I certainly hope that the Lege doesn't make free access provided by NGOs illegal (imagine not being able to run your own AP out of your house!)
Where do you live that this is allowed? In most of the US, the only available ISP has a contract that explicitly forbids such things. Granted, some people violate the rule. But if the ISP discovers you have an open AP, or are supplying service to a neighbor, they can and will terminate your service instantly.
Hereabouts (Boston), many towns have multiple ISPs available. We have speakeasy in our neighborhood, which is the only ISP that actually permits wireless APs. In fact, they not only allow them, but they encourage you to become a distributor. If you sign up some neighbors, they'll do the billing for you. It's somewhat of a multilevel marketing approach.
But the two other ISPs explicitly forbid this. If you let a neighbor share your connection, you are stealing away a customer, and they get real mad when you do this.
We're worried that the other ISPs will find a way to outlaw speakeasy. This could easily happen, as they can't legally run their own cable. They have to connect through the phone company's wires. And, of course, the phone company wants that business (although they're a notoriously crappy ISP).
Actually, "free" is routinely used by marketers of all sorts to mean "You've already paid for it by some other means". The sense of "free" meaning "paid for by taxes" is just a special case of this.
Cynicism is warranted any time someone gives you something "free".
... in five years you will ask the man-in-the-street what Linux is and they will reply, "That's that IBM stuff, right?
Heh. We're getting there fast. I recently came off a several-year project to wean a big corporation (who shall remain nameless here to protect the clueless;-) of their big IBM mainframes and move most of their stuff onto a flock of linux (RedHat) servers scattered around the Net. One problem the sales guys had to deal with was convincing their upper management to sign off on what they hadn't ever heard of and which they considered fly-by-night stuff.
The approach that worked was to show them some of IBM's web sites, and say "See? Linux is an IBM product."
Now, most readers here will probably think this is a joke. While I agree it's tremendously funny; fact is that it worked. They didn't see through the rather ambiguous wording at all. To their fuzzy minds, linux is indeed an IBM product, since IBM sells it.
Actually, the techies at the big corp also thought this was really funny. Most of them have either linux or OSX (or both) on their personal machines. And when I set up demos of our stuff via web sites, they knew exactly what to do with them. In fact, they mostly lost interest in the GUI stuff we were developing, and only wanted to talk about the Web interface, which became a significant part of my job.
But there is a widespread attitude among management that "computer" and "IBM machine" are synonyms. If it doesn't come from IBM, it's not a computer. And Microsoft is a division of IBM, of course.
We've had this attitude in the business community for over 40 years now, and we're probably not going to change it. The best approach probably is to get the message out that "Linux is an IBM product". This is all that most managers will want to see, and they don't want to hear any discussion of the details. Details are for underlings.
We'll know we've won when we start hearing the media talk about linux as an "IBM product". Most of the media consists of people who also think that IBM is the only real computer company, Microsoft makes IBM software, and all those other companies are insignificant.
We can probably also add to the confusion by pointing out that IBM has always supported free software. They sell computers; those computers come with all that software at no extra charge; this has been true since the 1950's. That'll be convincing. Details like "free as in beer" and "free as in speech" is way over their pretty talking heads (though some of them will understand "free as in disk space";-).
Outside the geek community, fuzzy thinking and fuzzy speech is the norm.
Another suggestion for IBM: I just went to ibm.com, clicked on the "Shop for... Notebooks" link, and looked around a bit. I was unable to find any notebook that included linux as an alternative OS. If it's there, it's very well hidden.
There was also no hint of AIX or any other unix-like system. The only OS choices were Microsoft® Windows® XP Home Edition and Microsoft® Windows® XP Professional.
This doesn't exactly give me a good feeling that they want to sell to us linux geeks.
OTOH, you can go to EmperorLinux, where you'll see a flock of IBM laptops for sale with linux installed, or dual-boot Windows/linux if you like.
So maybe IBM is just trying to support the independents like EmperorLinux? Think so?
Except that you really do not tend to surf the net from a production server or run email attachments.
Huh? I do this all the time.;-)
No, really. I routinely work on machines that are running various software whose best documentation (especially for problems and patches) is online. If I have a problem, I often fire up a browser, ask google for info on the problem, and look at the results. It's slowly becoming a very practical way to find documentation. I find myself using "man -k..." less and less as a result, since google is becoming better than any of the documentation packages.
As for it being a "production" server, well, that's where the problems turn up, and it's exactly where you want to be doing your work. Yeah, there are separate development machines, which are good for the early stages. But for getting something really working right, you have to watch it working in the real world. And you want to make sure you have all the diagnostic tools in place when Something Goes Wrong, which can only be done by working with them directly on a live system.
OTOH, I almost never bother with email attachment, because I'm usually using a plain-text CLI email reader that doesn't do attachments.
Granted, I'm not your typical point-and-drool user...
Their criteria included the number of reported vulnerabilities and their severity, as well as the number of patches issued and days of risk -- the period from when a vulnerability is first reported to when a patch is issued.
Actually, this tells us most of what we need to know. If we want our system to be considered secure, the way to do it is: 1) Don't report vulnerabilities; 2) Don't issue security patches.
Linux pretty much has to lose a contest that is judged this way.
When was the last time you read about a Unix/Linux worm or virus on a nontechnical site like CNN?
Never, of course. But then, I've noticed that you never hear about Windows malware on them, either.
That is, news stories in the commercial media almost never mention the infected system by name. They just say that "computers" are being infected. If you only get yourr computer news from the Media, you'd never get the idea that different computers exist and that a worm or virus might attack only one of them.
When I hear such stories, I usually check with computer-industry news sources. Invariably, it's a new Windows virus or worm that's being reported. But, of course, this could be because the Media never reports any computer stories unless they involve Microsoft or IBM. Not quite true, of course; last week we heard about HP firing Carly Fiorina. But it's pretty close to true. If you hear a news story that just talks about "computers", you should probably assume that they're talking about Microsoft or IBM.
We'll know that linux has reached the big time when the commercial media starts reporting embarrassing linux-related stories. We'll know that linux has won when the media reports positive linux-related stories.
(Actually, there has been a visible increase in mentions of Apple in the media in the past year or two. This probably signifies something.;-)
Funny thing that seems to be missing in the discussion so far: I don't see anyone pointing out that this is a "sample of one" study. So any generalization at all about which system (or admin;-) is more secure is laughable at best.
It is useful as an anecdotal example. Especially in the area of security, where real security tends to mean knowing a lot of very specific examples of how things can go wrong. Documenting how these guys could have inadvertently left holes open would be useful. Then we need several hundred more such paired tests, with a more extensive report listing all the ways that admins of both systems can get it wrong.
But concluding that, because two guys didn't get it right in a single test, therefore one of the systems is more or less secure than the other, shows little other than a total lack of understanding what security is all about.
That, or intentional FUD on the part of either or both.
I'd go with the lack of understanding. People are really good at generalizing from a single case with no statistical significance.
Why would it take a patch to make a server run in a chroot jail? This can be done with any program. It requires no cooperation from the program itself.
Of course, running anything chrooted usually requires making a list of subprocesses that the program calls, and linking them into the program's directory tree. You'd want to do this in this case, because web servers typically do invoke some subprocesses. Not always, of course; some web sites are completely static. In any case, this doesn't require any sort of patch; just a list of what files are needed in the chroot area.
So what's in the OpenBSD chroot patch? What sort of vulnerability existed without it?
Einstein didn't even get a prize for relativity, it was something slightly more obscure IIRC.
True; it was for his early work in that obscure field called "quantum mechanics".;-)
Basically, he got the Nobel Prize for showing that light is quantized. His primary paper dealt with the properties of the "photoelectric effect", in which photons are absorbed and electrons are ejected. He showed that the energy of the photons and electrons isn't continuously distributed, but has only a small set of discrete values.
A lot has been written about the ironies in this particular Nobel Prize.
You should replace your crappy MS Turing Machine (TM) to the new Apple iTurMach.
Or, if you don't want to spend that much, Microsoft has announced the upgrade to the new Infinite Tape module in 2007. Sure, there are some critics who predict that it will have more production delays and won't be delivered until 2012, but they're just a bunch of Open Source communists who should be ignored.
Bill Gates is also lobbying several standards committees to officially define "infinite" as 2^64 bits. After all, nobody could ever need more tape than that.
[TBD: Work up joke about how Gates threatens standards bodies if his definition isn't adopted.]
Heh. I do recall some time back reading of a Turing-machine emulator that was programmed to do a number of simple tasks, and one was responding to a few simple IP packets. It did have a problem that the speed was far too slow to be usable in a real network. It was really just a "proof of concept". But why else would you build a Turing machine?
It was also limited by the failure to implement an infinite tape.;-)
I don't remember where I read this; it's been a while. I know that a number of different people have written Turing-machine emulators. Right now, google gets over 14,000 matches for "Turing-machine emulator", so there's lots out there to read. A quick check found several that include programs to do various odd tasks, none very useful. This is irrelevant, of course, since the Turing machine exists primarily for its mathematical properties, not for any practical purpose.
Actually, there's a better term for Gates' threat, and it's a term that's very popular in the US these days. Think about it. He's threatening to take damaging action against Danish citizens in order to put pressure on the Danish government to do something that he wants.
Attacking a country's citizens to put pressure on the government is pretty much the dictionary definition of "terrorism".
He hasn't actually carried it out, so it's only threatened terrorism. But still, it could be fun if European politicians were to publicly point this out. That could make for an entertaining escalation of the rhetoric.
In any case, I'd wonder about the claims that this is legal. Firing someone because of something their government did would likely to be actionable in a lot of jurisdictions. Collecting on the fines could be a bit tricky, though.
You can send soldiers prepaid cards, but they MUST be AT&T. I wonder how much AT&T is making off that contract?
So why not use VoIP via milnet? This should take care of both the cost and security issues. Hasn't anyone in the DoD thought of this? I mean, who was it that paid for all the design and development of the Internet? Shouldn't they know how to use it?
Granted, they'd probably need a few gateways to the phone system back in the States. Big deal; install Asterisk on a few machines here and there. Or subcontract it to any of the VoIP suppliers.
Why is this even a question? Doesn't milnet have the connectivity and capacity? I'd really have a problem believing that.
Could AT&T be so good at bribery that they can block VoIP over milnet and force military calls to go over AT&T lines? Is the DoD really that corrupt?
I swear, sometimes geeks really do think in code, and can't handle natural ambiguity or fuzzy distinctions.
OF course we do. It comes with the job description. When dealing with gadgetry, especially computers, you learn very early on that ambiguity or fuzziness is an inevitable precursor to disaster. You learn to pay close attention to details that others would consider trivial. A missing (or extra) comma or semicolon can utterly change the meaning of a chunk of code. "Off by one" is a euphemism for "totally, disastrously wrong".
You'd expect such people to carry this to other aspects of life.
Of course, in fora like this, it's also a source of subtle "in" humor. In this case, the humor was hinted by the "Ob" in the title, which long-time/. participants will understand instantly.
One of the interesting facets to this pickiness is the notoriously bad speling and grammer you read here. That might be worth a sociology thesis by itself. I don't think I understand it fully.
... trust me, everyone here understands hyperbole. They just don't understand using the wrong damn word. It'd be like talking about Gates 'kidnapping' the jobs or 'robbing' the government.
Yeah, and I've heard phrases much like that. I'd just call them metaphors.
And, while blackmail is a form of extortion, it really doesn't apply here, not even metaphorically. After all, the salient part of blackmail is that I don't threaten you to direct harm; I just threaten to reveal something about you to others. Gates isn't threatening to reveal some evil deed that Danes have done. He's threatening to take direct action against Danish citizens in retaliation for their not obeying his wishes. This isn't blackmail by any stretch or hyperbole or metaphorical use. It's a different sort of extortion.
Gates would be found innocent of blackmail, because that's a different crime. It probably doesn't matter to the media, who are usually sloppy with terminology. But if you want to convict someone of a crime, you have to charge them with the crime that they actually committed, not some other crime.
Any criminal lawyers here want to expound on the definitions?
I've never looked into how VoIP is deployed, but suffice it to say that if it listens on a port for incoming connections, then it is a service.
That's exactly what it has to do, if you are to receive incoming calls. In the IP sense, a traditional telephone is a "server", because it is always listening on the line for the voltage wiggle that signals an incoming call. An IP phone has to listen for incoming connections; this is done by calling the listen() library routine. The term for such a program is "server". If an ISP doesn't allow servers, they are intentionally blocking things like IP phones.
The common ISP "no servers" rule is equivalent to having a telephone line that only allows outgoing calls. That isn't very useful, of course, though phone companies can sell you that sort of service if you want it. They can also sell you a "server only" service that only allows incoming calls. This is actually a bit more common, though still fairly rare. You don't see many phones set up these ways, because people normally understand how useless such a phone would be to them.
The main reason that ISPs have gotten away from this is that the Internet reached popularity with the idea of "web browsing". This led to people accepting the idea that a web site was something that someone else did, and you just looked at them. But the real value of the Internet is two-way communication, just as with the telephone. You shouldn't have to relay email through a third-party site, any more than you should have to use voice mail to send someone a telephone message. You should be able to make some of your own files available on the Web, by running a web server on your machine. Not allowing such things is as limiting as an outgoing-calls-only phone line would be. You have a pale shadow of an Internet connection, and are missing some of the Internet's most important capabilities.
It'll probably all sort itself out in a few more decades, and we'll be able to use the Internet as it was designed. But we're seeing one of the battles here. The big companies want their control back. They don't like these little upstarts providing a comm service. If they can get away with it, they will block traffic to and from their competitors, so you'll have to pay them extra for a service that your own computer could do on its own.
I am allowed to use all my ports with no transfer cap.... Do providers just do some "pin the tail on the donkey" game with a map of the USA when it comes to transfer caps and port blocks?
Yes, that's a good description of what they do. Hereabouts (Boston), the local linux/unix users group has had a discussion lately about Comcast blocking ports 80 and 25. Some people reported no blocking, others reported both ports blocked, others reported only one blocked. The story seems to be that they're slowly blocking these ports, one neighborhood at a time. If you don't like it, you can upgrade to business service.
Last year, we had RCN in our neighborhood. They started blocking port 80, then started blocking port 25. We switched to speakeasy in November, because they promise not to block ports (and are linux/unix friendly;-). But they aren't available everywhere.
A common excuse for blocking these ports is that it's an easy way for the ISP to block whatever malware is currently infecting Windows boxes and dragging the network to a standstill. But, of course, once a port gets blocked in your neighborhood, it never gets unblocked.
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I certainly hope that the Lege doesn't make free access provided by NGOs illegal (imagine not being able to run your own AP out of your house!)
Where do you live that this is allowed? In most of the US, the only available ISP has a contract that explicitly forbids such things. Granted, some people violate the rule. But if the ISP discovers you have an open AP, or are supplying service to a neighbor, they can and will terminate your service instantly.
Hereabouts (Boston), many towns have multiple ISPs available. We have speakeasy in our neighborhood, which is the only ISP that actually permits wireless APs. In fact, they not only allow them, but they encourage you to become a distributor. If you sign up some neighbors, they'll do the billing for you. It's somewhat of a multilevel marketing approach.
But the two other ISPs explicitly forbid this. If you let a neighbor share your connection, you are stealing away a customer, and they get real mad when you do this.
We're worried that the other ISPs will find a way to outlaw speakeasy. This could easily happen, as they can't legally run their own cable. They have to connect through the phone company's wires. And, of course, the phone company wants that business (although they're a notoriously crappy ISP).
Actually, "free" is routinely used by marketers of all sorts to mean "You've already paid for it by some other means". The sense of "free" meaning "paid for by taxes" is just a special case of this.
Cynicism is warranted any time someone gives you something "free".
Yeah, but they'd probably pronounce it "" ("yadren").
;-)
(The stress is on the first syllable.
Yeah, but have you noticed how often the replies are funnier than the first message, but they don't get a +5 Funny rating?
... in five years you will ask the man-in-the-street what Linux is and they will reply, "That's that IBM stuff, right?
;-) of their big IBM mainframes and move most of their stuff onto a flock of linux (RedHat) servers scattered around the Net. One problem the sales guys had to deal with was convincing their upper management to sign off on what they hadn't ever heard of and which they considered fly-by-night stuff.
;-).
Heh. We're getting there fast. I recently came off a several-year project to wean a big corporation (who shall remain nameless here to protect the clueless
The approach that worked was to show them some of IBM's web sites, and say "See? Linux is an IBM product."
Now, most readers here will probably think this is a joke. While I agree it's tremendously funny; fact is that it worked. They didn't see through the rather ambiguous wording at all. To their fuzzy minds, linux is indeed an IBM product, since IBM sells it.
Actually, the techies at the big corp also thought this was really funny. Most of them have either linux or OSX (or both) on their personal machines. And when I set up demos of our stuff via web sites, they knew exactly what to do with them. In fact, they mostly lost interest in the GUI stuff we were developing, and only wanted to talk about the Web interface, which became a significant part of my job.
But there is a widespread attitude among management that "computer" and "IBM machine" are synonyms. If it doesn't come from IBM, it's not a computer. And Microsoft is a division of IBM, of course.
We've had this attitude in the business community for over 40 years now, and we're probably not going to change it. The best approach probably is to get the message out that "Linux is an IBM product". This is all that most managers will want to see, and they don't want to hear any discussion of the details. Details are for underlings.
We'll know we've won when we start hearing the media talk about linux as an "IBM product". Most of the media consists of people who also think that IBM is the only real computer company, Microsoft makes IBM software, and all those other companies are insignificant.
We can probably also add to the confusion by pointing out that IBM has always supported free software. They sell computers; those computers come with all that software at no extra charge; this has been true since the 1950's. That'll be convincing. Details like "free as in beer" and "free as in speech" is way over their pretty talking heads (though some of them will understand "free as in disk space"
Outside the geek community, fuzzy thinking and fuzzy speech is the norm.
Another suggestion for IBM: I just went to ibm.com, clicked on the "Shop for ... Notebooks" link, and looked around a bit. I was unable to find any notebook that included linux as an alternative OS. If it's there, it's very well hidden.
There was also no hint of AIX or any other unix-like system. The only OS choices were Microsoft® Windows® XP Home Edition and Microsoft® Windows® XP Professional.
This doesn't exactly give me a good feeling that they want to sell to us linux geeks.
OTOH, you can go to EmperorLinux, where you'll see a flock of IBM laptops for sale with linux installed, or dual-boot Windows/linux if you like.
So maybe IBM is just trying to support the independents like EmperorLinux? Think so?
Except that you really do not tend to surf the net from a production server or run email attachments.
;-)
..." less and less as a result, since google is becoming better than any of the documentation packages.
...
Huh? I do this all the time.
No, really. I routinely work on machines that are running various software whose best documentation (especially for problems and patches) is online. If I have a problem, I often fire up a browser, ask google for info on the problem, and look at the results. It's slowly becoming a very practical way to find documentation. I find myself using "man -k
As for it being a "production" server, well, that's where the problems turn up, and it's exactly where you want to be doing your work. Yeah, there are separate development machines, which are good for the early stages. But for getting something really working right, you have to watch it working in the real world. And you want to make sure you have all the diagnostic tools in place when Something Goes Wrong, which can only be done by working with them directly on a live system.
OTOH, I almost never bother with email attachment, because I'm usually using a plain-text CLI email reader that doesn't do attachments.
Granted, I'm not your typical point-and-drool user
Their criteria included the number of reported vulnerabilities and their severity, as well as the number of patches issued and days of risk -- the period from when a vulnerability is first reported to when a patch is issued.
Actually, this tells us most of what we need to know. If we want our system to be considered secure, the way to do it is: 1) Don't report vulnerabilities; 2) Don't issue security patches.
Linux pretty much has to lose a contest that is judged this way.
When was the last time you read about a Unix/Linux worm or virus on a nontechnical site like CNN?
;-)
Never, of course. But then, I've noticed that you never hear about Windows malware on them, either.
That is, news stories in the commercial media almost never mention the infected system by name. They just say that "computers" are being infected. If you only get yourr computer news from the Media, you'd never get the idea that different computers exist and that a worm or virus might attack only one of them.
When I hear such stories, I usually check with computer-industry news sources. Invariably, it's a new Windows virus or worm that's being reported. But, of course, this could be because the Media never reports any computer stories unless they involve Microsoft or IBM. Not quite true, of course; last week we heard about HP firing Carly Fiorina. But it's pretty close to true. If you hear a news story that just talks about "computers", you should probably assume that they're talking about Microsoft or IBM.
We'll know that linux has reached the big time when the commercial media starts reporting embarrassing linux-related stories. We'll know that linux has won when the media reports positive linux-related stories.
(Actually, there has been a visible increase in mentions of Apple in the media in the past year or two. This probably signifies something.
Funny thing that seems to be missing in the discussion so far: I don't see anyone pointing out that this is a "sample of one" study. So any generalization at all about which system (or admin ;-) is more secure is laughable at best.
It is useful as an anecdotal example. Especially in the area of security, where real security tends to mean knowing a lot of very specific examples of how things can go wrong. Documenting how these guys could have inadvertently left holes open would be useful. Then we need several hundred more such paired tests, with a more extensive report listing all the ways that admins of both systems can get it wrong.
But concluding that, because two guys didn't get it right in a single test, therefore one of the systems is more or less secure than the other, shows little other than a total lack of understanding what security is all about.
That, or intentional FUD on the part of either or both.
I'd go with the lack of understanding. People are really good at generalizing from a single case with no statistical significance.
Why would it take a patch to make a server run in a chroot jail? This can be done with any program. It requires no cooperation from the program itself.
Of course, running anything chrooted usually requires making a list of subprocesses that the program calls, and linking them into the program's directory tree. You'd want to do this in this case, because web servers typically do invoke some subprocesses. Not always, of course; some web sites are completely static. In any case, this doesn't require any sort of patch; just a list of what files are needed in the chroot area.
So what's in the OpenBSD chroot patch? What sort of vulnerability existed without it?
Einstein didn't even get a prize for relativity, it was something slightly more obscure IIRC.
;-)
True; it was for his early work in that obscure field called "quantum mechanics".
Basically, he got the Nobel Prize for showing that light is quantized. His primary paper dealt with the properties of the "photoelectric effect", in which photons are absorbed and electrons are ejected. He showed that the energy of the photons and electrons isn't continuously distributed, but has only a small set of discrete values.
A lot has been written about the ironies in this particular Nobel Prize.
Actually my computer has no infinite tape, AFAIK.
You should replace your crappy MS Turing Machine (TM) to the new Apple iTurMach.
Or, if you don't want to spend that much, Microsoft has announced the upgrade to the new Infinite Tape module in 2007. Sure, there are some critics who predict that it will have more production delays and won't be delivered until 2012, but they're just a bunch of Open Source communists who should be ignored.
Bill Gates is also lobbying several standards committees to officially define "infinite" as 2^64 bits. After all, nobody could ever need more tape than that.
[TBD: Work up joke about how Gates threatens standards bodies if his definition isn't adopted.]
Heh. I do recall some time back reading of a Turing-machine emulator that was programmed to do a number of simple tasks, and one was responding to a few simple IP packets. It did have a problem that the speed was far too slow to be usable in a real network. It was really just a "proof of concept". But why else would you build a Turing machine?
;-)
It was also limited by the failure to implement an infinite tape.
I don't remember where I read this; it's been a while. I know that a number of different people have written Turing-machine emulators. Right now, google gets over 14,000 matches for "Turing-machine emulator", so there's lots out there to read. A quick check found several that include programs to do various odd tasks, none very useful. This is irrelevant, of course, since the Turing machine exists primarily for its mathematical properties, not for any practical purpose.
And for geek jokes.
Does this mean they got TCP/IP running on a Turing Machine?
;-)
Yeah, but it had a 2-day ping time. This was mostly due to tape spinning.
Now that we have terabyte-size disk drives, they've got the ping time down to under an hour.
(Hey, it's better than the ping time to Cassini.
I just got lost in thought. It was unfamiliar territory.
Hey, great sig! I think I'll steal it when you're not looking.
Just PUSH them in until they POP, eh? ;)
...
No, that's what you do with FORTH programmers.
There's gotta be a good (i.e., bad) FORTRAN pun based on "infix"
Actually, there's a better term for Gates' threat, and it's a term that's very popular in the US these days. Think about it. He's threatening to take damaging action against Danish citizens in order to put pressure on the Danish government to do something that he wants.
;-)? Nah ...
Attacking a country's citizens to put pressure on the government is pretty much the dictionary definition of "terrorism".
He hasn't actually carried it out, so it's only threatened terrorism. But still, it could be fun if European politicians were to publicly point this out. That could make for an entertaining escalation of the rhetoric.
In any case, I'd wonder about the claims that this is legal. Firing someone because of something their government did would likely to be actionable in a lot of jurisdictions. Collecting on the fines could be a bit tricky, though.
Lessee; do I need a
Calls home should be free. ...
You can send soldiers prepaid cards, but they MUST be AT&T. I wonder how much AT&T is making off that contract?
So why not use VoIP via milnet? This should take care of both the cost and security issues. Hasn't anyone in the DoD thought of this? I mean, who was it that paid for all the design and development of the Internet? Shouldn't they know how to use it?
Granted, they'd probably need a few gateways to the phone system back in the States. Big deal; install Asterisk on a few machines here and there. Or subcontract it to any of the VoIP suppliers.
Why is this even a question? Doesn't milnet have the connectivity and capacity? I'd really have a problem believing that.
Could AT&T be so good at bribery that they can block VoIP over milnet and force military calls to go over AT&T lines? Is the DoD really that corrupt?
I swear, sometimes geeks really do think in code, and can't handle natural ambiguity or fuzzy distinctions.
/. participants will understand instantly.
OF course we do. It comes with the job description. When dealing with gadgetry, especially computers, you learn very early on that ambiguity or fuzziness is an inevitable precursor to disaster. You learn to pay close attention to details that others would consider trivial. A missing (or extra) comma or semicolon can utterly change the meaning of a chunk of code. "Off by one" is a euphemism for "totally, disastrously wrong".
You'd expect such people to carry this to other aspects of life.
Of course, in fora like this, it's also a source of subtle "in" humor. In this case, the humor was hinted by the "Ob" in the title, which long-time
One of the interesting facets to this pickiness is the notoriously bad speling and grammer you read here. That might be worth a sociology thesis by itself. I don't think I understand it fully.
... trust me, everyone here understands hyperbole. They just don't understand using the wrong damn word. It'd be like talking about Gates 'kidnapping' the jobs or 'robbing' the government.
Yeah, and I've heard phrases much like that. I'd just call them metaphors.
And, while blackmail is a form of extortion, it really doesn't apply here, not even metaphorically. After all, the salient part of blackmail is that I don't threaten you to direct harm; I just threaten to reveal something about you to others. Gates isn't threatening to reveal some evil deed that Danes have done. He's threatening to take direct action against Danish citizens in retaliation for their not obeying his wishes. This isn't blackmail by any stretch or hyperbole or metaphorical use. It's a different sort of extortion.
It's also politics as usual, of course.
The charge would be "extortion", not "blackmail".
Gates would be found innocent of blackmail, because that's a different crime. It probably doesn't matter to the media, who are usually sloppy with terminology. But if you want to convict someone of a crime, you have to charge them with the crime that they actually committed, not some other crime.
Any criminal lawyers here want to expound on the definitions?
I've never looked into how VoIP is deployed, but suffice it to say that if it listens on a port for incoming connections, then it is a service.
That's exactly what it has to do, if you are to receive incoming calls. In the IP sense, a traditional telephone is a "server", because it is always listening on the line for the voltage wiggle that signals an incoming call. An IP phone has to listen for incoming connections; this is done by calling the listen() library routine. The term for such a program is "server". If an ISP doesn't allow servers, they are intentionally blocking things like IP phones.
The common ISP "no servers" rule is equivalent to having a telephone line that only allows outgoing calls. That isn't very useful, of course, though phone companies can sell you that sort of service if you want it. They can also sell you a "server only" service that only allows incoming calls. This is actually a bit more common, though still fairly rare. You don't see many phones set up these ways, because people normally understand how useless such a phone would be to them.
The main reason that ISPs have gotten away from this is that the Internet reached popularity with the idea of "web browsing". This led to people accepting the idea that a web site was something that someone else did, and you just looked at them. But the real value of the Internet is two-way communication, just as with the telephone. You shouldn't have to relay email through a third-party site, any more than you should have to use voice mail to send someone a telephone message. You should be able to make some of your own files available on the Web, by running a web server on your machine. Not allowing such things is as limiting as an outgoing-calls-only phone line would be. You have a pale shadow of an Internet connection, and are missing some of the Internet's most important capabilities.
It'll probably all sort itself out in a few more decades, and we'll be able to use the Internet as it was designed. But we're seeing one of the battles here. The big companies want their control back. They don't like these little upstarts providing a comm service. If they can get away with it, they will block traffic to and from their competitors, so you'll have to pay them extra for a service that your own computer could do on its own.
I am allowed to use all my ports with no transfer cap. ... Do providers just do some "pin the tail on the donkey" game with a map of the USA when it comes to transfer caps and port blocks?
;-). But they aren't available everywhere.
Yes, that's a good description of what they do. Hereabouts (Boston), the local linux/unix users group has had a discussion lately about Comcast blocking ports 80 and 25. Some people reported no blocking, others reported both ports blocked, others reported only one blocked. The story seems to be that they're slowly blocking these ports, one neighborhood at a time. If you don't like it, you can upgrade to business service.
Last year, we had RCN in our neighborhood. They started blocking port 80, then started blocking port 25. We switched to speakeasy in November, because they promise not to block ports (and are linux/unix friendly
A common excuse for blocking these ports is that it's an easy way for the ISP to block whatever malware is currently infecting Windows boxes and dragging the network to a standstill. But, of course, once a port gets blocked in your neighborhood, it never gets unblocked.
Unless you upgrade to business service.
If the users don't like it they can choose another ISP/connection.
Actually, most of them can't. In most places, there is only one ISP.
And the comms industry in the US is pushing hard for "consolidation", to minimize the number of people who can make a choice.