The object, for those in a dubious copyright position, would primarily be to hide the identity of the uploader sharing the files, not the downloader retrieving them - that's just a bonus. Most P2P networks use some kind of hub system to collate requests and assign them to servers, at least initially. So, at a very basic level:
Client contacts hub and requests a file
Hub contacts available servers with details
Server(s) sends data blocks to client
Client receives data blocks and ticks off the file bitmap, making additional requests of the hub until all sections are retrieved.
Therefore, if the servers fake their originating IPs and all data verification is done by the client only the hub needs to know the IPs of the servers. Apparently there is already a UDP based P2P client in development that does something like this - it's mentioned in this very thread in fact.
Quite how you get around the issue of the RIAA et al operating a hub and looking at the traffic though is another matter. Ultimately, something *must* bring the source and destination IPs together to initiate the transfer, and that's the point that the copyright police are going to be working at. I think it's a problem with a solution though - the similar issue of public key exchange had people stumped for an age before it was first solved by James Ellis' team at GCHQ.
In fact, that's another way of looking at the problem - who cares if Eve can see an ISOs worth of data transferred between Alice and Bob if they can't tell whether its the latest distro or the latest Hollywood movie DivX? They can't pursue every P2P downloader on the off chance it's a copyright violation, can they? And encryption is and essential feature of communications software to gain mainstream business acceptance in this paranoia ridden world, right?
I don't know about and native Linux Kazaa client clones, but Kazaa runs just fine if you run it on Linux via the WINE emulation layer. Couple that with the Linux version of BitTorrent and a copy of WASTE and you have all your P2P client needs met.
Quite. All that spam you get for various enhancement products should have taught all but the most gullible that this was the case. And *that* stuff even claims to have been endorsed by ABC, CNN, Fox and OPRAH! for God's sake. I mean if it's good enough for Oprah it must be good enough for Joe Sixpack, right?
Although quite what Oprah wants herbal penis extension tablets (no pumps!) for, I don't want to know.;)
Actually, the link to "robots.txt" raises an interesting point. Why is NY Times even in "discussions" for this, other than to gain some column inches? It's entirely upto the NYT whether to let Google's robots to index their site, isn't it? I would have thought that Google's robots would be well behaved in this respect and simply move onto the next site if they were told to go away by robots.txt.
Unfortunately, it's not FUD. Recently I've been receiving *huge* amounts of spam, vastly more than normal, and decided to take a closer look at what was being filtered out. There are some very obvious patterns in the extra spam:
It's pretty much all pornographic or for "enhancement" products.
The content is very similar - it's clearly the same small set of spams run through a hack to "randomise" the sender and basic subject/content details.
The originating IPs are *all* assigned to Windows boxes where I could sufficiently NMAP them.
WHOIS records almost always point to home/SOHO networks; I only found one corporate IP block in around 100 IP lookups.
There are no SMTP smarthosts being used - it's going direct from a Windows box to my SMTP gateways. Outlook *cannot* do this, so it's coming from malware with a dedicated SMTP engine.
I've also been seeing a huge increase in the amount of macro viruses inbound - just a guess, but it's probably the bot trying to propogate itself.
Couple this with the 500Mb/s DDoS attack on SpamCop over the last few days and the picture is fairly clear. Someone is thumbing their nose at the US/EU attempts to legislate against spam and sending a message loud and clear. If the antispam community cannot find and nail the person or persons responsible for this, then the eventual legislation is going to have no effect what-so-ever.
So. We have 500Mb/s+ of bandwidth being used in a DDoS, anyone's guess going on the actual spam, kids undoubtably seeing hardcore porn and computers being deliberately compromised and abused. Tell me again that spammers have a right to free speech and it's a victimless crime that doesn't cost anyone anything? They have a right to be force fed Hormel products until they explode like the Glutton in Seven if you ask me.
Would they conclude that it was unlikely that life could evolve in this system for one reason or another based upon their own standards?
If they did then they are an incredibly short sighted race, so much so that they probably wouldn't have got much beyond "banging the rocks together", let alone to radio astronomy. We are detecting Jupiter sized planets with a growing regularity, yet do we conclude from this that there are no other Earth type planets in the same star system, located in the zone necessary to support life as we know it? No. So why should they?
Some key details missing in the story
on
Twist on DNA Privacy
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· Score: 4, Insightful
It seems to me that the process of getting to the guilty party (who admitted as much in court, BTW), reads something like the Slashdot steps to profit thing. There is a stage they have glossed over somewhat immediately before the line that reads "Arrest!!!". Basically, they get a partial DNA match between material painstakingly recovered from the scene of the crime and another man who was "known to the police". This euphemistically means he has been arrested in the past, or at least was considered a serious enough suspect, to have had his DNA sampled and recorded in the same way as a fingerprint. Now we come to the "???" bit.
Somehow, the police managed to establish a connection between the nephew and his uncle based on the DNA sample. This could have been as simple as someone noticing that the uncle was mentioned in the original investigation (same surname), or as complex as some biological DNA jiggery pokery. Uncles and newphews have a common parent/grandparent respectively, so there will be a sizable chunk of identical genetic material in there (25%) to go on. In this specific case the suspect admitted guilt and justice eventually appears to have been done, but we need details on that missing step. It's all very well saying that the police would still have to prove the that someone identified in this way was guilty in court, but most jurors are going to hear the phrase "DNA match" and think "Guilty!" as their knee bounces off their chin.
On the whole, I have no privacy problems with this, it does seem like some brilliant police work from the forensics team. However, I am left wondering how this might have turned out if the uncle's DNA had been at the scene for a perfectly innocent reason that he could not justify, or if the DNA match was just a coincidence. The key is just how much additional investigative work was there to get from nephew to uncle?
Let's not forget a lot of the fantasy stuff done by Ray Harryhausen either. Sure, some of it sucks by today's standards, but the skeleton scene from "Jason and the Argonauts" in particular is still impressive FX, and there sure as hell wasn't CGI then, hell, there were barely even computers...
CGI has its place for FX, but frankly, Hollywood seems to have grasped onto this like some kind of Holy Grail in the same way that adventure games latched onto FMV a few years back. Decent scripts and acting are going out of the window in a pissing contest to see who can produce the best CGI. Another film I'll be seeing courtesy of BlockBuster, if at all, I think.
makes me think of going from a P-166 to a P-200.....
Actually, it's more like going from a PIII/600 to a modern P4/2GHz. I dunno about you, but I wouldn't like to try playing Quake III on a PIII/600 era PC.
Following up on my own post as something was nagging me and it finally clicked: fans. I think that you are *definately* going to need some fans to provide active cooling on the drives for zero G. I'm not sure, but I doubt that waste heat is going to "rise" in zero G as there is no up or down, so it's probably just going to sit there, slowly cooking your drives. I suspect you just need to push air across the top of each of the drives in whatever configuration you have them mounted.
How long before stores start installing cellphone jammers?
Not long at all I hope. There was an idea being muted about a while ago for places like cinemas and theatres to have a automatic "switch to mute" or "switch to off" for Bluetooth phones. As someone who has had several cultural outings disturbed by inconsiderate pricks who can't even be bothered switching their phone to silent, or leave the auditorium I'm all for the introduction of these things.
You are now entering a theatre. Setting ring to OFF!
You are now entering a secure zone. Setting camera to OFF!
You have a *really* irritating ring tone. Destroying phone!
And so on...;)
Have you tried IBM?
on
RAID for Zero-G?
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· Score: 4, Informative
They do use ThinkPads on the shuttle/ISS after all, so they must have the drives capable of this kind of thing. RAID cabinets and controllers have no moving parts (or maybe a fan or two), so I doubt they would be affected by zero G anyway.
In a celebrity death match for laptops maybe. I get a sore shoulder lugging 7lb for any appreciable distance in a shoulder bag, this sucker weighs 10lbs! And where are all the juicy goodies for that extra weight? Where's the 1920x1200 screen a la Dell? Where's the rest of the battery life? I'm not the biggest Apple fan around, but I'd take the Apple over this bloated monster anyday.
Also, I think you will find that Denethor is the father of both Boromir and Faramir - Faramir being the younger *brother*.
Actually, given the article doesn't go into specifics, this is probably nothing more than a request for the FTC to acquire the right to wire tap a suspected spammer's phone/internet connections etc. As long as they have to get a warrant from a judge like everyone else is supposed to, I can't see *anyone* except spammers having a problem with this.
Translation: it would appear that you don't understand "strip", like most of the package compilers on the distro release concerned.
For the non-developers who can't run "man strip"; "strip" removes the *optional* fluff added to a binary executable (including libraries). Since this is is really only useful when debugging the code, something a user doesn't do that often and certainly shouldn't be done on a production box strip will remove it for you. It does not stop the executable from running. When you try and run it on a file format it doesn't understand (a perl script say), it gives an error and leaves the file alone. Basically therefore, 10% of the/usr partition utilisation on the system was symbol tables.
In summary, if you are interested in reducing executable size, strip the binaries *then* apply the code compressor, assuming that it doesn't remove the symbol table for you anyway, of course.
Certainly, it's unlikely and unexpected, but it happens far more than you might expect, and a lot depends on the first compressor. Many compressors don't actually compress their own data, for instance ZIP doesn't make much effort at compressing its file table. As a result, if you "zip foo.zip *.gif ; zip bar.zip foo.zip" then "bar.zip" can be significantly smaller than "foo.zip", especially for very large numbers of files. Try looking at the Usenet binaries groups as well - they frequently double compress files with combinations of ARJ/RAR/ZIP before posting and often squeeze several additional percent by getting the right combo.
That still doesn't change the fact that, in my experience, the most effective compressor of large amounts of executable code is just to run "strip" on it. Just for giggles a few years back I performed a clean install of a major Linux distro, then ran "strip" on all the executables. There were a lot of errors for scripts etc., but overall disk saving was around 10%, and with no consistency what so ever in what was or was not stripped. It's not just FOSS that does this too, I've quite often found commercial Windows binaries with the symbol table still attached as well...
Confused me too, but having actually *read* the Intel PR - it's the one billionth x86 CPU specifically. So that excludes all the other silicon not classed as CPUs as well as other non-x86 CPUs shipped by Intel. They must have shippped a few 10m of the i[89]60 "RISC" chip for intelligent peripherals over the years as well.P.
Anyway, you didn't mention the 4004 either...:P
Actually, all that means is 1 in 6 Americans know how to download, install, and run a P2P client. Since the bulk of those are going to have installed the standard KaZaA client, that could also mean something like 1 in 10 Americans are prepared to install who knows what on their computer in return for some free music.
With me,.exe files in.zip files are fine - until the worms will do that to.
They already do, and have been for a few months now, I've seen just about every combination of file extension obfuscation for both the archive and the payload in my mail scanner's logs. While I'm smart enough to know not to click on an attachment, mistakes do happen, so I've got a whole bunch of hostile file extensions that automatically get ".safe" tacked onto the end of them by my firewall as well.
IIRC this question was raised when the channel tunnel was under construction, and the answer was that the UK is indeed drifting away from Europe at a rate of a few centimeters per annum. Quite how this works when we share the same tectonic plate that is fairly inactive in the region concerned I have no idea, but I'd suspect that individual plates exhibit a degree of elasticity or deform when pressure is applied to the sides.
The thought had occurred to me too. I've been trying for the last few minutes to find the breakdown of the reductions in enough detail to confirm that, but without much success so far. If the hypothesis is correct, then we should see interesting blips for countries such as India that have been in the news for large takeup of FOSS as well.
Or maybe the BSA is keeping that quiet on purpose...
Yeah, it's an expensive solution in that context, no doubt about that, $5 plus tax and shipping per key in-fact. However, when a keyboard dies it's almost always the QWERTY/space keys that fail, not the FN keys, so if we assume we go through three QWERTY keyboards to one X-Keys (probably harsh on the X-Keys) then you could look on it as $80+3 standard keyboards instead of 3 programmable keyboards. Here in the UK I can get a Cherry QWERTY for the equivalent of $20, so that's a total of $140. I can get a Cherry programmable (PS/2) for $59, which would be $177 for three.
In addition:
You don't need to sacrifice quality of the QWERTY keyboard to gain programmability; you can match it with an IBM/Cherry/whatever for the bulk of your typing needs
You can position it almost anywhere you like, although above the Fn keys on your QWERTY keyboard is most likely best ergonomically
You can move one X-Keys between several PCs as required, with all your macros in-place
It works on Apple and Sun kit if you are so inclined
You might not actually have to pay for it yourself, if you can justify it to your boss:-P
Also, I have yet to find a decent programmable keyboard with a good tactile response, decent build quality and a USB interface, and believe me, I've looked. And no, I don't want a "multimedia" keyboard - I want a boatload of Fn keys I can label and attach *long* macros to that I can change on the fly.
PI Engineering make a range of rather nifty "keyboard extenders" for all those keyboard macros. I've got my eyes on an X-Keys "Stick" or two, but want the USB version which has been "coming soon" for a few months now, so should be imminent.
The only drawback is that the management software utility is Windows only, although you can still program the keys directly or use a Windows PC and then tranfer the keyboard to a Mac/*NIX box. Since you have Windows anyway that shouldn't be a major problem in your case though. They seem open to developing custom solutions though, so *might* be prepared to provide the info necessary to develop a *NIX version of the programming tool. In my experiences with programmable keyboards however that's only really of use to people who need to either bulk program the things or flip between application specific macro sets.
Slashdot Mirror
Nope, *that's* where the 15% reduction in P2P traffic reported a few days ago has been going instead - DDoSing the RIAA out of existence. Again.
- Client contacts hub and requests a file
- Hub contacts available servers with details
- Server(s) sends data blocks to client
- Client receives data blocks and ticks off the file bitmap, making additional requests of the hub until all sections are retrieved.
Therefore, if the servers fake their originating IPs and all data verification is done by the client only the hub needs to know the IPs of the servers. Apparently there is already a UDP based P2P client in development that does something like this - it's mentioned in this very thread in fact.Quite how you get around the issue of the RIAA et al operating a hub and looking at the traffic though is another matter. Ultimately, something *must* bring the source and destination IPs together to initiate the transfer, and that's the point that the copyright police are going to be working at. I think it's a problem with a solution though - the similar issue of public key exchange had people stumped for an age before it was first solved by James Ellis' team at GCHQ.
In fact, that's another way of looking at the problem - who cares if Eve can see an ISOs worth of data transferred between Alice and Bob if they can't tell whether its the latest distro or the latest Hollywood movie DivX? They can't pursue every P2P downloader on the off chance it's a copyright violation, can they? And encryption is and essential feature of communications software to gain mainstream business acceptance in this paranoia ridden world, right?
I don't know about and native Linux Kazaa client clones, but Kazaa runs just fine if you run it on Linux via the WINE emulation layer. Couple that with the Linux version of BitTorrent and a copy of WASTE and you have all your P2P client needs met.
Although quite what Oprah wants herbal penis extension tablets (no pumps!) for, I don't want to know. ;)
Actually, the link to "robots.txt" raises an interesting point. Why is NY Times even in "discussions" for this, other than to gain some column inches? It's entirely upto the NYT whether to let Google's robots to index their site, isn't it? I would have thought that Google's robots would be well behaved in this respect and simply move onto the next site if they were told to go away by robots.txt.
- It's pretty much all pornographic or for "enhancement" products.
- The content is very similar - it's clearly the same small set of spams run through a hack to "randomise" the sender and basic subject/content details.
- The originating IPs are *all* assigned to Windows boxes where I could sufficiently NMAP them.
- WHOIS records almost always point to home/SOHO networks; I only found one corporate IP block in around 100 IP lookups.
- There are no SMTP smarthosts being used - it's going direct from a Windows box to my SMTP gateways. Outlook *cannot* do this, so it's coming from malware with a dedicated SMTP engine.
- I've also been seeing a huge increase in the amount of macro viruses inbound - just a guess, but it's probably the bot trying to propogate itself.
Couple this with the 500Mb/s DDoS attack on SpamCop over the last few days and the picture is fairly clear. Someone is thumbing their nose at the US/EU attempts to legislate against spam and sending a message loud and clear. If the antispam community cannot find and nail the person or persons responsible for this, then the eventual legislation is going to have no effect what-so-ever.So. We have 500Mb/s+ of bandwidth being used in a DDoS, anyone's guess going on the actual spam, kids undoubtably seeing hardcore porn and computers being deliberately compromised and abused. Tell me again that spammers have a right to free speech and it's a victimless crime that doesn't cost anyone anything? They have a right to be force fed Hormel products until they explode like the Glutton in Seven if you ask me.
If they did then they are an incredibly short sighted race, so much so that they probably wouldn't have got much beyond "banging the rocks together", let alone to radio astronomy. We are detecting Jupiter sized planets with a growing regularity, yet do we conclude from this that there are no other Earth type planets in the same star system, located in the zone necessary to support life as we know it? No. So why should they?
Somehow, the police managed to establish a connection between the nephew and his uncle based on the DNA sample. This could have been as simple as someone noticing that the uncle was mentioned in the original investigation (same surname), or as complex as some biological DNA jiggery pokery. Uncles and newphews have a common parent/grandparent respectively, so there will be a sizable chunk of identical genetic material in there (25%) to go on. In this specific case the suspect admitted guilt and justice eventually appears to have been done, but we need details on that missing step. It's all very well saying that the police would still have to prove the that someone identified in this way was guilty in court, but most jurors are going to hear the phrase "DNA match" and think "Guilty!" as their knee bounces off their chin.
On the whole, I have no privacy problems with this, it does seem like some brilliant police work from the forensics team. However, I am left wondering how this might have turned out if the uncle's DNA had been at the scene for a perfectly innocent reason that he could not justify, or if the DNA match was just a coincidence. The key is just how much additional investigative work was there to get from nephew to uncle?
Let's not forget a lot of the fantasy stuff done by Ray Harryhausen either. Sure, some of it sucks by today's standards, but the skeleton scene from "Jason and the Argonauts" in particular is still impressive FX, and there sure as hell wasn't CGI then, hell, there were barely even computers...
CGI has its place for FX, but frankly, Hollywood seems to have grasped onto this like some kind of Holy Grail in the same way that adventure games latched onto FMV a few years back. Decent scripts and acting are going out of the window in a pissing contest to see who can produce the best CGI. Another film I'll be seeing courtesy of BlockBuster, if at all, I think.
Actually, it's more like going from a PIII/600 to a modern P4/2GHz. I dunno about you, but I wouldn't like to try playing Quake III on a PIII/600 era PC.
Following up on my own post as something was nagging me and it finally clicked: fans. I think that you are *definately* going to need some fans to provide active cooling on the drives for zero G. I'm not sure, but I doubt that waste heat is going to "rise" in zero G as there is no up or down, so it's probably just going to sit there, slowly cooking your drives. I suspect you just need to push air across the top of each of the drives in whatever configuration you have them mounted.
Not long at all I hope. There was an idea being muted about a while ago for places like cinemas and theatres to have a automatic "switch to mute" or "switch to off" for Bluetooth phones. As someone who has had several cultural outings disturbed by inconsiderate pricks who can't even be bothered switching their phone to silent, or leave the auditorium I'm all for the introduction of these things.
You are now entering a theatre. Setting ring to OFF!
You are now entering a secure zone. Setting camera to OFF!
You have a *really* irritating ring tone. Destroying phone!
And so on... ;)
They do use ThinkPads on the shuttle/ISS after all, so they must have the drives capable of this kind of thing. RAID cabinets and controllers have no moving parts (or maybe a fan or two), so I doubt they would be affected by zero G anyway.
In a celebrity death match for laptops maybe. I get a sore shoulder lugging 7lb for any appreciable distance in a shoulder bag, this sucker weighs 10lbs! And where are all the juicy goodies for that extra weight? Where's the 1920x1200 screen a la Dell? Where's the rest of the battery life? I'm not the biggest Apple fan around, but I'd take the Apple over this bloated monster anyday.
Also, I think you will find that Denethor is the father of both Boromir and Faramir - Faramir being the younger *brother*.
Go FTC I say - and you all are forwarding your spam to "uce@ftc.gov" and 419s to "419.fcd@usss.treas.gov", yes?
For the non-developers who can't run "man strip"; "strip" removes the *optional* fluff added to a binary executable (including libraries). Since this is is really only useful when debugging the code, something a user doesn't do that often and certainly shouldn't be done on a production box strip will remove it for you. It does not stop the executable from running. When you try and run it on a file format it doesn't understand (a perl script say), it gives an error and leaves the file alone. Basically therefore, 10% of the /usr partition utilisation on the system was symbol tables.
In summary, if you are interested in reducing executable size, strip the binaries *then* apply the code compressor, assuming that it doesn't remove the symbol table for you anyway, of course.
That still doesn't change the fact that, in my experience, the most effective compressor of large amounts of executable code is just to run "strip" on it. Just for giggles a few years back I performed a clean install of a major Linux distro, then ran "strip" on all the executables. There were a lot of errors for scripts etc., but overall disk saving was around 10%, and with no consistency what so ever in what was or was not stripped. It's not just FOSS that does this too, I've quite often found commercial Windows binaries with the symbol table still attached as well...
Confused me too, but having actually *read* the Intel PR - it's the one billionth x86 CPU specifically. So that excludes all the other silicon not classed as CPUs as well as other non-x86 CPUs shipped by Intel. They must have shippped a few 10m of the i[89]60 "RISC" chip for intelligent peripherals over the years as well.P. Anyway, you didn't mention the 4004 either... :P
Rather scary really.
They already do, and have been for a few months now, I've seen just about every combination of file extension obfuscation for both the archive and the payload in my mail scanner's logs. While I'm smart enough to know not to click on an attachment, mistakes do happen, so I've got a whole bunch of hostile file extensions that automatically get ".safe" tacked onto the end of them by my firewall as well.
IIRC this question was raised when the channel tunnel was under construction, and the answer was that the UK is indeed drifting away from Europe at a rate of a few centimeters per annum. Quite how this works when we share the same tectonic plate that is fairly inactive in the region concerned I have no idea, but I'd suspect that individual plates exhibit a degree of elasticity or deform when pressure is applied to the sides.
Well, that explains all those Zombie processes I've been seeing recently, and I was starting to think it was just my box. ;)
The thought had occurred to me too. I've been trying for the last few minutes to find the breakdown of the reductions in enough detail to confirm that, but without much success so far. If the hypothesis is correct, then we should see interesting blips for countries such as India that have been in the news for large takeup of FOSS as well. Or maybe the BSA is keeping that quiet on purpose...
- You don't need to sacrifice quality of the QWERTY keyboard to gain programmability; you can match it with an IBM/Cherry/whatever for the bulk of your typing needs
- You can position it almost anywhere you like, although above the Fn keys on your QWERTY keyboard is most likely best ergonomically
- You can move one X-Keys between several PCs as required, with all your macros in-place
- It works on Apple and Sun kit if you are so inclined
- You might not actually have to pay for it yourself, if you can justify it to your boss
:-P
Also, I have yet to find a decent programmable keyboard with a good tactile response, decent build quality and a USB interface, and believe me, I've looked. And no, I don't want a "multimedia" keyboard - I want a boatload of Fn keys I can label and attach *long* macros to that I can change on the fly.PI Engineering make a range of rather nifty "keyboard extenders" for all those keyboard macros. I've got my eyes on an X-Keys "Stick" or two, but want the USB version which has been "coming soon" for a few months now, so should be imminent. The only drawback is that the management software utility is Windows only, although you can still program the keys directly or use a Windows PC and then tranfer the keyboard to a Mac/*NIX box. Since you have Windows anyway that shouldn't be a major problem in your case though. They seem open to developing custom solutions though, so *might* be prepared to provide the info necessary to develop a *NIX version of the programming tool. In my experiences with programmable keyboards however that's only really of use to people who need to either bulk program the things or flip between application specific macro sets.