I should probably point out that while this is certainly within Comcast's RIGHTS, it's really a very bad business decision that will just piss off their customers who will poison the hell out of their network to get around this. That's what's happening to Rogers. I see it as more of a "trial run" for DoSing their competitor's VoIP and Internet TV services.
Typical of someone who thinks stealing is acceptable. Now just hold on a minute here. The OP did not "steal" anything. He bought a new PC with a legitimate OEM copy of Windows on it. He was unhappy with all the crapware and spyware that his OEM put on his box, so he downloaded a copy of XP that bypassed activation (because he thought it was annoying) and which didn't include the crapware, and presumably installed it with his OEM keys. This is not only not illegal, it isn't even a violation of Microsoft's terms. It might be a violation of the OEM's terms but fuck them. "Pack-in" contracts don't mean anything.
Nobody has a God-given right to make money. It is not your job as a consumer to cater to the OEM by tolerating all the shovelware they dump on their new systems. It's YOUR computer. You can delete, disassemble, reformat, reinstall, etc. as you see fit. Of course, they might nor "support" your config, but "support" from OEMs is generally awful anyway.
See here for issues with even trying: Did you even READ the KB article you referenced? If you had, you'd see that it's perfectly possible to put your Users folder on another volume as long as it's an NTFS volume. The "problems" you're talking about have to do with the automated tools not updating the legacy junctions to the user-defined locations. Users will have to do that manually. Gee, you NEVER have to do ANYTHING in Linux manually, right?
And speaking of Linux: Ever heard of/usr/local/bin? Who keeps all their data in/home anyway? Assuming your users ARE doing this, they much be creating shitloads of symlinks to make their apps work properly. Symlinks that will all break when them move/home. Show me a package manager that cleanly installs apps in/home.
Next they'll do away with the registry and go back to config files Not likely. Text config files have a different set of disadvantages from a central database, but they do have disadvantages. All else being equal, I prefer MS' way of doing it.
not require a GUI for some server type stuff, and improve their cmd.exe..... Already done. Powershell is as good as any Unix shell, and in Windows Server 2008 they've made a big push to have everything configurable from the command line. There is even a "command line only" mode for Windows Server 2008.
Now, here's Comcast's issue. BitTorrent as a protocol is specifically designed to suck up all available bandwidth. The problem is that by necessity it does that to the exclusion of all other traffic which is more well behaved. Although we'd all love to live in a dreamworld where bandwidth is unlimited, reality is different. In reality, there are a lot of people who just want to check their e-mail and browse the web quickly. When their neighbors are running BitTorrent 24/7 they can no longer do this. Increasing the bandwidth does not help because BitTorrent will proceed to soak that up.
Nobody gets cable internet to check email. This isn't 1999.
Have you ever worked in an ISP? If you did, you would know that "bad" traffic has ALWAYS made up the majority of traffic going through ISPs. Before bittorrent it was other P2P, like Kazaa and Napster, before P2P it was Usenet, FTP, and IRC. Right now the majority of the web traffic flowing through most ISPs is STILL porn. What about streaming media like YouTube or online games like World of Warcraft? They eat up shitloads of bandwidth as well. Think nobody is interested in that?
My sympathy for Comcast is limited. The actual problem is that Comcast is wildly OVERSUBSCRIBED on the upstream bandwidth. And they want to make money selling services on top of their ISP fees (like VoIP and TV on Demand) that eat up even more of that oversubscribed bandwidth. In order to do this, they basically want to DoS all other traffic going through their network. This is what "net neutrality" is all about, and why the GOOD PEOPLE like EFF are pushing for it.
So, the only fix is to stop BitTorrent from sucking up all available bandwidth. That means you need some sort of a filter. Now, you can do it the first way by putting a filter in between the endpoints. The filter could presumably receive the packets then delay sending them for a bit. TCP window sizes are usually only so large so delaying the packets will delay them from reaching the other endpoint which will thus cause ACK messages to be delayed. The problem with this is that you have to have real QoS equipment to get all this done.
And why shouldn't they buy real QoS equipment? They're using this TCP RST crap because Sandvine underbid the people selling REAL QoS equipment. It's not like it's that difficult, I know that most ISPs already prioritize SMTP, VPN, and VoIP traffic. Comcast makes billions, they shouldn't be so cheap.
The other method is to realize that while most protocols would be disrupted due to forcibly closing the connection, BitTorrent will not be. The receiving peer will just go hunt for a different peer and the sending peer now has another slot open for a new receiving peer. Thus, closing BitTorrent connections doesn't prevent anyone from using BitTorrent, it just makes it slower.
No, it's BLOCKING. It's the definition of blocking. Just because the client can retry doesn't mean it's not blocking. If the Sandvine worked perfectly it WOULD block all Bittorrent traffic. It's only because of performance problems on the Sandvine boxes that any BT traffic works properly at all. I should also note that the Sandvine is sloppy and blocks lots of stuff in addition to Bittorrent, like Gnutella, eDonkey, Kazaa, Lotus Notes, apparently iChat, etc. Since Comcast refuses to admit they're using it, customers can't complain about it to customer support.
Comcast's sloppy use of TCP RST is going to hurt everyone in the long run as the P2P people start making clients that completely break the RFCs and shim the network stack to forge their own packets. Eventually people will start DoS'ing the Sandvine boxes, I've already figured out how to do it. Comcast WILL lose this arms race.
That, of course, is reasoned and intelligent debate without stupid emphasis on various words to make the story more sensational. The EFF is ridiculous. Like the ACLU, it's a good idea in principle. In practice both of those organizations aren't prot
The style of your posts is extremely abrasive, and doesn't do you any favors. This is why you have so many negative mods. Try to lay off the insults and swearing if you actually want people to respond to your posts. Your tactics aren't working to actually convince anyone of your positions. I've skimmed a few of your other posts and you seem to be able to make a point when you really want to, in between the insults. I'm showing a little faith in you here by assuming you're not just going to respond with the usual.
You said I misinterpreted your post and I responded to both interpretations. It's my assumption that you disagree with the OP somehow based on the tone of your posts. So the subtext I'm taking out of your posts is "The Bush Administration is right in their policies." If you disagree with the statement in quotes, maybe you shouldn't have posted in oblique support of the policy.
Yes, current troop deployments should be kept secret. The OP was not saying we should post the details of Army infantry deployments to the public. I don't know how you gleaned that from his post. He was talking about CIA "black bag" operations. And yes, a strong case can be made that we shouldn't do these kind of operations at all. We shouldn't "disappear" people. We shouldn't work with shady governments and criminals to gather "intelligence".
So what's your response to the real issue? Should US government agencies engage in "black bag" operations and "disappearing" people, or not?
Um, no.
Require all users to add and authorize Comcast's cert. Um, no. Do you really think that business customer with their own CA are going to be willing to toss it and encrypt everything using a general cert from Comcast (which entirely defeats the purpose of the encryption to begin with)? I think not. There is no fucking way any business that requires VPN is going to give every Comcast user access to their VPN link. It's crazy.
Proxy all SSL/TLS connections. Two problems:
1) Do you have any idea how much this costs in terms of hardware? I can't even imagine how much it would cost to proxy all that traffic. Millions certainly.
2) And what good would it do? Unless they're insisting every site on internet re-encrypt to their cert they have no fucking way of knowing what's in the packets. And every site on the internet isn't going to do this.
Block all other encrypted traffic. Which, assuming you're requiring people to re-encrypt to the Comcast cert, means that absolutely no online shopping, web banking, SSH, business VPN, remote management, etc. is possible on Comcast. ABSOLUTELY NO business customers would use such a service and few consumers would tolerate it as well. This is not a serious option.
What they're doing is deep inspecting the traffic for something that looks like P2P and then doing a "man in the middle" attack to send TCP RST commands to both ends of the connection. This is the DEFINITION of blocking. Or at least this is how most IPS and security products that do "protocol blocking" work.
Yes, SSL tunneling DOES work, but it completely kills your bandwidth, which is basically what this does as well. The solution is better protocol encryption. Sandvine has apparently hacked the protocol encryption used on most Bittorrent clients, that's why they're able to separate out the bittorrent traffic and run their RSTs.
Another solution is to figure out how the Sandvine is forging packets to do the RSTs, and then set up local firewall rules (using iptables or CoreForce) to reject those packets. The PeerGuardian people are apparently already working on this.
So, in the long run, Comcast's attempt to block Bittorrent will fail and they'll be out the $50k per site they paid for the Sandvine boxes. Maybe a few rounds more of this will convince them it's a waste of time.
"In fact, we would just point to the big sign on the wall that said "No returns on open software" and asked them to leave."
As others have said, you were probably breaking the law. Most states allow you to return defective merchandise up to 30 days after purchase. Period. In practice, this means that you legally have 30 days to return any merchandise (whether defective or not) because the retailer has to prove the customer broke it, which is near-impossible. So if a retailer insists on not accepting a game unless it's defective, just go out to the parking lot and scratch up the disc real good.
It really pisses me off the game stores like Gamestop make a living ripping off kids.
"So all those troops on location in hot zones that will get massacred just don't matter anymore?"
This is bad grammar. I parsed this as:
So all those troops in hot zones just don't matter anymore?
This implies something about the IDENTITY of those troops. If you meant location you should have said:
So the location of troops in hot zones that will get massacred just doesn't matter anymore?
Which is also bad grammar, but better conveys your point. Considering you wildly misinterpreted the OP, it seems odd to criticize me for misinterpreting your post.
You're also wrong. Should troop location details be kept secret FOREVER? Why does it matter if troop deployment details are released months or years later? Yet just about everything regarding troop deployment during the Iraq war is closely held (at least since the initial invasion).
The part that I found most interesting was this...
"But U.S. District Judge Florence-Marie Cooper in Los Angeles dismissed Bunnell's lawsuit Aug. 21 on the grounds that Anderson's intrusion did not violate the federal wiretapping statute.... the court took note of the contract language between the MPAA and Anderson that represented any data from Anderson as being lawfully obtained."
This illustrates how the courts give the benefit of the doubt in disputes to big corporations. What business or individual is stupid enough to write the details of their illegal dealings down in their contracts? If a drug dealer wrote a contract saying that a loan was for another purpose but an informant testified that it was really for drugs, would HE get the benefit of the doubt?
nor is it within their rights. It certainly *IS* within their rights. Comcast owns their network and they ALLOW you to use it based on terms THEY set. If they wanted to restrict you to port 80 HTTP traffic they certainly could, they just need to make that clear in their TOS.
There are all sorts of restrictions on use in their TOS (like using the standard connection on more than one PC and running just about ANY sort of server, like web and mail servers) and they can add new ones whenever they like. Comcast isn't impersonating you because you are not a DHCP assigned Comcast address. If they want to kill traffic on your connection they can do it as they see fit, read your TOS. If you don't like it, you're basically screwed since all the broadband providers have similar terms.
Comcast will allow you to pay more from more reliable connections that allow you to run servers.
And another thing: Comcast isn't screwing you by not providing guaranteed 6mps download bandwidth for $40 a month. Do you have any idea how expensive bandwidth costs really are? Basically, the Comcast service is a steal for what you get relative to commercial pservices (look into what a T3 costs). Feel free to use commercial services that don't have these restrictive terms.
If you want to whine about the cost and service quality, whine to the government to subsidize it. Because you simply aren't being cheated on pricing.
So all those troops on location in hot zones that will get massacred just don't matter anymore? Your example is stupid because knowing th names of troops on the ground really wouldn't help "the terrorists" at all. Knowing that the commander of the infantry squad shooting at you is named "Sgt. Jim Smith" doesn't stop the bullets.
Of course, virtually everyone agrees there should be a very small amount of secret information hidden from the Congress and the public. And example would be nuclear launch codes, or the identities of moles within foreign intelligence agencies. The complaint is that Congress and other regulatory agencies aren't informed of the overwhelming majority of secret or classified programs, which makes it impossible to perform oversight. And this leads to corruption and abuses. The federal and state governments, especially in recent years, have classified more and more material, most of which is innocuous.
It also hurts national security to make so much material secret. The more secrets you have, the harder it is to keep them. And more importantly, it becomes difficult to distinguish between what is really important to keep secret and what isn't. So when information inevitably leaks, the damage can be far worse.
I am still waiting for an official announcement Keep waiting. Microsoft doesn't want to admit that they basically screwed the early adopters so they are unlikely to tout bug fixes in new version of the 360 console, despite the fact they are significant.
Console manufacturers have always been reluctant to discuss the specific technical details of their consoles because it can leave them at a competitive disadvantage and can aid piracy. For example, it's been recently revealed that the wii is LITERALLY an overclocked Gamecube, which not only looks bad from a marketing perspective, but aids the mod chip makers.
The fact is, 3rd parties have been a very good source of data for consoles. Microsoft certainly isn't able to keep secrets very long. Third parties have discovered that newer Xbox 360s have more reliable DVD-ROM drives, better fans, better heatsinks, and 65nm CPUs.
Bullshit! Prove that statement. I can't. Though you can't disprove it. I did some digging and I found that apparently these statistics aren't really tracked. Police departments aren't required to keep track of the number of people they shoot, so many do not. They certainly don't separate out the SWAT shootings. For legal reasons the police departments insist that EVERY shooting in EVERY circumstance is justified.
Anecdotally, it SEEMS that a lot more innocent people get shot than "guilty" people. I also think it's difficult to deny that, per capita, the US police shoot far more people than the police in other Western industrialized nations like the UK or Canada.
If I'm ever in a hostage situation, I want SWAT there because I have full confidence in them saving me. Most SWAT officers are never in a hostage situation either. The most SWAT raids are attempts to serve warrants for drug offenses. Most of the time nobody is shot because the intel is halfway decent. It's when they have bad intel that the problems arise (the target isn't there or they're at the wrong location). It's how the SWAT members deal with less than perfect information that's at issue (see the original post). And, anecdotally, the answer to that seems to be: not well. They tend to shoot first and ask questions later.
SWAT doesn't do assassinations Bullshit. I have personally witnessed SWAT assassinate someone. I have personally seen SWAT members shoot through closed doors. Ever hear of SWAT snipers? You don't think they shoot to kill? SWAT, developed in LA and following the LA tradition, has a long record of excessive force. SWAT members DO kick down doors guns blazing, and it's gotten them into trouble many times. For every "guilty" person shot by SWAT you can find about 10 innocent people shot by SWAT.
If it affected anything but a narrow segment of one travel industry I might actually agree. When was the last time you travelled long distance by train or bus? And it's not like they're not putting the same travel restrictions on those either. Maybe you find it acceptable to arbitrarily deny people the ability to travel overseas or fly domestically, but I sure don't.
It's a simple question: Is freedom of movement a RIGHT? I believe it is. For the record, I have a problem with DRIVER'S LICENSES as I think the rationale that the government has a right to restrict travel on PUBLIC roads is crap. This doesn't mean I have a problem with traffic laws in general. If someone violates traffic rules restricting their travel *IS* appropriate. I just don't think there should be prior restraint.
Overly restrictive rules get put in place, get relaxed. I can carry sciccors again. That was damn stupid. That's called a free society where sometimes things will be too restrive, and other times too permissive - and we'll always be in one state or the other. In a FREE society it is the RESTRICTIONS that must be justified, not the freedoms. If you think most of the stupid TSA rules actually improve security, you're deluded. Most of them are there to create "busy work" jobs and provide the ILLUSION of security. For example, restricting people from bringing computer equipment onboard aircraft would provide real security, as it's easy to hide explosives in electronic equipment. But that would piss off the airlines that depend on business travelers with laptops as their bread and butter. Instead they restrict LIQUIDS, not because of the danger (it would be near-impossible to bring most liquid explosives on an aircraft due to their volatility), but because this means the airlines can charge you $5 for a bottle of water. It also means that (hopefully) the passengers will be using the toilet less. Every flush costs them money.
Our tolerance for this nonsense the problem, not the imaginary terrorists.
I like how you hide the reality of that behind "certain felonies" like there are none that would matter. I would have no problem with the law if it applied only to those convicted of, say, HIJACKING. That would be pretty short list. But the list includes "lying to federal officials"(which I don't think should even be a crime) and "conspiracy". So MOST of the people are on the list for trivial or petty crimes that have nothing to do with hijacking.
The point is not the 72 hour delay, but that all air travelers have to be "cleared" before they can travel. This "clearance" process is fundamentally anti-freedom and pro-fascism.
It's not like they aren't abusing the rules they have in place already. People are refused onto planes for carrying breast milk, for example. Even worse, peace activists and political opponents have been put on "do not fly" lists to keep them from traveling.
It gets better: Right now, if you are convicted of certain Federal felonies you are AUTOMATICALLY added to the "do not fly" list. And there's no way to get off the list.
There may not be a law preventing a store or theater from letting children watch R-rated movies, but as you note, it isn't needed. The industry voluntarily takes care of this themselves. Hence, there is no need for a law. The gaming industry as a whole (there are many exceptions to be sure) has no issue selling such games to minors. When was the last time you were carded at Blockbuster? I've never seen them card anyone. I was never rejected at a Century or AMC theater (the two biggest chains) for an R-rated movie when I was under 18. Not once. The indie theaters didn't card anyone for anything. Most of the people at Spike & Mike's Sick and Twisted Animation Festival are kids. There are lots of little liquor stores and video stores around here that stock porn mags and vidoes and most of those places sell to kids. And yeah, the strip clubs around here let kids in too. Every been to Vegas? There are kids all over the casinos and strip clubs.
Basically, it seems like videogames are held to a higher standard than other media because they're perceived as a "kid's media" like comic books. It has slowly dawned on American legislators that comic books aren't just for kids, and aren't a popular as they used to be, so they don't have the same scrutiny anymore. Anime has convinced Americans there's a place for adult animation. Eventually legislators will find something else to whine about "for the children".
The challenge was the podrace. It's a minigame. A non-required minigame like the space battle minigame. Such minigames are a staple of RPGs and it would defeat the purpose if you could "tune" your character to beat the minigames since beating the minigames can give your character an edge in the game.
For example, in Bioshock there is a minigame that involves hacking turrets, cameras, vending machines, etc. As your character acquires upgrades the hacking becomes far easier to the point where it's basically automatic. This quickly makes the preferred way of dealing with enemies to hack turrets. On Medium this makes the game frightfully easy (on Hard the health of the bots and turrets are reduced when hacked, making them relatively fragile).
The Repubs may play the supression game well, but they ahve nothing on the Dems when it comes to outright fraud. Ah, but which affects more voters? Statistical study shows that while vote fraud (voting twice, etc.) does occur, it's a much smaller problem than voter suppression. We're talking orders of magnitude here. It is MUCH easier to keep people from voting than it is to actually change their votes or organize large-scale fraud. The key ways voter suppression works are by purging voter rolls and by limiting access to polling places. This is the big reason for the push for electronic voting machines. Contrary to the claims made, because the machines are expensive and difficult to set up (compared to the alternative I discuss below) it means that FEWER people actually get to vote (this helps the Republicans) and especially fewer poor people get to vote. Voter rolls are generally purged by using the racist technique of determining (by name and location) the race of voters, and then purging the black and latino voters claiming they're felons, or registered improperly, or other nonsense. Since blacks and latinos overwhelmingly vote Democratic (because the Republicans court white power types), this suppresses the Democratic vote. This purging is in fact the MAIN voting problem we have in the United States today.
There is little doubt that voter suppression, in part, won the 2000 and 2004 elections for the Republicans. However, as bad as voter suppression is, it really pales in comparison to the propaganda we see on both sides of the debate. Personally, I think the Republicans are also worse in this regard. In particular, Bush's racist tactics against McCain and the "swift boating" of John Kerry.
We need a tamperproof photo/biometric voter ID, open and well documented voting machinery, solid cryptography basis for all this stuff, and checks and balances of the audit procedures. No we don't. The perfect voting system has already been invented. Locked, transparent plastic boxes with a slit in the top of single-page paper ballots. The ballots are marked with black felt tip markers. The boxes are collected by armed guards who then transport them to a central location where, under observation by watchers from all the candidates, the ballots are hand counted. Wah. It's not rocket science.
There is no such thing as a tamperproof ID, and I'm wary of putting ANY additional requirements on the voter since voter suppression is the main problem we're supposed to be addressing.
Candidate #2. At least with him, you have a shot at having a voice (though it may cost you). Alright, take out the crack smoking and insert "beats his wife". Same decision?
You're a voter and you have two candidates to vote for as Senator:
Candidate #1 publicly declares that he cheats on his wife with prostitutes, smokes crack cocaine, and has been charged, but not convicted, in the murder of 3 people. He also declares that he will turn down ALL campaign contributions, gifts, and bribes from ALL special interest groups. His campaign is either self-funded or funded by small (less than $500) individual donations.
Candidate #2 is a nondrinking, nonsmoking, nondrugtaking, Catholic priest. But he publicly declares that he will accept ANY campaign contribution or bribe offered and will act on it.
Inevitable? I sure as hell hope you're right, but I see very little evidence to indicate that. What makes you think we'll disengage from Iraq anytime in the next 5 years? We simply don't have the troops. We've got about 150,000 soldiers, and we aren't gaining any. New recruits are not replacing the soldiers getting killed and wounded. If they're extended again (a virtual certainty), it means that most American soldiers in Iraq will have been there for about 33 months (nearly three years) with only six weeks time off. Soldiers aren't putting up with this anymore. As soon as their tour is up, they muster out. Right now, the re-enlistment bonuses have grown to $100,000 tax-free CASH, and the soldiers still aren't biting. Large-scale mutinies are already commonplace in the National Guard. Many NG soldiers are simply refusing to go now. And an increasing number of Army soldiers are refusing to re-deploy.
We don't have the MONEY for mercenaries. We already have more mercenaries in Iraq than soldiers, but they basically don't do dick. They cost 10X as much are real soldiers and run at the first sign of trouble.
So the only thing we're left with is a draft, and that's not going to happen. It would cause riots in the streets.
So the lion's share of troops are definitely going to be gone after a couple years. The remaining question is whether or not we're going to try to maintain a low level of troops (say, 10,000) indefinitely in Iraq. I think that any winning candidate (except perhaps Barak Obama) would try to maintain such a force in Baghdad. It won't work. They'll just wall themselves up the Green Zone and pray they don't get hit by the constant mortar fire. After we've lost a bunch of troops or civilians (a la Beirut) we'll pull the troops out completely.
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I should probably point out that while this is certainly within Comcast's RIGHTS, it's really a very bad business decision that will just piss off their customers who will poison the hell out of their network to get around this. That's what's happening to Rogers. I see it as more of a "trial run" for DoSing their competitor's VoIP and Internet TV services.
Nobody has a God-given right to make money. It is not your job as a consumer to cater to the OEM by tolerating all the shovelware they dump on their new systems. It's YOUR computer. You can delete, disassemble, reformat, reinstall, etc. as you see fit. Of course, they might nor "support" your config, but "support" from OEMs is generally awful anyway.
And speaking of Linux: Ever heard of
Now, here's Comcast's issue. BitTorrent as a protocol is specifically designed to suck up all available bandwidth. The problem is that by necessity it does that to the exclusion of all other traffic which is more well behaved. Although we'd all love to live in a dreamworld where bandwidth is unlimited, reality is different. In reality, there are a lot of people who just want to check their e-mail and browse the web quickly. When their neighbors are running BitTorrent 24/7 they can no longer do this. Increasing the bandwidth does not help because BitTorrent will proceed to soak that up.
Nobody gets cable internet to check email. This isn't 1999.
Have you ever worked in an ISP? If you did, you would know that "bad" traffic has ALWAYS made up the majority of traffic going through ISPs. Before bittorrent it was other P2P, like Kazaa and Napster, before P2P it was Usenet, FTP, and IRC. Right now the majority of the web traffic flowing through most ISPs is STILL porn. What about streaming media like YouTube or online games like World of Warcraft? They eat up shitloads of bandwidth as well. Think nobody is interested in that?
My sympathy for Comcast is limited. The actual problem is that Comcast is wildly OVERSUBSCRIBED on the upstream bandwidth. And they want to make money selling services on top of their ISP fees (like VoIP and TV on Demand) that eat up even more of that oversubscribed bandwidth. In order to do this, they basically want to DoS all other traffic going through their network. This is what "net neutrality" is all about, and why the GOOD PEOPLE like EFF are pushing for it.
So, the only fix is to stop BitTorrent from sucking up all available bandwidth. That means you need some sort of a filter. Now, you can do it the first way by putting a filter in between the endpoints. The filter could presumably receive the packets then delay sending them for a bit. TCP window sizes are usually only so large so delaying the packets will delay them from reaching the other endpoint which will thus cause ACK messages to be delayed. The problem with this is that you have to have real QoS equipment to get all this done.
And why shouldn't they buy real QoS equipment? They're using this TCP RST crap because Sandvine underbid the people selling REAL QoS equipment. It's not like it's that difficult, I know that most ISPs already prioritize SMTP, VPN, and VoIP traffic. Comcast makes billions, they shouldn't be so cheap.
The other method is to realize that while most protocols would be disrupted due to forcibly closing the connection, BitTorrent will not be. The receiving peer will just go hunt for a different peer and the sending peer now has another slot open for a new receiving peer. Thus, closing BitTorrent connections doesn't prevent anyone from using BitTorrent, it just makes it slower.
No, it's BLOCKING. It's the definition of blocking. Just because the client can retry doesn't mean it's not blocking. If the Sandvine worked perfectly it WOULD block all Bittorrent traffic. It's only because of performance problems on the Sandvine boxes that any BT traffic works properly at all. I should also note that the Sandvine is sloppy and blocks lots of stuff in addition to Bittorrent, like Gnutella, eDonkey, Kazaa, Lotus Notes, apparently iChat, etc. Since Comcast refuses to admit they're using it, customers can't complain about it to customer support.
Comcast's sloppy use of TCP RST is going to hurt everyone in the long run as the P2P people start making clients that completely break the RFCs and shim the network stack to forge their own packets. Eventually people will start DoS'ing the Sandvine boxes, I've already figured out how to do it. Comcast WILL lose this arms race.
That, of course, is reasoned and intelligent debate without stupid emphasis on various words to make the story more sensational. The EFF is ridiculous. Like the ACLU, it's a good idea in principle. In practice both of those organizations aren't prot
The style of your posts is extremely abrasive, and doesn't do you any favors. This is why you have so many negative mods. Try to lay off the insults and swearing if you actually want people to respond to your posts. Your tactics aren't working to actually convince anyone of your positions. I've skimmed a few of your other posts and you seem to be able to make a point when you really want to, in between the insults. I'm showing a little faith in you here by assuming you're not just going to respond with the usual.
You said I misinterpreted your post and I responded to both interpretations. It's my assumption that you disagree with the OP somehow based on the tone of your posts. So the subtext I'm taking out of your posts is "The Bush Administration is right in their policies." If you disagree with the statement in quotes, maybe you shouldn't have posted in oblique support of the policy.
Yes, current troop deployments should be kept secret. The OP was not saying we should post the details of Army infantry deployments to the public. I don't know how you gleaned that from his post. He was talking about CIA "black bag" operations. And yes, a strong case can be made that we shouldn't do these kind of operations at all. We shouldn't "disappear" people. We shouldn't work with shady governments and criminals to gather "intelligence".
So what's your response to the real issue? Should US government agencies engage in "black bag" operations and "disappearing" people, or not?
1) Do you have any idea how much this costs in terms of hardware? I can't even imagine how much it would cost to proxy all that traffic. Millions certainly.
2) And what good would it do? Unless they're insisting every site on internet re-encrypt to their cert they have no fucking way of knowing what's in the packets. And every site on the internet isn't going to do this. Block all other encrypted traffic. Which, assuming you're requiring people to re-encrypt to the Comcast cert, means that absolutely no online shopping, web banking, SSH, business VPN, remote management, etc. is possible on Comcast. ABSOLUTELY NO business customers would use such a service and few consumers would tolerate it as well. This is not a serious option.
What they're doing is deep inspecting the traffic for something that looks like P2P and then doing a "man in the middle" attack to send TCP RST commands to both ends of the connection. This is the DEFINITION of blocking. Or at least this is how most IPS and security products that do "protocol blocking" work.
Yes, SSL tunneling DOES work, but it completely kills your bandwidth, which is basically what this does as well. The solution is better protocol encryption. Sandvine has apparently hacked the protocol encryption used on most Bittorrent clients, that's why they're able to separate out the bittorrent traffic and run their RSTs.
Another solution is to figure out how the Sandvine is forging packets to do the RSTs, and then set up local firewall rules (using iptables or CoreForce) to reject those packets. The PeerGuardian people are apparently already working on this.
So, in the long run, Comcast's attempt to block Bittorrent will fail and they'll be out the $50k per site they paid for the Sandvine boxes. Maybe a few rounds more of this will convince them it's a waste of time.
"In fact, we would just point to the big sign on the wall that said "No returns on open software" and asked them to leave."
As others have said, you were probably breaking the law. Most states allow you to return defective merchandise up to 30 days after purchase. Period. In practice, this means that you legally have 30 days to return any merchandise (whether defective or not) because the retailer has to prove the customer broke it, which is near-impossible. So if a retailer insists on not accepting a game unless it's defective, just go out to the parking lot and scratch up the disc real good.
It really pisses me off the game stores like Gamestop make a living ripping off kids.
What you said was:
"So all those troops on location in hot zones that will get massacred just don't matter anymore?"
This is bad grammar. I parsed this as:
So all those troops in hot zones just don't matter anymore?
This implies something about the IDENTITY of those troops. If you meant location you should have said:
So the location of troops in hot zones that will get massacred just doesn't matter anymore?
Which is also bad grammar, but better conveys your point. Considering you wildly misinterpreted the OP, it seems odd to criticize me for misinterpreting your post.
You're also wrong. Should troop location details be kept secret FOREVER? Why does it matter if troop deployment details are released months or years later? Yet just about everything regarding troop deployment during the Iraq war is closely held (at least since the initial invasion).
The part that I found most interesting was this...
... the court took note of the contract language between the MPAA and Anderson that represented any data from Anderson as being lawfully obtained."
"But U.S. District Judge Florence-Marie Cooper in Los Angeles dismissed Bunnell's lawsuit Aug. 21 on the grounds that Anderson's intrusion did not violate the federal wiretapping statute.
This illustrates how the courts give the benefit of the doubt in disputes to big corporations. What business or individual is stupid enough to write the details of their illegal dealings down in their contracts? If a drug dealer wrote a contract saying that a loan was for another purpose but an informant testified that it was really for drugs, would HE get the benefit of the doubt?
There are all sorts of restrictions on use in their TOS (like using the standard connection on more than one PC and running just about ANY sort of server, like web and mail servers) and they can add new ones whenever they like. Comcast isn't impersonating you because you are not a DHCP assigned Comcast address. If they want to kill traffic on your connection they can do it as they see fit, read your TOS. If you don't like it, you're basically screwed since all the broadband providers have similar terms.
Comcast will allow you to pay more from more reliable connections that allow you to run servers.
And another thing: Comcast isn't screwing you by not providing guaranteed 6mps download bandwidth for $40 a month. Do you have any idea how expensive bandwidth costs really are? Basically, the Comcast service is a steal for what you get relative to commercial pservices (look into what a T3 costs). Feel free to use commercial services that don't have these restrictive terms.
If you want to whine about the cost and service quality, whine to the government to subsidize it. Because you simply aren't being cheated on pricing.
Of course, virtually everyone agrees there should be a very small amount of secret information hidden from the Congress and the public. And example would be nuclear launch codes, or the identities of moles within foreign intelligence agencies. The complaint is that Congress and other regulatory agencies aren't informed of the overwhelming majority of secret or classified programs, which makes it impossible to perform oversight. And this leads to corruption and abuses. The federal and state governments, especially in recent years, have classified more and more material, most of which is innocuous.
It also hurts national security to make so much material secret. The more secrets you have, the harder it is to keep them. And more importantly, it becomes difficult to distinguish between what is really important to keep secret and what isn't. So when information inevitably leaks, the damage can be far worse.
Console manufacturers have always been reluctant to discuss the specific technical details of their consoles because it can leave them at a competitive disadvantage and can aid piracy. For example, it's been recently revealed that the wii is LITERALLY an overclocked Gamecube, which not only looks bad from a marketing perspective, but aids the mod chip makers.
The fact is, 3rd parties have been a very good source of data for consoles. Microsoft certainly isn't able to keep secrets very long. Third parties have discovered that newer Xbox 360s have more reliable DVD-ROM drives, better fans, better heatsinks, and 65nm CPUs.
Anecdotally, it SEEMS that a lot more innocent people get shot than "guilty" people. I also think it's difficult to deny that, per capita, the US police shoot far more people than the police in other Western industrialized nations like the UK or Canada. If I'm ever in a hostage situation, I want SWAT there because I have full confidence in them saving me. Most SWAT officers are never in a hostage situation either. The most SWAT raids are attempts to serve warrants for drug offenses. Most of the time nobody is shot because the intel is halfway decent. It's when they have bad intel that the problems arise (the target isn't there or they're at the wrong location). It's how the SWAT members deal with less than perfect information that's at issue (see the original post). And, anecdotally, the answer to that seems to be: not well. They tend to shoot first and ask questions later.
It's a simple question: Is freedom of movement a RIGHT? I believe it is. For the record, I have a problem with DRIVER'S LICENSES as I think the rationale that the government has a right to restrict travel on PUBLIC roads is crap. This doesn't mean I have a problem with traffic laws in general. If someone violates traffic rules restricting their travel *IS* appropriate. I just don't think there should be prior restraint. Overly restrictive rules get put in place, get relaxed. I can carry sciccors again. That was damn stupid. That's called a free society where sometimes things will be too restrive, and other times too permissive - and we'll always be in one state or the other. In a FREE society it is the RESTRICTIONS that must be justified, not the freedoms. If you think most of the stupid TSA rules actually improve security, you're deluded. Most of them are there to create "busy work" jobs and provide the ILLUSION of security. For example, restricting people from bringing computer equipment onboard aircraft would provide real security, as it's easy to hide explosives in electronic equipment. But that would piss off the airlines that depend on business travelers with laptops as their bread and butter. Instead they restrict LIQUIDS, not because of the danger (it would be near-impossible to bring most liquid explosives on an aircraft due to their volatility), but because this means the airlines can charge you $5 for a bottle of water. It also means that (hopefully) the passengers will be using the toilet less. Every flush costs them money.
Our tolerance for this nonsense the problem, not the imaginary terrorists. I like how you hide the reality of that behind "certain felonies" like there are none that would matter. I would have no problem with the law if it applied only to those convicted of, say, HIJACKING. That would be pretty short list. But the list includes "lying to federal officials"(which I don't think should even be a crime) and "conspiracy". So MOST of the people are on the list for trivial or petty crimes that have nothing to do with hijacking.
The point is not the 72 hour delay, but that all air travelers have to be "cleared" before they can travel. This "clearance" process is fundamentally anti-freedom and pro-fascism.
It's not like they aren't abusing the rules they have in place already. People are refused onto planes for carrying breast milk, for example. Even worse, peace activists and political opponents have been put on "do not fly" lists to keep them from traveling.
It gets better: Right now, if you are convicted of certain Federal felonies you are AUTOMATICALLY added to the "do not fly" list. And there's no way to get off the list.
I notice that Rob avoided all the tough questions that were asked over and over again, like:
/. actually have?
How many active users does
What do you think of digg?
etc.
Way to catch those softballs Rob.
Basically, it seems like videogames are held to a higher standard than other media because they're perceived as a "kid's media" like comic books. It has slowly dawned on American legislators that comic books aren't just for kids, and aren't a popular as they used to be, so they don't have the same scrutiny anymore. Anime has convinced Americans there's a place for adult animation. Eventually legislators will find something else to whine about "for the children".
For example, in Bioshock there is a minigame that involves hacking turrets, cameras, vending machines, etc. As your character acquires upgrades the hacking becomes far easier to the point where it's basically automatic. This quickly makes the preferred way of dealing with enemies to hack turrets. On Medium this makes the game frightfully easy (on Hard the health of the bots and turrets are reduced when hacked, making them relatively fragile).
There is little doubt that voter suppression, in part, won the 2000 and 2004 elections for the Republicans. However, as bad as voter suppression is, it really pales in comparison to the propaganda we see on both sides of the debate. Personally, I think the Republicans are also worse in this regard. In particular, Bush's racist tactics against McCain and the "swift boating" of John Kerry. We need a tamperproof photo/biometric voter ID, open and well documented voting machinery, solid cryptography basis for all this stuff, and checks and balances of the audit procedures. No we don't. The perfect voting system has already been invented. Locked, transparent plastic boxes with a slit in the top of single-page paper ballots. The ballots are marked with black felt tip markers. The boxes are collected by armed guards who then transport them to a central location where, under observation by watchers from all the candidates, the ballots are hand counted. Wah. It's not rocket science.
There is no such thing as a tamperproof ID, and I'm wary of putting ANY additional requirements on the voter since voter suppression is the main problem we're supposed to be addressing.
You're a voter and you have two candidates to vote for as Senator:
Candidate #1 publicly declares that he cheats on his wife with prostitutes, smokes crack cocaine, and has been charged, but not convicted, in the murder of 3 people. He also declares that he will turn down ALL campaign contributions, gifts, and bribes from ALL special interest groups. His campaign is either self-funded or funded by small (less than $500) individual donations.
Candidate #2 is a nondrinking, nonsmoking, nondrugtaking, Catholic priest. But he publicly declares that he will accept ANY campaign contribution or bribe offered and will act on it.
Who would you vote for?
We don't have the MONEY for mercenaries. We already have more mercenaries in Iraq than soldiers, but they basically don't do dick. They cost 10X as much are real soldiers and run at the first sign of trouble.
So the only thing we're left with is a draft, and that's not going to happen. It would cause riots in the streets.
So the lion's share of troops are definitely going to be gone after a couple years. The remaining question is whether or not we're going to try to maintain a low level of troops (say, 10,000) indefinitely in Iraq. I think that any winning candidate (except perhaps Barak Obama) would try to maintain such a force in Baghdad. It won't work. They'll just wall themselves up the Green Zone and pray they don't get hit by the constant mortar fire. After we've lost a bunch of troops or civilians (a la Beirut) we'll pull the troops out completely.