If the report is true, the whole project should be cancelled ASAP.
And what makes you think that this isn't what the US military hasn't been after all along? If they can get enough people to lose interest in Galileo, then the entire project might go away leaving the US operating the sole GPS system, with a whole range of options to retard its use as required. GPS has a huge range of uses beyond military applications, search and rescue for example, and it says a lot about current US policy that they consider possible military applications the most important.
This whole project has been one massive conflict of interest almost from day one, and it's not as simple as US vs EU either. I'm sure that while the military in NATO countries were arguing for the override functions, their countryfolk in the EU offices were arguing against it. Just look at all the confusion over the proposed EU Peace Keeping Force (or whatever it's called this week) to see how bad it can get.
Besides, just how much of a tactical benefit does a GPS system accurate to 1m instead of 10m, or 100m give you anyway? If you have access to the US arsenal of smartbombs and laser guided targetting systems, maybe enough to make a difference. If your weapons of choice are the RPG ambush, hijaaked airliner, and suicide bomber however I don't think having pinpoint accuracy really makes any difference. At a pinch, I suppose you could justify it by saying that it negates its use to accurately locate buried munition supplies, but that's about it.
Remind me how the European Union was going to be an independant entity equal to the United States again? Very disappointing!
Re:Taking a moment for clarification.
on
On The Death Of Unix
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
There's essentially no different from a user's point of view.
There certainly is from the shell scripters point of view though. Ever tried porting a script that some one wrote on Linux making full use of the GNU tools featuritis to, say, stock Solaris. Oh Man!
I'd have to agree about the "what". That governments are going to try and "regulate" (AKA "tax") IP telephony is pretty much a forgone conclusion I think. What is more interesting to me is the question "how will they do it?"; do you tax the customer, the telco, or both?
Taxing some telco that decides to shunt calls over its private data network, or even the Internet, is one thing, but how do you begin with taxing a IP telephony call made directly between two PCs? What if only one PC is in the US, and will it matter which one initiated the call? How do you even *start* with something like Skype?
You could try to tax the telco and not the individual, but that is surely going to lead to a plethora of loopholes and tax dodges as the telcos shift costs onto their customers. You could try a flat rate "Internet tax", but that's going to create a firestorm in the voting classes, never a good idea if you care about re-election.
Actually, DNS is designed to handle considerably more than just the few bytes of data that would typically be required for an A or PTR record. One reason for DNS supporting TCP was to enable queries of more than 64kB, which are quite often seen on zone transfers, and should be able to cope with the majority of.torrent files.
Plus, I don't see how this is going to put the huge strain on the DNS infrastructure that is implied, apart from the server hosting the torrent's TXT record anyway. Assuming no cached DNS information, I need to perform exactly the same number of DNS queries to resolve foo.domain.com to get a TXT record as I do get pull a tracker file from it. Judging by some of the posts here already some seem to think that the root DNS servers are going to have to handle terabytes of movies files or something, and that just isn't that case.
Maybe to avoid more allegations of Intel being a monopoly? This is kind of like Microsoft embedding an HTML rendering engine in Windows instead of the entire browser, or Intel's own onboard graphics set; it's up to the vendors what to do with it. They could ignore it and provide their own (presumably higher spec) system, (like all those onboard Intel boards with an ATI/Nvidia AGP card fitted). Alternatively, they can use it and either provide a cheap radio with short range, or go for it and bundle a radio that can communicate with nearby star systems.
Re:First steps
on
Human Pac Man
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Yes, in accordance with Newton's third law (conservation of momentum), they do. In fact, they have a hell of a lot of it, which is why the prototypes tend to be securely bolted to such stable structures as the ground. Apparently, because photons have momentum, even lasers have a tiny amount of recoil.
Of course, it's much easier to harmlessly disperse the energy from a recoil than from the impact.
Another observation; assuming you are heading West, which seems more logical to me, then the faster you fly during the day (under solar power) the longer time you have in daylight. At night though, it may be better to fly *slower* so that the sun catches up with you faster and you can regain solar power sooner. You could even *backtrack*, flying back East on battery to help shorten the periods of darkness!
Ah ha! Found the relevent paragraph of the website! They do indeed expect to stay aloft overnight, several in fact, which means enough power stored in batteries to keep the aircraft aloft during the shorter summer nights. I can't see any mention on whether they plan on gliding and using the propellers as required or not though.
I was wondering that too. I'd assume that the plane would essentially be a glider and would use the solar power to provide lift as required and thrust only if sufficient spare energy was available. I'd also assume any onboard batteries would be fully charged at takeoff too to give things a head start.
Even so, doing this in one hop seems a little unlikely, unless circumnavigation near the pole in summer is in order, and it's not in my book! Ignoring the tilt of the Earth, then taking off at dawn and flying west to maximise the amount of daylight would require a circumnavigation within 36 hours before night would fall. That's in the region of an average speed of 1,000mph. Fully charged batteries at takeoff, flying on battery through pre-dawn and recharging through the day and finishing off on battery at night would reduce that some, but enough for one hop?
I kind of get the impression, that with this being a laptop and all, it would have been using a modem to connect. Last I heard a modem does not actually have a static MAC address in firmware like a network card. Since this is Slashdot, we might as well blame Microsoft for this confusion since they gernerate a MAC with the vendor ID of 44:45:53 to "internal adapters" such as modems.
Logs, logs, and yet more logs. The process works like this (although not in this case, since apparently Yahoo is wrong and Krastoff actually used the original owners account):
Use WHOIS to find out which ISP owns the IP address
Get the ISP to look at their logs to determine which dial-up session was assigned that IP at the time.
Look at the logs for the access platform to identify the caller's line ID. This is usually the same as the telephone number, but not necessarily, and is *always* known to the remote system, even if you withhold you phone number because it's used in call setup.
Take that number to the Telco that owns it and look at *their* logs to give you the physical location of the phone that made the connection (or owner of the mobile).
Arrest the perp.
While that glosses over the paperwork, and assumes that the ISP maintain sufficiently details logs of calls and authentication, which many small ones don't, that's pretty much it.
Actually, the kind of security software implied by the original poster does work on IPs since you can't track a MAC address back across the Internet. When you log in, the laptop transmits its current IP address back to the servers of the "phone home" application vendor along with an ID. If that ID is flagged as belonging to a stolen system, then that IP is used to identify the ISP, who will then be informed of the situation and will hopefully be able to identify which user was using that IP at the time. Tie that user back to a person and contact details through billing records and you can proceed to make an arrest.
but if you steal a dollar you should pay back a dollar
So, stealing becomes a simple method of getting an interest free loan, only without all that annoying paperwork and the credit checks with repayment to be arranged upon apprehension and proof of guilt? Cool!
This is probably just in response to rumours about SCO going after Google. Nothing like a few rumours to hitch a stock price up a few notches, if you expand the time scale of the chart a bit you can see similar surges and falls, and even match them up to Slashdot stories if you are so inclined.
It does appear that people are finally catching on to the scam though; the one year chart seems to show signs of the stock starting to show the end of its upward trend from March through November. I really can't see thing getting to court somehow, which is a shame, because it would have been a fairly good test case for Linux and the GPL.
You know far too many people take a statement like "Middle Eastern countries comprised six of the top 10 bases for Internet attacks" at face value. That's no different than saying "80% of spam comes from the far east" despite the fact that its advertising in English with a clear link to the US/EU as being the actual source. All that is really telling us is that people in the Middle East are either a bunch of script kiddies, a bunch of lusers who know jack about securing their systems, or much more likely, a combination of the two.
The one link that I seem to notice about all these hotspots, is that they seem to be something of a political hotspot as as well - Israel and the Arab nations, China and Taiwan, Korea...
Maybe. Remember that the policy here was that the cabling was to be removed after each tennant left. That means it is simply a case of removing any cable from the duct, as opposed to removing just the defunct cables from a tangle of spaghetti. I suspect that the latter would require a considerable quantity of time, and therefore money, to accomplish.
No. It means that someone legit like Lyris can run two or more different mailing lists on two or more different IPs at the same time on the same box. If one list gets blacklisted accidentally, then the others can carry on functioning. A conventional MTA gateway setup does not offer this by default, although there is no reason why you couldn't configure your favorite MTA to do this.
True, a spammer could abuse the system, but why would they need too spend the money on the device in the first place? If they have all those IPs available in a single block then a traditional single IP MTA setup would work fine. A simple script to fire off a batch of spam for a couple of hours, switch the MTAs default IP to another and repeat. SpamCop will delist after at most 120 hours after the last spam was sent from an IP, so if you have an entire class/24 to play with and you switch IPs every few hours then uyou have a considerable idle time on each IP while it de-lists. Not much defence against Spamhaus though, once they get wind of the IP block it'll be on their SBL almost immediately.;)
Any one "possible spam" message processed through its system lands the server on the blacklist
That's not quite correct. SpamCop uses a fairly simple, but quite effective weighting system that combines the number of reports and the age of reports to decide whether to block an IP or not. You can find out the specifics here if you want, but in a nutshell a minimum of *two* reports are required for a listing of just 24 hours. All IPs will be delisted 48 hours after the last spam complaint, which can be upto 5 days after the last spam was sent, as you imply.
Yes, mistakes can and do happen (I've seen Amazon and a popular mailing list blocked), which is why SpamCop recommends you don't use it as a DNSBL, but despite that I have found it to be the most accurate blocklist of all. I use three DNSBLs on my server (SpamCop, Spamhaus and my own local one) with an SMTP error verbose enough to pick up bounces. I've seen just *two* false positives, one from a mailing list and another an advert from Amazon. A simple "amazon.com OK" in my mail config fixed that permanantly, but that's not really an applicable solution for a big multi-user server.
If that kind of filtering makes you nervous, then a better solution is to configure something like SpamAssassin to check the DNSBLs for you and assign a positive score to the hits. If you adjust your SpamAssassin scores to reflect your personal confidence in each enabled service then the results are superb. For the last three months I've been running with the three DNSBLs listed above blocking IPs outright and SpamAssassin checking about half a dozen more for a match amongst all its other checks, plus a few custom ones and adjusted scores. The results are stunning:
Two minor false positives on the DNSBLs
Zero false positives from SpamAssassin (you rock!)
Three spams of the meaningless content type arrived in my inbox (fixed by tweaking some SpamAssassin scores)
A few thousand legitimate emails received
Probably a similar number blocked or removed - who cares?
So can most big companies with thier fingers in lots of pies. Take Sony - it sells music and complains about P2P and copyright issues, yet it also makes hardware that makes is very easy to infringe those same copyrights. They were also threatened with legislation by Philips, their partners in designing the CD, about selling non standard CDs with the official logo on them.
All part of the fun and games that is big business.
The snag is that "???" is actually a known entity - "Implement a robust micro-payment system". That's a concept that seems about as nebulous as SCO's claims about Linux and I doubt it's going to happen anytime soon.
On the other tinfoil hat, if you require ISPs to monitor the amount of email being sent and bill accordingly, then the obvious way to go would be to force all email through a central server farm at the ISP. Wouldn't that be convenient for all the agencies that might want to monitor communications to "prevent terrorism".
What as? A control group to be infected with the real Ebola virus to give them something to compare the vaccine test subjects with? With all the other crap they are haemoraging at the moment a few pints of blood and liquified organs probably wouldn't even be noticed.
Perhaps you missed the bit about building the world's 38th most powerful computer (based on June '03 figures) in 17 hours? Damn impressive by any counts.
I'll reserve judgement on that until *after* President Bush has finished his imminent visit to the UK. From some of the discussions I've seen on various boards I have a feeling that things could get really ugly at the demonstations that are being planned. There are a lot of Brits who are extremely pissed at Bush and Blair over the WMD thing, even amongst those who supported the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. Add in a few militant types to stir things up and an over zealous security detail and you have a recipe for disaster.
Slashdot Mirror
And what makes you think that this isn't what the US military hasn't been after all along? If they can get enough people to lose interest in Galileo, then the entire project might go away leaving the US operating the sole GPS system, with a whole range of options to retard its use as required. GPS has a huge range of uses beyond military applications, search and rescue for example, and it says a lot about current US policy that they consider possible military applications the most important.
Besides, just how much of a tactical benefit does a GPS system accurate to 1m instead of 10m, or 100m give you anyway? If you have access to the US arsenal of smartbombs and laser guided targetting systems, maybe enough to make a difference. If your weapons of choice are the RPG ambush, hijaaked airliner, and suicide bomber however I don't think having pinpoint accuracy really makes any difference. At a pinch, I suppose you could justify it by saying that it negates its use to accurately locate buried munition supplies, but that's about it.
Remind me how the European Union was going to be an independant entity equal to the United States again? Very disappointing!
There certainly is from the shell scripters point of view though. Ever tried porting a script that some one wrote on Linux making full use of the GNU tools featuritis to, say, stock Solaris. Oh Man!
Taxing some telco that decides to shunt calls over its private data network, or even the Internet, is one thing, but how do you begin with taxing a IP telephony call made directly between two PCs? What if only one PC is in the US, and will it matter which one initiated the call? How do you even *start* with something like Skype?
You could try to tax the telco and not the individual, but that is surely going to lead to a plethora of loopholes and tax dodges as the telcos shift costs onto their customers. You could try a flat rate "Internet tax", but that's going to create a firestorm in the voting classes, never a good idea if you care about re-election.
Well, I'm sure they will not do the right thing.
Plus, I don't see how this is going to put the huge strain on the DNS infrastructure that is implied, apart from the server hosting the torrent's TXT record anyway. Assuming no cached DNS information, I need to perform exactly the same number of DNS queries to resolve foo.domain.com to get a TXT record as I do get pull a tracker file from it. Judging by some of the posts here already some seem to think that the root DNS servers are going to have to handle terabytes of movies files or something, and that just isn't that case.
Maybe to avoid more allegations of Intel being a monopoly? This is kind of like Microsoft embedding an HTML rendering engine in Windows instead of the entire browser, or Intel's own onboard graphics set; it's up to the vendors what to do with it. They could ignore it and provide their own (presumably higher spec) system, (like all those onboard Intel boards with an ATI/Nvidia AGP card fitted). Alternatively, they can use it and either provide a cheap radio with short range, or go for it and bundle a radio that can communicate with nearby star systems.
Of course, it's much easier to harmlessly disperse the energy from a recoil than from the impact.
Another observation; assuming you are heading West, which seems more logical to me, then the faster you fly during the day (under solar power) the longer time you have in daylight. At night though, it may be better to fly *slower* so that the sun catches up with you faster and you can regain solar power sooner. You could even *backtrack*, flying back East on battery to help shorten the periods of darkness!
Ah ha! Found the relevent paragraph of the website! They do indeed expect to stay aloft overnight, several in fact, which means enough power stored in batteries to keep the aircraft aloft during the shorter summer nights. I can't see any mention on whether they plan on gliding and using the propellers as required or not though.
Even so, doing this in one hop seems a little unlikely, unless circumnavigation near the pole in summer is in order, and it's not in my book! Ignoring the tilt of the Earth, then taking off at dawn and flying west to maximise the amount of daylight would require a circumnavigation within 36 hours before night would fall. That's in the region of an average speed of 1,000mph. Fully charged batteries at takeoff, flying on battery through pre-dawn and recharging through the day and finishing off on battery at night would reduce that some, but enough for one hop?
I kind of get the impression, that with this being a laptop and all, it would have been using a modem to connect. Last I heard a modem does not actually have a static MAC address in firmware like a network card. Since this is Slashdot, we might as well blame Microsoft for this confusion since they gernerate a MAC with the vendor ID of 44:45:53 to "internal adapters" such as modems.
- Use WHOIS to find out which ISP owns the IP address
- Get the ISP to look at their logs to determine which dial-up session was assigned that IP at the time.
- Look at the logs for the access platform to identify the caller's line ID. This is usually the same as the telephone number, but not necessarily, and is *always* known to the remote system, even if you withhold you phone number because it's used in call setup.
- Take that number to the Telco that owns it and look at *their* logs to give you the physical location of the phone that made the connection (or owner of the mobile).
- Arrest the perp.
While that glosses over the paperwork, and assumes that the ISP maintain sufficiently details logs of calls and authentication, which many small ones don't, that's pretty much it.Actually, the kind of security software implied by the original poster does work on IPs since you can't track a MAC address back across the Internet. When you log in, the laptop transmits its current IP address back to the servers of the "phone home" application vendor along with an ID. If that ID is flagged as belonging to a stolen system, then that IP is used to identify the ISP, who will then be informed of the situation and will hopefully be able to identify which user was using that IP at the time. Tie that user back to a person and contact details through billing records and you can proceed to make an arrest.
So, stealing becomes a simple method of getting an interest free loan, only without all that annoying paperwork and the credit checks with repayment to be arranged upon apprehension and proof of guilt? Cool!
Um, where do you live?
It does appear that people are finally catching on to the scam though; the one year chart seems to show signs of the stock starting to show the end of its upward trend from March through November. I really can't see thing getting to court somehow, which is a shame, because it would have been a fairly good test case for Linux and the GPL.
What was the problem again?
The one link that I seem to notice about all these hotspots, is that they seem to be something of a political hotspot as as well - Israel and the Arab nations, China and Taiwan, Korea...
Maybe. Remember that the policy here was that the cabling was to be removed after each tennant left. That means it is simply a case of removing any cable from the duct, as opposed to removing just the defunct cables from a tangle of spaghetti. I suspect that the latter would require a considerable quantity of time, and therefore money, to accomplish.
True, a spammer could abuse the system, but why would they need too spend the money on the device in the first place? If they have all those IPs available in a single block then a traditional single IP MTA setup would work fine. A simple script to fire off a batch of spam for a couple of hours, switch the MTAs default IP to another and repeat. SpamCop will delist after at most 120 hours after the last spam was sent from an IP, so if you have an entire class /24 to play with and you switch IPs every few hours then uyou have a considerable idle time on each IP while it de-lists. Not much defence against Spamhaus though, once they get wind of the IP block it'll be on their SBL almost immediately. ;)
That's not quite correct. SpamCop uses a fairly simple, but quite effective weighting system that combines the number of reports and the age of reports to decide whether to block an IP or not. You can find out the specifics here if you want, but in a nutshell a minimum of *two* reports are required for a listing of just 24 hours. All IPs will be delisted 48 hours after the last spam complaint, which can be upto 5 days after the last spam was sent, as you imply.
Yes, mistakes can and do happen (I've seen Amazon and a popular mailing list blocked), which is why SpamCop recommends you don't use it as a DNSBL, but despite that I have found it to be the most accurate blocklist of all. I use three DNSBLs on my server (SpamCop, Spamhaus and my own local one) with an SMTP error verbose enough to pick up bounces. I've seen just *two* false positives, one from a mailing list and another an advert from Amazon. A simple "amazon.com OK" in my mail config fixed that permanantly, but that's not really an applicable solution for a big multi-user server.
If that kind of filtering makes you nervous, then a better solution is to configure something like SpamAssassin to check the DNSBLs for you and assign a positive score to the hits. If you adjust your SpamAssassin scores to reflect your personal confidence in each enabled service then the results are superb. For the last three months I've been running with the three DNSBLs listed above blocking IPs outright and SpamAssassin checking about half a dozen more for a match amongst all its other checks, plus a few custom ones and adjusted scores. The results are stunning:
- Two minor false positives on the DNSBLs
- Zero false positives from SpamAssassin (you rock!)
- Three spams of the meaningless content type arrived in my inbox (fixed by tweaking some SpamAssassin scores)
- A few thousand legitimate emails received
- Probably a similar number blocked or removed - who cares?
Spam problem? What spam problem?So can most big companies with thier fingers in lots of pies. Take Sony - it sells music and complains about P2P and copyright issues, yet it also makes hardware that makes is very easy to infringe those same copyrights. They were also threatened with legislation by Philips, their partners in designing the CD, about selling non standard CDs with the official logo on them.
All part of the fun and games that is big business.
- Require a "miniscule tax on email"
- ???
- Profit!!! (through the taxation)
The snag is that "???" is actually a known entity - "Implement a robust micro-payment system". That's a concept that seems about as nebulous as SCO's claims about Linux and I doubt it's going to happen anytime soon.On the other tinfoil hat, if you require ISPs to monitor the amount of email being sent and bill accordingly, then the obvious way to go would be to force all email through a central server farm at the ISP. Wouldn't that be convenient for all the agencies that might want to monitor communications to "prevent terrorism".
What as? A control group to be infected with the real Ebola virus to give them something to compare the vaccine test subjects with? With all the other crap they are haemoraging at the moment a few pints of blood and liquified organs probably wouldn't even be noticed.
Perhaps you missed the bit about building the world's 38th most powerful computer (based on June '03 figures) in 17 hours? Damn impressive by any counts.
I'll reserve judgement on that until *after* President Bush has finished his imminent visit to the UK. From some of the discussions I've seen on various boards I have a feeling that things could get really ugly at the demonstations that are being planned. There are a lot of Brits who are extremely pissed at Bush and Blair over the WMD thing, even amongst those who supported the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. Add in a few militant types to stir things up and an over zealous security detail and you have a recipe for disaster.