This could be pure urban legend, but I've heard that the IRS is required by law to keep anything you send them. Apparently, more than a few people have mailed them bricks, and even broken refrigerators.
I'd tend to think that the law was eventually somehow clarified to note that random garbage irrelevant to the IRS's tasks don't have to be retained? If not, I could have a lot of fun...;)
I see your point, but I don't think they're quite the same.
It's somewhat reasonable to believe that if you buy a knife and stab someone, the police could see the blood and use it against you. But you shouldn't be expected to believe that the knife has a built-in camera that will show the police video of whoever you stab.
All cars come with tires, and it's more or less common knowledge that if you jam on your brakes, you'll leave tire marks. But why should you expect your car to be recording your location.
Speaking of measuring the length of skidmarks... I'm curious about how easily they can be challenged. If the road was very rough, there'd be more traction, and you'd stop more quickly. Does the distance equation figure in the road's 'roughness'? How about the road conditions? And suppose I don't jam on my brakes all the way? I think just questioning these things in court might get one off the hook?
I'm not seeing many post to indicate that anyone read the second article. It presents quite a different picture, one that I'm inclined to believe. From the second link mentioned in the story:
The two plaintiffs [suwain_2 note: the two fired IT guys] were commended by both Collegis and the law school in their handling of the situation.
Employment of the technicians ended due to issues completely unrelated to this isolated incident....
Of course they wouldn't come out and admit to firing them for making the company (college, actually; everyone keeps saying company) look bad, but I'm inclined to believe them that the firing (or whatever it was) was completely unrelated to this.
It's kinda like a police officer who shows up late to work every day, and rarely does anything but 'guard' Dunkin Donuts. One day, he catches one of the FBI's Most Wanted. The next day, however, he's fired for always being late to work and rarely even doing his job. Interesting timing, but it's not necessarily correct to claim that he was fired for making the city look bad by catching the criminal in *their* city and not a neighboring one.
I think this should be a lesson for those releasing projects in the future. It used to be that a search for "Phoenix" on Google would turn up the Phoenix webpage as its first match. "Firebird" matches all sorts of stuff, but (last I checked), none of them were the web browser. Over time, this will hopefully change, but the point is that name changes after a project gets popular are a bad thing.
Obviously there wasn't much choice when PhoenixBIOS's lawyers got involved, but I really wish people could see that not everything in the world needs a unique name. When someone introduces themselves as Matt, I don't get confused and refuse to talk to them because of a name conflict. (Since it's also my name.) Similarly, if asked to trim the bushes, I don't show up at the White House with hedge trimmers.
Similarly, if someone asks "What browser do you use?", and I reply "Phoenix," they're not going to get confused and think I'm talking about my BIOS. (Nor will they think I've captured a bird and am using it.)
Again, I realize that the developers in this case really had no choice, but I think it's pretty sad when lawyers decide the people don't know the difference between a bird, a web browser, and a database.
I've had this long-standing theory that you could play a video multiple times, and merge them to get a higher-quality signal. Obviously, VHS has it limits, but in theory, with the right magic, you could filter out some noise and stuff?
One time I saw something on a TV show where detectives took a video from a store CCTV system that was almost COMPLETELY unusable. They took it to some experts (at NASA, actually, IIRC), who were able to work out a formula for the horrible noise almost completely obscuring the video, and get pretty good quality video from it.
Now I realize the original post here wanted a *quick* way to to do, so taking his home cassettes to NASA isn't quite what he wants. But what I'd like to know is... Is there stuff out there that can do what I've described (play a video multiple times and take the best parts from each), or is this just some insane, impossible idea I dreamed up?
Most of the Internet is 'private.' That is, most of the networks my data travels through are owned by companies, not the government. In connecting to Slashdot, my data goes through Adelphia, MetroFiber Networks, AboveNet, and then to C&W (where Slashdot is housed).
To better illustrate... Take the cliche of "the information superhighway." Except it's not a state-, or even federal-, owned highway. It's a bunch of companies that built big roads on their private property. The companies owning the roads sometimes 'peer' with other companies' roads, allowing people to seamlessly move from one road to another. You can also buy a 'driveway,' or even a private street, from a company. (Representing your Internet connection.) The government doesn't own any of the roads.
Now the government wants to put tollbooths on the roads, and collect a toll from anyone driving on the roads. I really can't see how this idea can possibly be legal.
In addition, I've always felt that it's difficult to define the Internet. It's not too hard to say that when I'm posting to Slashdot, I'm using the Internet. But suppose I use an internal mail server to send mail to someone else using the same mailserver. It never leaves the internal LAN. Am I using the Internet?
Now suppose the mailserver is outside my firewall. Am I on the Internet? What if I have my routing messed up and it goes out the T1 and comes back in, going a single hop to my ISP. Am I using the Internet yet?
Suppose, as is actually the case, my mail server is several states away. If I send mail to someone else on it, am I subject to the tax? But it's a shared server; if I send mail to someone else who hosts there, but isn't related to my site, do I get taxed?
Suppose I VPN into the server. Although some of the data goes over the Internet, my e-mail program 'thinks' it's on the local LAN. Am I taxed?
And what if I own a small ISP with multiple data centers. If I send mail from my house to my local data center, which is sent over a WAN to another data center I / my company owns in another state, is it the Internet?
My goal isn't to name every possible way of getting mail from one place to another. Rather, I'm trying to illustrate the ambiguity of exactly when something's on the Internet versus a private network, when most of the Internet _is_ a private network. But even if exact conditions could be drawn, I still this is _horribly_ flawed because it's a private network. (ie, my "road" analogy)
In addition to the conceptual problems, it has a few serious flaws in practice as well. First, how will they know? Will every mailserver in the country start sending reports to the IRS on who is sending mail?
A second flaw is that e-mail isn't always e-mail, if that makes any sense. If I send mail from Hotmail, and you receive it at Yahoo, neither of us have directly used anything but HTTP. It's not my 'fault' that it got sent over SMTP.
And thirdly, I get a lot of mail that wouldn't be sent if it wasn't free. I'm on nearly a dozen mailing lists; is the mailserver going to be billed for every copy it sends out? Poor bugtraq! I also get mail anytime one of my comments here is replied to, or moderated. Countless other forums I visit do the same. I'm sure that none of these places would continue mailing helpful things like this if they had to pay.
Oh, and there's another little issue... It probably won't be too effective against the spammers. Since many of them already bounce mail through open relays, forging headers, they're probably not going to pay a cent. Sure, after getting a massive 'bill' for the mail the 'victim' might prohibit relaying on their server, but it's definitely not going to end open relays entirely. All it's going to do is destroy the Internet as we know it.
(BTW, after writing all this... Does anyone know if this idea is actually serious? I can't tell you how many e-mails I've received about how Congress is thinking of an e-mail tax to help the Post Office recoup lost money... Is it actually real now?)
Re:Who didn't see this coming?
on
SCO DOS'ed
·
· Score: 1
Heh, you've got my dream job -- being able to 'attack' other lines (that you own) with a Gigabit of traffic. (lol, how many other people would have said the same, but referred to where you work instead?)
As far as the route change... I'd think *anyone* with over 100 Mbps of bandwidth would have enough of a clue to run BGP4, giving them multi-homing. BGP4 (for those not familiar) is a dynamic routing thingy (to use formal terms), that essentially finds the best route at the time. If you have three different pipes coming into your building, and one goes down, it'll start routing just over the other two. Well-configured ones, IIRC, can also try to 'prioritize' traffic overe certain pipes that have lower latency -- if one connection is getting really slow for some reason, it can try to offload it. (It's been a while since I've done / read anything with BGP, so I could be wrong...)
As for potentially affecting others, I'm willing to bet a big company like SCO has their own datacenter. (I still wouldn't condone attacking them, though.)
As for the attack being from IBM or Microsoft, I think it's far more likely that it's DDoS. If their admins were awake at the time, they could quickly see the flood of data coming from a single IP (or netblock) and drop it at the router. Their bandwidth coming in might still be somewhat congested, but it'd never actually get in.
Will this affect the case?
on
SCO DOS'ed
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
As much as I dislike SCO, I have to wonder if this was actually a *bad* move. Couldn't SCO try to work this into its case as some sort of 'FUD' to try to make it look like IBM was somehow responsible, or that Linux users -- who already "stole" their code -- are now attacking them?
I hate SCO. But I'd hate even more if SCO could somehow spin this to help their case.
Getting pretty offtopic, but how do you like MIT? Not sure I'll get accepted, but it's one of the colleges I'm thinking of applying to. It obviously has a good academic ranking, but how do you like it? Even things like lack of bandwidth are good to know.:)
When you're one of the first people on the web.:) "Back in the day," no one imagined the Internet would be what it is today, and they gave out huge chunks of IP space without thinking twice.
BTW, I wrote a script to do whois lookups on all the Class A's (although I don't know where the output went... I though I saved it somewhere). There have to be at least 25 Class A's that the US Government owns.
This doesn't pertain to whether you should use DSL or Ethernet, but rather is a few things I've always thought ISPs should do. (I've had this almost life-long goal of starting an ISP for some reason...)
I own a domain, and use it primarily for the unlimited mail aliases. Every site I go to gets sitename@mydomain.com, which just forwards to my main address. If they start spamming, I can tell exactly who it is, and redirect (or block entirely) the mail. Why not give each customer a subdomain (customer.condo.com) where they get, say, 5 POP boxes, but unlimited aliases? Used effectively, this could *really* fight spam. (This is venturing more offtopic, but Cpanel seems to be the most popular web-based control panel; you could provide customers with some webspace and e-mail access. It's easy to use, but even great for geeks. You can get licenses for like $40/month, or possibly less.)
Another thing I've always thought ISPs should offer was NAT access. Rather than getting an external IP, they'd get an internal one and use your proxy. It'd save you from needing as many IPs, and it gives them great security -- unless you go out of your way to set it up, no one can connect to them. Of course you shouldn't force this upon people, but some people might *want* NAT. Offer it as a 'privacy' plan. (Heh, you could probably even charge extra, lol)
Something like Squid could really speed things up, especially if you only have a T1.
The last "If I ran an ISP..." item regards DNS. Maybe it's because Adelphia is so crappy (they have like 5 DNS servers, and whatever you have as primary ALWAYS goes down, so you're re-ordering the nameservers several times a week to make it work at all...), but I ended up using OpenNIC, which essentially is a 'democratic' TLD assigner; they have a lot of new TLDs not supported by 'real' DNS. (And, of course, lookups for regular TLDs work, too.) Not sure if you want to make it standard, but I'd be way impressed if an ISP gave me the choice of 'regular' DNS or OpenNIC DNS servers to use.
Oh! Don't forget to do your part and setup a good firewall. Another seemingly uncommon thing I've always thought ISPs should do was to do *good* egress filtering: filter traffic *leaving* your network too. I start to rant about this idea every time I read about a big DoS attack; if ISPs were more careful about what leaves their network, a lot of DoS attacks would simply get dropped at the attacker's ISP.
Microsoft Corporation today announced the beginning of a new program, aimed at preserving OpenSource software. "It's crucial to the continued existence of a secure Internet that we have OpenSource software like Linux out there, or there would be no Internet," Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer told reporters.
At the same time, a spokesman for a coalition between the RIAA and MPAA unveiled proposed legislation giving stricter penalties for bribing politicians, and, at the same time, promoting independent music. "Without valuable resources like Gnutella and Kazaa, independent artists would have no chance share their music. We want to make sure that doesn't happen," the unnamed spokesman claimed.
This doesn't appear to be the case, but this is a scary scenario I've often thought could happen.
Suppose, just suppose, that AOL charged a premium to receive mail from non-AOL members. International e-mail would cost even more. Similarly, "premium" websites (any popular places, cnn.com, wsj.com, etc.) cost a few extra dollars a month.
Again, I'm not suggesting that AOL is doing this, I'm merely using this to illustrate a fear that I've long had -- having various charges for each website you visit. It'd destroy the Internet as we know it, but ISPs could make a killing that way.
Heh, I figured if I didn't throw that in, someone would post something rambling about how it lulls me into a false sense of security, since I could get viruses, or some "l33t h4x0r" could compromise one of the services I'm running and then get at my other boxes.
I agree -- it's as secure as a box on the Internet can be. I just wanted to make sure people didn't think that I was content to setup a NAT and never think about security again; it's still theoretically possible for someone to get in if they can compromise another box on the network and get through that way.
Precisely. Although NATs *are* a bad solution to the shortage of IPs, they can actually be pretty handy. My desktop has port-forwarding for the ports I want to get at from the public, but anything else won't get through. Not total security, of course, but it makes things *way* safer.
"Back in the day" when I wanted to get a 100 Mbps Cogent line and start a wireless ISP (heh, who am I kidding... I still want to), I thought it would be a novel idea to offer a "NAT" plan -- you get a non-routable IP (such as 192.168.1.1). Some might view it as a disadvantage (of course I'd have plans with a "real" IP for those people), but I think a lot of people would appreciate the fact that it makes them far less vulnerable to worms and other attacks.
Not saying NAT's great for everyone (I myself wouldn't mind a few more IPs...), but there are definitely cases where I would use NAT even if I had a bunch of extra IPs not being used.
I believe there's an HTTP "do not cache" header. (PHP, etc., IIRC, set this, as caching, say, someone's shopping cart would be a Bad Thing (tm).)
Therefore, the whole "What if they don't want to be cached" thing is moot. Slashdot could easily write a little script that looks to see if that header is set, and if not, makes a mirror.
The problem is that you *can* make a case for mirroring being illegal: you're taking potentially copyrighted material and sharing it. Granted, in most cases the intent is to help the copyright owners, and you make no claim it's yours, but it's not *too* farfetched to say that they might have a valid lawsuit.
A while ago someone here suggested the concept of setting up a proxy server -- Slashdot could run a proxy server caching recently posted sites. The problem would be if people kept Slashdot as a 'permanent' cache, causing them to use a *TON* of bandwidth completely unnecessarily.
It's an interesting issue, though. The Slashdot editors are fully aware that they can cause insane bandwidth usage for a *lot* of the sites they link to, often either killing servers, or causing enormous bandwidth charges. In a sense, they could almost be sued for 'knowingly' causing it.
On the other hand, the Internet would fall apart with a "It's illegal to link to another site without permission" precedent. It goes completely against the entire purpose of the Internet.
The entire issue could be avoided (at least temporarily) if the Slashdot editors would act a little more responsibly. All it would take is a simple e-mail, offering them three choices: - Post the story without the link - Post the story with a link to a mirror on Slashdot - Post the story with the link
If they don't reply within a reasonable amount of time, I don't think it's entirely unethical to post a link to the site, but they really ought to ask first. Not only is it polite, but it could cover them legally, and help to defer a possible "Linking to sites is illegal" verdict.
That's your opinion, and I'm certainly not saying it's wrong. However, I wanted to share my personal belief...
I'm a Catholic, and I'm against artificially ending life (abortion, death penalty...), as well as artificially creating it. However, I don't think artificially extending life is wrong, nor at all "playing God," or even going against what God wanted.
I'm having a hard time articulating why I believe this, but... I have a hard time believe it's God's will that someone develop cancer and die. Rather, I'm more inclined to believe that the scientists trying to give people longer, healthier, happier lives are closer to the will of God.
To use a rather ridiculous comparison, if you witness a car accident, you don't tell those injured that it's the will of God that they be injured, but rather, you call 911. Again, this is just my personal belief, and I'm not asking you to change yours because I disagree, but I think preserving life is the will of God.
I don't think they're seeking to replace God, but rather, to try to imitate him, something we're called to do. Jesus healed many during his life on Earth; surely, he would have done the same for those with cancer. We're not seeking to be God, but rather, to try to live a more Jesus-like life, something we're all supposed to do.
The article doesn't mention what alterations were made. As someone with an avid interest in photography, I'm wondering if they went overboard in firing him or not.
Particularly with digital photography, it's common to alter photos. Not to, say, put a tank in a picture when one wasn't there, but to apply an unsharp mask to correct the blur, and tweak the contrast a little.
Plus, with 'challenging' photos in terms of lighting, it's common to take pictures exposed for different things: In one photo, the sunset is designed to look perfect, and in the next one, you instead meter for the ground, and then merge them afterward -- not always to 'change' things, but rather to make them closer to the way they were in real life, but that the camera's dynamic range couldn't accurately capture.
Granted, the mention of some people being in the photo twice makes it seem as if the alterations might have been more than simply adjusting the color tone or whatnot, but I think they should mention just what was changed. (Does anyone have a link to the actual pictures?)
When prime numbers were first discovered, don't you think everyone initially thought "Great... Who cares about these numbers that have no other factors?"
In fact, if I was around when they were first discovered, I bet I would have thought it was a completely meaningless discovery. Who would have thought that later on, prime numbers would become a vital part of encryption?
Anyway, my point is that although right now this seems to be of little practical value, who knows what future 'breakthroughs' will be based upon it? Perhaps someone will be inspired by this and come up with a revolutionary way allowing RSA to be cracked in microseconds? And even if no practical use is discovered any time soon, it's still one more thing better understood.
Brokedown Palace is an awesome movie. Without revealing much, two girls go to Thailand for their high school graduation, only to be arrested for smuggling drugs. I really don't want to say much, as it's much better if you don't know anything ahead of time. I guess I'd classify it as "Drama," but it's extremely good.
By the way... It's made by one of the major entertainment companies (I can't remember which, and I'm not sure where it is right now...); it's not some obscure movie. But every single person I've mentioned it to has never heard of it. Strange...
Perhaps we don't have it as bad as other people, and I'm thankful that we can discuss variations in textbooks instead of our tyrant dictator's plans to test nuclear weapons on us. (The latter being a combination of world events and not really referring to anyone in particular.)
But this is a pet peeve of mine: Just because someone has it much worse than you doesn't mean you have no right to complain. He's not saying we're the worst in the world, or coming anywhere near implying that he'd rather live under Taliban rule. If an innocent man gets ten years in jail, do you tell him to shut up and quit appealing, because some people have been put to death for crimes they didn't commit? No, even if you're better off then others, I think it's your perogative to try to work for better conditions.
Yes, we have it much better than many other nations. And yes, I'm thankful for that. But no, I don't expect anyone to sit back and watch the erosion of our rights.
Slashdot Mirror
No no no... Not steak, but stake. The things you kill vampires with.
Then again, I didn't know Microsoft made those either...
This could be pure urban legend, but I've heard that the IRS is required by law to keep anything you send them. Apparently, more than a few people have mailed them bricks, and even broken refrigerators.
;)
I'd tend to think that the law was eventually somehow clarified to note that random garbage irrelevant to the IRS's tasks don't have to be retained? If not, I could have a lot of fun...
I see your point, but I don't think they're quite the same. It's somewhat reasonable to believe that if you buy a knife and stab someone, the police could see the blood and use it against you. But you shouldn't be expected to believe that the knife has a built-in camera that will show the police video of whoever you stab. All cars come with tires, and it's more or less common knowledge that if you jam on your brakes, you'll leave tire marks. But why should you expect your car to be recording your location. Speaking of measuring the length of skidmarks... I'm curious about how easily they can be challenged. If the road was very rough, there'd be more traction, and you'd stop more quickly. Does the distance equation figure in the road's 'roughness'? How about the road conditions? And suppose I don't jam on my brakes all the way? I think just questioning these things in court might get one off the hook?
I'm not seeing many post to indicate that anyone read the second article. It presents quite a different picture, one that I'm inclined to believe. From the second link mentioned in the story:
The two plaintiffs [suwain_2 note: the two fired IT guys] were commended by both Collegis and the law school in their handling of the situation.
Employment of the technicians ended due to issues completely unrelated to this isolated incident....
Of course they wouldn't come out and admit to firing them for making the company (college, actually; everyone keeps saying company) look bad, but I'm inclined to believe them that the firing (or whatever it was) was completely unrelated to this.
It's kinda like a police officer who shows up late to work every day, and rarely does anything but 'guard' Dunkin Donuts. One day, he catches one of the FBI's Most Wanted. The next day, however, he's fired for always being late to work and rarely even doing his job. Interesting timing, but it's not necessarily correct to claim that he was fired for making the city look bad by catching the criminal in *their* city and not a neighboring one.
I think this should be a lesson for those releasing projects in the future. It used to be that a search for "Phoenix" on Google would turn up the Phoenix webpage as its first match. "Firebird" matches all sorts of stuff, but (last I checked), none of them were the web browser. Over time, this will hopefully change, but the point is that name changes after a project gets popular are a bad thing.
Obviously there wasn't much choice when PhoenixBIOS's lawyers got involved, but I really wish people could see that not everything in the world needs a unique name. When someone introduces themselves as Matt, I don't get confused and refuse to talk to them because of a name conflict. (Since it's also my name.) Similarly, if asked to trim the bushes, I don't show up at the White House with hedge trimmers.
Similarly, if someone asks "What browser do you use?", and I reply "Phoenix," they're not going to get confused and think I'm talking about my BIOS. (Nor will they think I've captured a bird and am using it.)
Again, I realize that the developers in this case really had no choice, but I think it's pretty sad when lawyers decide the people don't know the difference between a bird, a web browser, and a database.
And UNIX copied su from SCO? ;)
I've had this long-standing theory that you could play a video multiple times, and merge them to get a higher-quality signal. Obviously, VHS has it limits, but in theory, with the right magic, you could filter out some noise and stuff?
One time I saw something on a TV show where detectives took a video from a store CCTV system that was almost COMPLETELY unusable. They took it to some experts (at NASA, actually, IIRC), who were able to work out a formula for the horrible noise almost completely obscuring the video, and get pretty good quality video from it.
Now I realize the original post here wanted a *quick* way to to do, so taking his home cassettes to NASA isn't quite what he wants. But what I'd like to know is... Is there stuff out there that can do what I've described (play a video multiple times and take the best parts from each), or is this just some insane, impossible idea I dreamed up?
Most of the Internet is 'private.' That is, most of the networks my data travels through are owned by companies, not the government. In connecting to Slashdot, my data goes through Adelphia, MetroFiber Networks, AboveNet, and then to C&W (where Slashdot is housed).
To better illustrate... Take the cliche of "the information superhighway." Except it's not a state-, or even federal-, owned highway. It's a bunch of companies that built big roads on their private property. The companies owning the roads sometimes 'peer' with other companies' roads, allowing people to seamlessly move from one road to another. You can also buy a 'driveway,' or even a private street, from a company. (Representing your Internet connection.) The government doesn't own any of the roads.
Now the government wants to put tollbooths on the roads, and collect a toll from anyone driving on the roads. I really can't see how this idea can possibly be legal.
In addition, I've always felt that it's difficult to define the Internet. It's not too hard to say that when I'm posting to Slashdot, I'm using the Internet. But suppose I use an internal mail server to send mail to someone else using the same mailserver. It never leaves the internal LAN. Am I using the Internet?
Now suppose the mailserver is outside my firewall. Am I on the Internet? What if I have my routing messed up and it goes out the T1 and comes back in, going a single hop to my ISP. Am I using the Internet yet?
Suppose, as is actually the case, my mail server is several states away. If I send mail to someone else on it, am I subject to the tax? But it's a shared server; if I send mail to someone else who hosts there, but isn't related to my site, do I get taxed?
Suppose I VPN into the server. Although some of the data goes over the Internet, my e-mail program 'thinks' it's on the local LAN. Am I taxed?
And what if I own a small ISP with multiple data centers. If I send mail from my house to my local data center, which is sent over a WAN to another data center I / my company owns in another state, is it the Internet?
My goal isn't to name every possible way of getting mail from one place to another. Rather, I'm trying to illustrate the ambiguity of exactly when something's on the Internet versus a private network, when most of the Internet _is_ a private network. But even if exact conditions could be drawn, I still this is _horribly_ flawed because it's a private network. (ie, my "road" analogy)
In addition to the conceptual problems, it has a few serious flaws in practice as well. First, how will they know? Will every mailserver in the country start sending reports to the IRS on who is sending mail?
A second flaw is that e-mail isn't always e-mail, if that makes any sense. If I send mail from Hotmail, and you receive it at Yahoo, neither of us have directly used anything but HTTP. It's not my 'fault' that it got sent over SMTP.
And thirdly, I get a lot of mail that wouldn't be sent if it wasn't free. I'm on nearly a dozen mailing lists; is the mailserver going to be billed for every copy it sends out? Poor bugtraq! I also get mail anytime one of my comments here is replied to, or moderated. Countless other forums I visit do the same. I'm sure that none of these places would continue mailing helpful things like this if they had to pay.
Oh, and there's another little issue... It probably won't be too effective against the spammers. Since many of them already bounce mail through open relays, forging headers, they're probably not going to pay a cent. Sure, after getting a massive 'bill' for the mail the 'victim' might prohibit relaying on their server, but it's definitely not going to end open relays entirely. All it's going to do is destroy the Internet as we know it.
(BTW, after writing all this... Does anyone know if this idea is actually serious? I can't tell you how many e-mails I've received about how Congress is thinking of an e-mail tax to help the Post Office recoup lost money... Is it actually real now?)
Heh, you've got my dream job -- being able to 'attack' other lines (that you own) with a Gigabit of traffic. (lol, how many other people would have said the same, but referred to where you work instead?) As far as the route change... I'd think *anyone* with over 100 Mbps of bandwidth would have enough of a clue to run BGP4, giving them multi-homing. BGP4 (for those not familiar) is a dynamic routing thingy (to use formal terms), that essentially finds the best route at the time. If you have three different pipes coming into your building, and one goes down, it'll start routing just over the other two. Well-configured ones, IIRC, can also try to 'prioritize' traffic overe certain pipes that have lower latency -- if one connection is getting really slow for some reason, it can try to offload it. (It's been a while since I've done / read anything with BGP, so I could be wrong...) As for potentially affecting others, I'm willing to bet a big company like SCO has their own datacenter. (I still wouldn't condone attacking them, though.) As for the attack being from IBM or Microsoft, I think it's far more likely that it's DDoS. If their admins were awake at the time, they could quickly see the flood of data coming from a single IP (or netblock) and drop it at the router. Their bandwidth coming in might still be somewhat congested, but it'd never actually get in.
As much as I dislike SCO, I have to wonder if this was actually a *bad* move. Couldn't SCO try to work this into its case as some sort of 'FUD' to try to make it look like IBM was somehow responsible, or that Linux users -- who already "stole" their code -- are now attacking them?
I hate SCO. But I'd hate even more if SCO could somehow spin this to help their case.
Getting pretty offtopic, but how do you like MIT? Not sure I'll get accepted, but it's one of the colleges I'm thinking of applying to. It obviously has a good academic ranking, but how do you like it? Even things like lack of bandwidth are good to know. :)
When do I get my own class A subnet?
:) "Back in the day," no one imagined the Internet would be what it is today, and they gave out huge chunks of IP space without thinking twice.
When you're one of the first people on the web.
BTW, I wrote a script to do whois lookups on all the Class A's (although I don't know where the output went... I though I saved it somewhere). There have to be at least 25 Class A's that the US Government owns.
This doesn't pertain to whether you should use DSL or Ethernet, but rather is a few things I've always thought ISPs should do. (I've had this almost life-long goal of starting an ISP for some reason...)
I own a domain, and use it primarily for the unlimited mail aliases. Every site I go to gets sitename@mydomain.com, which just forwards to my main address. If they start spamming, I can tell exactly who it is, and redirect (or block entirely) the mail. Why not give each customer a subdomain (customer.condo.com) where they get, say, 5 POP boxes, but unlimited aliases? Used effectively, this could *really* fight spam. (This is venturing more offtopic, but Cpanel seems to be the most popular web-based control panel; you could provide customers with some webspace and e-mail access. It's easy to use, but even great for geeks. You can get licenses for like $40/month, or possibly less.)
Another thing I've always thought ISPs should offer was NAT access. Rather than getting an external IP, they'd get an internal one and use your proxy. It'd save you from needing as many IPs, and it gives them great security -- unless you go out of your way to set it up, no one can connect to them. Of course you shouldn't force this upon people, but some people might *want* NAT. Offer it as a 'privacy' plan. (Heh, you could probably even charge extra, lol)
Something like Squid could really speed things up, especially if you only have a T1.
The last "If I ran an ISP..." item regards DNS. Maybe it's because Adelphia is so crappy (they have like 5 DNS servers, and whatever you have as primary ALWAYS goes down, so you're re-ordering the nameservers several times a week to make it work at all...), but I ended up using OpenNIC, which essentially is a 'democratic' TLD assigner; they have a lot of new TLDs not supported by 'real' DNS. (And, of course, lookups for regular TLDs work, too.) Not sure if you want to make it standard, but I'd be way impressed if an ISP gave me the choice of 'regular' DNS or OpenNIC DNS servers to use.
Oh! Don't forget to do your part and setup a good firewall. Another seemingly uncommon thing I've always thought ISPs should do was to do *good* egress filtering: filter traffic *leaving* your network too. I start to rant about this idea every time I read about a big DoS attack; if ISPs were more careful about what leaves their network, a lot of DoS attacks would simply get dropped at the attacker's ISP.
Microsoft Corporation today announced the beginning of a new program, aimed at preserving OpenSource software. "It's crucial to the continued existence of a secure Internet that we have OpenSource software like Linux out there, or there would be no Internet," Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer told reporters.
At the same time, a spokesman for a coalition between the RIAA and MPAA unveiled proposed legislation giving stricter penalties for bribing politicians, and, at the same time, promoting independent music. "Without valuable resources like Gnutella and Kazaa, independent artists would have no chance share their music. We want to make sure that doesn't happen," the unnamed spokesman claimed.
This doesn't appear to be the case, but this is a scary scenario I've often thought could happen.
Suppose, just suppose, that AOL charged a premium to receive mail from non-AOL members. International e-mail would cost even more. Similarly, "premium" websites (any popular places, cnn.com, wsj.com, etc.) cost a few extra dollars a month.
Again, I'm not suggesting that AOL is doing this, I'm merely using this to illustrate a fear that I've long had -- having various charges for each website you visit. It'd destroy the Internet as we know it, but ISPs could make a killing that way.
I've been noticing some hits from my website mentioning something called "grub," but never knew what it was.
For the webmasters out there, this is what the UserAgent string shows up as on my site:
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; grub-client-1.2.1; Crawl your own stuff with http://grub.org)
(There are variations on the grub-client-1.2.1 version number, so if you for some reason decide to search, you may want to do grub-client-*.
Heh, I figured if I didn't throw that in, someone would post something rambling about how it lulls me into a false sense of security, since I could get viruses, or some "l33t h4x0r" could compromise one of the services I'm running and then get at my other boxes.
I agree -- it's as secure as a box on the Internet can be. I just wanted to make sure people didn't think that I was content to setup a NAT and never think about security again; it's still theoretically possible for someone to get in if they can compromise another box on the network and get through that way.
Precisely. Although NATs *are* a bad solution to the shortage of IPs, they can actually be pretty handy. My desktop has port-forwarding for the ports I want to get at from the public, but anything else won't get through. Not total security, of course, but it makes things *way* safer.
"Back in the day" when I wanted to get a 100 Mbps Cogent line and start a wireless ISP (heh, who am I kidding... I still want to), I thought it would be a novel idea to offer a "NAT" plan -- you get a non-routable IP (such as 192.168.1.1). Some might view it as a disadvantage (of course I'd have plans with a "real" IP for those people), but I think a lot of people would appreciate the fact that it makes them far less vulnerable to worms and other attacks.
Not saying NAT's great for everyone (I myself wouldn't mind a few more IPs...), but there are definitely cases where I would use NAT even if I had a bunch of extra IPs not being used.
How do you think Coke gets its brown color? ;)
(lol, I'm kidding... I hope.)
I believe there's an HTTP "do not cache" header. (PHP, etc., IIRC, set this, as caching, say, someone's shopping cart would be a Bad Thing (tm).)
Therefore, the whole "What if they don't want to be cached" thing is moot. Slashdot could easily write a little script that looks to see if that header is set, and if not, makes a mirror.
The problem is that you *can* make a case for mirroring being illegal: you're taking potentially copyrighted material and sharing it. Granted, in most cases the intent is to help the copyright owners, and you make no claim it's yours, but it's not *too* farfetched to say that they might have a valid lawsuit.
A while ago someone here suggested the concept of setting up a proxy server -- Slashdot could run a proxy server caching recently posted sites. The problem would be if people kept Slashdot as a 'permanent' cache, causing them to use a *TON* of bandwidth completely unnecessarily.
It's an interesting issue, though. The Slashdot editors are fully aware that they can cause insane bandwidth usage for a *lot* of the sites they link to, often either killing servers, or causing enormous bandwidth charges. In a sense, they could almost be sued for 'knowingly' causing it.
On the other hand, the Internet would fall apart with a "It's illegal to link to another site without permission" precedent. It goes completely against the entire purpose of the Internet.
The entire issue could be avoided (at least temporarily) if the Slashdot editors would act a little more responsibly. All it would take is a simple e-mail, offering them three choices:
- Post the story without the link
- Post the story with a link to a mirror on Slashdot
- Post the story with the link
If they don't reply within a reasonable amount of time, I don't think it's entirely unethical to post a link to the site, but they really ought to ask first. Not only is it polite, but it could cover them legally, and help to defer a possible "Linking to sites is illegal" verdict.
That's your opinion, and I'm certainly not saying it's wrong. However, I wanted to share my personal belief...
I'm a Catholic, and I'm against artificially ending life (abortion, death penalty...), as well as artificially creating it. However, I don't think artificially extending life is wrong, nor at all "playing God," or even going against what God wanted.
I'm having a hard time articulating why I believe this, but... I have a hard time believe it's God's will that someone develop cancer and die. Rather, I'm more inclined to believe that the scientists trying to give people longer, healthier, happier lives are closer to the will of God.
To use a rather ridiculous comparison, if you witness a car accident, you don't tell those injured that it's the will of God that they be injured, but rather, you call 911. Again, this is just my personal belief, and I'm not asking you to change yours because I disagree, but I think preserving life is the will of God.
I don't think they're seeking to replace God, but rather, to try to imitate him, something we're called to do. Jesus healed many during his life on Earth; surely, he would have done the same for those with cancer. We're not seeking to be God, but rather, to try to live a more Jesus-like life, something we're all supposed to do.
The article doesn't mention what alterations were made. As someone with an avid interest in photography, I'm wondering if they went overboard in firing him or not.
Particularly with digital photography, it's common to alter photos. Not to, say, put a tank in a picture when one wasn't there, but to apply an unsharp mask to correct the blur, and tweak the contrast a little.
Plus, with 'challenging' photos in terms of lighting, it's common to take pictures exposed for different things: In one photo, the sunset is designed to look perfect, and in the next one, you instead meter for the ground, and then merge them afterward -- not always to 'change' things, but rather to make them closer to the way they were in real life, but that the camera's dynamic range couldn't accurately capture.
Granted, the mention of some people being in the photo twice makes it seem as if the alterations might have been more than simply adjusting the color tone or whatnot, but I think they should mention just what was changed. (Does anyone have a link to the actual pictures?)
When prime numbers were first discovered, don't you think everyone initially thought "Great... Who cares about these numbers that have no other factors?" In fact, if I was around when they were first discovered, I bet I would have thought it was a completely meaningless discovery. Who would have thought that later on, prime numbers would become a vital part of encryption? Anyway, my point is that although right now this seems to be of little practical value, who knows what future 'breakthroughs' will be based upon it? Perhaps someone will be inspired by this and come up with a revolutionary way allowing RSA to be cracked in microseconds? And even if no practical use is discovered any time soon, it's still one more thing better understood.
Brokedown Palace is an awesome movie. Without revealing much, two girls go to Thailand for their high school graduation, only to be arrested for smuggling drugs. I really don't want to say much, as it's much better if you don't know anything ahead of time. I guess I'd classify it as "Drama," but it's extremely good. By the way... It's made by one of the major entertainment companies (I can't remember which, and I'm not sure where it is right now...); it's not some obscure movie. But every single person I've mentioned it to has never heard of it. Strange...
Perhaps we don't have it as bad as other people, and I'm thankful that we can discuss variations in textbooks instead of our tyrant dictator's plans to test nuclear weapons on us. (The latter being a combination of world events and not really referring to anyone in particular.)
But this is a pet peeve of mine: Just because someone has it much worse than you doesn't mean you have no right to complain. He's not saying we're the worst in the world, or coming anywhere near implying that he'd rather live under Taliban rule. If an innocent man gets ten years in jail, do you tell him to shut up and quit appealing, because some people have been put to death for crimes they didn't commit? No, even if you're better off then others, I think it's your perogative to try to work for better conditions.
Yes, we have it much better than many other nations. And yes, I'm thankful for that. But no, I don't expect anyone to sit back and watch the erosion of our rights.