Since even the mirrors are swamped : Go fetch BitTorrent from http://bitconjurer.org/BitTorrent/download.html (there are packages for Linux, Mac OS and Win32 avaiable, right next to the Python source), then click on this link :
BitTorrent is a peer to peer file swarming application. You upload the file you're downloading. This way, the more people there are, the faster you can get the episode. A couple of friends and me are seeding it.
If your download starts out slow, please wait a couple of minutes. It should pick up, especially once you start uploading.
While I wholeheartedly agree that more such services are needed, I have to ask you : why not do it yourself ? You can get a rackmounted server for decent prices these days, and are free to implement all that which you have mentioned -- offer it to a few friends and share the cost and you have what you were looking for. Of course making a business out of this is more difficult -- you'd need to have people who would be willing to pay for that service and people who trust you enough to not f*ck up and loose their eMail...
As for me, I already use a similar system, the difference being that said server is mostly used for web hosting of small sites (shared cost) and the eMail really is just an add-on (which I have full control over and regularily upgrade). You can have a pretty secure environment working within just a few hours (qmail has been rock solid for me).
If you want to offer this o the "mass populous" (populace ?), good luck to you -- Currently I don't have the risk capital to do that (being a student). Technically this is no problem, but I always get worried about bandwidth;)
Hrrm.. While this is a nice story, your advice should be taken with a grain of salt.
A company that has a reasonably big pipe to the net and does not notice the simplest of errors until it really hurts (monetarily speaking) will have a lot of problems, anyway.
Seriously, an open Proxy ? And nobody noticed ? An open ftp server with no quotas ? And nobody noticed ? A filled pipe ? And nobody noticed ? If you ask me, that just speaks of/very/ bad sysadmining. There are very simple tools to check for this kind of thing, and there are very pretty graphs to be drawn for traffic. Just make a habit of it to look at it every now and then. I know I do, and I know I stopped quite somee **** from coming down on our network. It's really not that much work, and it's really not worth 6000 Euros. Ever.
I have to shudder when thinking of how bad security will have to be if even such basic "exploits" worked so well for so long in your company...
That said, yes, an open relay will cause you headaches. But I'm guessing Mr. Gilmore knows that. I don't respect him for this decision, though I do have respect for the man.
This sounds a wonderful project to try... I always wanted to get into actually building things (rather than building virtual things / using premade parts that just "plug")...
What this page is missing is an approximate on how much I will have to spend, all things considered. There's a nifty listing for the parts and some pointers on what lenses may cost, but no total or any indication what price-regions we are talking about.
So, could any of the more technically inclined people here give a reasonable estimate on whether to spend $50, $200, or $1000 for one working link ? Thanks in advance...
While it is true that there are far better _strategy_ games (B&W rocks, btw), you can't simply dismiss D2 as a game without teamplay. Sure, you can beat the game all by yourself with your 31337 Lance-Barbarian. Just the same, it isn't much fun. Parties of 3 or 4 people are actually way more fun to play -- and strategies emerge. For example, if you play an Amazon together with a Sorceress, your strategy will be a lot different from, say, a Necromancer + a Paladin.
As for newbies getting crushed... Uhmm, have you actually played the game ? It's focus is _not_ Player vs. Player... As a newbie, you usually get a lot of help from experienced characters. A lot of free stuff, too (and not the worst, either).
24/7 playing just to be good ? It strikes me that you have never actually played the game. Yes, if you want to be number one in the ladder, you'll have to play in teams or 24/7. Nutcases, that. Yesterday I played a few hours, and the day before. Before that, I was on hiatus for two months. Still works fine.
And, in all fairness, how long _do_ you have to play to get good at FPS games ? Quite some time to find your style... Team games ? Well, come up with a winning strategy for Counterstrike when you are just starting -- and play against a good team. Oh. You get crushed ? Thought that wouldn't happen.
If you want to troll, at least get your facts straight. Blizzard releases for both MAC and Winblows. Last time I counted, that were 2 operating systems, not one.
Also, most Blizzard games are playable under Wine/WineX. The only thing that doesn't work well is Battle.Net support -- and it's coming.
Interesting point... I think I have to reread it when I'm awake some time:-)
One thing though -- while DVDs surely are of excellent quality, downloading movies is indeed feasible. With the birth of broadband (and corporations are pushing that without end... It is possible to get DSL or Cable in most places, and cheap, nowadays), it has become that much more feasible. In fact, I can log on, fire up a program or two, click a few things and be downloading a 1.2gbyte DVDRip from yesterday at 90kbyte/sec right now... Sure, it is pirated, but I the movie industry doesn't offer me that service. And again, while DVD is great, the DivX 2mbit/sec Rip does just fine in most cases. With a knowledgable encoder, you even get some darn good sound out of the whole thing (sometimes AC5.1, even). It is not yet DVD, but I for one can't tell the difference on a 21" monitor and a decent sound system hooked up to it.
And I would pay for this service. Say I can go to www.something.com, log in, pay them $3-$5, click on download and get guaranteed speeds and some extra value (like background information, still images, etc.), I'd be there pretty often.
The movie industry is in more trouble than you think once broadband is virtually ubiquitious (in the US, at least, as much as that hurts to say) in both directions... Napster-like file-sharing services exist today, and tomorrow they will actually be the quality of Napster (in terms of speed)... Waiting 2 hours for a movie is no holdup for most people, after all, you can let it run overnight...
As for music... I probably _would_ have paid something to get some decent music from the industry. Nowadays, I'll have to ask myself : "why ?" As you pointed out, every schmoe can encode something... Some people are actually pretty good at it. I can choose whether I'll go for the 128kbit schmoe encode or get the high-quality, specially tuned, vbr ~220kbit mp3 with well-made id3tags... Now if the industry had gotten their act together, _they_ would be providing that by now. Instead, they pissed me off. Severely. To the point where I won't entrust them with my CC-number, ever. If my favourite artist provides the means to pay him on his webpage, I will do that gladly and freely. But no, sorry, I won't buy his CD. It's just $.20 for him anyway. They pissed me off, and people who piss me off obviously don't want my business.
Besides, getting an MP3 is actually easier for me, since most of my favourite music just isn't to be found in any of the stores I've been to. It just isn't there. Even the more-established groups take a week or two to get there -- compare that to firing up AudioGalaxy, typing in the name, enter, download, listen...
I hope the two blurbs above at least make _some_ sense. I'm a little tired, but knowing that nobody's going to read this after the story disappears from the frontpage anyway, I thought it to be in order to post now:)
Pleas forgif my Englisch pleese, haven't been practicing it much, lately.
Having heard a LOT about this kind of system, I wonder why nobody tried to make usable and convenient system for this yet... Sure, there are some forays into this topic (Amazon, various tip jars), but nothing that would fit under convenient, easy, no BS, 3% max deducted, consumer- and site-oriented.
I'd shell out a buck or two to./ and various other sites right this minute IF there was a convenient, easy, hassle-free way. There isn't.
Maybe PayPal could investigate doing something like this SOME time. They seem to have a nice infrastructure (although I do miss direct wire transfers, which are a convenient way for me to transfer money (remember, this is Europe) and even allows me to automate the process).
If you keep asking whether I would do something you will never find out whether I actually will. Especially not on SlashDot. Give it a try, maybe give it some backing, if it doesn't work out, improve your concept. People are good. Usually. They are lazy, too.
Hmm... If they don't want to sell me the whole bandwidth all the time, they should just FORCE a traffic limit. Say, 5gbyte. That way I _know_ what I'm dealing with (in Germany, some providers do this -- you pay $10 for DSL and 500meg of Traffic and some cents per mb over that limit). If they want to have a package for casual use, set the traffic limit low and the bandwidth as high as you want (we want to surf fast, right ?)...
But if you sell me a DSL line that is advertised as "768kbit/128kbit" and no traffic limit (!), then it's is f**king well my business what I do with the bandwidth I receive (maybe excluding reselling, but that's it).
As for your calculations : I have a few friends who have DSL like me. We have that above package (big surprise, we just _have_ that one DSL package in here), and I can tell you that the average use is clearly above 50%... The upstream is used for different things (Napster, AudioGalaxy, anybody ? Sharing the video you just rendered with a friend ? God forbid, host your homepage ?), and the downstream is quickly filled up as well (why wait for usenet posts when you can have 'em on your local server ? What's that ? A 192kbit/sec MP3 Radio ? Those adcritic videos look nice. Leech the server dry. Err. High Volume Mailing lists (linux-kernel-volume-like) ? And don't forget that dose of (non-)streaming video... Anyway, my bw average for the last 3 weeks is 630kbit/sec in. Friends's a little lower, but still > 50%)
In conclusion, provide what you advertise. Not what you think I will do, but you advertise.
Technically this is cool, but I wouldn't want to put any capital in it...
What are you going to pay for this service ? It's currently not possible to do this for free (just think about the HUUUUGE amount of bandwidth it would take -- not even beginning to think of the processing power required to serve a decent amount of people). If it's $2/2 hour movie I might even consider it. If the quality is good and I get to say _exactly_ what the file has to look like. If it's more along the lines of $20, well, screw you;-)
Just look at all those disk-space providers (freediskspace, streamload, idrive, etc.)... Basically, they are either new or they suck. And if you want them _not_ to suck, you have to pay some decent money... ($8 if you want to transfer 3gbytes -- less than a decent-quality mpeg2 fulltime movie (streamload.com)). Add to that the processing and man power... Big numbers. Way too big for me.
In conclusion : a cool idea, bad prospects for my money. I'd rather have something like a rencod'o'matic to which I feed an URL and a desired format and it encodes it for me on my _own_ computer/server... That would be viable. Still some coding to do, but viable... And in the times of broadband internet, it doesn't really concern me whether the movie comes in at a few mbit/sec -- Most likely the encoder couldn't keep up with the full data rate, anyway).
Well... Talk about not thinking for a few minutes and then just leaving the darn thing on:)
Of course I could just have fired up command line ftp or far or ncftp/cygwin or whatever it is that I would have needed, but since the process was already started, why not play Russian Roulette with IE ?
The file is not really watcheable on Windows, either (or maybe it's the stream ?) -- lots of artifacts (sound and video-wise) here... I redownloaded it with the linux box, same result. Ah well. 34:31 Minutes in 1.1gig, what do you expect:)
Hmm... I'm now 300meg into the file with *gasp* Internet Explorer... Opera crashed on first sight of that thing, and I my Linux box doesn't have a gig free... Maybe I _should_ finally compile wget for Windoze:-)
Well... It would probably be expensive, but it would give them a slight edge over the competition, or even just let them catch up with the competition... Every Webmail service I use here has SSL encryption on both HTTP and POP... Sure, they spent some money for some SSL equipment, but they also get the "good" press...
If Yahoo was to offer SSL and _decent_ encryption, I think the slashdot crowd wouldn't bash it as much as it apparently does here...
Horribly expensive is relative. Once it is avaiable everywhere else, they will have to switch, too. Not to do so would be more expensive in the long run since they'd loose customers...
While I like this idea and really would like it to be practiced, it will never happen. Thieves _will_ outnumber the honest users. Sure, for most people $3-$6 is nothing compared to the good music they get, but the vast paying crowd are not the wealthy middle class workers. Go look how Pokemon sells and you know where the money is. And those kids sure don't have any reason to pay that money... ("why mom, I downloaded it, it's mine")
"who REALLY needs to fetch their email faster than 128kbps"
(did you leave out news on purpose ?)
Uhmm. Are you THIS naive ? Yes, I dont care how much DELAY I have on my eMail connection (up to a point -- 1500ms is my pers. max), but 128kbps just doesnt cut it. Even if you DONT have a business, 128kbps can be very restricting.
If a friend sends me his birthday pictures in eMail (and he makes LOTS of those), and I get a neat array of 20 mails 2meg each, I EXPECT to be served faster than 128kbps if my pipe allows it. This is one extreme. Another would be that youre subscribed to a few high volume mailinglists (say, securityfocus.*, and a few groups on onelist or egroups)... Not everybody is, but those who are want their conn to be able to keep up with the steady flow of mails coming in without overloading their POP3-box.
Who/ever/ thought of eMail as being low throughput ? Or even low priority ? High delay may be acceptable if the bandwidth keeps (dont go too high or your kernel TCP buffers will choke).
As for news being low bandwidth -- uhm. Please. They may be high latency and low priority, but theyre not low throughput. Right now Im getting fed news 24/7. If I had more bandwidth, Id still be fed news 24/7. Even if you only subscribe to a few binary groups you can get that much -- let alone a few high volume groups. And no, not only pr0n, although thats why many people get DSL these days;->
Being a business has nothing to do with the need of bandwidth, though. I could saturate a T3 without being a business if I wanted to. If I pay for 384kbit/sec, I damn well know why I pay for it -- otherwise an ISDN link or even an analog link would just be fine for me.
Of course youd need to adjust eth0 to the interface youre going to use.
This is just some basic port filtering. If your SSH server is secure (CHECK!), this is perfect. If you want to further secure the box in order to leave services open and not feel bad about it, youll have to do a lot more, most of it common-sense, some of it non-trivial;-)
You might also want to Block some ICMP traffic if youre truely paranoid (does anybody need to ping you ? no ? turn it off;-), or even go as far as rate limiting ingress and egress traffic with tc (from iproute2) to suit your needs.
Of course, putting a firewall in front of your machine is ALWAYS a good idea. A 486 is WELL able to handle the load of a Cable Modem. Do a MINIMUM install of your secure Free System of choice (that is, OpenBSD or Linux), set up NAT and the rules above, and churn away on the net. Do NOT enable anything else on that box, as it would defeat the purpose. No extra services, no nothing. Of course you might use some proxies, but if you do, make absolutely sure theyre attached only to the interface on your LAN and not to your cable modem. Proxies may either add to or decrease security, depending on how you deploy them. My setup is NAT + daisychained Junkbuster & Squid.
Hope this helps a little. Generally, just follow common sense and dont leave ANY ports open that you dont trust completely.
But apart from this, how does Comcast think to actually enforce this ? I mean, come on, everybody with some knowledge of ipchains, squid, and maybe a generic ip proxy will be able to masquerade that he/shes masquerading his/her traffic. Out of the box masquerading is easily detectable (who seriously uses ports upwards of 60000 ?), but with some precaution you can make it seem to be one computer, running MSIE if you want.
Oh, and how the heck would they tell a VPN protocol from http, provided one uses a sufficiently encrypted connection (ssh will do, so will any ssl-based app). Everybody who runs VPNs without encryption should be shot on the spot anyway. Or take out the P from VPN.
Can you believe the "Deutsche Telekom" (the phone company in Germany holding the monopoly to local lines and thus flatrates) actually prohibits this exact same behavior on even analog connections ? As if that would make any difference at all (they dont sell you IPs, theyre dynamic anyway), but what do you expect from monopolies.
This would not help at all. The subnets the attacks came from are most likely NOT the ones of the attacker -- just the ones of some sorry people who have an open socks, Back Orifice, Netbus, or any other number of trojans installed on their hdd and are not aware of it.
Sadly, any script-kiddy knows about it. And they usually know how to daisychain those hosts to evade getting caught.
Im sad Kuro5hin is down -- I really liked being there. The discussions were interesting, the atmosphere great, and the focus just amazed me:-)
Who says those pop-culture NGs are worthless ? Surely they are only by your standards, but there seem to be plenty of people that enjoy posting and reading there. I agree that the Usenet is a fine tool for technical questions, nevertheless it is also a fine tool for current moods, socializing, and plain fun.
The privacy issue is there, but theres no easy solution. How do you decide what NGs are tech and which are not ? Are all those politics NGs tech ?
If people post things and do NOT realize that they are posting to a PUBLIC forum, then its their fault. I for one know that when I post to usenet, Im bound to be archived (and to get tons of spam). If Joe Normal thinks he is untraceable (because his eMail address is Joe.Normal2@aol.com), then its really his fault.
The flame you cited is a problem inherent to the system. Of course it is tasteless, but you could have done the VERY SAME THING if that person posted his quesion a few months back instead of a few years. If you are posting sensitive material, you can always use one of the countless "anonymous" remailers.
Yes, Usenet IS a celebration of free expression. It is not anonymous and has never been, however. If you want something not to be associated with your name, just post it anonymously or under a specific identity you created on the net. Im for privacy, but Im not for regulating PUBLIC forums because of it (or rather because some people think that they ARE private...)
Ok, it is a nice idea of Hamburg to do this. It just isnt anything thats supposed to be on Slashdot (IMHO). We have LOTS of providers that dont charge a monthly fee, give you lots of POP3-Boxes and WebSpace. You dont even need to register (thats Internet by Call). Problem is that it costs extraordinary amounts of money to actually call them. Local calls arent free here, theyre running at $.05 a minute during the day. (which is ugly, considering that every competitor of the FINE company offering this service (DTAG) have to use (and pay for) those lines, too. Research a little, next time. Now, if a city offered internet for FREE, then it would be news. Internet for the cost of a phone call is just too darn expensive.
That are the sources for Quake 2 Mods, Tools, and other released stuff by id. Its not the engine, its not the data.
--mxs
Re:Is the Metaverse nearing practicality?
on
Quake 1 GPL'ed
·
· Score: 1
I don't think so, due to what I call the Database Problem (I'm sure there's a more formal name for it). [...] I suspect advancing CPU and network technologies will eventually make this practical, but I believe we're still
Hmm ? I wouldnt quite state it that way. The CPU and networking ARE in fact fast enough... There ARE approaches to distributed databases. And the databases dont even need to be quite that huge... Of course, theyd probably have to store what map/server a user is in/on, but thats one line. Any decent SQL server could save that data. Sure, there would need to be one of those fat-ass servers (or a cluster or a distributed DB), but that should be accomplishable given that you always find sponsors for interesting problems (witness distributed.net).
The servers holding the maps themselves wont need that much information. Maybe some adjacent map-pointers to go to if you enter this or that door. The 'subway' system would take care of the rest (subway = just pass user credentials along to another server/process). Theres been a lot of research into this already and also some products which implement some kind of it (http://www.activeworlds.com).
One could also play with dynamic maps for the frontier maps. If its a frontier and there is nothing notable in it, well, generate a seed for it and let the client create a huge map for it (yes, I know making.bsps will take some time, but hey, its possible, isnt it ? Tricks.) unique to that seed on every client. The server doesnt need to get too much information, as long as no change to the environment is made or another person enters the scene. Then we have to 'localize' the map to the point of interaction and get back to 'normal' network traffic again. Difficult but feasible.
Dynamic distributed systems are possible. As a matter of fact, youre using one right now. What else is the internet ?
Slashdot Mirror
Hi there ...
Since even the mirrors are swamped : Go fetch BitTorrent from http://bitconjurer.org/BitTorrent/download.html (there are packages for Linux, Mac OS and Win32 avaiable, right next to the Python source), then click on this link :
http://a.wirebrain.de/exeter/exeter.torrent
BitTorrent is a peer to peer file swarming application. You upload the file you're downloading. This way, the more people there are, the faster you can get the episode. A couple of friends and me are seeding it.
If your download starts out slow, please wait a couple of minutes. It should pick up, especially once you start uploading.
While I wholeheartedly agree that more such services are needed, I have to ask you : why not do it yourself ? You can get a rackmounted server for decent prices these days, and are free to implement all that which you have mentioned -- offer it to a few friends and share the cost and you have what you were looking for. ...
;)
Of course making a business out of this is more difficult -- you'd need to have people who would be willing to pay for that service and people who trust you enough to not f*ck up and loose their eMail
As for me, I already use a similar system, the difference being that said server is mostly used for web hosting of small sites (shared cost) and the eMail really is just an add-on (which I have full control over and regularily upgrade). You can have a pretty secure environment working within just a few hours (qmail has been rock solid for me).
If you want to offer this o the "mass populous" (populace ?), good luck to you -- Currently I don't have the risk capital to do that (being a student). Technically this is no problem, but I always get worried about bandwidth
ttyl,
mxs
Hrrm .. While this is a nice story, your advice should be taken with a grain of salt.
/very/ bad sysadmining. There are very simple tools to check for this kind of thing, and there are very pretty graphs to be drawn for traffic. Just make a habit of it to look at it every now and then. I know I do, and I know I stopped quite somee **** from coming down on our network. It's really not that much work, and it's really not worth 6000 Euros. Ever.
...
A company that has a reasonably big pipe to the net and does not notice the simplest of errors until it really hurts (monetarily speaking) will have a lot of problems, anyway.
Seriously, an open Proxy ? And nobody noticed ? An open ftp server with no quotas ? And nobody noticed ? A filled pipe ? And nobody noticed ? If you ask me, that just speaks of
I have to shudder when thinking of how bad security will have to be if even such basic "exploits" worked so well for so long in your company
That said, yes, an open relay will cause you headaches. But I'm guessing Mr. Gilmore knows that. I don't respect him for this decision, though I do have respect for the man.
ttyl,
mxs
This sounds a wonderful project to try ... I always wanted to get into actually building things (rather than building virtual things / using premade parts that just "plug") ...
...
What this page is missing is an approximate on how much I will have to spend, all things considered. There's a nifty listing for the parts and some pointers on what lenses may cost, but no total or any indication what price-regions we are talking about.
So, could any of the more technically inclined people here give a reasonable estimate on whether to spend $50, $200, or $1000 for one working link ? Thanks in advance
While it is true that there are far better _strategy_ games (B&W rocks, btw), you can't simply dismiss D2 as a game without teamplay. Sure, you can beat the game all by yourself with your 31337 Lance-Barbarian. Just the same, it isn't much fun. Parties of 3 or 4 people are actually way more fun to play -- and strategies emerge. For example, if you play an Amazon together with a Sorceress, your strategy will be a lot different from, say, a Necromancer + a Paladin.
... Uhmm, have you actually played the game ? It's focus is _not_ Player vs. Player ... As a newbie, you usually get a lot of help from experienced characters. A lot of free stuff, too (and not the worst, either).
... Team games ? Well, come up with a winning strategy for Counterstrike when you are just starting -- and play against a good team. Oh. You get crushed ? Thought that wouldn't happen.
As for newbies getting crushed
24/7 playing just to be good ? It strikes me that you have never actually played the game. Yes, if you want to be number one in the ladder, you'll have to play in teams or 24/7. Nutcases, that. Yesterday I played a few hours, and the day before. Before that, I was on hiatus for two months. Still works fine.
And, in all fairness, how long _do_ you have to play to get good at FPS games ? Quite some time to find your style
*bite*
If you want to troll, at least get your facts straight. Blizzard releases for both MAC and Winblows. Last time I counted, that were 2 operating systems, not one.
Also, most Blizzard games are playable under Wine/WineX. The only thing that doesn't work well is Battle.Net support -- and it's coming.
Interesting point ... I think I have to reread it when I'm awake some time :-)
... It is possible to get DSL or Cable in most places, and cheap, nowadays), it has become that much more feasible. In fact, I can log on, fire up a program or two, click a few things and be downloading a 1.2gbyte DVDRip from yesterday at 90kbyte/sec right now ... Sure, it is pirated, but I the movie industry doesn't offer me that service. And again, while DVD is great, the DivX 2mbit/sec Rip does just fine in most cases. With a knowledgable encoder, you even get some darn good sound out of the whole thing (sometimes AC5.1, even). It is not yet DVD, but I for one can't tell the difference on a 21" monitor and a decent sound system hooked up to it.
... Napster-like file-sharing services exist today, and tomorrow they will actually be the quality of Napster (in terms of speed) ... Waiting 2 hours for a movie is no holdup for most people, after all, you can let it run overnight ...
... I probably _would_ have paid something to get some decent music from the industry. Nowadays, I'll have to ask myself : "why ?" As you pointed out, every schmoe can encode something ... Some people are actually pretty good at it. I can choose whether I'll go for the 128kbit schmoe encode or get the high-quality, specially tuned, vbr ~220kbit mp3 with well-made id3tags ... Now if the industry had gotten their act together, _they_ would be providing that by now. Instead, they pissed me off. Severely. To the point where I won't entrust them with my CC-number, ever. If my favourite artist provides the means to pay him on his webpage, I will do that gladly and freely. But no, sorry, I won't buy his CD. It's just $.20 for him anyway. They pissed me off, and people who piss me off obviously don't want my business.
...
:)
One thing though -- while DVDs surely are of excellent quality, downloading movies is indeed feasible. With the birth of broadband (and corporations are pushing that without end
And I would pay for this service. Say I can go to www.something.com, log in, pay them $3-$5, click on download and get guaranteed speeds and some extra value (like background information, still images, etc.), I'd be there pretty often.
The movie industry is in more trouble than you think once broadband is virtually ubiquitious (in the US, at least, as much as that hurts to say) in both directions
As for music
Besides, getting an MP3 is actually easier for me, since most of my favourite music just isn't to be found in any of the stores I've been to. It just isn't there. Even the more-established groups take a week or two to get there -- compare that to firing up AudioGalaxy, typing in the name, enter, download, listen
I hope the two blurbs above at least make _some_ sense. I'm a little tired, but knowing that nobody's going to read this after the story disappears from the frontpage anyway, I thought it to be in order to post now
Pleas forgif my Englisch pleese, haven't been practicing it much, lately.
Having heard a LOT about this kind of system, I wonder why nobody tried to make usable and convenient system for this yet ... Sure, there are some forays into this topic (Amazon, various tip jars), but nothing that would fit under convenient, easy, no BS, 3% max deducted, consumer- and site-oriented.
./ and various other sites right this minute IF there was a convenient, easy, hassle-free way. There isn't.
I'd shell out a buck or two to
Maybe PayPal could investigate doing something like this SOME time. They seem to have a nice infrastructure (although I do miss direct wire transfers, which are a convenient way for me to transfer money (remember, this is Europe) and even allows me to automate the process).
If you keep asking whether I would do something you will never find out whether I actually will. Especially not on SlashDot. Give it a try, maybe give it some backing, if it doesn't work out, improve your concept. People are good. Usually. They are lazy, too.
Hmm ... If they don't want to sell me the whole bandwidth all the time, they should just FORCE a traffic limit. Say, 5gbyte. That way I _know_ what I'm dealing with (in Germany, some providers do this -- you pay $10 for DSL and 500meg of Traffic and some cents per mb over that limit). If they want to have a package for casual use, set the traffic limit low and the bandwidth as high as you want (we want to surf fast, right ?) ...
... The upstream is used for different things (Napster, AudioGalaxy, anybody ? Sharing the video you just rendered with a friend ? God forbid, host your homepage ?), and the downstream is quickly filled up as well (why wait for usenet posts when you can have 'em on your local server ? What's that ? A 192kbit/sec MP3 Radio ? Those adcritic videos look nice. Leech the server dry. Err. High Volume Mailing lists (linux-kernel-volume-like) ? And don't forget that dose of (non-)streaming video ... Anyway, my bw average for the last 3 weeks is 630kbit/sec in. Friends's a little lower, but still > 50%)
But if you sell me a DSL line that is advertised as "768kbit/128kbit" and no traffic limit (!), then it's is f**king well my business what I do with the bandwidth I receive (maybe excluding reselling, but that's it).
As for your calculations : I have a few friends who have DSL like me. We have that above package (big surprise, we just _have_ that one DSL package in here), and I can tell you that the average use is clearly above 50%
In conclusion, provide what you advertise. Not what you think I will do, but you advertise.
Technically this is cool, but I wouldn't want to put any capital in it ...
;-)
... Basically, they are either new or they suck. And if you want them _not_ to suck, you have to pay some decent money ... ($8 if you want to transfer 3gbytes -- less than a decent-quality mpeg2 fulltime movie (streamload.com)). Add to that the processing and man power ... Big numbers. Way too big for me.
... That would be viable. Still some coding to do, but viable ... And in the times of broadband internet, it doesn't really concern me whether the movie comes in at a few mbit/sec -- Most likely the encoder couldn't keep up with the full data rate, anyway).
What are you going to pay for this service ? It's currently not possible to do this for free (just think about the HUUUUGE amount of bandwidth it would take -- not even beginning to think of the processing power required to serve a decent amount of people). If it's $2/2 hour movie I might even consider it. If the quality is good and I get to say _exactly_ what the file has to look like. If it's more along the lines of $20, well, screw you
Just look at all those disk-space providers (freediskspace, streamload, idrive, etc.)
In conclusion : a cool idea, bad prospects for my money. I'd rather have something like a rencod'o'matic to which I feed an URL and a desired format and it encodes it for me on my _own_ computer/server
Well ... Talk about not thinking for a few minutes and then just leaving the darn thing on :)
... I redownloaded it with the linux box, same result. Ah well. 34:31 Minutes in 1.1gig, what do you expect :)
Of course I could just have fired up command line ftp or far or ncftp/cygwin or whatever it is that I would have needed, but since the process was already started, why not play Russian Roulette with IE ?
The file is not really watcheable on Windows, either (or maybe it's the stream ?) -- lots of artifacts (sound and video-wise) here
Nice try. Good thing that most JavaScript is filtered before it even hits Windows, and IE does not have anything even remotely scripted turned on :-)
;)
Next time, give me con/con, will ya ? Or maybe just something _really_ nasty. Like a satellite picture of my home or smth. Be creative.
Hmm ... I'm now 300meg into the file with *gasp* Internet Explorer ... Opera crashed on first sight of that thing, and I my Linux box doesn't have a gig free ... Maybe I _should_ finally compile wget for Windoze :-)
At least they don't just die
... the wondrous internet brings us all the ads from the superbowl, delivered directly into our homes
Well ... It would probably be expensive, but it would give them a slight edge over the competition, or even just let them catch up with the competition ... Every Webmail service I use here has SSL encryption on both HTTP and POP ... Sure, they spent some money for some SSL equipment, but they also get the "good" press ...
...
...
If Yahoo was to offer SSL and _decent_ encryption, I think the slashdot crowd wouldn't bash it as much as it apparently does here
Horribly expensive is relative. Once it is avaiable everywhere else, they will have to switch, too. Not to do so would be more expensive in the long run since they'd loose customers
While I like this idea and really would like it to be practiced, it will never happen. Thieves _will_ outnumber the honest users. Sure, for most people $3-$6 is nothing compared to the good music they get, but the vast paying crowd are not the wealthy middle class workers. Go look how Pokemon sells and you know where the money is. And those kids sure don't have any reason to pay that money ... ("why mom, I downloaded it, it's mine")
"who REALLY needs to fetch their email faster than 128kbps"
... Not everybody is, but those who are want their conn to be able to keep up with the steady flow of mails coming in without overloading their POP3-box.
/ever/ thought of eMail as being low throughput ? Or even low priority ? High delay may be acceptable if the bandwidth keeps (dont go too high or your kernel TCP buffers will choke).
;->
(did you leave out news on purpose ?)
Uhmm. Are you THIS naive ? Yes, I dont care how much DELAY I have on my eMail connection (up to a point -- 1500ms is my pers. max), but 128kbps just doesnt cut it. Even if you DONT have a business, 128kbps can be very restricting.
If a friend sends me his birthday pictures in eMail (and he makes LOTS of those), and I get a neat array of 20 mails 2meg each, I EXPECT to be served faster than 128kbps if my pipe allows it. This is one extreme. Another would be that youre subscribed to a few high volume mailinglists (say, securityfocus.*, and a few groups on onelist or egroups)
Who
As for news being low bandwidth -- uhm. Please. They may be high latency and low priority, but theyre not low throughput. Right now Im getting fed news 24/7. If I had more bandwidth, Id still be fed news 24/7. Even if you only subscribe to a few binary groups you can get that much -- let alone a few high volume groups. And no, not only pr0n, although thats why many people get DSL these days
Being a business has nothing to do with the need of bandwidth, though. I could saturate a T3 without being a business if I wanted to. If I pay for 384kbit/sec, I damn well know why I pay for it -- otherwise an ISDN link or even an analog link would just be fine for me.
ipchains -A input -i eth0 -p tcp -y -j DENY -l ipchains -I input -p tcp --dport ssh -j ACCEPT
You could also block UDP Ports from 1-1024 for good measure :
ipchains -A input -i eth0 -p udp --dport 1:1024 -j DENY
Of course youd need to adjust eth0 to the interface youre going to use.
This is just some basic port filtering. If your SSH server is secure (CHECK!), this is perfect. If you want to further secure the box in order to leave services open and not feel bad about it, youll have to do a lot more, most of it common-sense, some of it non-trivial ;-)
You might also want to Block some ICMP traffic if youre truely paranoid (does anybody need to ping you ? no ? turn it off ;-), or even go as far as rate limiting ingress and egress traffic with tc (from iproute2) to suit your needs.
Of course, putting a firewall in front of your machine is ALWAYS a good idea. A 486 is WELL able to handle the load of a Cable Modem. Do a MINIMUM install of your secure Free System of choice (that is, OpenBSD or Linux), set up NAT and the rules above, and churn away on the net. Do NOT enable anything else on that box, as it would defeat the purpose. No extra services, no nothing. Of course you might use some proxies, but if you do, make absolutely sure theyre attached only to the interface on your LAN and not to your cable modem. Proxies may either add to or decrease security, depending on how you deploy them. My setup is NAT + daisychained Junkbuster & Squid.
Hope this helps a little. Generally, just follow common sense and dont leave ANY ports open that you dont trust completely.
He probably is ...
But apart from this, how does Comcast think to actually enforce this ? I mean, come on, everybody with some knowledge of ipchains, squid, and maybe a generic ip proxy will be able to masquerade that he/shes masquerading his/her traffic. Out of the box masquerading is easily detectable (who seriously uses ports upwards of 60000 ?), but with some precaution you can make it seem to be one computer, running MSIE if you want.
Oh, and how the heck would they tell a VPN protocol from http, provided one uses a sufficiently encrypted connection (ssh will do, so will any ssl-based app). Everybody who runs VPNs without encryption should be shot on the spot anyway. Or take out the P from VPN.
Can you believe the "Deutsche Telekom" (the phone company in Germany holding the monopoly to local lines and thus flatrates) actually prohibits this exact same behavior on even analog connections ? As if that would make any difference at all (they dont sell you IPs, theyre dynamic anyway), but what do you expect from monopolies.
This would not help at all. The subnets the attacks came from are most likely NOT the ones of the attacker -- just the ones of some sorry people who have an open socks, Back Orifice, Netbus, or any other number of trojans installed on their hdd and are not aware of it.
:-)
Sadly, any script-kiddy knows about it. And they usually know how to daisychain those hosts to evade getting caught.
Im sad Kuro5hin is down -- I really liked being there. The discussions were interesting, the atmosphere great, and the focus just amazed me
Who says those pop-culture NGs are worthless ? Surely they are only by your standards, but there seem to be plenty of people that enjoy posting and reading there. I agree that the Usenet is a fine tool for technical questions, nevertheless it is also a fine tool for current moods, socializing, and plain fun.
...)
The privacy issue is there, but theres no easy solution. How do you decide what NGs are tech and which are not ? Are all those politics NGs tech ?
If people post things and do NOT realize that they are posting to a PUBLIC forum, then its their fault. I for one know that when I post to usenet, Im bound to be archived (and to get tons of spam). If Joe Normal thinks he is untraceable (because his eMail address is Joe.Normal2@aol.com), then its really his fault.
The flame you cited is a problem inherent to the system. Of course it is tasteless, but you could have done the VERY SAME THING if that person posted his quesion a few months back instead of a few years. If you are posting sensitive material, you can always use one of the countless "anonymous" remailers.
Yes, Usenet IS a celebration of free expression. It is not anonymous and has never been, however. If you want something not to be associated with your name, just post it anonymously or under a specific identity you created on the net. Im for privacy, but Im not for regulating PUBLIC forums because of it (or rather because some people think that they ARE private
Ok, it is a nice idea of Hamburg to do this. It just isnt anything thats supposed to be on Slashdot (IMHO). We have LOTS of providers that dont charge a monthly fee, give you lots of POP3-Boxes and WebSpace. You dont even need to register (thats Internet by Call). Problem is that it costs extraordinary amounts of money to actually call them. Local calls arent free here, theyre running at $.05 a minute during the day. (which is ugly, considering that every competitor of the FINE company offering this service (DTAG) have to use (and pay for) those lines, too. Research a little, next time. Now, if a city offered internet for FREE, then it would be news. Internet for the cost of a phone call is just too darn expensive.
--mxs
Hmm ? I wouldnt quite state it that way. The CPU and networking ARE in fact fast enough
The servers holding the maps themselves wont need that much information. Maybe some adjacent map-pointers to go to if you enter this or that door. The 'subway' system would take care of the rest (subway = just pass user credentials along to another server/process). Theres been a lot of research into this already and also some products which implement some kind of it (http://www.activeworlds.com).
One could also play with dynamic maps for the frontier maps. If its a frontier and there is nothing notable in it, well, generate a seed for it and let the client create a huge map for it (yes, I know making
The server doesnt need to get too much information, as long as no change to the environment is made or another person enters the scene. Then we have to 'localize' the map to the point of interaction and get back to 'normal' network traffic again. Difficult but feasible.
Dynamic distributed systems are possible. As a matter of fact, youre using one right now. What else is the internet ?
-- mxs