A long time ago, I noticed some similar problems with equipment powered off a two-wire power feed (actually a monitor). It could build up quite a voltage relative to earth (up to 90v) and possibly to other equipment. This wasn't a PSU fault and was down to some kind of leakage current in the switched mode power supply when it was switched on. If the current stayed in the microamp range, (which it did) then apparently this wasn't a problem. However you really didn't want to connect equipment together (even a BNC video connector) after switching on. As has been noted, modern stuff can be fried by this kind of current. Easily.
Of course, you can preconnect everything but then you have a lovely problem chasing mains hum on the audio. If you don't then you get a slight tingle (as being reported on the Dells).
Good point and as nobody put in the figures. A shuttle mission runs between $500mil to $900mill, depending on whether it is ISS or Hubble servicing (the higher cost). The war is costing the treasury about $364bill. Some of that money is the ongoing cost of the US military 'resting state' costs, i.e. salaries, training and equipment replacement. The fact is that the military has been upscaled for this and most of the costs are multiplied so most of that number realy is *extra* cost.
Even allowing for giving some of the tax back, thats one heck of a lot of missions and probably even a man on mars. Twice.
The quote about testing came from an EDS manager and this was minuited (actually, I believe the original quote was about regression testing) as it was no off the cuff remark but at a formal programme management meeting. He also suggested that we stop testing so no more bugs could be found. I was working at a large bank on a very important regulatory project. They were renewed and our management was given to understand that if they complained, they would be responsible for everything including the bad deliveries so they took the easy route.
EDS were using contractors as developers and some of them were good. Unfortunately, they were being totally mismanaged. We tried to help their management, but they decided they could screw things up nicely by themselves. End result: project closed down and EDS are being kicked out of the bank.
I should add that I have met some good EDS permanent staff too. Unfortunately, some of the remainder should never have been placed in a managerial or client facing role.
Only true for PDF 1.4 or the special version of PDF, PDF-A the archiving version. PDF 1.5 or above can include enough javascript to make a document that changes depending upon who looks at it. The trouble is that PDF-A doesn't exist yet so when we hold documents, we have to ensure that they are PDF 1.4 and only PDF 1.4 to be sure they are legally useful as source material.
No, they are the guys who screw up government projects and then send their worst project management types to major banks to screw them up even worst. Quote heard from a senior EDS monkey: "Whats this UAT thing? We have never done that before....". Answer, "Yes, and it shows".
Chechnya never had sovereignty since the times of the Tsars. I quite aware of the ransom that was going on - mostly connected with a distrust of the infrastructure being put in place. My wife had to write the condolence letters for two of the victims as it was her company that was employing them.
The oligarchs were by no means going 'straight', but some (Khordokovsky) had realised that they could only expand further by working in ways that were at least transparent to the west. By the late nineties, the days of the Robber bbarons was coming to an end and a middle class was emerging together with modern industries. As for the media war, well I wouldn't exactly have called it that - it was more of having some queries about the providence of their assets
The interesting thing is that with Checnya, nothing is clear. Yes, we always knew about the generals who were renting out soldiers as workers but large scale fraud was difficult without a war to cloud issues. It is easy to profit from oil but difficult to steal it in the open. Chechnya gave that cover.
The thing is that the Siloviki are a bit of a sad lot. They don't understand democracy and totally distrust free markets and transparency. What they wanted was someone firmly in charge. They brought in Putin who had a good reputation with them after seeing off Skuratov in that business over Mabetex and the Kremlin and knew how to follow orders.
The end result is that Russia is back to depending upon energy exports. Is it any wonder that they are playing games? What should have happened is that we would have a Russian Infosys. The thing is that no company dared get large because they would suddenly end up with new Mafya sitting on their board - retired security services personel, who knew nothing about the companies they were running into the ground. Those companies that do keep alive do so by keeping small.
As for Chechnya, it continues. If you don't have money to buy by yourself or your kids out then you have a problem. Those who survive and are whole will have had the pleasure of learning the criminal activities going on there.
I have seen RSX-11M as well as OpenVMS up close. Cutler had a large input into both. I haven't seen the Windows sources where he also had a large influence. Those people who I have talked to who have seen them say they are quite well written. Many people do not have a fundemental issue with Windows other than the compromises forced on the system by clunky GUI and applications software.
On a style note, from my commercial OS exposure then it could be seen that certain bits had a distinct style but the whole fitted well together. The feeling about a system like VMS was that tightness mattered but so did neatness.
Actually, after suffering through a bit of force-fed commercials during the news, I generally give up and go to my laptop for entertainment as I usally have a few hours of DVDs with me. Current ad levels on US TV breach my tolerance big time. Some hotels that I stay in equip their rooms with DVD players offer their own complimentary DVD loan service. I don't generally go for the Pay-TV at a hotel as the films aren't exactly current and are expensive.
The interesting thing is whether we had a choice, for TV or for the film example. In both cases, the advertising has crept up to an annoying level. The thing is that advertising time costs have plummeted. If you don't want half-time at the Superbowl or a hand full of popular shows like Desperate Housewives or Lost, slots aren't that expensive anymore because the market has become saturated. When I'm travelling in the US and don't have the luxury of a PVR, I find the frequenecy and length of the advertsing annoying. When I'm in the UK, they still have their advertising free channels, and somehow that restrains much of the commercial sector from going overboard with ads.
The Kremlin (and the Lubyanka) are acutely aware of their enemies abroad. As with any security services, the FSB (and the foreign service, the SVR) have any number of hangers-on. These are not so accountable. In fact due to the nature of the break-up there are more of these than most and they do very much have an 'old-boys' network. Any of these people could be requested to perform a 'favour'.
It is the theatricality of the assassination that is the message. Nobody would ever be able to link this with the Kremlin but the choice of method and the slow death tell us that somebody wanted to shut Litvinenko up in a very public way. This was a message to those Russians living outside Russia. Telling them to keep quiet. The Russians have been sending 'messages' in this way since even before the murder of Trotsky.
I believe that the security services underestimated how much the public would be interested in Litvinenko. His claims about the bombings had always been largely ignored by the British media. The thing is that it has backfired. Trust in the Kremlin has plummeted. Gazprom has been seeking involvement in downstream activities in Europe. Gazprom is owned by the Kremlin, it is not a private company, it is effectively an arm of their foreign policy. I can't see the British liking the idea of Gazprom acquiring the UK Gas network now.
Other English language sources have a slightly different viewpoint. Berezovsky owned a TV station, he was getting too powerful and they were involved with a 'peace' campaign. It also appeared to be getting somewhere. Russia never recognised Chechnya's right to secede as it was never considered a republic (unlike, say the Ukraine). However, Chechnya has oil and a number of senior people in the security forces are making serious money there. Guess who are the Siloviki behind Putin!
Back to to the murder victim, Litvinenko. Tt was rather interesting that his main accusation is that a security crisis was 'engineered' to get Putin into power and to stimulate further action against Putin.
I disagree. I have not had the dubious pleasure of seeing Windows source code but I have worked with older monolithic closed source kernels such as OpenVMS where at various points I had access. With a good book about the kernel, finding your way around wasn't a major issue. Some items were complex but you could easily extract, for example, material for a course on say lock management, I/O or scheduling.
A prof would want a commercial system to counterpoint something like Linux. However, if I was teaching, I would preder a system with less restrictions (i.e., with an OpenSource license) like Solaris, especially allowing students to easily tweak/replace subsystems.
The first rule is that spam is an advertisement that benefits an advertiser. To advertise something secret is an oxymoron - there is a product that is being promoted and somehow the spam recipiant must be persuaded to buy the product.
Broadly speaking, I see three types of spam at the moment creeping past the filters:
Drugs (usually sex or diat linked)
Penny shares
Money laundering
For the first, I'm being invited to buy something, and I have to pay by credit card. If the use of spam to advertise is illegal then why not void the credit card payments? The credit card companies will drop them like a hot potato. The second is more interesting. You don't actually have to be directly connected with the issuing company to benefit. All you have to do is to have a number of the shares. If the SEC wanted to, it wouldn't be that hard to close down such scams. The last is what interests me particularly. This is an advertisement for a sideline job that people could do from home to handle offshore payments. Allegedly this is to help people buying or selling via services such as eBay but with an address in Russia. It fails to mention that opening a bank account for a third party without declaring the fact is very illegal and may even give you trouble (think PATRIOT act).
In other words, there is a lot of legal ammunition to go after these people. It seems that many are just not interested.
you forgot that they are probably working on Wall St wheer as long as they steal in the name of the company, they will be rewarded handsomely with end-of-year bonuses.
WIngnut just want an audit and an independent ruling on some of the more questionable accounting practices. Newline seem to be scared of someone seeing the books. It seems reasonable to say that if you were promised 10% of the net, than you have rights as to review how that was calculated.
A charity is just another corporate structure, one that in return for not being able to declare a profit, can actually do quite a lot of things with it money and pay few taxes. It is, for example, perfectly reasonable for a charity to spend much of its money on administrative costs. As long as its actions fit in with its charter, not even the UK charities commission is going to do very much about it (they are one of the more stringent regulators).
Interestingly enough, this is why charities are seen to be at an increased risk of being used for money laundering by the Financial Action Task Force.
A shareholder doesn't have much participation in a company other than at a gemeral meeting. The board though are elected to represent the sahreholders interests in the running of the company.
It is possible to go beyond 'limited-liability' when a company commits an act of criminal irresponsibility. It is however very diffiult. For example, there was a case of a UK cross-channel RORO ferry that sank due to a management mandated procedure of leaving the moorings before the bow doors were closed (in this case actually leaving port with the doors still open) This cut down on port time meaning more ferries could share the dock and meant more runs per day. This was also incredibly stupid. The bow is high because of having to cut through waves, and in this case the waves came in before the door was secure and the ship capsized, killing 193 people.
The company ended up in the court as well as the crew members directly linked with the disaster. Three of the crew were found guilty and the company was tried for corporate manslaughter. Although the higher management were criticized in court. The company otherwise escaped, as did the board.
In your example, what happens is that the guy who opens the dumping valve may be found individually guilty, sometimes even the plant manager, but never the company nor the board where the corporate culture encouraged this. This is one of the instances where the US concept of punitive damages in civil torts becomes useful. However, when the disaster occurs under another jurisdiction, it may become difficult to seek redress.
The last DSL broadband service that I worked through used their own SMTP relay server. This had a rate circuit breaker so that if you sent out loads of emails, it would switch off. Most particularly on that router I had it set up that port 25 access only went to the relay so unless the bot was clever enough to find it then the logfile from the firewall would give me a chance to fix the problem.
Um, no. Users run without root as a default on Linux. Most dists warn users to be careful with their root account. With XP, you can deprivilege your users, but that isn't the case by default.
I'm no fan-boy of either system and can also say that the basic windows security architecture is much better than Linux with a very fine granularity of rights and privilege levels. Unfortunately, they are poorly documented and even Microsoft themselves can't use them properly within the applications.
Firewalls *should* be bidirectional filters. That is, they filter what goes out (egress) as well as what comes in (ingress). You are probably confusing them with NATs which usually allow anything out and provide some limited means for inbound port mapping. The XP firewall, when correctly configured will filter egress. Unfortunately it is relatively easy for an application to override. For example any kind of SMTP spambot needs to be able to send out SMTP (and probably hook up with IRC). If SMTP is blocked except through an official MTA with security controls then an infected PC can't do a whole lot.
Unfortunately, the routers that come with firewalls for domestic purposes seem quite limited. I was recently sent a nice new VOIP WiFi router with VoIP (AVM Fritz Fon 7170) as part of a new ADSL contract. It boasts a firewall, but it is only really connected with the NAT traversal with no real egress control. OTOH another router from Billion, I received as part of another contract had very good fireall control, but I suspect most domestic users would just disable egress control. In my case the routers unfortunately were not interchangeable because I needed ISDN support that my Billion model didn't have.
Good summaey. One of the characteristrics of lesser developed countries was that information = power. In one country that I was in, one of the greatest secrets was the world price of cotton which was a large multiple of that the statte was paying the farmers. Controlled information made it easy to rig markets as well as elections. Telephone lines tended to be limited and there was frequently an elaborate system of corruption around getting a line. The cell towers jumped over the corruption (mind you many of the companies had to pay $$$ to the politicians to get their licenses approved).
Yes, the OLPC should further improve markets as well as finance for small farmers.
I'm probably quite stupid but all of Suominem's patent's seem to be orientated towards hardware (or h/w techniques implemented in software). I couldn't identify any with a quick Google search that are connected with the BT protocol. This is available through membership of the BT syndicate. What interests me is his name suggestes a nordic link. Was he working anywhere in the nineties where he could have preliminary access to the technology?
If you google him, you will find that Edwin Suominen is a patent agent who studied RF at university and assigned some patents there. Despite his name (Suominen), he doesn't seem to have any Finnish connection (Suomi, is the Finnish name for themselves). I had wondered at first whether he had any connection to another well known Finnish company which was heavily involved in the original research. What is unusual is that he seems to have acquired a number of patents (about 4) whilst studying as an undergraduate at University.
The thing is that the original BT work done in Finland/Sweden (mostly the latter) was done some time ago. It has taken a very long time to catch on in the US but started appearing in the mid nineties. Simple implementations appeared a little later and it may be interesting to look at the history of this patent against when the first single chip implmentation appeared (about 98). It could well be that some existing technology leaked.
Slashdot Mirror
And a DVD costs what? 12 bucks or so.
A long time ago, I noticed some similar problems with equipment powered off a two-wire power feed (actually a monitor). It could build up quite a voltage relative to earth (up to 90v) and possibly to other equipment. This wasn't a PSU fault and was down to some kind of leakage current in the switched mode power supply when it was switched on. If the current stayed in the microamp range, (which it did) then apparently this wasn't a problem. However you really didn't want to connect equipment together (even a BNC video connector) after switching on. As has been noted, modern stuff can be fried by this kind of current. Easily.
Of course, you can preconnect everything but then you have a lovely problem chasing mains hum on the audio. If you don't then you get a slight tingle (as being reported on the Dells).
Good point and as nobody put in the figures. A shuttle mission runs between $500mil to $900mill, depending on whether it is ISS or Hubble servicing (the higher cost). The war is costing the treasury about $364bill. Some of that money is the ongoing cost of the US military 'resting state' costs, i.e. salaries, training and equipment replacement. The fact is that the military has been upscaled for this and most of the costs are multiplied so most of that number realy is *extra* cost.
Even allowing for giving some of the tax back, thats one heck of a lot of missions and probably even a man on mars. Twice.
The quote about testing came from an EDS manager and this was minuited (actually, I believe the original quote was about regression testing) as it was no off the cuff remark but at a formal programme management meeting. He also suggested that we stop testing so no more bugs could be found. I was working at a large bank on a very important regulatory project. They were renewed and our management was given to understand that if they complained, they would be responsible for everything including the bad deliveries so they took the easy route.
EDS were using contractors as developers and some of them were good. Unfortunately, they were being totally mismanaged. We tried to help their management, but they decided they could screw things up nicely by themselves. End result: project closed down and EDS are being kicked out of the bank.
I should add that I have met some good EDS permanent staff too. Unfortunately, some of the remainder should never have been placed in a managerial or client facing role.
This is why NASA lost those tapes of the moon landing - they knew they could face prosecution for copyright!!!!
Only true for PDF 1.4 or the special version of PDF, PDF-A the archiving version. PDF 1.5 or above can include enough javascript to make a document that changes depending upon who looks at it. The trouble is that PDF-A doesn't exist yet so when we hold documents, we have to ensure that they are PDF 1.4 and only PDF 1.4 to be sure they are legally useful as source material.
No, they are the guys who screw up government projects and then send their worst project management types to major banks to screw them up even worst. Quote heard from a senior EDS monkey: "Whats this UAT thing? We have never done that before....". Answer, "Yes, and it shows".
Chechnya never had sovereignty since the times of the Tsars. I quite aware of the ransom that was going on - mostly connected with a distrust of the infrastructure being put in place. My wife had to write the condolence letters for two of the victims as it was her company that was employing them.
The oligarchs were by no means going 'straight', but some (Khordokovsky) had realised that they could only expand further by working in ways that were at least transparent to the west. By the late nineties, the days of the Robber bbarons was coming to an end and a middle class was emerging together with modern industries. As for the media war, well I wouldn't exactly have called it that - it was more of having some queries about the providence of their assets
The interesting thing is that with Checnya, nothing is clear. Yes, we always knew about the generals who were renting out soldiers as workers but large scale fraud was difficult without a war to cloud issues. It is easy to profit from oil but difficult to steal it in the open. Chechnya gave that cover.
The thing is that the Siloviki are a bit of a sad lot. They don't understand democracy and totally distrust free markets and transparency. What they wanted was someone firmly in charge. They brought in Putin who had a good reputation with them after seeing off Skuratov in that business over Mabetex and the Kremlin and knew how to follow orders.
The end result is that Russia is back to depending upon energy exports. Is it any wonder that they are playing games? What should have happened is that we would have a Russian Infosys. The thing is that no company dared get large because they would suddenly end up with new Mafya sitting on their board - retired security services personel, who knew nothing about the companies they were running into the ground. Those companies that do keep alive do so by keeping small.
As for Chechnya, it continues. If you don't have money to buy by yourself or your kids out then you have a problem. Those who survive and are whole will have had the pleasure of learning the criminal activities going on there.
I have seen RSX-11M as well as OpenVMS up close. Cutler had a large input into both. I haven't seen the Windows sources where he also had a large influence. Those people who I have talked to who have seen them say they are quite well written. Many people do not have a fundemental issue with Windows other than the compromises forced on the system by clunky GUI and applications software.
On a style note, from my commercial OS exposure then it could be seen that certain bits had a distinct style but the whole fitted well together. The feeling about a system like VMS was that tightness mattered but so did neatness.
Actually, after suffering through a bit of force-fed commercials during the news, I generally give up and go to my laptop for entertainment as I usally have a few hours of DVDs with me. Current ad levels on US TV breach my tolerance big time. Some hotels that I stay in equip their rooms with DVD players offer their own complimentary DVD loan service. I don't generally go for the Pay-TV at a hotel as the films aren't exactly current and are expensive.
The interesting thing is whether we had a choice, for TV or for the film example. In both cases, the advertising has crept up to an annoying level. The thing is that advertising time costs have plummeted. If you don't want half-time at the Superbowl or a hand full of popular shows like Desperate Housewives or Lost, slots aren't that expensive anymore because the market has become saturated. When I'm travelling in the US and don't have the luxury of a PVR, I find the frequenecy and length of the advertsing annoying. When I'm in the UK, they still have their advertising free channels, and somehow that restrains much of the commercial sector from going overboard with ads.
The Kremlin (and the Lubyanka) are acutely aware of their enemies abroad. As with any security services, the FSB (and the foreign service, the SVR) have any number of hangers-on. These are not so accountable. In fact due to the nature of the break-up there are more of these than most and they do very much have an 'old-boys' network. Any of these people could be requested to perform a 'favour'.
It is the theatricality of the assassination that is the message. Nobody would ever be able to link this with the Kremlin but the choice of method and the slow death tell us that somebody wanted to shut Litvinenko up in a very public way. This was a message to those Russians living outside Russia. Telling them to keep quiet. The Russians have been sending 'messages' in this way since even before the murder of Trotsky.
I believe that the security services underestimated how much the public would be interested in Litvinenko. His claims about the bombings had always been largely ignored by the British media. The thing is that it has backfired. Trust in the Kremlin has plummeted. Gazprom has been seeking involvement in downstream activities in Europe. Gazprom is owned by the Kremlin, it is not a private company, it is effectively an arm of their foreign policy. I can't see the British liking the idea of Gazprom acquiring the UK Gas network now.
Other English language sources have a slightly different viewpoint. Berezovsky owned a TV station, he was getting too powerful and they were involved with a 'peace' campaign. It also appeared to be getting somewhere. Russia never recognised Chechnya's right to secede as it was never considered a republic (unlike, say the Ukraine). However, Chechnya has oil and a number of senior people in the security forces are making serious money there. Guess who are the Siloviki behind Putin!
Back to to the murder victim, Litvinenko. Tt was rather interesting that his main accusation is that a security crisis was 'engineered' to get Putin into power and to stimulate further action against Putin.
I disagree. I have not had the dubious pleasure of seeing Windows source code but I have worked with older monolithic closed source kernels such as OpenVMS where at various points I had access. With a good book about the kernel, finding your way around wasn't a major issue. Some items were complex but you could easily extract, for example, material for a course on say lock management, I/O or scheduling.
A prof would want a commercial system to counterpoint something like Linux. However, if I was teaching, I would preder a system with less restrictions (i.e., with an OpenSource license) like Solaris, especially allowing students to easily tweak/replace subsystems.
The first rule is that spam is an advertisement that benefits an advertiser. To advertise something secret is an oxymoron - there is a product that is being promoted and somehow the spam recipiant must be persuaded to buy the product.
Broadly speaking, I see three types of spam at the moment creeping past the filters:
For the first, I'm being invited to buy something, and I have to pay by credit card. If the use of spam to advertise is illegal then why not void the credit card payments? The credit card companies will drop them like a hot potato. The second is more interesting. You don't actually have to be directly connected with the issuing company to benefit. All you have to do is to have a number of the shares. If the SEC wanted to, it wouldn't be that hard to close down such scams. The last is what interests me particularly. This is an advertisement for a sideline job that people could do from home to handle offshore payments. Allegedly this is to help people buying or selling via services such as eBay but with an address in Russia. It fails to mention that opening a bank account for a third party without declaring the fact is very illegal and may even give you trouble (think PATRIOT act).
In other words, there is a lot of legal ammunition to go after these people. It seems that many are just not interested.
you forgot that they are probably working on Wall St wheer as long as they steal in the name of the company, they will be rewarded handsomely with end-of-year bonuses.
WIngnut just want an audit and an independent ruling on some of the more questionable accounting practices. Newline seem to be scared of someone seeing the books. It seems reasonable to say that if you were promised 10% of the net, than you have rights as to review how that was calculated.
A charity is just another corporate structure, one that in return for not being able to declare a profit, can actually do quite a lot of things with it money and pay few taxes. It is, for example, perfectly reasonable for a charity to spend much of its money on administrative costs. As long as its actions fit in with its charter, not even the UK charities commission is going to do very much about it (they are one of the more stringent regulators).
Interestingly enough, this is why charities are seen to be at an increased risk of being used for money laundering by the Financial Action Task Force.
A shareholder doesn't have much participation in a company other than at a gemeral meeting. The board though are elected to represent the sahreholders interests in the running of the company.
It is possible to go beyond 'limited-liability' when a company commits an act of criminal irresponsibility. It is however very diffiult. For example, there was a case of a UK cross-channel RORO ferry that sank due to a management mandated procedure of leaving the moorings before the bow doors were closed (in this case actually leaving port with the doors still open) This cut down on port time meaning more ferries could share the dock and meant more runs per day. This was also incredibly stupid. The bow is high because of having to cut through waves, and in this case the waves came in before the door was secure and the ship capsized, killing 193 people.
The company ended up in the court as well as the crew members directly linked with the disaster. Three of the crew were found guilty and the company was tried for corporate manslaughter. Although the higher management were criticized in court. The company otherwise escaped, as did the board.
In your example, what happens is that the guy who opens the dumping valve may be found individually guilty, sometimes even the plant manager, but never the company nor the board where the corporate culture encouraged this. This is one of the instances where the US concept of punitive damages in civil torts becomes useful. However, when the disaster occurs under another jurisdiction, it may become difficult to seek redress.
The last DSL broadband service that I worked through used their own SMTP relay server. This had a rate circuit breaker so that if you sent out loads of emails, it would switch off. Most particularly on that router I had it set up that port 25 access only went to the relay so unless the bot was clever enough to find it then the logfile from the firewall would give me a chance to fix the problem.
Um, no. Users run without root as a default on Linux. Most dists warn users to be careful with their root account. With XP, you can deprivilege your users, but that isn't the case by default.
I'm no fan-boy of either system and can also say that the basic windows security architecture is much better than Linux with a very fine granularity of rights and privilege levels. Unfortunately, they are poorly documented and even Microsoft themselves can't use them properly within the applications.
Firewalls *should* be bidirectional filters. That is, they filter what goes out (egress) as well as what comes in (ingress). You are probably confusing them with NATs which usually allow anything out and provide some limited means for inbound port mapping. The XP firewall, when correctly configured will filter egress. Unfortunately it is relatively easy for an application to override. For example any kind of SMTP spambot needs to be able to send out SMTP (and probably hook up with IRC). If SMTP is blocked except through an official MTA with security controls then an infected PC can't do a whole lot.
Unfortunately, the routers that come with firewalls for domestic purposes seem quite limited. I was recently sent a nice new VOIP WiFi router with VoIP (AVM Fritz Fon 7170) as part of a new ADSL contract. It boasts a firewall, but it is only really connected with the NAT traversal with no real egress control. OTOH another router from Billion, I received as part of another contract had very good fireall control, but I suspect most domestic users would just disable egress control. In my case the routers unfortunately were not interchangeable because I needed ISDN support that my Billion model didn't have.
Good summaey. One of the characteristrics of lesser developed countries was that information = power. In one country that I was in, one of the greatest secrets was the world price of cotton which was a large multiple of that the statte was paying the farmers. Controlled information made it easy to rig markets as well as elections. Telephone lines tended to be limited and there was frequently an elaborate system of corruption around getting a line. The cell towers jumped over the corruption (mind you many of the companies had to pay $$$ to the politicians to get their licenses approved).
Yes, the OLPC should further improve markets as well as finance for small farmers.
I'm probably quite stupid but all of Suominem's patent's seem to be orientated towards hardware (or h/w techniques implemented in software). I couldn't identify any with a quick Google search that are connected with the BT protocol. This is available through membership of the BT syndicate. What interests me is his name suggestes a nordic link. Was he working anywhere in the nineties where he could have preliminary access to the technology?
If you google him, you will find that Edwin Suominen is a patent agent who studied RF at university and assigned some patents there. Despite his name (Suominen), he doesn't seem to have any Finnish connection (Suomi, is the Finnish name for themselves). I had wondered at first whether he had any connection to another well known Finnish company which was heavily involved in the original research. What is unusual is that he seems to have acquired a number of patents (about 4) whilst studying as an undergraduate at University.
The thing is that the original BT work done in Finland/Sweden (mostly the latter) was done some time ago. It has taken a very long time to catch on in the US but started appearing in the mid nineties. Simple implementations appeared a little later and it may be interesting to look at the history of this patent against when the first single chip implmentation appeared (about 98). It could well be that some existing technology leaked.