesn't go by extension to identify file type) can easily be enough to pick up something nasty. On server? Media player isn't even installed. Nor, for that matter, is the service for audio enabled by default.
IIRC, it's not a household screwdriver. It's a tamperproof screwdriver, which is officially sold only to approved companies who use the tamperproof screws in their products. Not that this stops you buying one on ebay... there is always a grey market for something like that.
Part of the reason is that Windows is just so popular, it's heavily targeted. It's susceptability to every form of malware known to mankind isn't entirely due to poor security... though that is a factor too. Microsoft has historically been willing to trade security for useability - that's why just about anyone can use windows at least semi-competantly.
Any malware writer of significence is going to be working out of somewhere like Russia, where it would be a very complicated, slow and expensive process for the US to do anythign.
That is the main criticism of the US clause. The court interpretation is far broader than the text may imply, basically just extending it to include anything that might even impact the price of any good enough to affect interstate commerce - see Wickard v. Filburn. Since all economic activity impacts the value of goods, as does most activity of any type, that means the commerce clause has become very nearly a grant of unlimited power to the US Congress.
Take the Wickard v. Filburn mentioned previously. The law in dispute was intended to limit wheat production to stabilise prices during the Great Depression. The offender grew his own wheat, for his own chickens, on his own farm, to be consumed in the state. Mostly by his own family. The prosecution argued that by growing his own wheat the farmer was removing the need to buy wheat on the open market, thus causing a slight fall in demand for wheat and in turn lowering it's price which would affect the amount of wheat imported or exported to the state in inter-state trade. It went right up to the supreme court, who decided with the prosecution. It's been a controversial case ever since.
In law, what a piece of legal text appears to mean is less important than what courts have previously ruled it means.
Reminds me of the old Hays code for movies. It worked in much the same way - although not legally enforced in any way, it was impossible to make any money off a non-compliant film because very few cinemas would show it and very few distributors would distribute it.
I think that's it. Trying to claim laches as a defence in a patent dispute in the US has about a snowball's chance in Hell of working, but there might be some countries with more favorably law or precident.
Is there that much demand for higher bandwidth, outside of earth-sats? The only machines further out than that are scientific probes, and all they need to send back is telemetry and the occasional photograph.
Bit more than that - the sun would blind any attempts at communication when mars is directly opposite. You're going to have to either settle for being out of contact for a short time, or bounce the signal from somewhere else. The other inner planets arn't very suited to building a communication station, so probably a router at earth-sun L4/5 point.
Eight minutes means we'd have to dump this 'stream everything' internet and start actually downloading files before watching them again.
I can't find anything conclusive in googling, but I recall the patent thing is supposed to be to combat the old trick of deliberatly not enforcing a patent until the technology is in very common use and people are dependant upon it, then demanding payment when it's impossible to retool for alternatives. The method works best if you can keep the existance of the patent secret, as in the 'submarine patent' method where bureaucratic tricks are used to stall the approval process for years. Another variation is the 'patent ambush' in which a company manipulates a standards-setting process to require a patent they own without disclosing the existance of that patent until after deployment has begun. From what I can vaguely recall, not being a lawyer, some countries have passed limited measures to prevent such tricks - but the US is not one of them.
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I can't say about BTs, but Virgins one is built to that exact design too. Conveniently, it actually forwards *all* web traffic. You can configure it as a proxy in your browser and it will work fine. I've put that to use a few times in forum-trolling to get around IP bans.
Except that the DPI is only needed for partial blocking - denying access to one file on a website, or one vhost on a server. If the objective is just to block *a* server, completly, no exceptions, then all that need be done is one IP blocking rule. You don't need to mess with cleanfeed - the admin just needs to look at his network map, find the border routers, ssh in and add a single line to each one*. Bypassing that would require the use of a proxy or VPN. Doable, but inconvenient. Most of the affected users will just move to a torrent site. It's only when all the good torrent sites are blocked that they'll start working around the filtering.
*It'd probably take a bit longer, because this being an ISP there will be a change management process to go through to make sure no-one typos an address and breaks the internet. Still, no special equipment or software needed.
We have the choice of many, many ISPs here in the UK, but really they all come down to three options:
1. Virgin Media, cable internet. The only cable ISP, as they own the cable and brought up all other cable providers.
2. DSL. There are a lot of providers, but they all operate over BTs infrastructure. BT owns the phone lines. Although required by regulation to make them available to competing ISPs, that does mean they all offer much the same service and all suffer the same problems with contention.
3. Mobile. Good on the go, but the laws of physics are a harsh constraint on wireless internet. Bandwidth sucks, latency sucks, and the transfer quotas are pittiful. Forget piracy - download one legitimate game on Steam and the penalty fees will be a lot more than just buying it on disc.
"What it does not show you are a checked and rated list of links to harry potter torrents."
It does if you use it right.
http://www.google.com/search?q=deathly+hallows+site%3Athepiratebay.org
I use Freenet. The overheads are nasty, it's slow, content is limited... but for the paranoid, it's as anonymous as networking can get. There are a few pirate sites there, but the network isn't made for distributing really large files.
The average listener doesn't care that much. No-one just listens to music any more - it's something you have in the background. As long as the beat comes through, it will do.
MP3 should be obsolete, but it stuck now as the only format with universial support. There are several potential successors, but as every company involved is desperatly trying to promote their own patented codec over all others there is little prospect of any one reaching the critical marketshare needed to trigger a transition.
Mythbusters actually tried it. Busted. After multible filterings, the apparent taste of the vodka was slightly improved for the professional taster judge... but still nowhere near the quality of a more expensive vodka, plus it cost a lot in filters.
I work in IT support, and as 'the guys with the soldering iron' we get to fix anything that has a light on. We have display TVs, three of them. Two of them blew out caps.
We've also blown up six of our eight Apple G5s, but that isn't due to any design flaw in them. It's because that building is on a grumbling, smoke-belching diesel generator for power, and tends to explode anything plugged in. We're moving building in a year, and it's cheaper to rent a diesel to power the interim structure than to upgrade the substation.
They certainly *look* like lightsabres. Shorter, yes. But still distinctively glowy. I don't recall the films specifying them to be special training sabres (All glow, no slicy) but it might just be part of the extended universe works.
Whenever I read about these stories from china, I wonder... how much is true? It's sourced from a Chinese paper, which means it could very easily be a government plant. An effort to scare the people away from western MMORPGs and the internet in general, where they may be exposed to non-Chinese culture. It wouldn't be the first case of a government creating a moral panic for political reasons, and when it comes to manipulating media and population China has perhaps more skill than any other government.
The lightsabres cut through flesh and bone like a hot knife through butter. The surprising thing isn't that hands get chopped off, it's that anyone finishes the training with all their limbs still attached. How many corpses get thrown out the back of the Jedi academy for each one who graduates? They don't even use training swords - right from the time they are barely old enough to walk they are using the omni-slicer.
Doing some back-of-the-envelope calculations here... assuming that there are seven notes in a repeating theme, and that a theme may span one octave (On the grounds that anything shifted up or down an integral number of octaves would probably be considered identical for legal purposes), and twelve semitones per octave, that's 12^7 possible songs... 36 million. Now how many pieces of music have been written over the course of history? If you include all the amateurs, talentless wannabes, medieval minstrals, probably several million at least. So collisions are going to happen. Birthday thing. Exactly how may would take better math than my - I greatly simplified the concept of music to just determine, completly ignoring the issue of different genres, instruments, variable legal concepts of simularity and the relative size of the subset of that music which might actually be pleasant to listen to.
The 'threatened to sue them' sounds plausible. Paypal is a company - their first duty is to their shareholders, not any ideological campaign. They probably just calculated the cost of fighting potential legal action verses the profit they can gain from possibly pirate websites and decided it'd be more economical to avoid the legal problems.
Not all of it. Just that which has been recently accessed. Enough for most purposes, as usually only a tiny bit of the stored data is ever needed at once. Doesn't hold up well in some scientific and engineering uses though, and if you need fast response times even on files that haven't been accessed in weeks then it becomes a potential problem.
Windows server is configured to be secure by default. The other versions are certainly not. There is always a tradeoff between security and convenience for the user. MS sides with security on the server default, and convenience on the non-server default. This can be seen in hundreds of tiny little decisions.
.mp3 file (As WMP doesn't go by extension to identify file type) can easily be enough to pick up something nasty. On server? Media player isn't even installed. Nor, for that matter, is the service for audio enabled by default.
To name just one random example, Windows Media Player can run scripts embedded in WMA/WMV/ASF files, and does by default - a feature intended to allow for DRMed files to fetch licence information from a website, but in practice used mostly by p2p-propagated viruses and malware. On the non-server versions of windows, playing a
IIRC, it's not a household screwdriver. It's a tamperproof screwdriver, which is officially sold only to approved companies who use the tamperproof screws in their products. Not that this stops you buying one on ebay... there is always a grey market for something like that.
Part of the reason is that Windows is just so popular, it's heavily targeted. It's susceptability to every form of malware known to mankind isn't entirely due to poor security... though that is a factor too. Microsoft has historically been willing to trade security for useability - that's why just about anyone can use windows at least semi-competantly.
Any malware writer of significence is going to be working out of somewhere like Russia, where it would be a very complicated, slow and expensive process for the US to do anythign.
That is the main criticism of the US clause. The court interpretation is far broader than the text may imply, basically just extending it to include anything that might even impact the price of any good enough to affect interstate commerce - see Wickard v. Filburn. Since all economic activity impacts the value of goods, as does most activity of any type, that means the commerce clause has become very nearly a grant of unlimited power to the US Congress.
Take the Wickard v. Filburn mentioned previously. The law in dispute was intended to limit wheat production to stabilise prices during the Great Depression. The offender grew his own wheat, for his own chickens, on his own farm, to be consumed in the state. Mostly by his own family. The prosecution argued that by growing his own wheat the farmer was removing the need to buy wheat on the open market, thus causing a slight fall in demand for wheat and in turn lowering it's price which would affect the amount of wheat imported or exported to the state in inter-state trade. It went right up to the supreme court, who decided with the prosecution. It's been a controversial case ever since.
In law, what a piece of legal text appears to mean is less important than what courts have previously ruled it means.
Reminds me of the old Hays code for movies. It worked in much the same way - although not legally enforced in any way, it was impossible to make any money off a non-compliant film because very few cinemas would show it and very few distributors would distribute it.
The US constitution has the commerce clause, which is sufficiently vague that it lets the federal government do more or less anything.
I think that's it. Trying to claim laches as a defence in a patent dispute in the US has about a snowball's chance in Hell of working, but there might be some countries with more favorably law or precident.
Is there that much demand for higher bandwidth, outside of earth-sats? The only machines further out than that are scientific probes, and all they need to send back is telemetry and the occasional photograph.
Bit more than that - the sun would blind any attempts at communication when mars is directly opposite. You're going to have to either settle for being out of contact for a short time, or bounce the signal from somewhere else. The other inner planets arn't very suited to building a communication station, so probably a router at earth-sun L4/5 point.
Eight minutes means we'd have to dump this 'stream everything' internet and start actually downloading files before watching them again.
I can't find anything conclusive in googling, but I recall the patent thing is supposed to be to combat the old trick of deliberatly not enforcing a patent until the technology is in very common use and people are dependant upon it, then demanding payment when it's impossible to retool for alternatives. The method works best if you can keep the existance of the patent secret, as in the 'submarine patent' method where bureaucratic tricks are used to stall the approval process for years. Another variation is the 'patent ambush' in which a company manipulates a standards-setting process to require a patent they own without disclosing the existance of that patent until after deployment has begun. From what I can vaguely recall, not being a lawyer, some countries have passed limited measures to prevent such tricks - but the US is not one of them.