Just for the record: This was purely a communication exercise. The scenario was just an excuse to get people to talk to each other. Technical realism was not a goal in this exercise.
One can argue whether the assumptions on the availability of the PSTN was warranted or not, but given the fact that a good number of the involved teams had no direct contact prior to this exercise, this exercise was a worthwhile first step.
That was one of the premises of an early German SF book: Hans Dominik's Atlantis.
Barely readable by today's standards, but maybe an interesting glimpse on the thinking 80 years ago.
The main benefit of not torturing PoWs is not the hope of being treated in kind.
The real, down to earth benefit you get from that policy in wars is the enemy's attitude towards getting captured. In WW2, German soldiers fought tooth and nail not be captured on the eastern front, as it was well known that the red army mishandled PoWs. Things were different in the west: surrendering was a good choice in a tight spot. The war was over for you and you certainly had a better life in the US camps than fighting against the inevitable defeat.
Result: during the last days of the war, the US army had troubles coping with all the German soldiers who were surrendering vs. the soviets who found stiff resistance till the end.
The same effect was significant in both gulf wars.
Firstly they will be able to be forged, just because it will be a smart card doesn't mean that you will not be able to make another one. All that you would need to duplicate the smart card is to read all the current data off the card then to program an emulator on your own card to spit out those values whenever they are requested, this is the way that a GSM card can be copied.
Hello? GSM SIM cards cannot be copied by just monitoring them during operation. They use challenge/response based cryptography. You don't get the private key of the card by monitoring its communication. And without that key, you can't produce correct answers to further challenges.
You missed the point of ENUM. IMHO there are three types of ENUM applications:
a) Calls from the PSTN to VoIP: You only can dial numbers and not URIs on more than a billion handsets which are out there.
b) Calling someone where you don't know whether he's on VoIP or not. You give your PBX (or softphone) a telephone number and it finds out via ENUM which is the best way to call
c) Retrieving additional info concerning a phone number. e.g. finding a URL for a photo to display on a headset on an incoming call.
Why not? Just require it to be a handwritten postcard. (Actually, just having them type a few million email apologies might do the trick as well. And no messing around with cut'n'paste or scripting.)
I fully agree with this I, Cringly column on this topic. Basically, he argues that paper voting is superior and cheaper that any fancy machinery. And from my experience here in Austria where we do just that, I fully agree.
"We're obviously in a struggle right now trying to figure out the best techniques to ensure that they are compensated appropriately."
Whenever I hear these statements, I'm wondering how much of that is "someone rights are not infringed" and how much is "someones business model must be protected".
There is no god-given right to make a living off whatever you choose to be your profession. Circumstances can change, and your business model can become unviable. Facts of life 101. Everybody has to deal with that (cf. type-setters, weavers,...). Thus any argument similar "those poor XXX, YYY destroys their income, thus YYY must be banned" is IMHO just wrong.
The correct approach is to look whether somebody need legal help to ascertain his right to the fruits of his labor. That he's not wronged in the legal sense of the word. Whether his income would be enough to sustain his life is not the court's business.
If the state decides that it really wants a certain tradecraft to be a viable business, then that's a purely political question (cf. farm subsidies, military spending, art funding) and should not be decided by a court of law.
SIP server do *not* route the actual voice traffic; they just do the signalling. Thus you don't need any signficant amount of bandwidth to run a SIP server for a large community.
The RTP stream containing the actual audio goes directly from phone to phone.
And then there is the difference between the apostrophe ' and the right (acute) accent (which slashdot seems to strip here. on windows: try ALT-0180) This isn't a problem on US keyboards, but German ones have usually one key with left and right accents on it and a seperate key with '.
To complicate things further, there are opening and closing single quotes at 145 and 146 in the *windows* character set. Just like the opening double quotes (windows: ALT-0147), these are not NOT in ISO-8859-1.
/ol (using an US-keyboard here in Austria. Programming C and Perl with German ones is a PITA.)
So you can call other people who use the same brand easily by tapping a 'phone number' that's the same regardless of their everchanging IP number, but don't expect to call your buddy who's using netmeeting so easily. Also, if you place a call from one VOIP telco to another, chances are it will travel some distance over PSTN and will be billed in stead of free, despite the fact it could have been an end-to-end-over-IP connection which is usually free of charge.
There is a solution for that problem: it's called ENUM and that way you can link all there SIP communities together using the DNS. You just need to overlay the E.164 numbering scheme over all these number-based SIP communities, install the proper NAPTR records, get ENUM support into the SIP servers (well, we got that put into iptel's ser and into Asterisk already) and you're set.
It's just like interconnecting host-based email systems via common addressing (RFC822) and a global directory for domains (MX records in the DNS).
Been there, done that, gave a demo at the last IETF meeting. See this presentation for details.
As I see it, SIP services will be very similar to email/POP services: Any decent ISP will give his customers a SIP-login. And just as there is hotmail, gmx, yahoo & co for free email, there is Free World Dialup and iptel for the SIP world.
The tricky part will be the interconnection of these SIP islands. And here NAPTR records in the ENUM DNS will have the same role as MX records for mail.
Slashdot Mirror
No Capes!
Just for the record: This was purely a communication exercise. The scenario was just an excuse to get people to talk to each other. Technical realism was not a goal in this exercise.
One can argue whether the assumptions on the availability of the PSTN was warranted or not, but given the fact that a good number of the involved teams had no direct contact prior to this exercise, this exercise was a worthwhile first step.
That was one of the premises of an early German SF book: Hans Dominik's Atlantis. Barely readable by today's standards, but maybe an interesting glimpse on the thinking 80 years ago.
For once, I can check how many people have really RTFA (or at least fetched the .pdf). :-)
I really didn't expect we'd make slashdot with that report. Well, any exposure help to get people to patch.
This a quite US-centric view.
In most other countries, the local ccTLD is the default where people look for company websites.
The main benefit of not torturing PoWs is not the hope of being treated in kind.
The real, down to earth benefit you get from that policy in wars is the enemy's attitude towards getting captured. In WW2, German soldiers fought tooth and nail not be captured on the eastern front, as it was well known that the red army mishandled PoWs. Things were different in the west: surrendering was a good choice in a tight spot. The war was over for you and you certainly had a better life in the US camps than fighting against the inevitable defeat.
Result: during the last days of the war, the US army had troubles coping with all the German soldiers who were surrendering vs. the soviets who found stiff resistance till the end.
The same effect was significant in both gulf wars.
"Password Recovery" sounds so much more benign than "Cracking Passwords".
Hello, Mr. Orwell. *wave*
Hello? GSM SIM cards cannot be copied by just monitoring them during operation. They use challenge/response based cryptography. You don't get the private key of the card by monitoring its communication. And without that key, you can't produce correct answers to further challenges.
Here in Austria we all have government issued credentials. And lo!
There is no legal requirement to carry one with you all the time.
Identity theft is almost non-existant.
A nice blog-post on this can be found here.
See http://www.ripe.net/ripe/meetings/ripe-51/presenta tions/pdf/ripe51-ipv4-lifetime-rev.pdf.
I also recommend you read "Das politische Leben eines Unpolitischen" by Elisabeth Heisenberg. (Link)
You missed the point of ENUM. IMHO there are three types of ENUM applications:
a) Calls from the PSTN to VoIP: You only can dial numbers and not URIs on more than a billion handsets which are out there.
b) Calling someone where you don't know whether he's on VoIP or not. You give your PBX (or softphone) a telephone number and it finds out via ENUM which is the best way to call
c) Retrieving additional info concerning a phone number. e.g. finding a URL for a photo to display on a headset on an incoming call.
Why not? Just require it to be a handwritten postcard. (Actually, just having them type a few million email apologies might do the trick as well. And no messing around with cut'n'paste or scripting.)
While the CAN-SPAM act does not prohibit spam per se, it might manage to separate spam into:
* "legal", clearly labeled spam: instant filter-fodder
* clearly illegal spam, where the feds might use their investigative muscle and send the perp to club fed.
While not perfect, I could live with that outcome.
I fully agree with this I, Cringly column on this topic. Basically, he argues that paper voting is superior and cheaper that any fancy machinery. And from my experience here in Austria where we do just that, I fully agree.
Whenever I hear these statements, I'm wondering how much of that is "someone rights are not infringed" and how much is "someones business model must be protected".
There is no god-given right to make a living off whatever you choose to be your profession. Circumstances can change, and your business model can become unviable. Facts of life 101. Everybody has to deal with that (cf. type-setters, weavers, ...). Thus any argument similar "those poor XXX, YYY destroys their income, thus YYY must be banned" is IMHO just wrong.
The correct approach is to look whether somebody need legal help to ascertain his right to the fruits of his labor. That he's not wronged in the legal sense of the word. Whether his income would be enough to sustain his life is not the court's business.
If the state decides that it really wants a certain tradecraft to be a viable business, then that's a purely political question (cf. farm subsidies, military spending, art funding) and should not be decided by a court of law.
SIP server do *not* route the actual voice traffic; they just do the signalling. Thus you don't need any signficant amount of bandwidth to run a SIP server for a large community.
The RTP stream containing the actual audio goes directly from phone to phone.
To complicate things further, there are opening and closing single quotes at 145 and 146 in the *windows* character set. Just like the opening double quotes (windows: ALT-0147), these are not NOT in ISO-8859-1.
As far as I know Telcordia. ENUM is done by Infonova. We're prodding iptel, FWD and earthlink to get blocks in some suitable +878 space.
There is a solution for that problem: it's called ENUM and that way you can link all there SIP communities together using the DNS. You just need to overlay the E.164 numbering scheme over all these number-based SIP communities, install the proper NAPTR records, get ENUM support into the SIP servers (well, we got that put into iptel's ser and into Asterisk already) and you're set.
It's just like interconnecting host-based email systems via common addressing (RFC822) and a global directory for domains (MX records in the DNS).
Been there, done that, gave a demo at the last IETF meeting. See this presentation for details.
As I see it, SIP services will be very similar to email/POP services: Any decent ISP will give his customers a SIP-login. And just as there is hotmail, gmx, yahoo & co for free email, there is Free World Dialup and iptel for the SIP world.
The tricky part will be the interconnection of these SIP islands. And here NAPTR records in the ENUM DNS will have the same role as MX records for mail.
An interesting read concerning the US debt is on billmon.org. Powerfull stuff.
There is a really good article on the economics invoved by Clay Shirky. Recommended reading.
In fact, I posted it to Usenet later in '96. I'm pretty sure that you can find lots of similar prior art in the google usenet archive.