I know there are a lot of naysayers who say that this action is rather Draconian, but I am inclined to disagree. It would be one thing if an ISP did this, but this is UF's private network we're talking about here. They should be permitted to operate it however they please.
I am sure that being a university, that high speed access to the 'Net was meant to be used as an academic tool, not for hosting warez and game servers. Universities also have big problems with security. The network admins have virtually no control over the systems that get put in the dorms, and all it takes is one Joe to download an email and infect the whole network with the latest baddie of the week.
Let me put it this way, if YOU were in charge of UF's network, would you be down with the kiddies sucking up 90% of your netfeed downloading warez, setting up servers, and exposing you to legal liability? I sure wouldn't, and Icarus sounds like a great tool to automatically track down open these people, whether their ports were opened intentionally or not.
You're answering your own questions. But...I had no questions, just offering two points of view on some items:)
1. Advanced electronics
Well, it's not that advanced. They can certainly fit in a can. A Pentium4 could.
Well, by "advanced" I meant it's not a tiny antenna that just listens to a signal from a satellite and is magically handed its location. A GPS receiver must determine its own location by essentially measuring how long it takes radio waves to get from the satellite to it and triangulating its position based on the data. That sounds pretty advanced to me. You are right about the form factor though, I've seen pretty small ones. Still, it would have to be coupled with some kind of radio transmitter to report its location to a ground based station. I think by the time all is said and done there would be nothing in the can to drink.
The GSM network can give you a triangulation of sorts to the nearby base-stations
Good point, but the problem is that it can only do this if the transmitter is operating contantly, and assuming the network provider is willing to triangulate.
What if you're in bed with your girlfriend and/or her husband about to embark on some kinky pepsi sex game?!
Well you won't be answering the door, that's for sure.:)
The scientific accomplishment here is not that 3G waves cause this problem, it's that when people are faced with expanded mental capacity they get headaches, like an overclocked chip getting thermal burnout.
Scientific evidence that people aren't used to thinking!
This is probably something the marketing boys came up with and released before they figured out it was not feasible. Here's why:
1. The GPS satellites don't tell you where you are. A GPS receiver figures out where it is by triangulating its position by measuring how far it is away from each satellite. This takes some pretty advanced electronics which would barely fit in a soda can.
2. GPS does not track. Nothing is beamed back to the satellites, and even if it were, it would not reach them without a lot of power and a high gain antenna. The most common ways to get realtime tracking information on a GPS receiver is to couple it with ground-based radio or cell network. This would have to go in the soda can along with the rest...
3. GPS (generally) only works outside. The signals that GPS uses are very high frequency, weak, and thus very prone to attenuation due to obstacles. They COULD use the can itself as an antenna, but even that probably wouldn't give you enough gain to get the signal indoors.
4. Power source. None of this stuff works without power. How are they going to propose to keep this thing powered while they have this thing stored in the back of a warehouse for god knows how long before it gets put on a shelf and bought? Even if you didn't have it activate until you, say, opened it, there's still a pretty good chance you will not be in a location where GPS signals can be acquired.
Pepsi, please stick with the damned instant win cards. Oh, and you are planning on going though with this, it may not be a good idea to fill the can.:)
Same thing happened to my network a couple of weeks ago. Firewall was blocking all the nasties but someone with an infected laptop plugged in...There were quite a few unpatched systems, but Norton stopped them from getting infected, so luckily there was practially no harm done, unless you count the calls from users saying Norton is giving them a warning that a virus has walked into their system.
I visited Singapore a couple of months ago and they already have a system like this in place. At the MRT station, you give them $10, and they hand you a card with $5 on it. The other $5 is a deposit that you get back when you turn the card in (I hope I remembered that right. Feel free to correct me if you know otherwise) They do not require any personal information, which seems to differ from the UK version. Other than that, the function appears to be identical.
Singapore's MRT system is highly efficient and is all run on these cards. We did not need a taxi or a car to see most of the country, and getting around was a snap even though we were tourists and it was our first time in Singapore (I guess it helps that English is a primary language there:)). Obviously, the system works great without the need to tie personal information to the card.
Draw your own conclusions as to why the UK goverment feels the need to assign names to the cards.
Well the problem may not be that there is no firewall. I've got a firewall in my network but Welchia managed to sneak in on a user's laptop when he hooked it up to the local network. Fortunately, my second line of defense is Norton Coporate edition...And believe me all the systems lit up like Christmas trees. UNfortunately, a couple systems in my network had buggy installs of Norton and they weren't taking auto updates correctly. There were only two, and I quickly isolated and disinfected them.
This underscored the importance of patching systems even though they may be behind a firewall, which I regrettably had been pretty lax in doing. You don't know when one of these things will piggyback on a mobile system. I'm just glad it was a relatively benign virus like Welchia, in that it doesn't cook your files...In the future I'm betting these kinds of bugs will carry way more payload.
Technically the T1 you are talking about is a voice circuit. I guess it was a mistake for me to reference POTS instead of voice circuits in my original post, but here's my point: At my company we do it both ways. We have a PRI for voice and a separate Internet feed from Qwest via a T1 point to point link though Verizon. I have some telecommuters on DSL endpoints with Nortel VoIP phones hooked into our network though IPSec tunnels. If those telecommuters are getting crappy voice service, who are they going to call? Me. If I call Verizon and tell them, "hey, my VoIP phones are cutting out, what's the deal?", they will first laugh at me, and then proceed to tell me that the T1 line to Qwest is in perfect condition and it's not their problem.
If there's a problem with the PRI on the other hand, it's all about them getting it fixed. Now. Whether the problem is with the PRI itself or with the voice circuits. And they have to jump though hoops until the problem is fixed.
So you see, my point is that VoIP takes a load of responsibility off the telecom's shoulders. All they have to worry about is the phyical connection. Everything else? Your problem.
I've always been fascinated by the VoIP vs. POTS argument. I doubt the telecoms will lose money in the switch...After all, who owns all of the underground cable? If everything switches to VoIP, the only difference is that more data capacity will be needed as opposed to voice capacity. Not only that, VoIP is the Wild West compared to POTS, which is regulated to hell and back. In a VoIP house, the telecoms kick back, take their money, and only worry about the customers having a solid data connection from the main office to whatever endpoint the connection is going to. After that, quality of service issues are strictly in the hands of the customer.
This makes it even easier for the telecoms to tell you "it's not our problem". If I were them, I'd be pretty happy about the popularization of VoIP.
I have submitted a few articles to a handful of Usenet groups....
Now just wait...Your job is done. But I get the impression you are not getting results fast enough. No problem! Just post an item on eBay with your real email address. If you don't like eBay, just go with any company that says in their privacy policy "We will never never never never never ever sell your email address"...They are just waiting to rope the suckers.
But if you really think you have a badass mail server, sign up with Earthlink. Don't say I didn't warn you though.
The first thing I do when I install a Linux distro is wipe out sendmail. Running it is simply asking to be broken into. It is old, full of holes, and far past its prime. Why people still run it, I do not know...but it's probably for the same reason they still run BIND.
The alternatives I prefer to these veritable blocks of swiss cheese are qmail and djbdns (tinydns)
It's only been a day since Verisign has done this and already I'm seeing implications from it...One of the things being email sent to an incorrect address. For instance, I tried sending mail to an obviously fake domain and have yet to get a bounceback. It could be assumed that this is because their server has been completely flooded by worldwide domain mispellings and general abuse from pissed off people like me.
This is a major, major problem. This means that MX servers all over the world no longer can tell you if the domain is invalid because they are getting a valid MX record returned. That mail is then sent to Verisign where they do god-knows-what with it. At best we must rely on THEM to tell us the domain does not exist.
This unilateral action by them is insane...I really am speechless.
I'm curious to know what Slashdot readers think: is P2P the start of a major new trend that is just getting started, or is it a passing fad that will fade once legal client/server systems for media distribution finally take hold? If the former, which of the supposed advantages of P2P over client/server systems are really significant?
I believe p2p is the future. Copyright issues aside, I doubt I'm the only one that's noticed that there are some downloads that are getting extremely large. Maybe it's a game demo, a movie trailer, or a software upgrade. How often has it happened that some thing comes out like, say, a Matrix trailer or a new game mod and people swamp the main server and mirrors alike to download it? Why else would recent Slashdot articles on popular downloads be linking.torrent files?
The problem is further escalated by the fact that the ranks of broadband users are growning every day. I hear that Verizon is wanting to dump somewhere around 11 billion dollars into their network to ensure that all of their customers are able to get DSL, and they have lowered their prices across the board...You can now get 1.5 down/128 up for a flat $30/mo, similar to what SBC's been offering. With all this broadband around, popular web sites will not be able to keep up, expecially if they have downloadable goodies. The answer is distributed computing. p2p represents the infancy of the inevitibility of distributed storage, processing, and bandwidth.
Well you have to remember that production CD's and CDR's are created by two different processes. CD's you buy in the store are created with a physical process...They are literally stamped. Here is a link from a CD manufacturer that explains the process.
CD-R's on the other hand are written using a chemical process, where a photoreactive dye changes properties when it gets hit by a recording laser. Things like humidity, heat, and time can degrade this dye. Production CD's do not have this problem. If they are exposed to direct sunlight for a decent amount of time, it won't erase the data like it would with a chemical dye, but other nasty things could happen like the polycarbonate warping and rendering the disc unusable. I would venture to say, however, that production CD's if properly taken care of can indeed last for decades, if not centuries. At issue is if the polycarbonate layer breaks down and becomes cloudy or brittle over time.
Dear Filesharer, We know we can't possibly track all you bastards down in order to put you (or your parents) into financial ruin just like you have done to our starving "artists". So instead, just give us your photo, name, and address and admit you are pirating music and we promise nothing will happen. Really.
Whether a game is no fun or not depends entirely on who you are. They want games to appeal to a mass market? Then they are going to have to dumb them down to the lowest common denomonator. God forbid games become as popular as music and movies...To do so they would have to be just as mundane.
Computer games are about the only form of thinking man's entertainment left, unless one ventures out to the Big Blue Room. I like games that have good stories to them, puzzles, and a touch of wanton destruction...Deus Ex comes to mind. It's one of my favorite games ever. It was also entertaining because various conspiracy theories (Area 51, Illuminati, etc) were tied into it and it got downright philosophical at times. If I picture my mom, dad, or sister playing this game all I hear is a big whooshing sound as it flies over their heads. My dad hates games, my mom likes to play casino games, and the most challenging thing my sister has ever played is Windows Solitaire. So then, if Miss Laura Fryer of Xbox Advanced Technology Group wishes to have her utopia, then perhaps she should command all the Xbox developers to churn out endless versions of Freecell and Minesweeper clones for the hungry masses.
I guess she'd be doing me a favor now that I think about how much money I'd be saving. I'd have to add games to my blacklist along with music, movies, and TV.
Slashdot Mirror
I know there are a lot of naysayers who say that this action is rather Draconian, but I am inclined to disagree. It would be one thing if an ISP did this, but this is UF's private network we're talking about here. They should be permitted to operate it however they please.
I am sure that being a university, that high speed access to the 'Net was meant to be used as an academic tool, not for hosting warez and game servers. Universities also have big problems with security. The network admins have virtually no control over the systems that get put in the dorms, and all it takes is one Joe to download an email and infect the whole network with the latest baddie of the week.
Let me put it this way, if YOU were in charge of UF's network, would you be down with the kiddies sucking up 90% of your netfeed downloading warez, setting up servers, and exposing you to legal liability? I sure wouldn't, and Icarus sounds like a great tool to automatically track down open these people, whether their ports were opened intentionally or not.
ICANN vs. Verisign? With any luck they'll annihilate each other, I hate them both so....
The article summary says they are switching $300M worth of PC's, but actually that's what they plan on saving.
You're answering your own questions. :)
:)
But...I had no questions, just offering two points of view on some items
1. Advanced electronics
Well, it's not that advanced. They can certainly fit in a can. A Pentium4 could.
Well, by "advanced" I meant it's not a tiny antenna that just listens to a signal from a satellite and is magically handed its location. A GPS receiver must determine its own location by essentially measuring how long it takes radio waves to get from the satellite to it and triangulating its position based on the data. That sounds pretty advanced to me. You are right about the form factor though, I've seen pretty small ones. Still, it would have to be coupled with some kind of radio transmitter to report its location to a ground based station. I think by the time all is said and done there would be nothing in the can to drink.
The GSM network can give you a triangulation of sorts to the nearby base-stations
Good point, but the problem is that it can only do this if the transmitter is operating contantly, and assuming the network provider is willing to triangulate.
What if you're in bed with your girlfriend and/or her husband about to embark on some kinky pepsi sex game?!
Well you won't be answering the door, that's for sure.
3G Waves Causes Headaches, Sharpens Memory
The scientific accomplishment here is not that 3G waves cause this problem, it's that when people are faced with expanded mental capacity they get headaches, like an overclocked chip getting thermal burnout.
Scientific evidence that people aren't used to thinking!
This is probably something the marketing boys came up with and released before they figured out it was not feasible. Here's why:
:)
1. The GPS satellites don't tell you where you are. A GPS receiver figures out where it is by triangulating its position by measuring how far it is away from each satellite. This takes some pretty advanced electronics which would barely fit in a soda can.
2. GPS does not track. Nothing is beamed back to the satellites, and even if it were, it would not reach them without a lot of power and a high gain antenna. The most common ways to get realtime tracking information on a GPS receiver is to couple it with ground-based radio or cell network. This would have to go in the soda can along with the rest...
3. GPS (generally) only works outside. The signals that GPS uses are very high frequency, weak, and thus very prone to attenuation due to obstacles. They COULD use the can itself as an antenna, but even that probably wouldn't give you enough gain to get the signal indoors.
4. Power source. None of this stuff works without power. How are they going to propose to keep this thing powered while they have this thing stored in the back of a warehouse for god knows how long before it gets put on a shelf and bought? Even if you didn't have it activate until you, say, opened it, there's still a pretty good chance you will not be in a location where GPS signals can be acquired.
Pepsi, please stick with the damned instant win cards.
Oh, and you are planning on going though with this, it may not be a good idea to fill the can.
That will get very interesting since there is a goverment mandate to allow land line phone numbers to be switched to a cell phone.
:)
When such a number is changed to a cell phone, does it automatically get added to a do-not-call database too?
It sucks to be a telemarketer these days
Same thing happened to my network a couple of weeks ago. Firewall was blocking all the nasties but someone with an infected laptop plugged in...There were quite a few unpatched systems, but Norton stopped them from getting infected, so luckily there was practially no harm done, unless you count the calls from users saying Norton is giving them a warning that a virus has walked into their system.
I visited Singapore a couple of months ago and they already have a system like this in place. At the MRT station, you give them $10, and they hand you a card with $5 on it. The other $5 is a deposit that you get back when you turn the card in (I hope I remembered that right. Feel free to correct me if you know otherwise) They do not require any personal information, which seems to differ from the UK version. Other than that, the function appears to be identical.
:)). Obviously, the system works great without the need to tie personal information to the card.
Singapore's MRT system is highly efficient and is all run on these cards. We did not need a taxi or a car to see most of the country, and getting around was a snap even though we were tourists and it was our first time in Singapore (I guess it helps that English is a primary language there
Draw your own conclusions as to why the UK goverment feels the need to assign names to the cards.
Well the problem may not be that there is no firewall. I've got a firewall in my network but Welchia managed to sneak in on a user's laptop when he hooked it up to the local network. Fortunately, my second line of defense is Norton Coporate edition...And believe me all the systems lit up like Christmas trees. UNfortunately, a couple systems in my network had buggy installs of Norton and they weren't taking auto updates correctly. There were only two, and I quickly isolated and disinfected them.
This underscored the importance of patching systems even though they may be behind a firewall, which I regrettably had been pretty lax in doing. You don't know when one of these things will piggyback on a mobile system. I'm just glad it was a relatively benign virus like Welchia, in that it doesn't cook your files...In the future I'm betting these kinds of bugs will carry way more payload.
Technically the T1 you are talking about is a voice circuit. I guess it was a mistake for me to reference POTS instead of voice circuits in my original post, but here's my point: At my company we do it both ways. We have a PRI for voice and a separate Internet feed from Qwest via a T1 point to point link though Verizon. I have some telecommuters on DSL endpoints with Nortel VoIP phones hooked into our network though IPSec tunnels. If those telecommuters are getting crappy voice service, who are they going to call? Me. If I call Verizon and tell them, "hey, my VoIP phones are cutting out, what's the deal?", they will first laugh at me, and then proceed to tell me that the T1 line to Qwest is in perfect condition and it's not their problem.
If there's a problem with the PRI on the other hand, it's all about them getting it fixed. Now. Whether the problem is with the PRI itself or with the voice circuits. And they have to jump though hoops until the problem is fixed.
So you see, my point is that VoIP takes a load of responsibility off the telecom's shoulders. All they have to worry about is the phyical connection. Everything else? Your problem.
I've always been fascinated by the VoIP vs. POTS argument. I doubt the telecoms will lose money in the switch...After all, who owns all of the underground cable? If everything switches to VoIP, the only difference is that more data capacity will be needed as opposed to voice capacity. Not only that, VoIP is the Wild West compared to POTS, which is regulated to hell and back. In a VoIP house, the telecoms kick back, take their money, and only worry about the customers having a solid data connection from the main office to whatever endpoint the connection is going to. After that, quality of service issues are strictly in the hands of the customer.
This makes it even easier for the telecoms to tell you "it's not our problem". If I were them, I'd be pretty happy about the popularization of VoIP.
I have submitted a few articles to a handful of Usenet groups....
Now just wait...Your job is done. But I get the impression you are not getting results fast enough. No problem! Just post an item on eBay with your real email address. If you don't like eBay, just go with any company that says in their privacy policy "We will never never never never never ever sell your email address"...They are just waiting to rope the suckers.
But if you really think you have a badass mail server, sign up with Earthlink. Don't say I didn't warn you though.
See everyone? Your cell phone CAN spread viruses!
Is this anything like "Trustworthy Computing"? As with all things, I'll believe it when I see it.
The first thing I do when I install a Linux distro is wipe out sendmail. Running it is simply asking to be broken into. It is old, full of holes, and far past its prime. Why people still run it, I do not know...but it's probably for the same reason they still run BIND.
The alternatives I prefer to these veritable blocks of swiss cheese are qmail and djbdns (tinydns)
It's only been a day since Verisign has done this and already I'm seeing implications from it...One of the things being email sent to an incorrect address. For instance, I tried sending mail to an obviously fake domain and have yet to get a bounceback. It could be assumed that this is because their server has been completely flooded by worldwide domain mispellings and general abuse from pissed off people like me.
This is a major, major problem. This means that MX servers all over the world no longer can tell you if the domain is invalid because they are getting a valid MX record returned. That mail is then sent to Verisign where they do god-knows-what with it. At best we must rely on THEM to tell us the domain does not exist.
This unilateral action by them is insane...I really am speechless.
Sounds like the BIND syndrome, doesn't it?
And to think I was about to apologize for my last typo-ridden post.
I'm curious to know what Slashdot readers think: is P2P the start of a major new trend that is just getting started, or is it a passing fad that will fade once legal client/server systems for media distribution finally take hold? If the former, which of the supposed advantages of P2P over client/server systems are really significant?
.torrent files?
I believe p2p is the future. Copyright issues aside, I doubt I'm the only one that's noticed that there are some downloads that are getting extremely large. Maybe it's a game demo, a movie trailer, or a software upgrade. How often has it happened that some thing comes out like, say, a Matrix trailer or a new game mod and people swamp the main server and mirrors alike to download it? Why else would recent Slashdot articles on popular downloads be linking
The problem is further escalated by the fact that the ranks of broadband users are growning every day. I hear that Verizon is wanting to dump somewhere around 11 billion dollars into their network to ensure that all of their customers are able to get DSL, and they have lowered their prices across the board...You can now get 1.5 down/128 up for a flat $30/mo, similar to what SBC's been offering. With all this broadband around, popular web sites will not be able to keep up, expecially if they have downloadable goodies. The answer is distributed computing. p2p represents the infancy of the inevitibility of distributed storage, processing, and bandwidth.
Well you have to remember that production CD's and CDR's are created by two different processes. CD's you buy in the store are created with a physical process...They are literally stamped. Here is a link from a CD manufacturer that explains the process.
CD-R's on the other hand are written using a chemical process, where a photoreactive dye changes properties when it gets hit by a recording laser. Things like humidity, heat, and time can degrade this dye. Production CD's do not have this problem. If they are exposed to direct sunlight for a decent amount of time, it won't erase the data like it would with a chemical dye, but other nasty things could happen like the polycarbonate warping and rendering the disc unusable. I would venture to say, however, that production CD's if properly taken care of can indeed last for decades, if not centuries. At issue is if the polycarbonate layer breaks down and becomes cloudy or brittle over time.
...We need a category for "No Shit"
Dear Filesharer,
We know we can't possibly track all you bastards down in order to put you (or your parents) into financial ruin just like you have done to our starving "artists". So instead, just give us your photo, name, and address and admit you are pirating music and we promise nothing will happen. Really.
-The RIAA
Whether a game is no fun or not depends entirely on who you are. They want games to appeal to a mass market? Then they are going to have to dumb them down to the lowest common denomonator. God forbid games become as popular as music and movies...To do so they would have to be just as mundane.
Computer games are about the only form of thinking man's entertainment left, unless one ventures out to the Big Blue Room. I like games that have good stories to them, puzzles, and a touch of wanton destruction...Deus Ex comes to mind. It's one of my favorite games ever. It was also entertaining because various conspiracy theories (Area 51, Illuminati, etc) were tied into it and it got downright philosophical at times. If I picture my mom, dad, or sister playing this game all I hear is a big whooshing sound as it flies over their heads. My dad hates games, my mom likes to play casino games, and the most challenging thing my sister has ever played is Windows Solitaire. So then, if Miss Laura Fryer of Xbox Advanced Technology Group wishes to have her utopia, then perhaps she should command all the Xbox developers to churn out endless versions of Freecell and Minesweeper clones for the hungry masses.
I guess she'd be doing me a favor now that I think about how much money I'd be saving. I'd have to add games to my blacklist along with music, movies, and TV.
They also say that 'the state Supreme Court ruled that property and trade secrets rights outranked free speech rights in this case.'"
Jesus, we might as well staple our mouths shut now. Just what can one say or do that CAN'T be construed as some kind of IP violation these days?