and what the fuck kind of "real connection" can I get for $150 a month? Loop line for my house would cost a bit over $500/month, plus the bandwidth, so even a very small fractional T1 would cost me $1k/mo. Fuck that shit, $1k/mo is a car payment.
Since the article seems to be rejecting/. referrers, here's the full text. Send your comments to the author, (who thankfully will get paid a little less for this steaming pile of crap due to this post).
The good news is, the dishonest people who know how to do it are already doing it, but they?re a slender fraction of today?s installed cable modem base.
The bad news is, there?s nothing you can do about it. At least, not anytime
soon.
Such is the case with some wireless home networking hubs, which use a form of over-the-counter routing known as ?network address translation,? or NAT.
Just as, to some, ?take one? always means ?take three,? and ?contribution appreciated? always means ?free,? so can the bandwidth of a legal cable modem subscription become wirelessly shared among neighbors. It can be shared omnidirectionally, as it turns out, for about 300 feet?the range of wireless hubs based on the 802.11b home networking specification.
?So all we could do was to Sit! Sit! Sit! And we did not like it. Not one little bit.?
?Dr. Seuss, The Cat In The Hat
This probably doesn?t come as a big surprise to CED?s readers. The NAT conundrum is reminiscent of the early days of pay television?when descrambler boxes presumed for use on additional TVs within a subscribing household mysteriously found their way into someone else?s house? someone who wasn?t paying for HBO or Showtime or a similar premium service.
What?s different between the two types of thievery, technologists say, is that descrambler boxes of yore, and particularly those sold for additional outlets, could be (and were, once the debauchery was discovered) provided at an additional, and undiscounted, rental fee.
But NAT, because it is invisible to the cable modem, can theoretically continue its stealth stride into cable networks, undetected. The only remedy?at least until CableLabs? ?CableHome? effort releases its antidote, known as Cable Address Translator, or CAT?is to trust in humanity?s application of right and wrong: ??Tis a sin, to steal a pin, as we, all of us, used to be informed in the nursery,? as the 1875 proverb goes. Or, in this case, ?tis a sin, to steal bandwidth, as we, all of us, learned in the workplace.
What?s the value of the stolen goods? Revenues associated with additional IP addresses, for one. Let?s say one in 10 of the 5 million U.S. cable modem subscribers are usurping IP addresses without paying the $4.95 per month fee that?s typically charged (beyond a pre-specified limit, which varies MSO to MSO.) Right off that bat, that?s just shy of $30 million lost, annually.
Under NAT?s hat
Network address translation started out innocently enough. Back in 1993, the World Wide Web consisted of just a handful of graphically-oriented destinations?what we now call ?Web sites??and a group of data-minded, engineering members of the Internet Engineering Task Force got worried.
There was no question that the Internet, and its TCP/IP-based underpinnings, would get big, the engineers mused. And when it did, how on earth would the distribution of zillions of Internet Protocol (IP) addresses be managed, let alone scaled?
At its inception, NAT was viewed as a way to ward off a looming shortage of IP addresses.
The only answer, the engineers decided, was some form of hierarchical distribution, handled transparently at drop-off points. Something that could partition IP addresses for multiple, simultaneous use by devices ?lower? in the hierarchy. The drop-off point, though, was imagined more as a standard LAN than a home network.
NAT was also meant to simplify matters. Specifically, it was intended to simplify small business networks, so that the technologically-challenged small business owner could install and run IP address-sharing on a run-of-the-mill local area network, without having to go to night school to acquire a data communications doctorate.
Who knew?
At the time, eight or so years ago, no one had fully imagined that regular, everyday consumers would someday own multiple PCs, and would want a way to hook them together. Nor had anyone fully imagined that a cable or DSL modem could be hooked into a residential network, and its IP address resource shared. (The Internet, mostly a bulletin board at the time, topped out at 9600 baud back then.) And certainly, no one had fully imagined that the resources shared by a single, wirelessly-networked residence would also be shared among other devices, at other residences, within 300 feet.
What happened is the inverse of the old Ivory soap story: Upon going to lunch one day, somebody forgot to turn off the mixer. An ordinary accident. The result was soap that floated: A good, marketable, accidental discovery. NAT turns out to accidentally be a bad, unmarketable discovery. Its intentions were good; but one portion of its reality is clearly not so good.
Reality, right now, is walking into a computer store and buying a $100-ish wireless home networking hub, with built-in NAT. These days, NAT is a feature differentiator for home networking hub vendors. Suppliers describe the benefits of NAT in terms of modifying IP and transport headers to provide transparent routing to end hosts, which are trying to communicate from disparate address realms.
That means the NAT-based home networking hubs can create secret domains, behind and invisible to the cable or DSL modem. The IP address intended for the cable modem is partitioned into re-usable addresses, transparently, through software routing mechanisms. The result is a sort of private, sub-network running datagrams to and from invisible end devices (the PCs in neighboring homes).
How it works
A home-networking hub is a fairly unglamorous, rectangular box with lights on the front that correspond to what?s connected. On the back there are eight or so receptacles for telephone wires, or thicker ?category-5? wires, for the items being linked?laptops, PCs, printers, the cable or DSL modem. Ditto for wireless hubs, except they use an antenna to send and receive datagrams from other antennas; those antennas are attached to the things to be connected.
Put simply, NAT works by securing an IP address via the cable modem and the IP-address server (the ?DHCP,? or Dynamic Host Control Protocol server). NAT software resident inside the wireless hub handles the parsing of the IP address, as well as back-and-forth conversations with all connected devices. Notably, not all home networking hubs include NAT; in general, less-expensive $50-ish hubs don?t have it.
Tactically, it works like this: Anyone with a networkable computer, an 802.11b antenna and receiver, and approval from the master PC connected to a wireless hub, can sit, invisibly, ?behind? the NAT, and share the throughput of the cable modem attached ?ahead of? the NAT.
?The Cat in the hat came back in with a box. A big, red wood box. It was shut with a hook. ?Now look at this trick,? said the cat. ?Take a look! ??
?Dr. Seuss, The Cat In The Hat
For example: Neighbor Bob buys cable modem service and a wireless home network. Neighbors Carol, Ted and Alice don?t buy cable modem service, but they go out and buy antennas compatible with Neighbor Bob?s wireless network. Everybody agrees to share Neighbor Bob?s connection. So what if it?s not quite as zippy? It?s free. Neighbor Bob?s cable modem, and Neighbor Bob?s broadband service provider, never know its throughput is being shared. They, sadly, can?t see a thing past the NAT.
NAT also raises issues for forthcoming cable-delivered home-networking services. A crucial part of the success or failure of broadband home networks will be the set-up and ongoing care processes used to link PCs and consumer-electronics gear.
With NAT-based hubs, cable providers won?t be able to see into all connected devices?making remote troubleshooting difficult?because, again, the NAT is speaking for all connected devices. It?s the data communications equivalent of, ?You wanna talk to her, you go through me??except you don?t even know she?s there to talk.
Cable?s CAT in the Hat
MSO technologists involved with home networking are already sorely aware of NAT?s blemishes. In addition to what?s already been noted, technologists grumble that NAT hubs vary in operation from one supplier to the next, making uniform maintenance a nightmare.
Gladly, there?s a remedy in the works. It?s coming from CableHome, the CableLabs project specifically focused on specifications for cable home networks.
Mercifully, MSO and CableLabs technologists involved in the project are hard at work on a cable-friendly form of IP-address distribution to connected devices. They?re unofficially calling it ?CAT,? for ?Cable Address Translator.? In future CableHome-based networks, CAT software could go one step further, essentially saying, ?Pardon, NAT, but what?s that behind you?? Or, CAT could replace NAT altogether, at least in equipment hand-picked by MSOs for home-network service packages.
At the very least, cable MSOs involved in CableHome want a counting mechanism, with parameters set by them, that specifies a maximum number of connected devices. Until then, all indicators point to DOCSIS 1.1, which includes methods to monitor bandwidth consumption (how much is used per customer) and speed (who?s bursting at what rates).
Unquestionably, the ability to ?see? connected devices makes troubleshooting and customer care somewhat easier. It will also put some enforceability into what, today, is an unintentional honor system, in terms of IP address and resultant bandwidth sharing.
Perhaps Theodore Geisel, Dr. Seuss? inventor, had the best advice, albeit not from The Cat in the Hat: ?You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself any direction you choose.?
terrible analogy. a much better one would be if you left the keys in your car, and parked it under a sign that said 'free cars, it is 100% legal and will be appreciated if you would please remove any car you'd like from this parking lot'
okay, so there's a very real chance that data could get garbled, and that's "No big deal"? I can see why you deserve to make a generous salary of up to $25k/year!
Okay, 2.4.15 was supposed to be "enterprise quality and bug-free", but it couldn't unmount filesystems without destroying them and now we're all supposed to go upgrade to the latest poorly tested kernel? What the fuck?
It's time to admit that most people don't need the newest kernel, and should just run whatever their favorite distro has properly tested. Unless you enjoy pain and you have no data of consequence, chasing kernel versions is a losing proposition.
And there's another one that you've managed to ignore completely, despite it's huge presence.
Companies that pay employees to debug and add features to open source software, because they don't feel the need to reinvent the wheel just because they want two features that aren't in the original program.
Actually i'm more concerned about somebody executing illegal RPC requests because of a flaw in the web server. A lot of this bullshit tends to be implemented on IIS after all.
It's a new trend, run everything on port 80 so your network admin has less to worry about, but that whole concept is a steaming pile of shit.
The security or insecurity of a service has nothing to do with whether or not the request can be brokered by a webserver. All this really accomplishes is setting up the webserver as a massive single point of failure, and making it harder to audit what services a particular box is running.
When you use the paradigm that each service has an associated port, you can be sure that nobody is running any unknown services merely by blocking ports. When everything is on port 80, the firewall becomes much less useful.
Re:Bad screenshots for showing anti-aliasing
on
KDE 3.0 Screenshots
·
· Score: 1, Flamebait
from this message my psychic powers tell me you're an idiot who likes to use html email, and has a shitty net connection.
yeah, i mean, how are you supposed to see your free porn through all those pop-up ads? don't they know that you're too timid to go out and buy yourself a nice collection at a porn store, or to sign up for www.teensluts.com?
Despite what this article says, Intel is not the first company to release 802.11a devices. Proxim has the Harmony line of 802.11a devices, and has for some time.
I know the officials want to convince everybody that it's not terrorism, but intelligent people should at least consider the possibility with an open mind.
After all, if nobody thinks that this could be terrorism, why is every NYC area airport closed? JFK, LGA and EWR are all fully operational at the moment, but have been forced to close. That is not standard procedure. Or at least it wasn't before 11 Sep 2001.
There's no need to be testy and defensive, just because you're wrong.
Your site may have linked to a form that is able to be filled out by a person with visual disabilities, however you did not suggest this in your post. You merely suggested obfuscating all addresses in images, thus making it a little harder for me to use the web.
For those of you who are complaining that this brings the web down to the least common denominator, you're missing another important point. Pages that work well for people with disabilities work well for people using alternate browsers, such as those that you might want to use someday on your PDA, or cell phone, or car radio.
That's a great way to make your site less accessible to people with disabilities. You've succesfully made it so people with visual disabilities cannot get your email address.
Your solution breaks the web even more than it's already broken, as a blind person, I find your idea contemptable.
Your sig seems to have an error. It offers $150 total for a service when you obviously mean $150/hr. Unless of course your goal is to get a shoddy, insecure distro of low quality, then pass it on to clients as if it was put together by somebody who knows their ass from their elbow.
If there's a key learning for us, we can't have free software, it's kind of inconsistent with the goals of most people in the room. We recognize it, it probably doesn't fit in most of these people's mind's eye, so we're not going to embrace that.
More proof that we need to mobilize the power that is slashdot to write more GPL software. I love the BSD license as much as anybody, but it's obvious that Microsoft will hijack BSD licensed software, and use it for their own negative purposes.
Come on people, what GPL projects have you contributed to? File a bug report, write a patch, help with the documentation, write a HOWTO, anything. Help make Linux strong!
Yes, but when you check the list archives, it's apparent that asking for illegal materials, such as Bruce Springsteen bootlegs, is perfectly acceptable. I challenge you to find a reprimand for such requests.
Perhaps DAT-Heads has become a bushel that needs to be thrown out. It's obvious that you're only defending DAT-heads because of your interest in getting more illgotten music. How sad...
Wow, as much as $0.20 per song. Wow, how generous! Why, given the artists time to compose the work, the studio time for production, the post-production, the creation of a website to sell the work, the advertisement of said site, the operation of said site and the advertisement of the original work, that could make as much as -$1.00/track for the artist! What a deal!
If the artist sold a five million copies or so, they'd almost be able to recoup their costs. Wow. This is a great idea, and must be implemented immediately!
Slashdot Mirror
As far as people getting screwed, how about I add to every mailing list on the planet, and see how well you deal when your email is effectively destroyed.
Letters != email.
Bill paying services can't be changed in a week
You're a fucking retard.
terrible analogy. a much better one would be if you left the keys in your car, and parked it under a sign that said 'free cars, it is 100% legal and will be appreciated if you would please remove any car you'd like from this parking lot'
okay, so there's a very real chance that data could get garbled, and that's "No big deal"? I can see why you deserve to make a generous salary of up to $25k/year!
It's time to admit that most people don't need the newest kernel, and should just run whatever their favorite distro has properly tested. Unless you enjoy pain and you have no data of consequence, chasing kernel versions is a losing proposition.
enterprise software, by Linux.
- crackdowns on religion
- harsh treatment of political dissent
- falun gong practitioners put in detention, sentenced to "reeducation-through-labor" camp, incarcerated in mental institutions or killed
- extrajudicial killings
- torture
- forced confessions
- arbitrary arrest and detention
- mistreatment of prisoners
- lengthy incommunicatdo detention
- denial of due process
- a judicial system that denies defendants basic legal safeguards
- restrictions on freedom of speech and the press
- restrictions on freedom assembyly and freedom of association
- restrictions on freedom of movement
- violence against women, including forced abortion and sterlization
- trafficking in women and children
- massive abuses in Tibey and Xinjiang
- a lack of worker rights
- forced labor in prison facilities
- child labor
The list goes on, and details are provided. Check out what goes on in the country that makes your shoes for such a good price.What a shock, who'd have thought that China would have bad Human Rights Practices.
Most geeks could really use a trip to Prague, where the girls are very friendly!
1000 mp3s on your belt, in a tiny, light package that doubles as a firewire hard drive. What more could you want?
Companies that pay employees to debug and add features to open source software, because they don't feel the need to reinvent the wheel just because they want two features that aren't in the original program.
Personally I found the Leonids to be most amazing, while exposing my mind to a dose of good LSD with an MDMA intro.
Actually i'm more concerned about somebody executing illegal RPC requests because of a flaw in the web server. A lot of this bullshit tends to be implemented on IIS after all.
The security or insecurity of a service has nothing to do with whether or not the request can be brokered by a webserver. All this really accomplishes is setting up the webserver as a massive single point of failure, and making it harder to audit what services a particular box is running.
When you use the paradigm that each service has an associated port, you can be sure that nobody is running any unknown services merely by blocking ports. When everything is on port 80, the firewall becomes much less useful.
WOW! I'm right!
yeah, i mean, how are you supposed to see your free porn through all those pop-up ads? don't they know that you're too timid to go out and buy yourself a nice collection at a porn store, or to sign up for www.teensluts.com?
Slashdot needs a fact checker.
After all, if nobody thinks that this could be terrorism, why is every NYC area airport closed? JFK, LGA and EWR are all fully operational at the moment, but have been forced to close. That is not standard procedure. Or at least it wasn't before 11 Sep 2001.
Your site may have linked to a form that is able to be filled out by a person with visual disabilities, however you did not suggest this in your post. You merely suggested obfuscating all addresses in images, thus making it a little harder for me to use the web.
For those of you who are complaining that this brings the web down to the least common denominator, you're missing another important point. Pages that work well for people with disabilities work well for people using alternate browsers, such as those that you might want to use someday on your PDA, or cell phone, or car radio.
Everybody, please validate your pages with Bobby.
Your solution breaks the web even more than it's already broken, as a blind person, I find your idea contemptable.
Your sig seems to have an error. It offers $150 total for a service when you obviously mean $150/hr. Unless of course your goal is to get a shoddy, insecure distro of low quality, then pass it on to clients as if it was put together by somebody who knows their ass from their elbow.
The first link in the story is incorrect, Tom's little preview is actually located at http://www4.tomshardware.com/technews/technews-200 11108.html#0053
Come on people, what GPL projects have you contributed to? File a bug report, write a patch, help with the documentation, write a HOWTO, anything. Help make Linux strong!
Perhaps DAT-Heads has become a bushel that needs to be thrown out. It's obvious that you're only defending DAT-heads because of your interest in getting more illgotten music. How sad...
If the artist sold a five million copies or so, they'd almost be able to recoup their costs. Wow. This is a great idea, and must be implemented immediately!