Sorry, I was aware that Demon settled before any *final* ruling was handed down - clumsy wording on my part.
However, it has still set a legal precedent - Mr Moorland (?) *did* confirm that Demon were liable under English law for the posting. Demon were already 'guilty' - the only thing that would have been decided had the case progressed further would have been the size of the damages.
There are already laws that can force you to 'unpublish' articles that are considered untruthful and damaging to a person's or corporation's image. These are not generally considered unconstitutional.
However, in the case of web pages, there doesn't even have to be a direct threat of legal action. A person who feels libelled by a negative web page can ask the ISP to remove the page, and the ISP might think 'Yes - that's an offensive page' and remove the site, on the basis that (a) it's more trouble than it's worth keeping it there, only with the risk of legal action or (b) simply think 'yep - that's not the sort of thing we want to host'.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, or of the press, or the right of the people to peaceably assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
relates to what a company decides should be allowed on its own servers. The first amendment is there to stop the Government restricting freedom of the press etc. The 'press' can choose to not print whatever the hell they like. They are under no obligation.
The only reason the problem is over stated is because the press have ( as usual ) got the wrong end of the stick.
The real problem with the recent ruling against Demon was that it made UK ISP's responsible for the content for messages on USENET, even if that message did not originate from one of their users. By the act of Demon's newsservers accepting a messages that a Court of Law deemed libellous, Demon were classed of publishers of the libel, and thus responsible.
What is needed is a law to state the 'transient' information, such as USENET, does not open up the transit provider to legal action.
It has been pointed out that Demon could have avoided all this problem by simply cancelling the message when they were made aware of it. However, this would allow deliberate cancellation of innocuous messages, and lead us into another legal mess.
'Free speech' and 'the 1st amendment' are complete red herrings in this debate. The 1st amendment applies only to Congress, and *not* private business. Corporation can censor whatever and whenever they like on *their* systems/equipment/whatever.
The problem with the recent Godfrey vs Demon ruling is the application of libel laws and the way they allow you to sue not only the originator of the libel, but also the publisher and distributor.
The result of this is that when faced with a choice to sue (a) the writer of the libel or (b) the distributor of the libel, it's generally the case that the distributor has the deeper pockets. Therefore, they get sued, not the author.
Because of this, if a newsagent carries a newspaper that contains a defamatory article, you can infact sue the newsagent, or the publishing company, or the author. In the past, such cases have generally resulted in the publisher being sued, although the newsagent (distributor) has been sued on occasion.
However, in the case of the Internet, it's the ISP's who have the cash, and so they are the ones who get sued.
Having said that, the case that started all this, ( Godfrey vs Demon ) related to a USENET posting. This posting was not from a Demon customer, but ended up on Demon's servers in the natural course of things. Demon, upon getting a notice to remove the article, ignored it. Demon have now, in effect, been treated as the publisher of a USENET article that did not originate from them, and since it was deemed libellous, they've paid out a sum not unadjacent to 1/4 million pounds.
THe situation now is that Demon are paranoid about USENET postings and will suspend your net access for even posting a link to an article the is defmatory/libellous, as that is also deemed as publishing.
Whilst ISP being responsible for their users' web sites is acceptable - there is no freedom of speech, you are using the resources of a private company and they are under no obligation to let you make potentially business-damaging allegations on their equipment - there is now an air over extreme over-cautiousness, which will hopefully be moderated back down to something more sensible given time.
The real problem is USENET. There is no way an ISP can be responsible for a USENET feed, 99% of which does not originate from their customers, and for which there is no real method of control for content based cancelling of litigation-inviting messages.
"Public" in the sense that it is generally available to the public, not "Public" in the sense that it is government owned/operated.
Of course, you knew exactly what I meant anyway. Perhaps I should have said "The basic problem is that the Internet is now much more accessible to the general public, and is a much more widely available service"
And since you are nitpicking, read your penultimate paragraph and consider, for a moment, that there are in fact places outside the US...
However, the problem(s) would still arise. Just because the network is private ( ie, not publically accessible ) doesn't mean it isn't subject to the same laws. The only reason it wasn't subject to these laws previously ( in practice, it obviously was in principle ) was the fact that it reached a small proportion of the population, and outside of that population it was unknown and to all intents and purposes didn't exist.
All you'd end up with is an internet that is much smaller than the current Internet. BUT, with the much higher awareness factor now your 'new' internet would quickly grow/degenerate into the Internet as it is today.
As with Andy_R, much of this legislation being US-centric, doesn't really affect me too much at the moment, however, it does set a precedent and with much of the Internet being in the US, it will affect many people outside of the US in some ways.
Still, with reference to the original question, the internet that I knew and loved disappeared years ago when open servers started to be seen as a scourge rather than a service, insecure protocols were insecure because everyone one was pretty much honest, etc, etc, rant, rant...
The basic problem is that the Internet is now a universal ( -ish ) public service, and not, as was, a network used by a select few in University and such like, so there are now an incredible proportion of clueless users - the so called 'Endless septmeber'. It's not that these people are stupid, indeed, they may be very highly qualified in their field, but the Internet is not their field, they don't know the 'rules', so they play by their own...
A minor point, but there's been a porn mag called 'Whitehouse' in the UK for *years*, so they do have a claim on whitehouse.com - it's not just opportunistic domain squatting.
I had no idea all of China, India, and Zimbabwe had computers and ISPs! Such progress in such short time! (Maybe that's why AOL's stock is so inflated?) I doubt there are even 6 billion TVs in the world.
The MPAA are looking ahead. Maybe not now, but 15-20 years time.
Wow! I never knew pipes to those third-world countries were so fat! And the net has the bandwidth to transport a 5GB move to all of those 6 billion computers simultaneously!
Bandwidth is increasing at a huge rate, and for broadcasting there's this thing called 'multicast'. have a look sometime.
(What is 5GB x 6,000,000,000 anyway? Are that many molecules in the universe?)
3.e+19B. The second part of your question makes no sense.
Perhaps if companies such as C&W invested in their own local loops and exchanges then we'd see some real competition.
As it is, I have analogue phone and cable TV from C&W, provided over their own fibre.
NOw, I wanted ISDN, so I though 'Hell, I'll try C&W'. So I ordered from C&W, and who comes to install it ? A BT engineer. And he installs a standard BT ISDN2e connection via BT cables, abnd I just have a routing box from C&W that I plug in between my TA and the wall socket.
If Cable & Wireless can't even provide an ISDN service to me when they already have Cable TV and analogue phone lines into my house, what hope is there ?
When you consider that the basics of the "intel" machine hasn't changed all that much since the days of 640KB memory and a whopping 10MB hard drive....look at DOS.
Hmm..
PCI is a totally different bus from ISA USB is totally different from Serial/Parallel ports A Pentium is effectively a totally different processor from an 8086 AGP is very different from slapping in an ISA video card.
Bus, Processor, IO. That covers most of the basics of an 'Intel' machine...
'Traditionally' a British billion was a million million, and a US billion was a thousand million. However, sometime in the 1970's the British Government changed accounting practices and as such started using a thousand million as a 'billion'.
A customer says they're getting lousy routing to www.imvs.com
Traceroute to www.imvs.com and tell me what you see.
Then tell me if there is a problem with PSI or if www.imvs.com is dead, or, *shock horror* ICMP packets are simply dropped, congestion or not, thus rendering traceroute worse than useless because it has no reported a 'problem' that doesn't exist.
Same applies to microsoft.com, news.com and many, many others because their routers and servers have got better things to do than respond to thousands of pings from DIY troubleshooters picking common addresses to 'test' their routing.
From an end users point of view, there's not much you can do.
But that doesn't change the point that traceroute is not very helpful as a diagnostic tool, as it can all too easily show 'problems' that don't actually exist...
E.g., as I mentioned above, routers that silently drop ICMP packets...
OK, so if I am Sprint and I configure my routers to throttle ICMP packets how does traceroute help ?
Or if the target site has round robin DNS, and you happen to hit a particular interface that is routed round a totally different route from the 'problem' the customer is reporting ?
Or don't they teach you that in Helpdesk 101 ?
Traceroute is *not* a particularly useful diagnostic tool for the Internet...
As stated elsewhere, this software has been available for a while, and can actually be very useful. QoS enables you to guarantee a particular information rate for a connection. For videoconferencing and other real time activities this is essential.
As for the 'finding the optimal path' BGP4 ( the routing protocol used on most of the Internet ) doesn't select routes depending on the speed or available bandwidth of a particular route...
Visual C++ is the only C++-based environment that I know of that actually *requires* a bloody WIZARD to develop. Souls who are cursed with having to use VC++ know what I'm talking about
VC++ does not *require* a Wizard, it just makes it easier as you have the appliction template written for you. Wizard or no Wizard, application templates are pretty common with doing GUI development...
And I won't get into the fact that even the most simple Windows-based applications have to be written using an event-driven model. That is so downright stupid that I can't even find the words to describe it.
And exactly what would you replace the event model with in a GUI system ? If you want to use the Windows GUI then you really have no choice but to use an event driven model. If all you want is to use the Win32 API then there is no requirement to use the GUI, and hence no event driven model.
Slashdot Mirror
The AMULET itself has been around for *years*. It's led by , IIRC, Steve Furber, one of the original designers of the ARM when it was part of Acorn
Sorry, I was aware that Demon settled before any *final* ruling was handed down - clumsy wording on my part.
However, it has still set a legal precedent - Mr Moorland (?) *did* confirm that Demon were liable under English law for the posting. Demon were already 'guilty' - the only thing that would have been decided had the case progressed further would have been the size of the damages.
There are already laws that can force you to 'unpublish' articles that are considered untruthful and damaging to a person's or corporation's image. These are not generally considered unconstitutional.
However, in the case of web pages, there doesn't even have to be a direct threat of legal action. A person who feels libelled by a negative web page can ask the ISP to remove the page, and the ISP might think 'Yes - that's an offensive page' and remove the site, on the basis that (a) it's more trouble than it's worth keeping it there, only with the risk of legal action or (b) simply think 'yep - that's not the sort of thing we want to host'.
The only reason the problem is over stated is because the press have ( as usual ) got the wrong end of the stick.
The real problem with the recent ruling against Demon was that it made UK ISP's responsible for the content for messages on USENET, even if that message did not originate from one of their users. By the act of Demon's newsservers accepting a messages that a Court of Law deemed libellous, Demon were classed of publishers of the libel, and thus responsible.
What is needed is a law to state the 'transient' information, such as USENET, does not open up the transit provider to legal action.
It has been pointed out that Demon could have avoided all this problem by simply cancelling the message when they were made aware of it. However, this would allow deliberate cancellation of innocuous messages, and lead us into another legal mess.
How difficult is it to understand that that companies/corporations are not subject to the 1st amendment ?
'Free speech' and 'the 1st amendment' are complete red herrings in this debate. The 1st amendment applies only to Congress, and *not* private business. Corporation can censor whatever and whenever they like on *their* systems/equipment/whatever.
The problem with the recent Godfrey vs Demon ruling is the application of libel laws and the way they allow you to sue not only the originator of the libel, but also the publisher and distributor.
The result of this is that when faced with a choice to sue (a) the writer of the libel or (b) the distributor of the libel, it's generally the case that the distributor has the deeper pockets. Therefore, they get sued, not the author.
Because of this, if a newsagent carries a newspaper that contains a defamatory article, you can infact sue the newsagent, or the publishing company, or the author. In the past, such cases have generally resulted in the publisher being sued, although the newsagent (distributor) has been sued on occasion.
However, in the case of the Internet, it's the ISP's who have the cash, and so they are the ones who get sued.
Having said that, the case that started all this, ( Godfrey vs Demon ) related to a USENET posting. This posting was not from a Demon customer, but ended up on Demon's servers in the natural course of things. Demon, upon getting a notice to remove the article, ignored it. Demon have now, in effect, been treated as the publisher of a USENET article that did not originate from them, and since it was deemed libellous, they've paid out a sum not unadjacent to 1/4 million pounds.
THe situation now is that Demon are paranoid about USENET postings and will suspend your net access for even posting a link to an article the is defmatory/libellous, as that is also deemed as publishing.
Whilst ISP being responsible for their users' web sites is acceptable - there is no freedom of speech, you are using the resources of a private company and they are under no obligation to let you make potentially business-damaging allegations on their equipment - there is now an air over extreme over-cautiousness, which will hopefully be moderated back down to something more sensible given time.
The real problem is USENET. There is no way an ISP can be responsible for a USENET feed, 99% of which does not originate from their customers, and for which there is no real method of control for content based cancelling of litigation-inviting messages.
"Public" in the sense that it is generally available to the public, not "Public" in the sense that it is government owned/operated.
Of course, you knew exactly what I meant anyway. Perhaps I should have said "The basic problem is that the Internet is now much more accessible to the general public, and is a much more widely available service"
And since you are nitpicking, read your penultimate paragraph and consider, for a moment, that there are in fact places outside the US...
I couldn't agree more in principle.
However, the problem(s) would still arise. Just because the network is private ( ie, not publically accessible ) doesn't mean it isn't subject to the same laws. The only reason it wasn't subject to these laws previously ( in practice, it obviously was in principle ) was the fact that it reached a small proportion of the population, and outside of that population it was unknown and to all intents and purposes didn't exist.
All you'd end up with is an internet that is much smaller than the current Internet. BUT, with the much higher awareness factor now your 'new' internet would quickly grow/degenerate into the Internet as it is today.
As with Andy_R, much of this legislation being US-centric, doesn't really affect me too much at the moment, however, it does set a precedent and with much of the Internet being in the US, it will affect many people outside of the US in some ways.
Still, with reference to the original question, the internet that I knew and loved disappeared years ago when open servers started to be seen as a scourge rather than a service, insecure protocols were insecure because everyone one was pretty much honest, etc, etc, rant, rant...
The basic problem is that the Internet is now a universal ( -ish ) public service, and not, as was, a network used by a select few in University and such like, so there are now an incredible proportion of clueless users - the so called 'Endless septmeber'. It's not that these people are stupid, indeed, they may be very highly qualified in their field, but the Internet is not their field, they don't know the 'rules', so they play by their own...
A minor point, but there's been a porn mag called 'Whitehouse' in the UK for *years*, so they do have a claim on whitehouse.com - it's not just opportunistic domain squatting.
As to what is legacy, I would say all those Unix boxes are legacy systems.
Oh please. 'Legacy' has just come to mean 'anything we compete against'
The MPAA are looking ahead. Maybe not now, but 15-20 years time.
Wow! I never knew pipes to those third-world countries were so fat! And the net has the bandwidth to transport a 5GB move to all of those 6 billion computers simultaneously!
Bandwidth is increasing at a huge rate, and for broadcasting there's this thing called 'multicast'. have a look sometime.
(What is 5GB x 6,000,000,000 anyway? Are that many molecules in the universe?)
3.e+19B. The second part of your question makes no sense.
Competitive ? I doubt it.
Perhaps if companies such as C&W invested in their own local loops and exchanges then we'd see some real competition.
As it is, I have analogue phone and cable TV from C&W, provided over their own fibre.
NOw, I wanted ISDN, so I though 'Hell, I'll try C&W'. So I ordered from C&W, and who comes to install it ? A BT engineer. And he installs a standard BT ISDN2e connection via BT cables, abnd I just have a routing box from C&W that I plug in between my TA and the wall socket.
If Cable & Wireless can't even provide an ISDN service to me when they already have Cable TV and analogue phone lines into my house, what hope is there ?
All the staff are having a collection for him - apparently he was quite popular after having left a rather large 'tip'
Hmm..
PCI is a totally different bus from ISA
USB is totally different from Serial/Parallel ports
A Pentium is effectively a totally different processor from an 8086
AGP is very different from slapping in an ISA video card.
Bus, Processor, IO. That covers most of the basics of an 'Intel' machine...
Darren
It's the other way around.
'Traditionally' a British billion was a million million, and a US billion was a thousand million. However, sometime in the 1970's the British Government changed accounting practices and as such started using a thousand million as a 'billion'.
OK.
A customer says they're getting lousy routing to www.imvs.com
Traceroute to www.imvs.com and tell me what you see.
Then tell me if there is a problem with PSI or if www.imvs.com is dead, or, *shock horror* ICMP packets are simply dropped, congestion or not, thus rendering traceroute worse than useless because it has no reported a 'problem' that doesn't exist.
Same applies to microsoft.com, news.com and many, many others because their routers and servers have got better things to do than respond to thousands of pings from DIY troubleshooters picking common addresses to 'test' their routing.
From an end users point of view, there's not much you can do.
But that doesn't change the point that traceroute is not very helpful as a diagnostic tool, as it can all too easily show 'problems' that don't actually exist...
E.g., as I mentioned above, routers that silently drop ICMP packets...
OK, so if I am Sprint and I configure my routers to throttle ICMP packets how does traceroute help ?
Or if the target site has round robin DNS, and you happen to hit a particular interface that is routed round a totally different route from the 'problem' the customer is reporting ?
Or don't they teach you that in Helpdesk 101 ?
Traceroute is *not* a particularly useful diagnostic tool for the Internet...
Very good analogy, bar the fact it's utter shite.
If Cisco did charge extra for the QoS / Bandwidth Allocation then they'd be charging for an extra feature. Quite common, apparently...
As stated elsewhere, this software has been available for a while, and can actually be very useful. QoS enables you to guarantee a particular information rate for a connection. For videoconferencing and other real time activities this is essential.
As for the 'finding the optimal path' BGP4 ( the routing protocol used on most of the Internet ) doesn't select routes depending on the speed or available bandwidth of a particular route...
The NOC for an ISP recommends using traceroute to troubleshoot a users connection ?
You wouldn't care to name that ISP so I can make damn sure I never touch them with a shitty stick would you ?
As a case in point...
FreeServe, the largest UK ISP has just has 18.5% of its shares floated on the UK stock exchange. This amounts to some 150million ordinary shares.
Since then there have been over 150million shares traded. This is in 2 1/2 days.
Clearly, the underwriters have *not* been holding on to their shares shares...