"The Professional series switches utilize WideBand's robust signaling technology allowing Gigabit connections over Category 5 runs in excess of 200 meters, and even over 100-meter segments of Category 3 cable"
To even further improve the effectivity of the BatMax and even increase the range of your mobiles, my company will offer a special nanotech tinfoil. Prices are from only $1 per square foot!
If the product doesn't have the desired effect, you can return it to SKM&C, Netherlands....
Credit card payments are, of course, welcome. Refunds at our discretion;-)
Under current Dutch law, as far as I understand it (yeah, studied it...) and it's interpretation at the moment, bitTorrent trackers are exactly what you state here: nothing but pointers to content. As long as nog part of the original is involved, dutch copyright laws cannot be applicable.
The only situations in which one could object to BitTorrent trackers are: 1) when it could be proven in court that the sole purpose of such a tracker would be creating te means to violate copyrights. However, if such an argument could be made succesfully, copiers would be illegal as well - 'quod non' (Latin.: which is not so) 2) when the tracker file itself would be considered a work covered by copyright law and the author of the tracker would want to uphold that copyright (both of'm not really probable, I admit...)
Yes, this decision does affect the mentioned types of sites as well. Since it's been decided that pointing to a copyrighted work cannot in itself be a copyright infringment, these sites are allowed under dutch copyright law.
Considerations: since the site does not hold any part or the whole of the original work(s), there is no 'copying' here and as such copyrights are not involved.
Likewise, the dutch interpretation has decided that ftp site indexing or whatever the site does is currently on the "ok" side of the tipping point
On the contrary: the court has decided that indexing is neither a copyright infringement (since there is no original content being copied) nor a 'derivative work', and therefor (as someone else already stated here) copyright laws are simply not applicable.
In fact, as far as I can tell, you can add any record type to djbdns, since it allows entering a binary "type" in its data. Therefore, even though a type is not "known" to djbdns, you can still publish / use it.
Right now, I have a "partimage" solution we use to reinstall our PC rooms (115 PC's right now) in a similar way to what's asked for in the originating post.
Complete picture: + PC boots, loads linux from network (PXE boot) + Linux does an fdisk, start partimage and restores original image
Overnight reinstalls are necessary 'cause we want to give students total freedom on the machine
Two problems: 1) found no way to boot windows from a running Linux so far. Temporary solution is a reboot, having the DHCP server change it's PXE options OR alter the file that decides whether a Linux networkboot or/dev/hda1 will happen (syslinux variant, PXELinux used, so changing the PXElinux configuration file for a certain MAC will do that trick)
2) Partimaged, the serverside program that offers the images on the network, is pretty much crippled by its limitation to 10 (15 now?) simultaneous clients. This makes it impossible to update all PC's in a single room (up to 30) at once, even though the server capacity is up to it. Tried to run multiple instances of partimage on different listening ports, but this crashes partimaged...
Improvement would be a good thing here, so I'll be watching this thread closely.
Reading the present responses to this question, I'd say the only reason we can't use this today is society;-)
However...
BitTorrent doesn't work, or has to be using a completely different principle, right?
A technique similar to the one described has not been used in the last Gulf War to lay out a wireless network troughout the desert
Free commodities are impossible. GPS does not exist
Business is not willing to provide free access to "expensive backbones" if it attrackts customers or enables them to use a free network for their own needs, thus saving costs
McDonalds / airports /... have no free in-house (wireless) internet access for their customers
For more then a decade, assumption has been that the Echelon network actually exists, and there's been lots of discussion about that. I'll save you another comment on it, and leave that to the European Commission's investigation team.
One of the websites mentioned in a previous comment (New Scientist) states: "A new European Parliament document confirms the existence of a secretive US-led communications surveillance network, known as Echelon."
What's far more concerning (IMHO) and pops up in the discussions far less often, is how relevant a network like Echelon might be. Therefore, let's have a look at the technical difficulties one would have to overcome. Try to imagine being the 'big bad board' (BBB) implementing a system that would monitor all the network traffic for, say, a company with 10000 employees on five locations throughout the United States (or, if you prefer, Europe, the Far- or Middle East, Africa...). Our first challenge would be deciding what network traffic is worth monitoring. Of course we're going to intercept all e-mail sent by our employees! Who knows what evil plans they're making up to throw over the BBB! On the other hand, we're proud to have the best educated employees in the region, so they're probably not stupid enough to use our own mail server for their evil purposes. They're likely using a hotmail account or the likes, so we're going to monitor all internet traffic on our networks too. In fact, we'd better watch all network traffic other than the use of our network shares and databases! So this thing is going to take up a lot of computing power! Now, we can't possibly install the hardware needed for our Big Brother Watchdog on every site so we'll have to tap into network traffic at all five locations, bundle it and send it to our headquarters, where the BBB will be pleased to see all the hardware and extra cabling installed. Jeez, that'll be a lot of network traffic flowing to our headquarters from now on! And of course, let's not ignore the faxes, telephone lines and the likes.
Talking about 'all the hardware'... one of the things still growing more and more popular are peer-to-peer networks and combining the computing power of numerous machines to achieve nearly impossible investigation goals. Some examples are the "United Devices Cancer Research Project", the Seti@home project, and the diverse Distributed.Net projects. Please, do have a look at some of these and consider the tasks they're working at. Trying to fit a molecular structure to a cancer helix, calculating the numerous combinations of a 21 mark Golomb ruler, or -possibly the best comparison- sifting through an incredible amount of interstellar radio noise to sift out signals sent out by ALF's (Artificial Life Forms as seen by US television - No, I'm not talking about the Jerry Springer show here): These tasks are the likes of what the Echelon network is supposed to do (i.e. filter enormous amounts of data, looking for certain keywords, possibly even decoding encrypted messages). Now look again! But this time, try to perceive the number of computers taking part in these projects, the total computing power involved, and the time needed to acquire the ultimate goal: a possible match on a cancer cure, the radio signal we wanted or an optimal Golomb Ruler. Quoting some of these statistics:
Distributed.Net, OGR project: Our current combined OGR network speed is 182.49 Giga-nodes per second
UD Cancer Research Project: 609,178 devices, 104,791,203 hours total CPU time
Seti@home: 3044035 users, 673412.833 years of computer time
Looking at these statistics, let's reconsider the amount of computing power we'll need to sift through all this network traffic...
Yeah, sure, even as a European from a pretty open-minded and at times unbelievably tolerant country (I'm talking about the Netherlands here), I do believe that any government (1) has the money to make sure they get the best technology available to date, (2) can make sure this technology will be available to them alone by issuing laws accordingly and (3) will use this technology to whatever purpose they want. Even with this 'knowledge' in mind, it's hard to perceive the amount of equipment that would be needed to filter and accumulate all the data on the internet, telephone networks, etcetera. And that's just accumulating the data - not even processing it yet! Looking back to our mass-computing statistics, and how little you can actually achieve in a certain amount of time, it dare say that, even with the most advanced linguistic filtering techniques and disregarding all non-human communication, it's impossible to sift through the amount of data we're talking about when it comes to Echelon.
And off course, since we're all a least a little geeky here, we wouldn't be using ASCII for our secret communications, would we?
Too bad for our BBB, but we simply can't put up enough computer power to do the monitoring we had in mind here. So as a company, we better just stick to checking our employers' e-mail...
There's one more technical hurdle I'd like to point out here. When you intercept network traffic at the source, for instance listening to a single segment of a network, it's pretty easy to reassemble single-user communication from the entire data stream. But on the internet, thanks to the wonderful original design of the network, we can't be sure that all our data is taking the same path from client to host and vice versa. In fact, TCP/IP makes sure our data is split into little fragments, and that each fragment on it's own will be routed to it's destination. One of these routes may be a copper cable on the seabed, another will be fibre, the third might even take a little space trip bouncing to and from a satellite. Now: how to intercept and reassemble ALL that?
In the EU (European Union - subst: UE, L'Union européenne) report the point I'm trying to make is stated as follows:
"Today, various media are available for all forms of intercontinental communication (voice, fax and data). The scope for a worldwide interception system is restricted by two factors:
restricted access to the communication medium
the need to filter out the relevant communication from a huge mass of communications taking place at the same time."
Some of the arguments mentioned above are also (albeit briefly) illustrated in the report. The (EU rapporteur's) assumption that the ability to analyse spoken language using a computer is still very limited may be naïve, the restrictions mentioned in the report ("the scope for filtering out is restricted by other factors: the ultimate capacity of the computers, the language problem and, above all, the limited number of analysts who can read and assess filtered messages.") remain intact.
Concluding, I think we shouldn't be worried about BBG (Big Brother Governments / Big Bad Governments) listening in on our communications. Nevertheless, I support the EU rapporteur's conclusion: it's always a good idea to encrypt messages that you don't want to go public. Even if we disregard Echelon, all you need is a single geek on your network trying to get out some interesting information...
Slashdot Mirror
Too bad, even 'they always drive on the left' doesn't work:
http://www.brianlucas.ca/roadside/#trains
Even I could trace that - RTFWebsite?
"The Professional series switches utilize WideBand's robust signaling technology allowing Gigabit connections over Category 5 runs in excess of 200 meters, and even over 100-meter segments of Category 3 cable"
(too bad about the barbed wire, though...)
I guess I'll have to ask the Mozilla foundation to extend the spamfilters to RSS feeds in the next release...
To even further improve the effectivity of the BatMax and even increase the range of your mobiles, my company will offer a special nanotech tinfoil.
;-)
Prices are from only $1 per square foot!
If the product doesn't have the desired effect, you can return it to SKM&C, Netherlands....
Credit card payments are, of course, welcome.
Refunds at our discretion
Under current Dutch law, as far as I understand it (yeah, studied it...) and it's interpretation at the moment, bitTorrent trackers are exactly what you state here: nothing but pointers to content.
As long as nog part of the original is involved, dutch copyright laws cannot be applicable.
The only situations in which one could object to BitTorrent trackers are:
1) when it could be proven in court that the sole purpose of such a tracker would be creating te means to violate copyrights. However, if such an argument could be made succesfully, copiers would be illegal as well - 'quod non' (Latin.: which is not so)
2) when the tracker file itself would be considered a work covered by copyright law and the author of the tracker would want to uphold that copyright (both of'm not really probable, I admit...)
Yes, this decision does affect the mentioned types of sites as well.
Since it's been decided that pointing to a copyrighted work cannot in itself be a copyright infringment, these sites are allowed under dutch copyright law.
Considerations: since the site does not hold any part or the whole of the original work(s), there is no 'copying' here and as such copyrights are not involved.
Likewise, the dutch interpretation has decided that ftp site indexing or whatever the site does is currently on the "ok" side of the tipping point
On the contrary: the court has decided that indexing is neither a copyright infringement (since there is no original content being copied) nor a 'derivative work', and therefor (as someone else already stated here) copyright laws are simply not applicable.
In fact, as far as I can tell, you can add any record type to djbdns, since it allows entering a binary "type" in its data.
Therefore, even though a type is not "known" to djbdns, you can still publish / use it.
Right now, I have a "partimage" solution we use to reinstall our PC rooms (115 PC's right now) in a similar way to what's asked for in the originating post.
/dev/hda1 will happen (syslinux variant, PXELinux used, so changing the PXElinux configuration file for a certain MAC will do that trick)
Complete picture:
+ PC boots, loads linux from network (PXE boot)
+ Linux does an fdisk, start partimage and restores original image
Overnight reinstalls are necessary 'cause we want to give students total freedom on the machine
Two problems:
1) found no way to boot windows from a running Linux so far. Temporary solution is a reboot, having the DHCP server change it's PXE options OR alter the file that decides whether a Linux networkboot or
2) Partimaged, the serverside program that offers the images on the network, is pretty much crippled by its limitation to 10 (15 now?) simultaneous clients. This makes it impossible to update all PC's in a single room (up to 30) at once, even though the server capacity is up to it. Tried to run multiple instances of partimage on different listening ports, but this crashes partimaged...
Improvement would be a good thing here, so I'll be watching this thread closely.
However...
Hail the visioneers!
CPU's: 37-44, Ambient: 24, water in: 26.5, water out: 26...
Isn't "cooling" supposed to create more than an accidental 0.5 degree temperature difference?
For more then a decade, assumption has been that the Echelon network actually exists, and there's been lots of discussion about that. I'll save you another comment on it, and leave that to the European Commission's investigation team. One of the websites mentioned in a previous comment (New Scientist) states: "A new European Parliament document confirms the existence of a secretive US-led communications surveillance network, known as Echelon."
What's far more concerning (IMHO) and pops up in the discussions far less often, is how relevant a network like Echelon might be. Therefore, let's have a look at the technical difficulties one would have to overcome. Try to imagine being the 'big bad board' (BBB) implementing a system that would monitor all the network traffic for, say, a company with 10000 employees on five locations throughout the United States (or, if you prefer, Europe, the Far- or Middle East, Africa...).
Our first challenge would be deciding what network traffic is worth monitoring. Of course we're going to intercept all e-mail sent by our employees! Who knows what evil plans they're making up to throw over the BBB! On the other hand, we're proud to have the best educated employees in the region, so they're probably not stupid enough to use our own mail server for their evil purposes. They're likely using a hotmail account or the likes, so we're going to monitor all internet traffic on our networks too. In fact, we'd better watch all network traffic other than the use of our network shares and databases! So this thing is going to take up a lot of computing power!
Now, we can't possibly install the hardware needed for our Big Brother Watchdog on every site so we'll have to tap into network traffic at all five locations, bundle it and send it to our headquarters, where the BBB will be pleased to see all the hardware and extra cabling installed. Jeez, that'll be a lot of network traffic flowing to our headquarters from now on!
And of course, let's not ignore the faxes, telephone lines and the likes.
Talking about 'all the hardware'
Now look again! But this time, try to perceive the number of computers taking part in these projects, the total computing power involved, and the time needed to acquire the ultimate goal: a possible match on a cancer cure, the radio signal we wanted or an optimal Golomb Ruler. Quoting some of these statistics:
- Distributed.Net, OGR project: Our current combined OGR network speed is 182.49 Giga-nodes per second
- UD Cancer Research Project: 609,178 devices, 104,791,203 hours total CPU time
- Seti@home: 3044035 users, 673412.833 years of computer time
Looking at these statistics, let's reconsider the amount of computing power we'll need to sift through all this network traffic... Yeah, sure, even as a European from a pretty open-minded and at times unbelievably tolerant country (I'm talking about the Netherlands here), I do believe that any government (1) has the money to make sure they get the best technology available to date, (2) can make sure this technology will be available to them alone by issuing laws accordingly and (3) will use this technology to whatever purpose they want. Even with this 'knowledge' in mind, it's hard to perceive the amount of equipment that would be needed to filter and accumulate all the data on the internet, telephone networks, etcetera.And that's just accumulating the data - not even processing it yet! Looking back to our mass-computing statistics, and how little you can actually achieve in a certain amount of time, it dare say that, even with the most advanced linguistic filtering techniques and disregarding all non-human communication, it's impossible to sift through the amount of data we're talking about when it comes to Echelon. And off course, since we're all a least a little geeky here, we wouldn't be using ASCII for our secret communications, would we?
Too bad for our BBB, but we simply can't put up enough computer power to do the monitoring we had in mind here. So as a company, we better just stick to checking our employers' e-mail...
There's one more technical hurdle I'd like to point out here. When you intercept network traffic at the source, for instance listening to a single segment of a network, it's pretty easy to reassemble single-user communication from the entire data stream. But on the internet, thanks to the wonderful original design of the network, we can't be sure that all our data is taking the same path from client to host and vice versa. In fact, TCP/IP makes sure our data is split into little fragments, and that each fragment on it's own will be routed to it's destination. One of these routes may be a copper cable on the seabed, another will be fibre, the third might even take a little space trip bouncing to and from a satellite. Now: how to intercept and reassemble ALL that?
In the EU (European Union - subst: UE, L'Union européenne) report the point I'm trying to make is stated as follows:
"Today, various media are available for all forms of intercontinental communication (voice, fax and data). The scope for a worldwide interception system is restricted by two factors:
- restricted access to the communication medium
- the need to filter out the relevant communication from a huge mass of communications taking place at the same time."
Some of the arguments mentioned above are also (albeit briefly) illustrated in the report. The (EU rapporteur's) assumption that the ability to analyse spoken language using a computer is still very limited may be naïve, the restrictions mentioned in the report ("the scope for filtering out is restricted by other factors: the ultimate capacity of the computers, the language problem and, above all, the limited number of analysts who can read and assess filtered messages.") remain intact.Concluding, I think we shouldn't be worried about BBG (Big Brother Governments / Big Bad Governments) listening in on our communications. Nevertheless, I support the EU rapporteur's conclusion: it's always a good idea to encrypt messages that you don't want to go public. Even if we disregard Echelon, all you need is a single geek on your network trying to get out some interesting information...
Paranoia, anyone? Tell us!