Useful (and potentially profitable) P2P is here. Check out Red Swoosh, done by the same fine folks as brought you Scour.net. They're already serving up pages for Deviant Art, where you can get art and skins for things like Trillian (which I'm very happy with), and are closing other deals with certain varied media empires.
Think Akamai with peered nodes and intelligent network mapping.
I think you confused your products. The LinkSys switch with 8 ports all gigabit, the EG0008, as an MSRP of $1400 and is selling on the street for about $850. That's not $189.
You Don't *KNOW* What You Need.
on
Wiring A New House?
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Here's the straight-up truth. You don't know what you need 10 years from now! Neither does anybody else in this forum. 5 or 10 years down the pipe, you're going to want to drop in some new cabling/communications wiring, right? Maybe you will want to run audio/video cables through the walls like one poster suggested. But the point is not to NOW lay every single possible cable you'd want. What you want to do is to future-proof your house.
In my opinion, the best way to do that is to use conduit. Conduit will let you easily drop in new cables to your house's framework. That way, just drop in your cat 5e and telephone wiring now, and then, as you need it, drop in other transport media.
I might caution you as to using long-haul analog cabling media, like stereo RCA - long, straight wires make excellent antennas and the audio quality by the time it actually got to your speakers would be undoubtedly subpar. If you have the money, running something like optical S/PDIF would make more sense, as it's digital and won't lose signal quality over the kind of runs you're likely to have in your house.
Good luck, and kudos on putting together a fabulous new home!
Hey, I've actually been working for the past three months or so at assembling a proper non-profit colocation facility in Northern California. We're investigating non-profit incorporation or a partnership with an existing 501(c)(3) organization. There are about 40 folks on our mailing list (see our site for info on how to subscribe) and we just today signed an agreement with Hurricane Electric for preliminary hosting (DNS, mail, and monitoring tools).
We've found a real gem of a place in Palo Alto one block away from a major net drop that already is airconditioned and that we may be able to freely use (no rent!). We're putting together a setup where responsible admins can come, drop in a box (no commercial content, banner ads, pr0n, or warez) and be connected at 10mbps (unmetered) for less than $100/mo; we have a target goal of $50/month for our users, which should be low enough to not be a barrier to entry for interested parties, including individuals, nonprofits, open source projects requiring dedicated hosting, and independent researchers.
Send me an email at dweeklyATlegatoDOTcom to let me know you'd like to either help out or have your box hosted and I'll give you more information. We're probably having a face-to-face get-together next week in Palo Alto! If you know any lawyers who could do pro bono work on assisting our 501(c)(3) incorporation, too, that'd be a huge hand! =)
Cheers,
-david
USB 2.0 is already here...
on
USB 2.0 For Linux
·
· Score: 4, Informative
At Fry's Electronics here in Silicon Valley, low-cost USB 2.0 PCI controllers have been on the shelves for well over a month now. Funny thing is, I haven't seen any devices on the shelves that could speak 2.0. Maybe I just didn't happen to see them, but it seems that we might run into the kind of time-delay catch-22's that plagued the original USB: it wasn't important to get a USB board or have USB-support because there weren't any peripherals, and there wasn't any impetus to manufacture USB peripherals, since the install base of computers with USB controllers was small. So USB took quite some time to actually achieve widespread penetration. The same fate may befall 2.0; it may be at least a year before 2.0 is truly compelling. In the interim, Firewire will do quite well. (It's more widespread and is also a more interesting, peered protocol with QOS-like features.)
At any rate, Linux support for these next-generation devices is still important; better for it to come sooner (before it's popular) than later (at which point people wonder why Linux is lagging behind).
If you wanted to get into the broadband deployment arena, now would be a really good fscking time to do so.
Fiber pipes nationally are wildly underlit nationally, DWDM technology is continuing to advance at a breakneck pace, and, relevant to this article, you'll have have no more competition, save Baby Bell DSL offerings.
Team up with the power companies! They own the rights of way to metro and suburban wiring ways and "telephone" poles already. (A "telephone" pole should be called a "power" pole because most of the time the telephone company is leasing space from the power company to string telephone wires on it!) They're being hit bad by this whole deregulation bit and are losing quite a bit of money. They'd be delighted to find a potential new revenue stream, especially in a market that's clamoring for access, but has no outlet.
Supply and Demand -- there's a dwindling supply and a growing demand. Market forces dictate that someone's gotta have the "can-do" to get the power companies to plug people in.
(BTW, I am not talking about using the power lines for transmission of data (many issues w/that), I'm talking about turning power companies into ISPs by stringing fiber along their rights of way.)
Yeah, baby! Anton Altaparmikov's excellent work on the NTFS updates moves forward with 2.4.9. Now Linux can read, write, and format NTFS partitions pretty stably! Go Anton! =)
(Disclaimer: I'm having my company sponsor Anton's work.;) )
I find it interesting to note that OS/X comes with an SSH (secure shell) server and client for encrypted connections; but further yet (and relevant to this article) it comes with a very pretty port scanner. That's right, each and every copy of OS/X could be illegal in Australia if scanners are made illegal. Hm. Wonder if Apple has the heads up on that?
Further yet, is it illegal for you in the US to make available hacking tools to Australians? (Legislation is pushing that way, yes?) If not now, might it be soon?
I went to the RSA 2001 Conference up in San Francisco, and the Embedded Systems Conference was just across the street, so I dropped by with my digital camera. I managed to take several pictures of these boxes in various form factors. You may (or may not) be interested.
It seems that Xavier doesn't understand that the number of users diplayed as being online in the Napster client is the number that are logged onto the current server. It wasn't the case that there were only 7000 people on the whole service when he wrote the article; there were 7000 people on the same server as him, which means that each Napster server was carrying about that many.
Despite him getting his facts messed up, it is true that Napster usage has slacked off tremendously: a search for "funk" yielded no results on several servers a week ago, which I felt was a telling sign. There's no more funk in the system. Go home.
I can't believe this. We got ten questions to ask this guy and only one (question 5) is really about his methodology? C'mon people! It is vital that we drill these research firms that seem to periodically publish data out of their asses; to ask them how they get their numbers. Drill them on their statistical methodology. As a friend of mine once pointed out "if they can't tell you where they got their numbers from, they probably just asked their kid sister." People fall into a trap of trusting numbers. Note how Jupiter's numbers are always very precise but rarely ever accurate (e.g., "In 2010, 2,103,293,523 people will use cellular telephones.") - it's easy to trust these numbers, but it's pure, fanatical faith if the firms don't detail how they achieved their results.
Could you imagine a scientific journal that only contained abstracts? It would be laughed at. The methodology is absolutely essential to understanding the trustworthiness of the data. There needs to be full disclosure of these procedures before they release their snippets into the media.
Spreading unfounded information is as good as lying.
Fizzilla - Mozilla for OS/X - already 0.9.1+
on
Mozilla 0.9.1 Out
·
· Score: 3
If any of you have OS/X and want to grab a version, get it fresh and hot from the fizzila page on mozilla.org. They've got
a binary based on a post 0.9.1+ that seems pretty stable and pretty fast. It was taken from the trunk two days ago. Yay!
I don't know if you noticed, but (among other queries) a search for "funk" on Napster returned zero hits. Napster is dead.
The sad part is that Gnutella's not sufficiently useable to be a replacement, even on a 1.5 megabit line on a fast computer. And yes, I've tried just about every client out there (BearShare, ToadNode, Limewire, etc.) - while you can get some interesting content every once in a while, it just doesn't measure up to what Napster used to be. The scaling issues inherent in peered networks may be a fundamental stumbling block to their popularity and efficiency, and centralized networks are easily sued.
The kneejerk answer, to take things offshore, seems to currently only be carried out by pretty slimy people (with a few exceptions), with ties to offshore gambling, sketchy offshore banks, etc. (I just helped expose one such venture.) Frankly, I'd trust the RIAA more after looking into some of these things.
So I'm not sure what the answer is, or where things are going to go, other than small, tight sharing networks of people. The record companies are pretty happy, they seem to have won for now.
And oh yeah, the record labels are starting to take stakes in CD recording companies to prevent you from burning data you shouldn't be. =/ Ack.
I went to the RSA 2001 Conference up in San Francisco, and the Embedded Systems Conference was just across the street, so I dropped by with my digital camera. I managed to take several pictures of these boxes in various form factors. You may (or may not) be interested.
IPNSIG (the InterPlanetary Internet Special Interest Group) submitted this document to the IETF. It's interesting to note that IPNSIG is looking at very long-term solutions, but (to me at least) it's equally fascinating to read about current space communications standards in development that already take into account many, indeed nearly all, of the "far reaching" recommendations made in the post.
Readers may be interested in the CCSDS (Consultative Committee for Space Data Systems) homepage which has many protocols, proposals, and drafts available for public review. Take for example their file transfer protocol (PDF - start reading on page 20) that already "bundles" data and looks to be somewhat comprehensively thought out.
Food for thought; these principles have not only been conceived before, but reduced to standards (and implementation).
This could unfortunately be pretty bad news globally for countries like Sealand that are attempting to establish themselves as autonomous free information states. If a sufficient number of countries are banded together to snip access to "rogue states" the Internet could end up less than the free utopia that we've been hoping for. Economic sanctions could be imposed upon nations that permitted access to non-compliant states.
Oh well. We didn't need freedom anyhow.
I'm at Comdex right now, covering for some Korean news media agencies, and I interviewed the folks at Qbe, who have been making a tablet PC for the last year or so. Their next-gen Qbe (Qbe Vivo) has built in 802.11, among other things. I asked the woman who was giving the demonstration about the hardware: it's all standardized! I asked her right off if it could run Linux and she unabashedly said yes. A further look into the guts showed that indeed, it was just a full computer in an incredible form factor. Shipping March 2001, there you go. A cute, sexy Linux tablet.
-david
There's one at Ming-Na's website (she's one of the lead vocalists) not on the main site
(picture), another from Animation Artist herepage for the movie).
Those who merely install Linux and expect it to be secure deserve to get rooted.
Technosnobbery in general is abhorrent, but to see someone like you refusing to even acknowledge that perhaps a distribution could be shipped secure out-of-the-box additionally reflects ignorance.
Distributions should be friendly, easy-to-use, and informative. They should instruct where necessary (i.e., 'Turning on this option will let anyone remotely read the directories you've specified. Are you sure you want to do this?') and be as secure as possible.
Why hasn't anyone done an OpenBSD-style audit on the Linux source base? There, at least, they know a thing or two about shipping a secure distribution. Instead of making fun of their users they simply provide them with the world's most secure operating system out-of-the box, no questions asked.
The short of it? Distros can and should be secure out-of-the box and any potentially insecure operations should be accompanied by links to the latest literature. Users should be informed about security updates instead of having to actively discover patches, with an option for one-click upgrades (e.g., 'The FTP server you're running has just been updated. Your version contains a serious security hole. Would you like to update it now?'). These things are possible.
Don't make fun of users for wanting a good product.
Well, danged if slashdot isn't turning into geek classifieds of sorts, but I'm heading out to the San Francisco area in the next two weeks and am looking for a geek pad myself, to crash at for a few months to a year. Anyone within 50 miles of SF? =)
Seriously, though, is there a real place for geek classifieds and roommate ads?
The ultimate point is that crypto is useless in this application. Hackers won't try to break the keys, they'll just record the digital output, such as is trivial to do with a SoundBlaster Live! card - it's a handy and trivial way to break any cryptosystem, because no matter how you protect the music, you've ultimately got to send the raw data to sound card and that's pretty trivial to intercept.
So the sum of this is that it's ultimately a futile endeavor, regardless of how they rotate keys or whatnot. The folks at Emusic are selling hundreds of times more music than anyone else and none of their stuff is encrypted -- did you know that half their board came from PGP: Pretty Good Privacy, the crypto folks? And that Gene, their CEO, is a longtime cypherpunk? So why is it, you should ask yourself, that some of the most knowledgeable crypto people in the world would start the only online music sales outfit to sell *unencrypted* dowloads?
Maybe because they understand what crypto is really for.
Crypto is for keeping secrets between parties that desire to keep that information a secret. If A wants to tell B something, he can use crypto to prevent some C from listening in that both A and B don't want hearing the information. But if B desires to share this information with other parties, there is fundamentally, long-term nothing that can be done to protect B from sharing it. Crypto is only useful at protecting information if all parties who know the secret want to keep it a secret.
So ultimately, any attempt to protect publicly-published data (books, movies, music) with crypto is going to fail; it's fundamentally untenable.
Maybe Pike is amusing, but next to a language like Perl, is it really needed? And can you really claim that Pike has "character" when you can't even write poetry? (Yes, I am a Perl bigot.)
BTW, Hello world in perl? perl -e 'print "hello, world\n";' on the command line will do the trick. Ha!
People are going to want to read your book on paper if they like it. Releasing the whole book online is a good way to expose people to your ideas; if people like what they see, they'll buy your book.
A simple example from a government office should illustrate my point: a pamphlet was being sold for about $10 via the mail, but wasn't getting many orders. The administration decided to put the text online for free, and the next year, they had ten times as many sales of the paper document.
I myself am writing a book on MP3s (very slowly, mind you) and have published the first two chapters online in HTML format. As I write chapters, I'll be posting them to my website and then when I'm all done I'm going to sell a print version. Fundamentally, it's going to be a while before a sufficiently compelling non-paper solution comes into existance.
For another example of this in action, take Neal Stephenson's "In the Beginning was the Command Line" which he released as ASCII text to the Net for free redistribution and simultaneously put up for sale in bookstores. I can't speak for the sales of the book, but I know that I bought a copy as did quite a few of my friends.
So release your book online in HTML format and sell it in paper version as well. Don't worry, if your content is good, you'll find an audience. =) And remember, it's not about minimizing the number of people who read your book without paying for it; it's about maximizing the amount of money you make. There's a big difference there; those two goals may very well be in opposition to each other.
Slashdot Mirror
Think Akamai with peered nodes and intelligent network mapping.
I think you confused your products. The LinkSys switch with 8 ports all gigabit, the EG0008, as an MSRP of $1400 and is selling on the street for about $850. That's not $189.
Here's the straight-up truth. You don't know what you need 10 years from now! Neither does anybody else in this forum. 5 or 10 years down the pipe, you're going to want to drop in some new cabling/communications wiring, right? Maybe you will want to run audio/video cables through the walls like one poster suggested. But the point is not to NOW lay every single possible cable you'd want. What you want to do is to future-proof your house.
In my opinion, the best way to do that is to use conduit. Conduit will let you easily drop in new cables to your house's framework. That way, just drop in your cat 5e and telephone wiring now, and then, as you need it, drop in other transport media.
I might caution you as to using long-haul analog cabling media, like stereo RCA - long, straight wires make excellent antennas and the audio quality by the time it actually got to your speakers would be undoubtedly subpar. If you have the money, running something like optical S/PDIF would make more sense, as it's digital and won't lose signal quality over the kind of runs you're likely to have in your house.
Good luck, and kudos on putting together a fabulous new home!
Hey, I've actually been working for the past three months or so at assembling a proper non-profit colocation facility in Northern California. We're investigating non-profit incorporation or a partnership with an existing 501(c)(3) organization. There are about 40 folks on our mailing list (see our site for info on how to subscribe) and we just today signed an agreement with Hurricane Electric for preliminary hosting (DNS, mail, and monitoring tools).
We've found a real gem of a place in Palo Alto one block away from a major net drop that already is airconditioned and that we may be able to freely use (no rent!). We're putting together a setup where responsible admins can come, drop in a box (no commercial content, banner ads, pr0n, or warez) and be connected at 10mbps (unmetered) for less than $100/mo; we have a target goal of $50/month for our users, which should be low enough to not be a barrier to entry for interested parties, including individuals, nonprofits, open source projects requiring dedicated hosting, and independent researchers.
Send me an email at dweeklyATlegatoDOTcom to let me know you'd like to either help out or have your box hosted and I'll give you more information. We're probably having a face-to-face get-together next week in Palo Alto! If you know any lawyers who could do pro bono work on assisting our 501(c)(3) incorporation, too, that'd be a huge hand! =)
Cheers,
-david
At any rate, Linux support for these next-generation devices is still important; better for it to come sooner (before it's popular) than later (at which point people wonder why Linux is lagging behind).
Fiber pipes nationally are wildly underlit nationally, DWDM technology is continuing to advance at a breakneck pace, and, relevant to this article, you'll have have no more competition, save Baby Bell DSL offerings.
Team up with the power companies! They own the rights of way to metro and suburban wiring ways and "telephone" poles already. (A "telephone" pole should be called a "power" pole because most of the time the telephone company is leasing space from the power company to string telephone wires on it!) They're being hit bad by this whole deregulation bit and are losing quite a bit of money. They'd be delighted to find a potential new revenue stream, especially in a market that's clamoring for access, but has no outlet.
Supply and Demand -- there's a dwindling supply and a growing demand. Market forces dictate that someone's gotta have the "can-do" to get the power companies to plug people in.
(BTW, I am not talking about using the power lines for transmission of data (many issues w/that), I'm talking about turning power companies into ISPs by stringing fiber along their rights of way.)
Someone go out there and do it!
(Disclaimer: I'm having my company sponsor Anton's work. ;) )
Further yet, is it illegal for you in the US to make available hacking tools to Australians? (Legislation is pushing that way, yes?) If not now, might it be soon?
David E. Weekly
David E. Weekly
Despite him getting his facts messed up, it is true that Napster usage has slacked off tremendously: a search for "funk" yielded no results on several servers a week ago, which I felt was a telling sign. There's no more funk in the system. Go home.
[singing] ...the day / the music died...
David E. Weekly
Could you imagine a scientific journal that only contained abstracts? It would be laughed at. The methodology is absolutely essential to understanding the trustworthiness of the data. There needs to be full disclosure of these procedures before they release their snippets into the media.
Spreading unfounded information is as good as lying.
David E. Weekly
David E. Weekly
The sad part is that Gnutella's not sufficiently useable to be a replacement, even on a 1.5 megabit line on a fast computer. And yes, I've tried just about every client out there (BearShare, ToadNode, Limewire, etc.) - while you can get some interesting content every once in a while, it just doesn't measure up to what Napster used to be. The scaling issues inherent in peered networks may be a fundamental stumbling block to their popularity and efficiency, and centralized networks are easily sued.
The kneejerk answer, to take things offshore, seems to currently only be carried out by pretty slimy people (with a few exceptions), with ties to offshore gambling, sketchy offshore banks, etc. (I just helped expose one such venture.) Frankly, I'd trust the RIAA more after looking into some of these things.
So I'm not sure what the answer is, or where things are going to go, other than small, tight sharing networks of people. The record companies are pretty happy, they seem to have won for now.
And oh yeah, the record labels are starting to take stakes in CD recording companies to prevent you from burning data you shouldn't be. =/ Ack.
Welcome to the Future(TM).
David E. Weekly
David E. Weekly
Readers may be interested in the CCSDS (Consultative Committee for Space Data Systems) homepage which has many protocols, proposals, and drafts available for public review. Take for example their file transfer protocol (PDF - start reading on page 20) that already "bundles" data and looks to be somewhat comprehensively thought out.
Food for thought; these principles have not only been conceived before, but reduced to standards (and implementation).
David E. Weekly
David E. Weekly
David E. Weekly
The dmoz category for the movie is here with a fair number of links to sites about the movie (like the GIA).
David E. Weekly
Technosnobbery in general is abhorrent, but to see someone like you refusing to even acknowledge that perhaps a distribution could be shipped secure out-of-the-box additionally reflects ignorance.
Distributions should be friendly, easy-to-use, and informative. They should instruct where necessary (i.e., 'Turning on this option will let anyone remotely read the directories you've specified. Are you sure you want to do this?') and be as secure as possible.
Why hasn't anyone done an OpenBSD-style audit on the Linux source base? There, at least, they know a thing or two about shipping a secure distribution. Instead of making fun of their users they simply provide them with the world's most secure operating system out-of-the box, no questions asked.
The short of it? Distros can and should be secure out-of-the box and any potentially insecure operations should be accompanied by links to the latest literature. Users should be informed about security updates instead of having to actively discover patches, with an option for one-click upgrades (e.g., 'The FTP server you're running has just been updated. Your version contains a serious security hole. Would you like to update it now?'). These things are possible.
Don't make fun of users for wanting a good product.
David E. Weekly
Seriously, though, is there a real place for geek classifieds and roommate ads?
David E. Weekly
So the sum of this is that it's ultimately a futile endeavor, regardless of how they rotate keys or whatnot. The folks at Emusic are selling hundreds of times more music than anyone else and none of their stuff is encrypted -- did you know that half their board came from PGP: Pretty Good Privacy, the crypto folks? And that Gene, their CEO, is a longtime cypherpunk? So why is it, you should ask yourself, that some of the most knowledgeable crypto people in the world would start the only online music sales outfit to sell *unencrypted* dowloads?
Maybe because they understand what crypto is really for.
Crypto is for keeping secrets between parties that desire to keep that information a secret. If A wants to tell B something, he can use crypto to prevent some C from listening in that both A and B don't want hearing the information. But if B desires to share this information with other parties, there is fundamentally, long-term nothing that can be done to protect B from sharing it. Crypto is only useful at protecting information if all parties who know the secret want to keep it a secret.
So ultimately, any attempt to protect publicly-published data (books, movies, music) with crypto is going to fail; it's fundamentally untenable.
David E. Weekly
Only without the years of development, the thousands of freely available modules, the extreme flexibility, the massive cross-platform portability (you can configure perl for your toaster), integration with Apache, Database support, tens of thousands of existing experts and freely available sample scripts, a huge set of some of the world's best programming language documentation, and (let's not forget) its own poetry (what other language can claim that?), having the core built by one of the coolest people on earth (read and laugh!).
Maybe Pike is amusing, but next to a language like Perl, is it really needed? And can you really claim that Pike has "character" when you can't even write poetry? (Yes, I am a Perl bigot.)
BTW, Hello world in perl? perl -e 'print "hello, world\n";' on the command line will do the trick. Ha!
David E. Weekly
A simple example from a government office should illustrate my point: a pamphlet was being sold for about $10 via the mail, but wasn't getting many orders. The administration decided to put the text online for free, and the next year, they had ten times as many sales of the paper document.
I myself am writing a book on MP3s (very slowly, mind you) and have published the first two chapters online in HTML format. As I write chapters, I'll be posting them to my website and then when I'm all done I'm going to sell a print version. Fundamentally, it's going to be a while before a sufficiently compelling non-paper solution comes into existance.
For another example of this in action, take Neal Stephenson's "In the Beginning was the Command Line" which he released as ASCII text to the Net for free redistribution and simultaneously put up for sale in bookstores. I can't speak for the sales of the book, but I know that I bought a copy as did quite a few of my friends.
So release your book online in HTML format and sell it in paper version as well. Don't worry, if your content is good, you'll find an audience. =) And remember, it's not about minimizing the number of people who read your book without paying for it; it's about maximizing the amount of money you make. There's a big difference there; those two goals may very well be in opposition to each other.
David E. Weekly
BTW - THURSDAY is the big day here @ Stanford - the DMCA hearings are here at the Business School. Come raise your voice!!!
David E. Weekly
News for Nerds - stuff that matters??
David E. Weekly