I'm interested to know how HavenCo - which will invariably have to connect into a French or, more likely, British ISP - will host material that may be considered illegal in the nation to which the data is travelling to.
Most terms and conditions for ISPs restrict you from undertaking illegal activities and are recognised as being legal in the country that service is obtained from. If you HavenCo host something that is disallowed in the Terms and Conditions you agreed to then claiming International independance is not an option.
About the only way I can see of getting round this is to take bandwidth from a much more liberal country who are more likely to accept the money without questions.
I can't offer much of a view onhow things work in the States, it was bad enough trying to order 5 phone lines and ISDN service along with a phone system from BellSouth Miami while I was safely tucked up in London, but I can give you a bit of an idea of how it works here
We have an incumbent monopolistic telephone supplier, British Telecom, who have a monopoly on most of the local loop. We also have cable operators and a few business oriented suppliers but outside of the large cities BT gets the lions share of the cake.
The are offering a service to ISPs for ADSL. It operates over a customer's existing line and the ISP incurs all costs. BT havedeveloped a 2.4Gbps nationwide ATM network over which all ADSL traffic is carried. When a customer is connected they are connected directly into this, they authenticate and a virtual channel is created allowing a direct IP connection to their chosen ISP. This costs a minimum of £40 per month plus VAT (17.5%) for the ISP per customer. The ISP must also purchase a "Central" link into the ATM network which costs upwards of £5000 per year for a 512kbps link (Currently the Central link is limited to 34Mbps but will be offered soon at 155Mbps and multiple central links may be bought)
This provides a basic 512kbps level of service with a single IP offered over an Alcatel Speed Touch USB modem, which is owned by BT, on a maximum contention ratio of 50:1. For a faster or network capable service you must go to a more expensive service which starts at £68 for 512kbps, a router and 20:1 contention ratio rising to £110 for a 2Mbps variant.
All these prices are before ISP service is applied, all lines have to be BT, the service is not yet available (Launches next month).
To make it even worse all contact, ordering, support has to be provided through the ISP. There is no way of checking with BT regarding faults or resolutions of problems.
I don't know wether this is better than the US way of things or not as I don't have experience of the US DSL situation but I thought some people might like to know whats going on in the other side of the pond. Visit ADSLuk if you're interested in any more details.
without tying a downloaded file into a specific device or set of devices - possibly requiring the owner to have registered keys which are installed on the playback device (something I don't like the idea of because it's very big brother and would include horrendouse licensing deals for close cryptography etc probably bumping up the cost of the music) - I can't see how this problem can go away.
People will always be able to make their own MP3s from CD and the public are not going to stand for the CD format being junked or tampered with too much.
On-line ditribution still takes more time than most people are willing to wait - unless you're one of the lucky few with half a meg+ ADSL or Cable connections. When it's available to everyone then the piracy will dwindle a little - after all why put up with a possibly shonky copy when for a dollar/pound you could have access to the original?
The problem seems to stem from the people. Most people wont pirate media purposefully because they know it is wrong - but when the media is removed from a medium as MP3 is there is nothing tangible for people to feel guilty about. No one sees the traffic or feels the file when Napster is used to transfer the latest Brittany Spears track from one bedroom to another.
Iridium is heading for liquidation after Teledesic's McCaw pulled out of the funding and Nippon Iridium ceased their funding and now ICO Global have suffered a launch failiure on a $100million pound satellite.
Now call me a cynic but doesn't this tell you something about the immediate future of LEO communications? Craig McCaw efectivelly controls all the cards now that Iridium is gone He was there from the beginning in Teledesic and has stepped into ICO effectively making the market a monopoly. In my experience monopolies do nothing to drive prices down so ICO and Teledesic are going to be far from affordable for a good long while - and what if both fail to meet expectations?
I just don't want to see 100 odd LEO birds up in the sky with no one paying for them to be brought to earth safely and their orbits decaying and either disrupting other services or burning up in the outer atmosphere. I saw a quote saying that these satellites are the size of a Volkswagen Beetle so that's quite a lot to burn up safely.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for wireless fast Internet access but I feel strongly that earth based UMTS or 3rd Generation GSM is going to be the way to go - it offers speeds around 3 times that of ISDN while moving and upto 2Mbps while stationary and doesn't need handsets that take us back to the old Motorola brick phones.
I'm not normally one to moan but now even I am starting to wish that the Slashdot originators / moderators would check out FULLY the story they are posting.
A quick read totalling about 30 seconds of the story linked from this/. post proved that this guys main crime had been illegal entry into an ex-employers computer system AND the misappropriation of data.
This is clearly wrong and I agree with the charges against him. If it were innocent joe (Me) who had downloaded the utilities to learn on his own system and to help secure the network at work then yes this would have been a gross injustice but this guy done wrong and he needs to learn his lesson.
Colour - Graphite instead of schoolchild 64Mb Ram - the old iMac had 32Mb Larger Hard drive - 6Gb in place of 4 Better Memory expandability - you can now add 256 more.
It seems like Mr. Metcalfe is just getting into the very typical columnists mindset of "Write what makes headline no matter the truth".
I really cant stand it when people writing for an industry based magazine or journal start to stray from the truth and facts toward tabloid style headline grabbers - in the eyes of the general public it hurts the innocent and in the eyes of the knowledgable it hurts the columnist. No-one gains from any of this - unless of course Box is an AMD/Intel stockholder.....;o)
Rather than all discuss how the people doing this are "eL33t" or just twats with more time on their hands than can be filled wanking how about a discussion of possible preventative measures?
I recently installed a firewall at our company - previously we were reliant on protection of our private network by Microsoft Poxy Server which is by no means a security product. We now use the Sonicwall Pro product which includes a DMZ segement and halfway decent reporting facilities.
One thing I've noticed is how many DoS attacks are attempted by single hosts aimed at our network, we're not a large organisation and we provide services to a pretty small yet worldwide market.
Now I'm not entirely sure how well the firewall would stand upto a proper attack and would like to know what other options are available to me to help avoid this sort of outage.
Of course it's perfectly possible that there are multiple reasons behind this
Microsoft are chasing the right market The market for streaming media - despite what people say - is not currently the workplace since many offices dont allow audio and lets face it video without audio is a little lame. The home market - where there is a burgeoning number of Linux installations - is where the money is going to be in delivering digital media content and Microsoft has a large and growing stake in content providers.
Microsoft are playing the press card Not all of the press is going to be sceptical about this and will happily swallow everything Microsoft gives to them - including the spiel of "We're supporting other operating systems" and "Linux is a true competitor otherwise we wouldn't be supporting it"
Microsoft are trying to stave off court actions by supporting (in a loose sense) the open source arenaNo they're not going to release this as open source but I fully expect to see some reference to the Microsoft Nix Media Player miced in with words such as "Support" and "the" and "open" and "source" and "movement" to try and bluff their way out of having to actually open source things
Sceptic - yes. Happy - sorta, this is needed - especially is web media providers do start to ditch Real for the Microsoft offerings - and who can blame them all the Microsoft stuff is free while Real expect licences for streams. Waiting to see the flames brought on by this - God yeah.;o)
You have to admit that radar has brought about some mighty fine changes in the way we live.
Originally it was just designed to track aircraft but then some bright psark discovered that if you help your hand in front of the radar it got hot - leading to the development of the microwave.
Research into microwaves lead to the satellite bands that are used today to bring me over 200 channels of digital TV and radio and similar bands are used in mobile phones.
So the same technology that keeps my flight on holiday away from other flights on holiday also heats my food, brings me TV and lets me check my email in the middle of a field with nothing more than a phone and a PalmIII - thats progress:O)
Diverging from the original thread (but what Slashdot thread doesn't) it's not necessarily the fault of region coding that brings us discs with fewer extras on but our own BBFC (British Board of Film Classification)
As an example the Region 1 disc of The Matrix has additional sound tracks and a follow the white rabbit interactive element which are not included on the Region 2 disk - not because Warner couldn't do it or didn't have time but because to put these extras on the disk would have meant them having to re-edit each one because the BBFC objected to a scene that included headbutting - something they consider to be 'imitatable behaviour'
Don't get me wrong - I'm not in favour of the Region system but we do have to tackle our own film industry as well as trying to take on the big guys because even if Regions were removed from DVDs the versions on sale in the UK will still be butchered and less featured thanks to the BBFC.
The register contains a little - Article Here but basically it says that the Norwegian police force arrested him and his father on copyright enfringment charges.
His father was arrested because he owns the site on which DeCSS was posted. A mobile phone and two computers were also taken.
It seems to me that the college's case with Napster is more bandwidth than the legality / illegality of the software. Napster has the potential to be a huge bandwidth hog. Admittedly mostly because of people than by design but a bandwidth hog nonetheless.
Looking at the topics raised I noticed everything but star trek - now this may just be me but surely it's more important to discuss all these topics on their own merits before bundling them into one - especially when the AOL/TimeWarner (EMI?) merger has only just raised its head.
Just wondering what Jim thinks the future of emulation in general will be. It seems to me that we're seeing more and more emultion being used in ever more corporate companies - the pinnacle so far being Transmeta's crusoe Intel x86 emulator.
So where are we going - and how far will it take FreeDOS?
Having played with the downloadable version of Corel Linux (I like fast 'net access) I've been very very pleasantly surprised with Corel Linux although disappointed that the deluxe version is not to be available in the UK. I'm wondering when the other linux distro's are going to be able to share in this - so bluntly when are corel going to release their modifications to GPL'd code? M@T:O)
...Intel just wont support it For the moment Firewire seems to be relegated to Macs, Sony laptops and people willing to buy expensive Adaptec (or similar) cards. Intel simply arent interested in Firewire because they believe USB2 will support higer speeds and remain backwards compatible.
I see this as a bit of a shame - Firewire is a good system - it can act peer to peer without needing hubs which USB can not manage. It's being adapted by alot of domestic AV equipment manufacturers - we're starting to see DV decks with Firewire in/out - couple a Digicam and an iMacDV to one of thses and you have amazing picture quality and a nice looking PC to boot.
Personally I dont think that the domestic PC market would be worried about having 2 different busses for use externally - after all we've survived having 2 legacy keyboard connectors 2 (3 if you count the old busports models) different mouse connectors, 2 ize serial sockets, seperate printer sockets and as many SCSI connectors as you can shake a very big stick at - as long as connector A doesn't plug into connector B the consumer will be happy.
What a wonderful tool for your average hack - 10 Slashdot comments from recent times - there is bound to be something in there that can be totally taken out of context and misquoted. I meta moderate daily (that sounds rude now that I come to read it) and sometimes it can be quite funny to read a comment taken out of it's thread - however while funny it also fails to bring the nature of the thread across and can result in a diametrically opposite meaning.
Seriously though - the mainstream media is not necessarily something to worry about as the people who cover the news properly for the people who are truly affected are getting the stories right. It doesn't really matter what Joe Public thinks as he doesn't have any say in the matter - however your (Computer Weekly)/(Insert Foreign Computing Mag Here) [delete as appropriate] reader is more likely to be the sort of person who makes decisions for more than one persons IT needs - these are the people who can affect the market and these are the people who matter.
Not really - if you read through my original piece you'll see I dont say 'if IBM wrote DOS from the ground up' just that it could have been written from the ground up - I'm sure there were more companies than just Microsoft who were looking at writing the OS for the machine.
... someone wrote a similar book about the 50's / 60's changing how invented what - who would be taking Bill Gates' position as evil overlord of the non OSS movement. Would OSS even have started or would it be the over-riding force that defined the computer software market.
I'd like to think that a single change in the early pioneering days would have made a huge change to what we have now - hopefully not for the worst. Let's imagine that Gates, Jobs and the early guys were still there but Gates didn't get the IBM deal and dos was written from the ground up. Who knows - we might not be using Linux now because DOS was written properly and multitasked from day 1! I can't proclaim to have any solid ideas as regards what might have been but it's fun to think about it.
Slashdot Mirror
Most terms and conditions for ISPs restrict you from undertaking illegal activities and are recognised as being legal in the country that service is obtained from. If you HavenCo host something that is disallowed in the Terms and Conditions you agreed to then claiming International independance is not an option.
About the only way I can see of getting round this is to take bandwidth from a much more liberal country who are more likely to accept the money without questions.
Would the new news peer be anything to do with the comments made by Gareth the other day :o) Oh and can you thank Erica for replying to my email.
:o)
M@t
Let's replace her with one of the cows Gateway modelled their boxes after - it's talk just as much sense.
We have an incumbent monopolistic telephone supplier, British Telecom, who have a monopoly on most of the local loop. We also have cable operators and a few business oriented suppliers but outside of the large cities BT gets the lions share of the cake.
The are offering a service to ISPs for ADSL. It operates over a customer's existing line and the ISP incurs all costs. BT havedeveloped a 2.4Gbps nationwide ATM network over which all ADSL traffic is carried. When a customer is connected they are connected directly into this, they authenticate and a virtual channel is created allowing a direct IP connection to their chosen ISP. This costs a minimum of £40 per month plus VAT (17.5%) for the ISP per customer. The ISP must also purchase a "Central" link into the ATM network which costs upwards of £5000 per year for a 512kbps link (Currently the Central link is limited to 34Mbps but will be offered soon at 155Mbps and multiple central links may be bought)
This provides a basic 512kbps level of service with a single IP offered over an Alcatel Speed Touch USB modem, which is owned by BT, on a maximum contention ratio of 50:1. For a faster or network capable service you must go to a more expensive service which starts at £68 for 512kbps, a router and 20:1 contention ratio rising to £110 for a 2Mbps variant.
All these prices are before ISP service is applied, all lines have to be BT, the service is not yet available (Launches next month).
To make it even worse all contact, ordering, support has to be provided through the ISP. There is no way of checking with BT regarding faults or resolutions of problems.
I don't know wether this is better than the US way of things or not as I don't have experience of the US DSL situation but I thought some people might like to know whats going on in the other side of the pond. Visit ADSLuk if you're interested in any more details.
People will always be able to make their own MP3s from CD and the public are not going to stand for the CD format being junked or tampered with too much.
On-line ditribution still takes more time than most people are willing to wait - unless you're one of the lucky few with half a meg+ ADSL or Cable connections. When it's available to everyone then the piracy will dwindle a little - after all why put up with a possibly shonky copy when for a dollar/pound you could have access to the original?
The problem seems to stem from the people. Most people wont pirate media purposefully because they know it is wrong - but when the media is removed from a medium as MP3 is there is nothing tangible for people to feel guilty about. No one sees the traffic or feels the file when Napster is used to transfer the latest Brittany Spears track from one bedroom to another.
So is there a simple answer - I can't see one.
Also I fail to see how providing a link is akin to calling someone stupid, if you want to follow the link it's there, if you don't read the text.
Now call me a cynic but doesn't this tell you something about the immediate future of LEO communications? Craig McCaw efectivelly controls all the cards now that Iridium is gone He was there from the beginning in Teledesic and has stepped into ICO effectively making the market a monopoly. In my experience monopolies do nothing to drive prices down so ICO and Teledesic are going to be far from affordable for a good long while - and what if both fail to meet expectations?
I just don't want to see 100 odd LEO birds up in the sky with no one paying for them to be brought to earth safely and their orbits decaying and either disrupting other services or burning up in the outer atmosphere. I saw a quote saying that these satellites are the size of a Volkswagen Beetle so that's quite a lot to burn up safely.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for wireless fast Internet access but I feel strongly that earth based UMTS or 3rd Generation GSM is going to be the way to go - it offers speeds around 3 times that of ISDN while moving and upto 2Mbps while stationary and doesn't need handsets that take us back to the old Motorola brick phones.
A quick read totalling about 30 seconds of the story linked from this /. post proved that this guys main crime had been illegal entry into an ex-employers computer system AND the misappropriation of data.
This is clearly wrong and I agree with the charges against him. If it were innocent joe (Me) who had downloaded the utilities to learn on his own system and to help secure the network at work then yes this would have been a gross injustice but this guy done wrong and he needs to learn his lesson.
Unless of course Larry has a wicked sense of humour and does like to Troll /. which I most seriously hope is not true.
I know that it's not the usual thing for Slashdot to censor but maybe this would be one case where it is fiscally the right thing to do.
Colour - Graphite instead of schoolchild
64Mb Ram - the old iMac had 32Mb
Larger Hard drive - 6Gb in place of 4
Better Memory expandability - you can now add 256 more.
Nice to see the iBook in the Graphite though - I was never a fan of the iBoox colours - they seemed to suit the iMac more than theiBook.
I really cant stand it when people writing for an industry based magazine or journal start to stray from the truth and facts toward tabloid style headline grabbers - in the eyes of the general public it hurts the innocent and in the eyes of the knowledgable it hurts the columnist. No-one gains from any of this - unless of course Box is an AMD/Intel stockholder..... ;o)
I recently installed a firewall at our company - previously we were reliant on protection of our private network by Microsoft Poxy Server which is by no means a security product. We now use the Sonicwall Pro product which includes a DMZ segement and halfway decent reporting facilities.
One thing I've noticed is how many DoS attacks are attempted by single hosts aimed at our network, we're not a large organisation and we provide services to a pretty small yet worldwide market.
Now I'm not entirely sure how well the firewall would stand upto a proper attack and would like to know what other options are available to me to help avoid this sort of outage.
Any takers?
The market for streaming media - despite what people say - is not currently the workplace since many offices dont allow audio and lets face it video without audio is a little lame. The home market - where there is a burgeoning number of Linux installations - is where the money is going to be in delivering digital media content and Microsoft has a large and growing stake in content providers.
Not all of the press is going to be sceptical about this and will happily swallow everything Microsoft gives to them - including the spiel of "We're supporting other operating systems" and "Linux is a true competitor otherwise we wouldn't be supporting it"
Sceptic - yes. Happy - sorta, this is needed - especially is web media providers do start to ditch Real for the Microsoft offerings - and who can blame them all the Microsoft stuff is free while Real expect licences for streams. Waiting to see the flames brought on by this - God yeah. ;o)
Originally it was just designed to track aircraft but then some bright psark discovered that if you help your hand in front of the radar it got hot - leading to the development of the microwave.
Research into microwaves lead to the satellite bands that are used today to bring me over 200 channels of digital TV and radio and similar bands are used in mobile phones.
So the same technology that keeps my flight on holiday away from other flights on holiday also heats my food, brings me TV and lets me check my email in the middle of a field with nothing more than a phone and a PalmIII - thats progress :O)
Isn't arresting someone what comes before them being charged - then comes the trial then improsonment / not imprisonment?
As an example the Region 1 disc of The Matrix has additional sound tracks and a follow the white rabbit interactive element which are not included on the Region 2 disk - not because Warner couldn't do it or didn't have time but because to put these extras on the disk would have meant them having to re-edit each one because the BBFC objected to a scene that included headbutting - something they consider to be 'imitatable behaviour'
Don't get me wrong - I'm not in favour of the Region system but we do have to tackle our own film industry as well as trying to take on the big guys because even if Regions were removed from DVDs the versions on sale in the UK will still be butchered and less featured thanks to the BBFC.
Rant over.
His father was arrested because he owns the site on which DeCSS was posted. A mobile phone and two computers were also taken.
Looking at the topics raised I noticed everything but star trek - now this may just be me but surely it's more important to discuss all these topics on their own merits before bundling them into one - especially when the AOL/TimeWarner (EMI?) merger has only just raised its head.
Just my twopeneth worth.
So where are we going - and how far will it take FreeDOS?
Having played with the downloadable version of Corel Linux (I like fast 'net access) I've been very very pleasantly surprised with Corel Linux although disappointed that the deluxe version is not to be available in the UK. I'm wondering when the other linux distro's are going to be able to share in this - so bluntly when are corel going to release their modifications to GPL'd code? M@T :O)
For the moment Firewire seems to be relegated to Macs, Sony laptops and people willing to buy expensive Adaptec (or similar) cards. Intel simply arent interested in Firewire because they believe USB2 will support higer speeds and remain backwards compatible.
I see this as a bit of a shame - Firewire is a good system - it can act peer to peer without needing hubs which USB can not manage. It's being adapted by alot of domestic AV equipment manufacturers - we're starting to see DV decks with Firewire in/out - couple a Digicam and an iMacDV to one of thses and you have amazing picture quality and a nice looking PC to boot.
Personally I dont think that the domestic PC market would be worried about having 2 different busses for use externally - after all we've survived having 2 legacy keyboard connectors 2 (3 if you count the old busports models) different mouse connectors, 2 ize serial sockets, seperate printer sockets and as many SCSI connectors as you can shake a very big stick at - as long as connector A doesn't plug into connector B the consumer will be happy.
What a wonderful tool for your average hack - 10 Slashdot comments from recent times - there is bound to be something in there that can be totally taken out of context and misquoted. I meta moderate daily (that sounds rude now that I come to read it) and sometimes it can be quite funny to read a comment taken out of it's thread - however while funny it also fails to bring the nature of the thread across and can result in a diametrically opposite meaning.
Seriously though - the mainstream media is not necessarily something to worry about as the people who cover the news properly for the people who are truly affected are getting the stories right. It doesn't really matter what Joe Public thinks as he doesn't have any say in the matter - however your (Computer Weekly)/(Insert Foreign Computing Mag Here) [delete as appropriate] reader is more likely to be the sort of person who makes decisions for more than one persons IT needs - these are the people who can affect the market and these are the people who matter.
Not really - if you read through my original piece you'll see I dont say 'if IBM wrote DOS from the ground up' just that it could have been written from the ground up - I'm sure there were more companies than just Microsoft who were looking at writing the OS for the machine.
I'd like to think that a single change in the early pioneering days would have made a huge change to what we have now - hopefully not for the worst.
Let's imagine that Gates, Jobs and the early guys were still there but Gates didn't get the IBM deal and dos was written from the ground up. Who knows - we might not be using Linux now because DOS was written properly and multitasked from day 1!
I can't proclaim to have any solid ideas as regards what might have been but it's fun to think about it.