Amtrak did this to me (kind of), but it was before 9/11.
One of my (ex-) father-in-law(s) is running from the IRS and has been doing so for years. One day, several years ago, my wife tells me her mom and husband are going to be staying with us for a month. Then it is time for them to move on. They want to go visit another of their children, and the best way to get there is Amtrak (Federal US passenger rail service). So I make the ticket purchase, and the Amtrak website asks for the names of the passengers. I put my home address for where the tickets were to be mailed.
Months later, the IRS (Federal Taxation Department) sends letters to my home address, in care of my ex-father-in-law.
I was able to truthfully send the letters back, stating 'not at this address, whereabouts unknown'. But still, it opened my eyes about information sharing and the Feds.
I used to be a conservative, but then went to work for local government (county). About a year later, I became a Libertarian.
Republicans want to spend your money helping business people. Jobs=good.
Democrats want to spend your money helping poor people. Less poor=good.
Libertarians don't want professional 'do-gooders' blowing our tax money on their political friends. Its my money, I'll decide which cause to help out, thank you very much.
In the USA, you pay about 40% to the government (tax).... what's no longer in your wallet?
Way back when, if the government didn't have so much money, we would not have been able to afford sticking our nose in other people's business. It was our using the Afghans to hurt the USSR that got us into the 9/11 terrorism mess.
Cabletron pretty much invented VLANs, but used a central server and a bunch of switch cpu horsepower to get the job done. SecureFast was a beautiful thing.
Cisco knew their gear didn't have the horsepower to compete. So when it came time for the standards body to declare the 802.1q standard - guess which company threw everything into winning the battle?
And of course, the Cisco marketing department promptly started making noise about Cabletron not having a "standards based" VLAN technology.
We lost a lot of fine-grained control when we switched from SecureFast to 802.1q.
What we need now is the control SecureFast gave us, with 802.1q as the transport technology. Then we would beat 'em on both fronts.
The factory I worked at a long time ago put in a new Mitel phone system when they moved the building to another site. It had some sort of integration with Dictaphone equipment, where a road-warrior could call in on a cell-phone, punch a few codes, and start dictating onto tape. The next day, the transcriptionist would have the memo ready for signing. For diagnostic purposes, the system could call the vendor and do some sort of status reporting.
Anyway, the system would randomly call not only the vendor, but the cell-phones of the road-warriors, too. Made for some horrific bills.
So I am at work late one night, programming my little heart out, and my telephone rings. I pick it up, hear the clicks of lines being accessed, and then hear ringing.
"Hello."
"Hello."
"What did you want?"
"Did you call me?"
"No. You called me."
"Actually, my phone rang, and I picked it up, and am now talking to you."
"I'm hanging up now."
"Good night."
"(click)"
The whole dictation thing lasted about a month.
And then I have the story about it prank calling me every 60 seconds while I was on receptionist duty....
I used to work at a factory that made these, and the primary owner was an electrical engineer. He used to point out that really, we should call them PWB - Printed Wiring Boards. They were after all, just wiring, not actual electronic cicuits.
Once in a great while, we got a board with a funny pattern for some traces, and he pointed out those were actual circuitry. He said that at high enough frequencies, an engineer could play with the trace pattern and fiddle with impedence or frequency attenuation.
Lastly he said of course we can call them whatever we want - but whatever the customer says, goes. The customer was always right.:-)
Re:Wouldn't you want your VoIP encrypted anyway?
on
Snooping on VOIP
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· Score: 1
Thank you. I did not know about RTP, nor the details of the setup and teardown standards.
It is cool that RTP factored in a way to do encryption, even if implementation is left as an excercise for the VOIP engineer.
Re:Wouldn't you want your VoIP encrypted anyway?
on
Snooping on VOIP
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· Score: 1
Thank you. I did not know that, and it might very well come in handy. Where I work, we will be investigating a VOIP solution this coming year. My boss went to a dog and pony show by Avaya, and was pretty impresed. We were less impressed with the Cisco + SBC solution. It is reliant on a Windows 2000 server and only integrates with MS Outlook (we are a GroupWise shop).
Can you imagine how happy our clients would be if the VOIP call setup server got last week's WindowsUpdate WebDAV patch?
If thats all it does, tell me again why its anyones damn buisness how many computers i have?
Revenue.
Your ISP (probably) currently sells you a connection, at a particular speed, for a fixed monthly price. What they (probably) don't charge you for is the actual bytes transferred. If you set up links between you and twenty neighbors, and you all split the cost of one broadband connection; then the ISP feels deprived of potential revenue.
Get this: the government agency I work for buys its wide-area connections on a state schedule from a Baby Bell, so we get a pretty good discount. Buried in the fine print is the claim that by buying any one circuit on this schedule (discounted price), we agreed to use them as the sole-source for all WAN links.
Their lawyers sent us a letter, claiming that all the point-to-point 802.11 links (wireless!) we put in place are violations of the sole-source agreement. They want to be paid for the T1 lines they did not install, but could have. They want to be paid retroactively, and from now on, for service they don't provide.
Its all about the revenue.
As you might expect, our lawyers are going to challenge it, pointing out that if we were forced to have bought T1 lines, we would have just done without. We don't have to lease any particular building anywhere, and wouldn't if the telecomm cost was prohibitive. We can get dark fiber to buildings via the local Cable TV provider - MANs are not WANs.
But still, they sent us the letter, trying to bully us into forking out more from our deep pockets.
When you think about it, doesn't it almost seem typical for a former (?) monopoly?
But getting back on track, if you hide from your ISP the quantity of machines you have, then you deprive them of (potential) revenue. Someone else (insightfully) pointed out these bills are most likely the work of a single lobbyist (or PAC). First, the businesses (?) have to legislate that hiding the quantity of computers you have is illegal. Then they can change the TOS to charge per internet connected device.
Its all about the revenue.
Re:Wouldn't you want your VoIP encrypted anyway?
on
Snooping on VOIP
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· Score: 1
I might be wrong, but I thought VOIP traffic was primarily UDP, not TCP. TCP is used for the call setup and teardown, but the actual stream of voice pakets is UDP for speed's sake.
With UDP, you don't mind losing a packet or two to network congestion (and the voice stream comes through with garbled for half a second.) The idea is that if your network buffer (or stack) fills up, the UDP packets are thrown away first. I can't see encryption being speedy enough. I could very well be wrong.
But to me, encryption = significant packet processing; and, UDP = "don't process it, ship it!"
I would expect that if done, the encrypted VOIP call will be done
Three answers: "wireless wiki", "biometric single sign-on", and "check out SIGCOMM journal."
SIGCOMM being the special interest group for data communications within the ACM. If it is data, it will need to be moved. What better way to see the future than to read the published papers of those hard thinking graduate students?
Yes, al-Queda did the terrorist thing for mortal revenge because of our treatment of the Afghan freedom fighters after they kicked the USSR's butt on our behalf. You could almost hear Nelson from The Simpsons cry out "Ha-ha", and Bart mutter "Suckers". So you are correct, changing our policy of messing with other people's lives could keep things like September 11 from happening in the future.
On the other hand, Iraq is a completely different situation. With WMD, Saddam has an extortion tool that he can use - cave to his demands, or we lose Cleveland. He wants money, he wants assets un-frozen, he wants us to abandon our support of Israel, and he will want us to sit on our hands when he and his friends invade their neighbors. Don't like it? Lose Miami, too.
So I agree with you that the September 11 bombings were largely our State Department and Presidents' (past and present) fault. But I also (now) see that there is a wealthy, dangerous man fueled by greed that is a truly large problem.
The original post said this:
Placing restrictions upon any technology hobby in the name of "combating terrorism" is folly of the highest order and constitutes blindingly stupid public policy.
I'll go one better: the anti-terror junk is such blindingly stupid policy, that I decided to turn off the TV every time I saw George Bush trying to pitch his plan for anything. Literally, if the current administration pitched it, it must be blindingly stupid, so turn it off.
How am I supposed to reconcile the following? Immediately after September 11, George Bush said "If we allow ourselves to get caught up in a life of fear, then the terrorists have already won." Compare that to the Patriot Act, Patriot Act II, TIA, and... classifying two ounce model rocket engines as explosives.
sigh.
I sure hope George Bush feels like the boy crying wolf right now.
So your basic premise is correct: don't piss them off, and they won't feel the need to hurt you. Unfortunately, being only good + helpful doesn't remove the ability of a career criminal to ply even more of his trade.
For my.sig below, notice its says "jerk" not "criminal."
Yeah, that is kind of a hard one. On the one hand, if you go down to the bookstore, look in the Science Fiction section, under "Niven" you will see a bunch of titles. On the other hand, we cannot point you to a movie you might have seen. On the gripping hand*, you if you read one of his books, you probably went out and found more of his books to read. At least that was what happened to me, and seems to have happened to my science fiction reading friends. (So then, you are now a part of the "in crowd"....)
Essentially, his books had more science to them than many many of of the other popular science fiction writers. A number of people get into reading science fiction while they are young, so the exposure to scientific ideas (in addition to a story) is cool.
I remember vividly when in one of the books, the story gave the description of a totally private, un-snoopable communications link: lasers between spacesuits, in perfectly lined up tubes (robotically maintained alignment.) At my age (I think I was thirteen or fourteen), the dawning of that idea in my mind was a revelation. It was that kind of thing that caused me to pursue more of Larry Niven's work (and collaborative works with Jerry Pournelle.)
Eventually, someone wrote that if you like the science in these guys' work, you will also like Robert L. Forwards' work - and they were right.
But back to your point - I agree, a list of titles would have nice. If there is something like imdb for authors (what? Amazon.com in a Lynx browser?) that would have helped.
*Inside joke - you'll have to read "Mote In God's Eye"
I have a combo clockradio + telephone (its a Chronofone) with big red LED display made by Radio Shack that I got in 1979 or '80. Still wakes me up to pleasent music every morning. Phone still works too. Far exceeded my expectations. I still have the manual for the thing. The manual has not one, but two schematics for the circuity inside - and a statement "We Service What We Sell". None of the other telephones I have owned have lasted as long.
At work, I just moved the last of 40 users off an old NetWare 4 server we have had for nearly eight years. I never expected a 468/33 server to last that long. Up until recently, it was easy to forget. And then it would be time to apply patches, and we would see that it had an an uptime of nearly 400 days....
No offense, but if you let them get away with it, there is no reason for them to fix the problem.... When I balance my monthly statement and find even a six cent error, I call them up and make them change it. Sure it cost them more to answer the phone than that. But, I want them to know that when they screw up with my money, I am going to complain. It would have just cost them less just to do it right the first time.
Re:In other words, it isn't a product for most peo
on
Buy a Segway... Please
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· Score: 1
I think you hit the nail on the head. I could see a lot of really old baby boomers going for the eco-friendly, way-cooler-than-a-wheelchair Segway, if and only if it didn't cost as much as their college tuition.
The answer to this is speed and hassle. The other cars in traffic go too fast, which means the driver has to either 1) drive faster than their mind can keep up, or 2) drive as slow as is safe (but becoming a hazard to the other people driving at normal speed.)
And then there is the hassle of driving a big car - it really is a hassle to avoid hitting other things in a parking lot in a big car.
Some other posters pointed out that the market segment is those that need electric wheelchairs. They are correct. If old people were to drive Segways, they would need the same right of way as the wheelchair-bound. One would hope they don't drive the Segways faster than they can react, either.
Andy Rooney on 60 Minutes rode one, and loved it. I could see it as a great product for old people who can't drive, still need to get to the market, and don't want to go too fast.
Yes the price is a problem. And younger people would be willing to ride a bike. But my grandma could handle one of these things, and it would actually be a big help to her. She is otherwise stranded at home, dependent on taxis, neighbors, or public transportation (which in the wide- flat- towns of central California is problematic at best.)
Do know that your tax dollars pay a yearly license to West for this. And it isn't cheap. The only point I am trying to make is that the money is still coming out of your (and my) wallet.
(Because of the expensive (and stringent) licensing terms these companies require I had to set up a method to control the quantity of simultaneous users for our Law Library. It is a big pain.)
I don't see support for the new 802.somethingorother that supplies power through the RJ45 jack. So if the building power fails, but the net equipment is on a backup power system, you still lose phone service. Didn't someone say the thing was rather pricey? The competition supports the power via CAT 5 standard....
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One of my (ex-) father-in-law(s) is running from the IRS and has been doing so for years. One day, several years ago, my wife tells me her mom and husband are going to be staying with us for a month. Then it is time for them to move on. They want to go visit another of their children, and the best way to get there is Amtrak (Federal US passenger rail service). So I make the ticket purchase, and the Amtrak website asks for the names of the passengers. I put my home address for where the tickets were to be mailed.
Months later, the IRS (Federal Taxation Department) sends letters to my home address, in care of my ex-father-in-law.
I was able to truthfully send the letters back, stating 'not at this address, whereabouts unknown'. But still, it opened my eyes about information sharing and the Feds.
Republicans want to spend your money helping business people. Jobs=good.
Democrats want to spend your money helping poor people. Less poor=good.
Libertarians don't want professional 'do-gooders' blowing our tax money on their political friends. Its my money, I'll decide which cause to help out, thank you very much.
In the USA, you pay about 40% to the government (tax).... what's no longer in your wallet?
Way back when, if the government didn't have so much money, we would not have been able to afford sticking our nose in other people's business. It was our using the Afghans to hurt the USSR that got us into the 9/11 terrorism mess.
Cisco knew their gear didn't have the horsepower to compete. So when it came time for the standards body to declare the 802.1q standard - guess which company threw everything into winning the battle?
And of course, the Cisco marketing department promptly started making noise about Cabletron not having a "standards based" VLAN technology.
We lost a lot of fine-grained control when we switched from SecureFast to 802.1q.
What we need now is the control SecureFast gave us, with 802.1q as the transport technology. Then we would beat 'em on both fronts.
Anyway, the system would randomly call not only the vendor, but the cell-phones of the road-warriors, too. Made for some horrific bills.
So I am at work late one night, programming my little heart out, and my telephone rings. I pick it up, hear the clicks of lines being accessed, and then hear ringing.
"Hello."
"Hello."
"What did you want?"
"Did you call me?"
"No. You called me."
"Actually, my phone rang, and I picked it up, and am now talking to you."
"I'm hanging up now."
"Good night."
"(click)"
The whole dictation thing lasted about a month.
And then I have the story about it prank calling me every 60 seconds while I was on receptionist duty....
I'm pretty sure the avian transport layer sets the bit on you....
I think I will set it for the IIS servers anyway. I can remove it the day Microsoft stops adding sabotage code to their products.
Anyone care to place a bet? I need the URL of those 'Betting Pool' web sites. This one will need to run until at least the year 2050....
It'll be the Router Admin Full Employment Act of 2003!
Once in a great while, we got a board with a funny pattern for some traces, and he pointed out those were actual circuitry. He said that at high enough frequencies, an engineer could play with the trace pattern and fiddle with impedence or frequency attenuation.
Lastly he said of course we can call them whatever we want - but whatever the customer says, goes. The customer was always right. :-)
It is cool that RTP factored in a way to do encryption, even if implementation is left as an excercise for the VOIP engineer.
Can you imagine how happy our clients would be if the VOIP call setup server got last week's WindowsUpdate WebDAV patch?
Gad.
Your ISP (probably) currently sells you a connection, at a particular speed, for a fixed monthly price. What they (probably) don't charge you for is the actual bytes transferred. If you set up links between you and twenty neighbors, and you all split the cost of one broadband connection; then the ISP feels deprived of potential revenue.
Get this: the government agency I work for buys its wide-area connections on a state schedule from a Baby Bell, so we get a pretty good discount. Buried in the fine print is the claim that by buying any one circuit on this schedule (discounted price), we agreed to use them as the sole-source for all WAN links.
Their lawyers sent us a letter, claiming that all the point-to-point 802.11 links (wireless!) we put in place are violations of the sole-source agreement. They want to be paid for the T1 lines they did not install, but could have. They want to be paid retroactively, and from now on, for service they don't provide.
Its all about the revenue.
As you might expect, our lawyers are going to challenge it, pointing out that if we were forced to have bought T1 lines, we would have just done without. We don't have to lease any particular building anywhere, and wouldn't if the telecomm cost was prohibitive. We can get dark fiber to buildings via the local Cable TV provider - MANs are not WANs.
But still, they sent us the letter, trying to bully us into forking out more from our deep pockets.
When you think about it, doesn't it almost seem typical for a former (?) monopoly?
But getting back on track, if you hide from your ISP the quantity of machines you have, then you deprive them of (potential) revenue. Someone else (insightfully) pointed out these bills are most likely the work of a single lobbyist (or PAC). First, the businesses (?) have to legislate that hiding the quantity of computers you have is illegal. Then they can change the TOS to charge per internet connected device.
Its all about the revenue.
With UDP, you don't mind losing a packet or two to network congestion (and the voice stream comes through with garbled for half a second.) The idea is that if your network buffer (or stack) fills up, the UDP packets are thrown away first. I can't see encryption being speedy enough. I could very well be wrong.
But to me, encryption = significant packet processing; and, UDP = "don't process it, ship it!"
I would expect that if done, the encrypted VOIP call will be done
one
word
at
a
time
half
duplex.
SIGCOMM being the special interest group for data communications within the ACM. If it is data, it will need to be moved. What better way to see the future than to read the published papers of those hard thinking graduate students?
Thanks for those links. I did not know about the ISBN one, nor about the search page for the Library of Congress catalog.
Yes, al-Queda did the terrorist thing for mortal revenge because of our treatment of the Afghan freedom fighters after they kicked the USSR's butt on our behalf. You could almost hear Nelson from The Simpsons cry out "Ha-ha", and Bart mutter "Suckers". So you are correct, changing our policy of messing with other people's lives could keep things like September 11 from happening in the future.
On the other hand, Iraq is a completely different situation. With WMD, Saddam has an extortion tool that he can use - cave to his demands, or we lose Cleveland. He wants money, he wants assets un-frozen, he wants us to abandon our support of Israel, and he will want us to sit on our hands when he and his friends invade their neighbors. Don't like it? Lose Miami, too.
So I agree with you that the September 11 bombings were largely our State Department and Presidents' (past and present) fault. But I also (now) see that there is a wealthy, dangerous man fueled by greed that is a truly large problem.
The original post said this:
I'll go one better: the anti-terror junk is such blindingly stupid policy, that I decided to turn off the TV every time I saw George Bush trying to pitch his plan for anything. Literally, if the current administration pitched it, it must be blindingly stupid, so turn it off.
How am I supposed to reconcile the following? Immediately after September 11, George Bush said "If we allow ourselves to get caught up in a life of fear, then the terrorists have already won." Compare that to the Patriot Act, Patriot Act II, TIA, and ... classifying two ounce model rocket engines as explosives.
sigh.
I sure hope George Bush feels like the boy crying wolf right now.
So your basic premise is correct: don't piss them off, and they won't feel the need to hurt you. Unfortunately, being only good + helpful doesn't remove the ability of a career criminal to ply even more of his trade.
For my .sig below, notice its says "jerk" not "criminal."
I crack myself up.
Essentially, his books had more science to them than many many of of the other popular science fiction writers. A number of people get into reading science fiction while they are young, so the exposure to scientific ideas (in addition to a story) is cool.
I remember vividly when in one of the books, the story gave the description of a totally private, un-snoopable communications link: lasers between spacesuits, in perfectly lined up tubes (robotically maintained alignment.) At my age (I think I was thirteen or fourteen), the dawning of that idea in my mind was a revelation. It was that kind of thing that caused me to pursue more of Larry Niven's work (and collaborative works with Jerry Pournelle.)
Eventually, someone wrote that if you like the science in these guys' work, you will also like Robert L. Forwards' work - and they were right.
But back to your point - I agree, a list of titles would have nice. If there is something like imdb for authors (what? Amazon.com in a Lynx browser?) that would have helped.
*Inside joke - you'll have to read "Mote In God's Eye"
At work, I just moved the last of 40 users off an old NetWare 4 server we have had for nearly eight years. I never expected a 468/33 server to last that long. Up until recently, it was easy to forget. And then it would be time to apply patches, and we would see that it had an an uptime of nearly 400 days....
All I see at the moment is placeholder text for a graphic "The Active Network". Which it isn't.
Is this what we should expect from Office 2003? Loooong periods of wait from their ardent supporters? ;-)
No offense, but if you let them get away with it, there is no reason for them to fix the problem.... When I balance my monthly statement and find even a six cent error, I call them up and make them change it. Sure it cost them more to answer the phone than that. But, I want them to know that when they screw up with my money, I am going to complain. It would have just cost them less just to do it right the first time.
I think you hit the nail on the head. I could see a lot of really old baby boomers going for the eco-friendly, way-cooler-than-a-wheelchair Segway, if and only if it didn't cost as much as their college tuition.
And then there is the hassle of driving a big car - it really is a hassle to avoid hitting other things in a parking lot in a big car.
Some other posters pointed out that the market segment is those that need electric wheelchairs. They are correct. If old people were to drive Segways, they would need the same right of way as the wheelchair-bound. One would hope they don't drive the Segways faster than they can react, either.
Yes the price is a problem. And younger people would be willing to ride a bike. But my grandma could handle one of these things, and it would actually be a big help to her. She is otherwise stranded at home, dependent on taxis, neighbors, or public transportation (which in the wide- flat- towns of central California is problematic at best.)
(Because of the expensive (and stringent) licensing terms these companies require I had to set up a method to control the quantity of simultaneous users for our Law Library. It is a big pain.)
I don't see support for the new 802.somethingorother that supplies power through the RJ45 jack. So if the building power fails, but the net equipment is on a backup power system, you still lose phone service. Didn't someone say the thing was rather pricey? The competition supports the power via CAT 5 standard....