I just tried the Skype homepage direct from outside the USA, and then again using a USA proxy server.
From outside the USA the page looked the same as always.
Using the proxy server within the USA (the same one I had to use to get them to take my credit card!), there's a big message that says "Free calls within the US and Canada to all phones", accompanied by this image.
If you have access to a VPN connection via the US, I assume you could take advantage of this, but at the same time, I think most people who have access to a VPN in the US don't care about 2 cents a minute.
For a bit more a month you can get real VoIP service with an ATA which will work with all your existing phones.
If you make any significant quantity of outgoing calls, the overall cost will be cheaper than using Skype anyway, because their outgoing rates aren't very good.
I use Skype only for times when I am wandering down the street in some random city and country and need to make a quick international call; I can just stumble a hotspot, sit down on a stoop, and Skype away. Otherwise, when I'm in the hotel, etc., I set up the ATA properly and get better call quality, lower rates, and a proper handset.
I'm not so sure Qwest is so innocent. Can someone explain to me why they would be switching people all over their networks? When I first signed up for dsl thru Qwest I had a say 68.x.x.x ip... a couple months later I was put on a 207.x.x.x ip... then again a couple months later I was at a 106.x.x.x... Those aren't the real ip subnets, but the point is, why would I be jumped all over the damn place like that? Usually ISPs set up their ip subnets according to some certain criteria such as geographic location, correct? Why in the world would the be moving massive amounts of people all over the network like that?
For any of a zillion reasons. Maybe they were rationalising their address space utilisation. Maybe they were trying new routing strategies. Maybe they were performing major network upgrades and were trying to simplify the cutover. Maybe the Mossad made them do it.
Perhaps it's an invalid conclusion but I assumed they were doing the same shit AT&T has already done... cutting people over to the NSA watchboxes...
I think you're definitely onto something there. The NSA has satellites that can count your sperm from space, but they do not have the technology to intercept network traffic without changing everyone's IP addresses twice.
Reminds me of all those people in Silicon Valley who got their area codes changed from 415 to 650 a few years back. The party line, what Hillary Clinton would have you believe, was that 415 was full (yeah, and so was 68.x.x.x, am I right? Am I right? Dude!). You and I know better, though: It was the only way the NSA could start tapping all the phone lines south of San Bruno and find out when eHaircut.com was going to IPO.
The good news is that I still have the same IP address, so I know that the NSA isn't monitoring any of my traffic.
Not to mention that VOIP is functionally useles with response times greater than 150ms.
The ping time from here in southeast Asia to my VoIP provider in the USA is 300ms, and I use it each and every day. Works great. There's a tiny delay, of course, but most people don't notice. For the past couple weeks I was in Africa, with 250ms pings via hotel broadband, and it worked fine there too.
This is with a standard SIP-based service, BTW. On the other hand, I do find that the delay with Skype is often unbearable from the fringes of the net, so I only use that when pesky firewalls make SIP impossible.
Iran's army includes 350,000 regular soldiers (non-conscript) and 220,000 conscripts
How many of those conscripts are below the age of 14 these days? During the Iran-Iraq war the Iranian front lines were heavily populated with untrained child soldiers who served solely as cannon fodder.
Occam's razor.
In this particular instance, we don't even need evidence of mising or altered emails to suspect that email from Iran/Iraq (and a lot of other places), is being censored.
It would be most odd of those emails *weren't* being censored
Occam's Razor is not on your side here. Actively censoring email messages is a fairly blatant step which is easily detected. If it were happening, the word would be out.
Additionally, as someone who from time to time works on projects involving Iraq and Iran ("and a lot of other places") - including firsthand experience connecting to the internet, sending my own email messages, etc - I can assure you that I have never experienced any such thing nor have any of my colleagues. If this were so obvious and widespread as you imply, surely someone would have encountered it at some point.
He's right, no one will ever hold any qualification against you because any qualification is better than none.
I don't think you can say "ever". When I'm doing a first pass on a stack of resumes, and I see someone that plays up certifications, I get a little suspicious. My general experience has been that - all other factors on the resume being equal - someone with certifications (especially a lot of them) will be the same as, or worse than, someone without any. I wouldn't say it's an automatic trip to the circular file but it's definitely a red flag.
Far as I can tell, the primary market for these falls into a few categories, none of them auguring particularly well:
People who are not moving as fast in their careers as they'd hope, probably because they're not as useful to their employers as their employers would hope.
People who have too much time on their hands at work - and too little initiative to come up with interesting things to do and improve - and get their employers to pay for certification classes.
People who have bad managers who spend their budgets on getting people certified instead of on helping people to learn things.
This business model in the US is just plain stupid.
I have metered access during the day and un-metered at night this is exactly what paid for and my ISP & I don't have a problem with each other. Grant it I probably pay a bit more per month than the average USian Slashdoter (49 Euros) but it's fast and I don't get hassled.
Making this out to be an allegory of some culture clash between profligate Americans and prudent Europeans is childish not to mention factually baseless.
There is metered access in the USA and there is unmetered access in Europe (not to mention elsewhere). Today I am in the Netherlands using unlimited DSL at 19.95/month (there is also a 9.95/month plan from this ISP). And at home in Malaysia, unlimited DSL is about the same price. A quick read of dslreports.com or lowyat.net forums will confirm that the Malaysian service is in fact unlimited; many people seem to torrent 24 hours a day. From what I can see, metered broadband is rare and getting rarer worldwide.
I was easily able to read the linked articles. There's probably even a Firefox extension for this, though it's easy enough to type with a slap of the keyboard so I've never looked.
Re:One Point For Gmail
on
Gmail vs Pine
·
· Score: 1
Is getting fired for circum-navigating your IT security policy really worth it though?
After all you are supposed to be doing work.
Dunno, at our office (where I rarely am) we are expected to use adult judgment to determine what tools we need to in order to get our work done effectively.
It's only at other outfits' offices I have to deal with the silly restrictions. Without SSH I'm not much use to anyone, so it's tolerated.
Re:Only one way to resolve this...
on
Gmail vs Pine
·
· Score: 1
an even nigger advantage
Is this some new street slang I'm not down with?
Re:PINE + PortaPuTTY + Thumb Drive
on
Gmail vs Pine
·
· Score: 1
I work in a place where SSH ports are blocked.
You don't need port 22, you can use any port and tunnel over almost any protocol.
What if you're visiting someone who has a Mac?
Then you can leave your thumbdrive in your pocket, because the Mac already has an SSH client built in.
At a kiosk in the airport?
Then you use a web-based Java SSH client.
Re:One Point For Gmail
on
Gmail vs Pine
·
· Score: 1
I'm glad to hear your employer allows you to get out through (presumably) ssh, but not all employers do. Thus it's more likely that your average user would be able to access Gmail from work than pine. My current employer (a major bank) blocks both.
If you can access any arbitrary net resource at all (web site, DNS information, whatever), you can find a way to tunnel SSH. I have never been somewhere where I could not, and I do a lot of on-site work in strange and sometimes sensitive places.
Re:One Point For Gmail
on
Gmail vs Pine
·
· Score: 1
If you can maintain your server and keep it running, then pine is fine. However, some firewall will block telnet ports, so you'd be out of luck.
Telnet?? Who uses that?
I run sshd on port 22 and 443, pretty much always works.
Also, let's say you're on the road and your server is down, who's going to get it running again for you?
Start a bandwidth cooperative at a colo with a few friends. Whoever's around can deal with it.
I don't understand how two monitors solves the problem. I have two monitors and I have to put up with applications stealing focus all the time. Start up Thunderbird or Firefox and go work on something else while they're loading. 30 seconds later, boom, there goes half a sentence into the Location bar.
Allow me to agree with everyone who thinks that applications stealing focus (on launch, on completion of a task, really any time except when they're about to delete your entire hard drive) is hateful. It's definitely my number one annoyance with OSX (and it's worth with Windows, with IE seemingly doing it at the end of something as trivial as loading a web page). I sure hope someone is listening. In case they are:
I WILL CHOOSE WHICH APPLICATION HAS FOCUS. I AM THE USER. I PAID FOR THE DAMN COMPUTER. LEAVE ME ALONE.
Not only that, but it will get people used to always-on internet connectivity, which is like doing the ISPs' sales job for them. Once they get addicted they'll start jonesing for the premium stuff, and that's where the ISPs make their big profits.
However, if the.xxx domain was instated and sites registered then it would make it easier for those Christians that are trying to move ahead with their spiritual growth, to avoid temptation.
I guess then, as a policy matter, you get to the question of to what degree the DNS system exists to facilitate Christian spiritual growth.
Most of CERN's members are also members of the EU, but that doesn't mean it's funded by the EU. CERN also includes Norway and Switzerland. And many EU members (e.g., Ireland, the Baltics, etc.) have nothing to do with CERN.
Fundamentally, the two organisations are only related by geographic coincidence.
To claim that providing metadata about a domain serves only to make it easier to find that data is misguided. The purpose is to inform the end user about what the data is, whether so the can find it, avoid it, or process it. Suppose I'm looking for the Cranberry Inserting Association. I do a search for "CIA" and see several links. One is to "CIA.gov." I don't follow that link because I know the organization I am looking for is not a government one. You're claiming that is somehow a "wrong" way to use the TLD information I saw? Hogwash.
No, mainly I'm claiming that the primary purpose of the classification is to provide assertive information about the organisation (what country it's in, what subject matter they deal with, etc.). It may occasionally be useful for the opposite purpose, but not nearly so often, because a large number of organisations fall into multiple geographic or functional categories and/or register domains all over the place. You are of course free to use the information any way you choose.
You do know most major porn sites sign themselves up with all the filtering companies out there right?
No, I haven't heard that. Cite please.
Porn sites don't want unprofitable visits and almost anyone who is running a filter would be unprofitable in one way or another.
I doubt that. A huge amount of paid porn access (most?) happens in the workplace, where employers and their IT departments are constantly playing cat-and-mouse with porn sites. Shutting off all that revenue would be devastating.
Slashdot Mirror
I just tried the Skype homepage direct from outside the USA, and then again using a USA proxy server.
From outside the USA the page looked the same as always.
Using the proxy server within the USA (the same one I had to use to get them to take my credit card!), there's a big message that says "Free calls within the US and Canada to all phones", accompanied by this image.
If you have access to a VPN connection via the US, I assume you could take advantage of this, but at the same time, I think most people who have access to a VPN in the US don't care about 2 cents a minute.
If you make any significant quantity of outgoing calls, the overall cost will be cheaper than using Skype anyway, because their outgoing rates aren't very good.
I use Skype only for times when I am wandering down the street in some random city and country and need to make a quick international call; I can just stumble a hotspot, sit down on a stoop, and Skype away. Otherwise, when I'm in the hotel, etc., I set up the ATA properly and get better call quality, lower rates, and a proper handset.
I'm completely with you there. "Can you fashion some sort of rudimentary lathe?"
And Tony Shalhoub was just genius as Stoned Scotty.
For any of a zillion reasons. Maybe they were rationalising their address space utilisation. Maybe they were trying new routing strategies. Maybe they were performing major network upgrades and were trying to simplify the cutover. Maybe the Mossad made them do it.
I think you're definitely onto something there. The NSA has satellites that can count your sperm from space, but they do not have the technology to intercept network traffic without changing everyone's IP addresses twice.
Reminds me of all those people in Silicon Valley who got their area codes changed from 415 to 650 a few years back. The party line, what Hillary Clinton would have you believe, was that 415 was full (yeah, and so was 68.x.x.x, am I right? Am I right? Dude!). You and I know better, though: It was the only way the NSA could start tapping all the phone lines south of San Bruno and find out when eHaircut.com was going to IPO.
The good news is that I still have the same IP address, so I know that the NSA isn't monitoring any of my traffic.
The ping time from here in southeast Asia to my VoIP provider in the USA is 300ms, and I use it each and every day. Works great. There's a tiny delay, of course, but most people don't notice. For the past couple weeks I was in Africa, with 250ms pings via hotel broadband, and it worked fine there too.
This is with a standard SIP-based service, BTW. On the other hand, I do find that the delay with Skype is often unbearable from the fringes of the net, so I only use that when pesky firewalls make SIP impossible.
How many of those conscripts are below the age of 14 these days? During the Iran-Iraq war the Iranian front lines were heavily populated with untrained child soldiers who served solely as cannon fodder.
Occam's Razor is not on your side here. Actively censoring email messages is a fairly blatant step which is easily detected. If it were happening, the word would be out.
Additionally, as someone who from time to time works on projects involving Iraq and Iran ("and a lot of other places") - including firsthand experience connecting to the internet, sending my own email messages, etc - I can assure you that I have never experienced any such thing nor have any of my colleagues. If this were so obvious and widespread as you imply, surely someone would have encountered it at some point.
I don't think you can say "ever". When I'm doing a first pass on a stack of resumes, and I see someone that plays up certifications, I get a little suspicious. My general experience has been that - all other factors on the resume being equal - someone with certifications (especially a lot of them) will be the same as, or worse than, someone without any. I wouldn't say it's an automatic trip to the circular file but it's definitely a red flag.
Far as I can tell, the primary market for these falls into a few categories, none of them auguring particularly well:
People who are not moving as fast in their careers as they'd hope, probably because they're not as useful to their employers as their employers would hope.
People who have too much time on their hands at work - and too little initiative to come up with interesting things to do and improve - and get their employers to pay for certification classes.
People who have bad managers who spend their budgets on getting people certified instead of on helping people to learn things.
Sorry, you're right, forget I posted anything.
It's Dutch for "now". It's Swedish for "naked".
That's what I'm talking about when I mentioned the people who torrent 24 hours a day.
Making this out to be an allegory of some culture clash between profligate Americans and prudent Europeans is childish not to mention factually baseless.
There is metered access in the USA and there is unmetered access in Europe (not to mention elsewhere). Today I am in the Netherlands using unlimited DSL at 19.95/month (there is also a 9.95/month plan from this ISP). And at home in Malaysia, unlimited DSL is about the same price. A quick read of dslreports.com or lowyat.net forums will confirm that the Malaysian service is in fact unlimited; many people seem to torrent 24 hours a day. From what I can see, metered broadband is rare and getting rarer worldwide.
One word for you:
I was easily able to read the linked articles. There's probably even a Firefox extension for this, though it's easy enough to type with a slap of the keyboard so I've never looked.
Dunno, at our office (where I rarely am) we are expected to use adult judgment to determine what tools we need to in order to get our work done effectively.
It's only at other outfits' offices I have to deal with the silly restrictions. Without SSH I'm not much use to anyone, so it's tolerated.
Is this some new street slang I'm not down with?
You don't need port 22, you can use any port and tunnel over almost any protocol.
Then you can leave your thumbdrive in your pocket, because the Mac already has an SSH client built in.
Then you use a web-based Java SSH client.
If you can access any arbitrary net resource at all (web site, DNS information, whatever), you can find a way to tunnel SSH. I have never been somewhere where I could not, and I do a lot of on-site work in strange and sometimes sensitive places.
Telnet?? Who uses that?
I run sshd on port 22 and 443, pretty much always works.
Start a bandwidth cooperative at a colo with a few friends. Whoever's around can deal with it.
Why on earth is this modded offtopic? Just some random loser with a hard-on for Linux? Guess it's time to play metamod keno again.
I don't understand how two monitors solves the problem. I have two monitors and I have to put up with applications stealing focus all the time. Start up Thunderbird or Firefox and go work on something else while they're loading. 30 seconds later, boom, there goes half a sentence into the Location bar.
Allow me to agree with everyone who thinks that applications stealing focus (on launch, on completion of a task, really any time except when they're about to delete your entire hard drive) is hateful. It's definitely my number one annoyance with OSX (and it's worth with Windows, with IE seemingly doing it at the end of something as trivial as loading a web page). I sure hope someone is listening. In case they are:
I WILL CHOOSE WHICH APPLICATION HAS FOCUS. I AM THE USER. I PAID FOR THE DAMN COMPUTER. LEAVE ME ALONE.
Not only that, but it will get people used to always-on internet connectivity, which is like doing the ISPs' sales job for them. Once they get addicted they'll start jonesing for the premium stuff, and that's where the ISPs make their big profits.
I guess then, as a policy matter, you get to the question of to what degree the DNS system exists to facilitate Christian spiritual growth.
Most of CERN's members are also members of the EU, but that doesn't mean it's funded by the EU. CERN also includes Norway and Switzerland. And many EU members (e.g., Ireland, the Baltics, etc.) have nothing to do with CERN.
Fundamentally, the two organisations are only related by geographic coincidence.
No, mainly I'm claiming that the primary purpose of the classification is to provide assertive information about the organisation (what country it's in, what subject matter they deal with, etc.). It may occasionally be useful for the opposite purpose, but not nearly so often, because a large number of organisations fall into multiple geographic or functional categories and/or register domains all over the place. You are of course free to use the information any way you choose.
No, I haven't heard that. Cite please.
I doubt that. A huge amount of paid porn access (most?) happens in the workplace, where employers and their IT departments are constantly playing cat-and-mouse with porn sites. Shutting off all that revenue would be devastating.
The seminal web work was done by a British guy at research facility in Switzerland, which is not and has never been part of the EU.