Ok you want security, its going to cost you $1000 an hour. You don' like it, take a fsck hike cause some teenager is going to take you down. Sure my billable rate seems high but my sites don't get hacked (well the real old one does from time to time but hey its a damn old box {10+ yrs} and its like the pet you can't let be put to sleep).
The scary thing is there are people much better than me out there for securing boxes. Are you one? If so why they he0x6c0x6c aren't you asking for your fair share?
The marketteers that run this crud are making billions.
Re:Imminent death of Usenet Again!
on
Is Usenet Dying?
·
· Score: 1
Just a more historical footnote. The Lotus Notes system looks like it was copied from a concept called "notes" developed by some school in Chicago that was running back in '85.
Imminent death of Usenet Again!
on
Is Usenet Dying?
·
· Score: 1
So this is going to happen again... Funny, It seems to have managed to survive the last 'Imminent death of Usenet'.
Sure usenet has problems but to avoid thouse, I run my own news server. It gets rid of the problems of heaps of nonsense. I've got two very good feeders that spam filter before they send me news and I've got 4 feeds that basicly don't talk to anyone else. Since they are small they don't spam much and when they do, the clueless user is Located, Isolated and Eliminated.
I only run about 450 groups. I don't do binary groups at all and only a handful of alt.*. My ranking is sometimes in the 3k->4k range. [i'm looking for a good peer in.au]
I don't think usenet is going off to the grave anytime soon. Notes, now thats dead. (for the/. newbies: I'm talking about the one time chalanger to B news, not the other thing that should be dead too)
I recently turned off the spam filters and I was supprised that I don't get more junk. I'm getting about 4 messages a day and I've been posting using the same email address since mid 95.
The US has designed engines since the Saturn V days. They just never got anywhere. There was a cool nuke based one that was even test fired but it was designed by a completely different set of now retired Germans. We need to point out to congress that the people who put the first man on the moon are rapidly taking a huge amount of information to their graves. I've meet a number of these men and the stories they tell are great. I remember having a long talk about the space suit by the head of life support for the Apollo program where he was telling me the details about some of the space suits that is still considered secret beause the Rusians haven't figured something out. I've been told that most of the Apollo documents no longer exist.
Keep in mind NASA is still running the Jet Propulsion Laboratory which has lead the way in ummm... wait a sec they don't don't do jet propulstion research but they did do lots of other cool things like perl.
First of all they were FREE in 1994. There were free till sometime after july 1995.
Back then they were all owned by the US goverments National Science Foundation. I suspect that the law still counts them as US property that is licensed to the users (which they can transfer). Now if I sign a long term lease with the US goverment for a house in Miami (they did end up with a few) and I release it for more, I'm obligated to refund all but %25 becuase there are federal laws that say the most proffit you can make while dealing with the goverment is 25%.
If this guy had a problem with domain name hording, he could send a check for a large sum of money to the NSF via a congress-critter. That would end domain name squatting real qucik.
But if its found and can recive data it may be possable to reprogram it to transmit back in a different way based on the assumption that there is massive computer power to decode its messages.
I read that someone is doing des in about 28 cycles using a MMX based hack. Let see here: add about 50 cycles to generate the next key(assume its ascii folded to 40 bits). Add in 22 more cycles to check to see if the result needs to be looked at. That means I've got 256 sets of 2 billion iterations of an inner loop of 100 cycles. One of those nice 1 trillion cycle per second K7's on ice and it takes how long to brute force this? Triple des has problems that make its key size much less than 3 times des.
One thing that lots of people are doing these days is putting hash sigs outside of the encrypted packet. This is just stupid because if the encrypted packet is small enough, you may not need to decrypt it. Just guess at the data till you get the same sig (this generaly is more work that just cracking des)
If the NSA is one step ahead in the prime generation game (and they have paid hundreds of billions to get there) then they can crack the 1024 bit keys with ease. If you use PGP and you don't pick a good prime, you generate an additional 2 keys for every factor your psuedo-prime has. Since my pc isn't going to generate a real 512 bit prime, I don't know how many other keys will unlock my messages.
AIX sucked. It just flat out it sucked. It was a result of AT&T and Sun hopping in bed together and IBM/DEC/HP had to do something. The result was an ill-concieved inbreed os. Sun had a very strong BSD based unix and AT&T had System V R3 (which had a single bsd feature called vi added after R2). Sys V was rock solid. It never went down (its close kin is still running many phone switches) but it was useless if you need a user interface of any kind (and I'm not even talking about the level requireed to run X)
So why is IBM going with Linux? They don't have a real unix and they need one. Sun has a real unix and doesn't need one.
Keep in mind the Bill Joy (co founder of sun, now a VP of some sort) was into writing "free" unix software early in the game. He wrote vi as well as lots of other things including some of the kernel bits.
Personaly I think that sun sys V sucks compared to the bsd stuff but once they went down that road, there was no going back. It was the first of a long line of stupid things they've done.
Anyone know why they took a 64 bit bus that ran well on a 32 bit cpu (sbus) and replaced it with a 32 bit bus (pci) that runs on a 64 bit cpu? I guess they like to see their expensive boxes die in preformace reviews so they can save a few bucks buy putting crap components in my servers...
What has happened: 1) Gcc makes code for the beast 2) its well documented. (and it runs a mips CPU) 3) its got a damn fast coprocessor (that no one is using in any game) 4) bung makes a device that lets you copy code to its "rom" image. A guy in.ru has a design to roll your own roms. 5) www.dextrose.com exists
What needs to happen: 1) someone needs to build a decent memory card for the silly thing. It uses rambus. hint take a Pelican expansion pack (it uses 2 2mb devices) and replace its rdram with ones out of Nintendos rampack and fix the heat problem) 2) a decent HOWTO to build gcc for this thing. 3) undo the nintendo lawsuit against Bung who makes a device to run your own code on the box. 4) write a network driver to talk over the controller ports 5) someone with more time and a bit of interest should check out a simple page with some notes about coding on the N64
Keep in mind that at upto 200m instructions per sec the thing isn't a slow box for its price.
A stock option is simply the right to buy or sell stock at a fixed price in the future. They started long ago in Holland as an attempt to bring some stability to the tulip bulb business.
10 years ago a start up would often give an employee stock options because of the cash flow issues of giving them money. To keep the person around they would offten require that they stay with the company a number of years (as much as 10).
In todays world of rocket like IPO's it seems that it is no longer the incentive it once was. Compaines can get cash qucikly and don't have the problem of cash flow 2 years into a project.
With one start up we divided the value of the company by the number of hours worked. At one time I had about 10% of the company but years after I left and its worth millions, my % is so small I don't even want to think about it. I was in a better position by walking away from it. Sure I lost big on paper but I got to eat in the meantime.
I guess my only advice is don't take options in leu of decent pay. Look at options as an additioanl incentive that just might make you rich. I've meet people worth hundreds of millions on paper because of their options (that they could not sell) but are broke because they spent like millionares and the stock fell. Don't get caught up in that trap.
The major points to web hosting is the DNS and http hosting side of it.
You must have several dns servers. This means you must have three working at all times on at least two diffeent networks so when one dies, you've still got at least one left. This should have different MX records to stash your mail on a nice mailq somewhere till you get back on line.
Telsta lost a major router that the main reverse dns for all of 203.*.*.* was on. Guess what that did to email all over oz-- telstra's bigpond internet service was deleteing messages because it couldn't reverse lookup addresses and assumed it was spam. Its nice when all your dns servers are on the same side of one router.
The next is the http hosts.... Web hosting compaines are everywhere but I run my own box. It may be on a slow modem link but I'm going to run my own server. If I need (or want) the speed, I'll mirror it on one or two other servers near MAE-(east|west). Its easy to build a cgi on a server to basicly webcopy an entire site so the main site only needs to very little hosting.
So you've got the worlds best site and need to up no matter what so what do you do? 1) set up your source site 2) set up your development/stage site (you don't work on the live one do you) 3) set up your dns servers (at least two plus your main site which is the "master" and you don't tell the nic about it) 4)get an account on one of the big players. Don't let them dns for you. Don't let them do email. They are only there for hosting. 5) copy your site to big site and wait for the hits. 6) have a plan in place to deal with your big site going away.
So what about databases? Run them on the big server and have it send you changes every 15 minutes (or what ever you can afford to lose) to your source site. That way your "offical site" is someplace safe under your full control but a very good copy is off somewhere running fast with a big pipe.
Then there are all the security issues but I think thats a different/. discussion...
For thouse that care... web.abnormal.com is a sparc 1 with 24m on a T1 somewhere in KCMO. www.abnormal.com usualy points to three servers including the main server and mirrors at jumpline.com and cqhost.com. Jumpline is running some sort of smp beast that has lots of bandwidth which I pay $15/mo for. I've been having problems with cqhost so they are out of the loop for now. Dns is done by the main server, an isp in Oklahoma, and one in the bay area. I've got current zone backups on two other servers ready to roll should I need it as well as a backup of the complete site here in oz. And this is only a personal site.
This might just get me back into writting scripts for the kiddies.
If 62% of fortune 500 got hit, whats with the other 38% that didn't but were targets? Maybe the Reno just wants a safe area where people don't need to lock their front door or even have one.
I know what they do with the cash. They buy custom made clothes and beach front property. They are living the high life off your donations...
The next time your in Melbourne Australia (you are going to vist arn't you?--it summer here now-hint, hint) go to the Penguin Parade on Phillip Island and you can see what they do. Just bring lots of warm clothes (think 20mph+ winds all the way from antartica) and don't bring a camera since they don't allow them(the flash blinds the birds)
Pet Penguins are easy to take care of but like large dogs you need a big space to keep them in. They need some nice bushy area to nest in and they also need a rather large salt water swimming hole that needs to be stocked with little fish. I recomend set up a small area near the beach for them next to the pacific ocean.
Can you think of any better way to get one heck of a nice grant than to be the only country in the world to have lots of major problems with y2k? I bet the US state dept is currently offering them lots of aid. Looks like Gambian is in for an inrush of new funds.
Or you could see what havoc it causes... Aparently it confuses IE. I don't see this as a problem. Also isn't it mentioned in one of the RFCs that this is going to happen so the clients must be able to deal with it?
I run a very old and tired server thats sitting of a T3 somewhere in KC (I've been told -- its been two years since I've seen the box) and its mirrored from time to time on two servers on big fast networks. Currenly its CQhost and Jumpline. I've never had a problem with Jumpline but CQhost isn't great. They both insist on doing dns for me (which isn't going to happen, I've got 5 dns servers I control on 4 different networks). As a result of that mess, if they send me email it sits on their server where I never see it. These people all need a standard "web hosting only" package. I don't want there server sending back the name www.abnormal.com because I want to be able to tweek things to specifc hosts based on bandwidth and demand.
Why did I get the box in the first place? It because I'm better at running boxes in my sleep than most isps. My mail and news always works and I maintain full control... if one of the jokers goes down, I just take them out of my dns and find a new mirror if I need to. Its not like I get that much traffic I just like having access to more Internet bandwidth for my personal home page than the entire country of Australia.
I guess in the end, you've got to have two servers if you want to be 24x7.
There is at least one problem in Melbourne Australia... Optus Cable and Wireless is down now as far as I can tell and its 1:55am local time. I can't get a connection to or from my mobile phone. Early in the night it did seem quite busy but now its just a mix between being dead and a noise recording. It even stoped sending out the message saying which tower the phone was reciving
So if your counting on mobile as a backup...forget it.
So my old sparc is just a few years behind.... but what a timezone offset. Well, its not sunos's fault, its that damn copy of elm compiled back in 1996. I am wondering about the old copy of innd which could have a few of these kinds of problems as well. Is it too late to start y2k fixes? If it is, I'll be heading down to the local pub to have a brew to two...
I always had a problem with the eletist attitude caused by morse code. I know there are several good reasons for it and I still use it (to id navigation aids) but for a huge part of the spectrum, its just a waste. I wanted to be a ham to deal with digital radio but I didn't meet the code requirement. It was enough to get me out of RF and analog completely.
The bit about the international treaty is true but there are a number of countries that do not require any CW test at all so it can't be that importaint to anyone (other than the old mens club)
I know a few of old hams that love CW (I used to know a lot). Those guys did a great deal for the whole radio and electronics business and I think that some of them deserve that special area to use as long as they can. Sure they have big egos and don't like newbies but I can respect that -- if they are good.
And on a typical/. note... There is a company in Lynchburg VA that has a patent on a single-wire transmission protocol...its simply more code over a wire. It works at 5 wpm or 50000 wpm. Its the only case I know of where the invenotor would argue that patents are getting out of hand and that it should not have been accepted by the patent office.
And now (20000101 00:33) it looks like Victoria Aus won't been needing CW to tell the rest of the world what went wrong...
They may be able to claim copyright on the set of keys or the datatables used in the code if they were lifted from any program. What needs to happen now is someone needs to generate a new way of finding and storing keys as well as building the needed table.
Slashdot Mirror
Ok you want security, its going to cost you $1000 an hour. You don' like it, take a fsck hike cause some teenager is going to take you down. Sure my billable rate seems high but my sites don't get hacked (well the real old one does from time to time but hey its a damn old box {10+ yrs} and its like the pet you can't let be put to sleep).
The scary thing is there are people much better than me out there for securing boxes. Are you one? If so why they he0x6c0x6c aren't you asking for your fair share?
The marketteers that run this crud are making billions.
Just a more historical footnote. The Lotus Notes system looks like it was copied from a concept called "notes" developed by some school in Chicago that was running back in '85.
So this is going to happen again...
.au]
/. newbies: I'm talking about the one time chalanger to B news, not the other thing that should be dead too)
Funny, It seems to have managed to survive the last 'Imminent death of Usenet'.
Sure usenet has problems but to avoid thouse, I run my own news server. It gets rid of the problems of heaps of nonsense. I've got two very good feeders that spam filter before they send me news and I've got 4 feeds that basicly don't talk to anyone else. Since they are small they don't spam much and when they do, the clueless user is Located, Isolated and Eliminated.
I only run about 450 groups. I don't do binary groups at all and only a handful of alt.*. My ranking is sometimes in the 3k->4k range. [i'm looking for a good peer in
I don't think usenet is going off to the grave anytime soon. Notes, now thats dead. (for the
I recently turned off the spam filters and I was supprised that I don't get more junk. I'm getting about 4 messages a day and I've been posting using the same email address since mid 95.
The US has designed engines since the Saturn V days. They just never got anywhere. There was a cool nuke based one that was even test fired but it was designed by a completely different set of now retired Germans. We need to point out to congress that the people who put the first man on the moon are rapidly taking a huge amount of information to their graves. I've meet a number of these men and the stories they tell are great. I remember having a long talk about the space suit by the head of life support for the Apollo program where he was telling me the details about some of the space suits that is still considered secret beause the Rusians haven't figured something out. I've been told that most of the Apollo documents no longer exist.
Keep in mind NASA is still running the Jet Propulsion Laboratory which has lead the way in ummm... wait a sec they don't don't do jet propulstion research but they did do lots of other cool things like perl.
A Saturn V launch was a damn impressive sight.
But at least the judge ponted out weaknesses that can be used next time. Keep in mind that he didn't need to do that.
If you don't like what the law says, check your suit, call your congress critter and make an appointment to talk to them.
First of all they were FREE in 1994. There were free till sometime after july 1995.
Back then they were all owned by the US goverments National Science Foundation. I suspect that the law still counts them as US property that is licensed to the users (which they can transfer). Now if I sign a long term lease with the US goverment for a house in Miami (they did end up with a few) and I release it for more, I'm obligated to refund all but %25 becuase there are federal laws that say the most proffit you can make while dealing with the goverment is 25%.
If this guy had a problem with domain name hording, he could send a check for a large sum of money to the NSF via a congress-critter. That would end domain name squatting real qucik.
But if its found and can recive data it may be possable to reprogram it to transmit back in a different way based on the assumption that there is massive computer power to decode its messages.
I read that someone is doing des in about 28 cycles using a MMX based hack. Let see here:
add about 50 cycles to generate the next key(assume its ascii folded to 40 bits). Add in 22 more cycles to check to see if the result needs to be looked at. That means I've got 256 sets of 2 billion iterations of an inner loop of 100 cycles. One of those nice 1 trillion cycle per second K7's on ice and it takes how long to brute force this? Triple des has problems that make its key size much less than 3 times des.
One thing that lots of people are doing these days is putting hash sigs outside of the encrypted packet. This is just stupid because if the encrypted packet is small enough, you may not need to decrypt it. Just guess at the data till you get the same sig (this generaly is more work that just cracking des)
If the NSA is one step ahead in the prime generation game (and they have paid hundreds of billions to get there) then they can crack the 1024 bit keys with ease. If you use PGP and you don't pick a good prime, you generate an additional 2 keys for every factor your psuedo-prime has. Since my pc isn't going to generate a real 512 bit prime, I don't know how many other keys will unlock my messages.
Maybe an ad in a paper in Norway could be helpful...
...
maybe something like:
You can play your DVD's on equipment made in:
Japan, Tiawan, Korea, USA, Germany,
You can not play your DVD's on software written in Norway thanks to the US movie industry.
[big picture of tux here]
AIX sucked. It just flat out it sucked. It was a result of AT&T and Sun hopping in bed together and IBM/DEC/HP had to do something. The result was an ill-concieved inbreed os. Sun had a very strong BSD based unix and AT&T had System V R3 (which had a single bsd feature called vi added after R2). Sys V was rock solid. It never went down (its close kin is still running many phone switches) but it was useless if you need a user interface of any kind (and I'm not even talking about the level requireed to run X)
So why is IBM going with Linux? They don't have a real unix and they need one. Sun has a real unix and doesn't need one.
Keep in mind the Bill Joy (co founder of sun, now a VP of some sort) was into writing "free" unix software early in the game. He wrote vi as well as lots of other things including some of the kernel bits.
Personaly I think that sun sys V sucks compared to the bsd stuff but once they went down that road, there was no going back. It was the first of a long line of stupid things they've done.
Anyone know why they took a 64 bit bus that ran well on a 32 bit cpu (sbus) and replaced it with a 32 bit bus (pci) that runs on a 64 bit cpu? I guess they like to see their expensive boxes die in preformace reviews so they can save a few bucks buy putting crap components in my servers...
This has been on my projects list for years...
.ru has a design to roll your own roms.
What has happened:
1) Gcc makes code for the beast
2) its well documented. (and it runs a mips CPU)
3) its got a damn fast coprocessor (that no one is using in any game)
4) bung makes a device that lets you copy code to its "rom" image. A guy in
5) www.dextrose.com exists
What needs to happen:
1) someone needs to build a decent memory card for the silly thing. It uses rambus. hint take a Pelican expansion pack (it uses 2 2mb devices) and replace its rdram with ones out of Nintendos rampack and fix the heat problem)
2) a decent HOWTO to build gcc for this thing.
3) undo the nintendo lawsuit against Bung who makes a device to run your own code on the box.
4) write a network driver to talk over the controller ports
5) someone with more time and a bit of interest
should check out a simple page with some notes about coding on the N64
Keep in mind that at upto 200m instructions per sec the thing isn't a slow box for its price.
Think the B-word and a room full of N64's...
A stock option is simply the right to buy or sell stock at a fixed price in the future. They started long ago in Holland as an attempt to bring some stability to the tulip bulb business.
10 years ago a start up would often give an employee stock options because of the cash flow issues of giving them money. To keep the person around they would offten require that they stay with the company a number of years (as much as 10).
In todays world of rocket like IPO's it seems that it is no longer the incentive it once was. Compaines can get cash qucikly and don't have the problem of cash flow 2 years into a project.
With one start up we divided the value of the company by the number of hours worked. At one time I had about 10% of the company but years after I left and its worth millions, my % is so small I don't even want to think about it. I was in a better position by walking away from it. Sure I lost big on paper but I got to eat in the meantime.
I guess my only advice is don't take options in leu of decent pay. Look at options as an additioanl incentive that just might make you rich. I've meet people worth hundreds of millions on paper because of their options (that they could not sell) but are broke because they spent like millionares and the stock fell. Don't get caught up in that trap.
The major points to web hosting is the DNS and http hosting side of it.
/. discussion...
You must have several dns servers. This means you must have three working at all times on at least two diffeent networks so when one dies, you've still got at least one left. This should have different MX records to stash your mail on a nice mailq somewhere till you get back on line.
Telsta lost a major router that the main reverse dns for all of 203.*.*.* was on. Guess what that did to email all over oz-- telstra's bigpond internet service was deleteing messages because it couldn't reverse lookup addresses and assumed it was spam. Its nice when all your dns servers are on the same side of one router.
The next is the http hosts....
Web hosting compaines are everywhere but I run my own box. It may be on a slow modem link but I'm going to run my own server. If I need (or want) the speed, I'll mirror it on one or two other servers near MAE-(east|west). Its easy to build a cgi on a server to basicly webcopy an entire site so the main site only needs to very little hosting.
So you've got the worlds best site and need to up no matter what so what do you do?
1) set up your source site
2) set up your development/stage site (you don't work on the live one do you)
3) set up your dns servers (at least two plus your main site which is the "master" and you don't tell the nic about it)
4)get an account on one of the big players. Don't let them dns for you. Don't let them do email. They are only there for hosting.
5) copy your site to big site and wait for the hits.
6) have a plan in place to deal with your big site going away.
So what about databases?
Run them on the big server and have it send you changes every 15 minutes (or what ever you can afford to lose) to your source site. That way your "offical site" is someplace safe under your full control but a very good copy is off somewhere running fast with a big pipe.
Then there are all the security issues but I think thats a different
For thouse that care...
web.abnormal.com is a sparc 1 with 24m on a T1 somewhere in KCMO. www.abnormal.com usualy points to three servers including the main server and mirrors at jumpline.com and cqhost.com. Jumpline is running some sort of smp beast that has lots of bandwidth which I pay $15/mo for. I've been having problems with cqhost so they are out of the loop for now. Dns is done by the main server, an isp in Oklahoma, and one in the bay area. I've got current zone backups on two other servers ready to roll should I need it as well as a backup of the complete site here in oz. And this is only a personal site.
This might just get me back into writting scripts for the kiddies.
If 62% of fortune 500 got hit, whats with the other 38% that didn't but were targets? Maybe the Reno just wants a safe area where people don't need to lock their front door or even have one.
I know what they do with the cash. They buy custom made clothes and beach front property. They are living the high life off your donations...
The next time your in Melbourne Australia (you are going to vist arn't you?--it summer here now-hint, hint) go to the Penguin Parade on Phillip Island and you can see what they do. Just bring lots of warm clothes (think 20mph+ winds all the way from antartica) and don't bring a camera since they don't allow them(the flash blinds the birds)
Pet Penguins are easy to take care of but like large dogs you need a big space to keep them in. They need some nice bushy area to nest in and they also need a rather large salt water swimming hole that needs to be stocked with little fish. I recomend set up a small area near the beach for them next to the pacific ocean.
We call it CYA.
Can you think of any better way to get one heck of a nice grant than to be the only country in the world to have lots of major problems with y2k? I bet the US state dept is currently offering them lots of aid. Looks like Gambian is in for an inrush of new funds.
Or you could see what havoc it causes...
Aparently it confuses IE. I don't see this as a problem. Also isn't it mentioned in one of the RFCs that this is going to happen so the clients must be able to deal with it?
I run a very old and tired server thats sitting of a T3 somewhere in KC (I've been told -- its been two years since I've seen the box) and its mirrored from time to time on two servers on big fast networks. Currenly its CQhost and Jumpline.
I've never had a problem with Jumpline but CQhost isn't great. They both insist on doing dns for me (which isn't going to happen, I've got 5 dns servers I control on 4 different networks). As a result of that mess, if they send me email it sits on their server where I never see it. These people all need a standard "web hosting only" package. I don't want there server sending back the name www.abnormal.com because I want to be able to tweek things to specifc hosts based on bandwidth and demand.
Why did I get the box in the first place? It because I'm better at running boxes in my sleep than most isps. My mail and news always works and I maintain full control... if one of the jokers goes down, I just take them out of my dns and find a new mirror if I need to. Its not like I get that much traffic I just like having access to more Internet bandwidth for my personal home page than the entire country of Australia.
I guess in the end, you've got to have two servers if you want to be 24x7.
There is at least one problem in Melbourne Australia...
Optus Cable and Wireless is down now as far as I can tell and its 1:55am local time. I can't get a connection to or from my mobile phone.
Early in the night it did seem quite busy but now its just a mix between being dead and a noise recording. It even stoped sending out the message saying which tower the phone was reciving
So if your counting on mobile as a backup...forget it.
So my old sparc is just a few years behind.... but what a timezone offset. Well, its not sunos's fault, its that damn copy of elm compiled back in 1996. I am wondering about the old copy of innd which could have a few of these kinds of problems as well. Is it too late to start y2k fixes? If it is, I'll be heading down to the local pub to have a brew to two...
Everyone have a happy 19100!
I always had a problem with the eletist attitude caused by morse code. I know there are several good reasons for it and I still use it (to id navigation aids) but for a huge part of the spectrum, its just a waste. I wanted to be a ham to deal with digital radio but I didn't meet the code requirement. It was enough to get me out of RF and analog completely.
/. note... There is a company in Lynchburg VA that has a patent on a single-wire transmission protocol...its simply more code over a wire. It works at 5 wpm or 50000 wpm. Its the only case I know of where the invenotor would argue that patents are getting out of hand and that it should not have been accepted by the patent office.
The bit about the international treaty is true but there are a number of countries that do not require any CW test at all so it can't be that importaint to anyone (other than the old mens club)
I know a few of old hams that love CW (I used to know a lot). Those guys did a great deal for the whole radio and electronics business and I think that some of them deserve that special area to use as long as they can. Sure they have big egos and don't like newbies but I can respect that -- if they are good.
And on a typical
And now (20000101 00:33) it looks like Victoria Aus won't been needing CW to tell the rest of the world what went wrong...
They may be able to claim copyright on the set of keys or the datatables used in the code if they were lifted from any program. What needs to happen now is someone needs to generate a new way of finding and storing keys as well as building the needed table.