"sane" and "legislation" in the same breath. Uyah.
I'm glad someone caught that, as it's exactly what I was "writing between the lines". Just consider how absolutely fscked our bank and credit card regulations are, and you'll understand why that statement was really just a little jab at the fact that there's honestly no way in hell we can expect good privacy protection.
Every US bank is required to report every transaction over $5K (maybe it's $10K these days) to the fed. You can't even move your money offshore privately - you're required to report it all and there's no way to access it without being tracked. My credit card company is allowed to sell my personal information and data about spending habits to anyone they want unless I take the time to opt out (just got the form from them today, in fact.) The IRS can get whatever information they want just by sending a letter. Shit, even cash transactions are recorded on video and linked to serial numbers embedded in the bills.
I mean really, if you value your privacy above systems like electronic banking and efficient trade, then you have no choice to buy a shack in Montana and sever all ties with civilization. RFID, however, is not the kind of thing you can stop society from adopting. And if you think our government will volutarily track valuable goods any less than than they track legal tender, you're in for a big surprise.
That's simple. While waiting to be seated, each of your customers would receive an injection containing an RFID tying them to your restaurant. Then their feces would be inspected later to determine what food had been consumed, and the system would report back to your inventory control process.
I didn't realize RFID tags could be turned off. Are they not basically passive "reflectors", powered by the scanner's signal?
Anyway - from a privacy perspective there is much to fear about how RFID will be misued. However, as a geek I can not overlook the incredible myriad of practical uses for them. To be pragmatic about it, I'm quite sure that such uses will override the privacy concerns in the long run, just as credit cards have done to cash, for example. The best we can do, I think, is to push for sane privacy legislation like we don't have for banking.
I mean, how cool would it be if you ran a restaurant, for example, and you never had to keep track of what food to order? Your garbage can would just detect that your chef had thrown a tomato can, and add a new can of tomatoes to the next delivery. I can think of a thousand practical uses for RFID and I suggest that any geek with foresight should be thinking not about how to stop RFID, but how to protect our privacy in a world which will inevitably be filled with billions of the little things.
I 2nd that... they never dry out and they're very reliable. They also get stolen from the office a lot which is not necessarily a good thing, but at least a testament to them not sucking.
Yes it costs a lot of money to replace the system. It also costs a lot of money to maintain ancient copper bundles and have guys sitting out at a box all afternoon fiddling with punchdown blocks and rewiring huge cable junctions just to install/repair one line.
We are a point where replacing the outdated infrastructure will pay off quickly in reduced maintenance cost an increased margins on better services (on demand video delivery etc). Unfortunately the telcos blew all their money during the boom trying to prop up the ancient infrastructure with kludgy hacks like DSL.
However, just because you can buy an 8-port consumer grade, made by Linksys, switch for $60 does NOT mean that the telcos can get a carrier class switch for the same price
It was an analogy - I'm not suggesting that SBC can run the phone system on linksys equipment, jackass.
But the rest of the world has moved to packet switching while the telcos are holding on to their channellized services and custom features like frame relay and inter-LATA crap because it LETS THEM KEEP THEIR PRICES HIGH. DSL/T1/T3 are so insanley inefficient and that's exactly how SBC likes it.
Why not run a big data pipe out to every B box and a switched port to each customer from there? No, that would work too well and be too cheap to service. How would they continue to justify all the revenue that the PUC guarantees them? How would they employ 60000 phone monkies if the service were so simple and reliable that it didn't need supporting? How would they stifle competition for phone service when people can just buy a simple high-speed data circuit and get their voice service from someone else?
It's clear to me that the telcos have no incentive to offer cheap data services (100Mbps+) even though it is possible and with today's technology it would be CHEAPER than delivering a single voice line.
1) The service is absurdly overpriced for what you get. I can go to fry's a pick up a commodity 100mbps switch for less than $10 per port, but can I get decent data service to my house for less than $60/mo? No.
2) Yes my basic phone service is quite reliable and I can always dial 911. That's because the California PUC requires it, and there are very stiff penalties for failing to deliver this minimal level of service. But what if I want to block telemarketers? What if I want reliable data service? What if I want a phone bill I can understand? What if I want to be able to call a support rep who can help? There are no fines for failing to provide these things, and as a government-imposed monopoly providing an essential service, they have no reason to improve service in these areas.
Communications technology has improved enormously in the last 20 years. But is SBC spending my $80/mo rolling trucks to pull fiber and install high-speed switches in neighborhoods? No, they're out repairing ancient 100-pair copper cables using outdated tools and labor imported from Canada because all their experienced techs have quit due to getting fucked on pay and retirement benefits even during the telecom boom.
What about data services for my business? Why should a meager 1.5Mbps in each direction, used occasionally, cost more almost ten times what the average home user pays to fill the pipe with pr0n and mp3s?
And a final bit of context: I used to own an ISP during the late 90's. Sold it for a pretty penny, but it was a money-losing business and a pain in the ass to run. The biggest impediment to my success was the fucking phone companies. I'm paying $1K per month for each of a dozen T1 lines, but can I get a knowledgeable person on the phone to help me troubleshoot a line problem? No. Can I get a tech out on 1 hrs notice when my service goes down, no. That wasn't the worst of it either. When DSL became available, I had to pay Covad to pay PacBell to get service to my customer, while PacBell was allowed to offer the service in direct competition at a lower price than my own cost just to get a line out the customer. Fuck the phone companies. I am so glad that my livelihood does not depend on their services any more.
Really you had two questions: "why haven't they released this", and "why won't this go into the mainline kernel". Two totally different questions. I addressed the first. We can discuss the second if/when the code is released.:)
Exactly what? Do you agree with me or are you just very confused?
I would suggest that you read the GPL. It makes no distinction between software for PCs versus software for embedded systems. It just says you have to ditribute the source to whomever you distribute a binary. What is confusing about that?
When I buy a linksys router I am gettting linux binaries running on the system.
FSMLabs sells RTLinux, a real-time version of linux. i'm sure that they are doing their duty and distributing the source of the RTLinux kernel. wouldn't their additions to the kernel become GPL, and be able to be integrated into the main-line kernel?
At this point there is no reason to doubt that when they release these changes in the form of a product, we'll get source.
They only have to distribute their source to whomever they distribute a binary, if and when they do so. Under the GPL you do not bear the burden of publishing, distributing, and supporting source changes that you made for your own use, or changes which you have not yet distributed.
Go RTFA - several points: You don't just simply "load an image into memory" and have a running system. This is why properly supporting APM is difficult on any machine. All your hardware needs to be reinitialized. Network connections need to be reestablished (getting IP and so on), file systems need to be remounted, there are all kinds of timer-driven things that need special handling, and so on and so forth.
What these guys are doing is optimizing for embedded systems - where the kernel is hardwired for exactly the same hardware every time. You don't need to probe, and you don't need to guess what state the hardware is in - it's a closed system and it's the same at every power-on. Furthermore there are all kinds of things you can initialize simultaneously when you can optimimize for a deterministic environment - if your video system wants a moment to do a POST, you can spend that time initializing a network interface, for example.
Also, the definition of "boot time" for this dicussion is the time until the first application-level code runs. That's something like only 1/3 to 1/2 of the boot time for a typical linux server or desktop that you're thinking of. Most of the time is spent bringing up userland services and loading the graphical environment. There's a big savings on big workstation in flushing RAM to disk, but not so much for small embedded systems, where application state is very minimal (eg a Tivo, or a wireless router).
You make it sound like the spammers were so shrewd as to design this ingenious "attack" scheme into the virus from the start. I highly doubt that.
There is no evidence that the SoBig virus was written by spammers, or even that the RBL DDOS is intentional. To me it looks like the RBLs simply can't handle the load from trying to filter out this virus, plain and simple.
Perhaps an improvement to filtering tools would be to rely as much as possible on bayesian and rule-base filters, and only contact an external RBL (or other rule) if the score is borderline. Right now they're hitting the RBLs for every single message even if it would fail the most simple filter. I imagine the problem is just that everyone's mail server can easily handle 1000x the current level of crap, but the RBLs can't.
I'm honestly not sure if it was a joke or not, but the first thing that came to mind when I read the article was that it sounded like a problem in the DC-DC power supply. I've heard that sort of audible "static" noise coming from a switching supply when the caps go bad.
I would agree that probably replacing a single inductor or cap would fix this.
PCMCIA != Cardbus. PCMCIA is ISA, Cardbus is PCI. Mechanically they're the same, but electrically the only significant thing they have in common is the location of the power pins. Host interfaces need a special layer of logic and auto-detection to support both, since ISA uses separate address and data buses, while PCI is a biriectional 32-bit bus plus a bunch of control lines.
At any rate, I see absolutely no need for yet another serial interface. We already have SD cards, and for smarter/bigger devices, something in a similar fomr factor as PCMCIA but using USB or Firewire would be perfect. No need to reinvent the wheel. All you end up with when you needlessly reinvent the wheel is a bunch of half-baked hardware with poor OS support. By the time any of it actually gets mature enough to work right, we'll already be moving on to something else. Shit, USB barely even works as intended on most OSes.
Logitch is the undisputed king of mice... despite being dirt cheap, they feel good, have a nice click, and work forever.
But what about keyboards? Last time I went to Fry's looking for a keyboard, they did not have ONE SINGLE FULL SIZE KEYBOARD AT ANY PRICE that wasn't either stupidly large with ergonimic styling, or littered with special "Internet" keys. I bought the Memorex one because it was the sanest looking thing I could find. Took the thing home, plugged it in, and 30 minutes later I accidentally hit one of the special keys and it shut down my whole damned machine. So I used a pair of pliers to lift up the rubber button and then cut it off with a razor... but it looked stupid and every time I used the thing, my ass would twitch over the fact that this POS was the best keyboard I could find.
That is, until somebody mentioned the old IBM keyboards and how great they were. I'm not affiliated with these guys... just a happy customer. Please check out www.pckeyboard.com. They (Unicomp) bought the original design from IBM and are still producing it. As far as I know it is the only full-size keyboard you can buy with a standard layout, no bullshit, and actual buckling-spring keys. Costs fifty bucks, weighs about three pounds so it doesn't slide all over your desk, indestructible, and has keys that are very satisfying to type on.
I got one for each of my PCs and one for my Mac (used a PS2-USB converter dongle). It is absolutely AMAZING how much faster you can type when you use the exact same keyboard everywhere, and it's not a sucky keyboard. My raw typing speed is about the same as before but I make way less typos so overall speed is maybe 10-20% higher.
Kazaa could easily confuse a 12 year old into thinking that she could have unlimited downloads for $29.95
Did you READ MY POST AT ALL? The whole point I was trying to make is that you CAN get legiitmate music for cheap, ergo the girl was not out of line in her understanding of Kazaa's offer.
I'll admit, that's news to me. But if it's the only way I can legally get good music for a fair price, I'm game. RIAA: I'm done buying CDs for $15+ a pop. Please tally one more vote for emusic.
What bitrate were the MP3s? I'd join a subscription service, but I'm afraid of poor quality.
It's not bad... the stuff they've had on there for a long time is 128 CBR, but the newer stuff is higher bit-rate VBR (160+). Anything beyond a 128-190 average VBR bitrate, and you're beginning to approach the ability to capture an insect fart. For some that may be important - personally, I listen to the music and not so much the codec.:)
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"sane" and "legislation" in the same breath. Uyah.
I'm glad someone caught that, as it's exactly what I was "writing between the lines". Just consider how absolutely fscked our bank and credit card regulations are, and you'll understand why that statement was really just a little jab at the fact that there's honestly no way in hell we can expect good privacy protection.
Every US bank is required to report every transaction over $5K (maybe it's $10K these days) to the fed. You can't even move your money offshore privately - you're required to report it all and there's no way to access it without being tracked. My credit card company is allowed to sell my personal information and data about spending habits to anyone they want unless I take the time to opt out (just got the form from them today, in fact.) The IRS can get whatever information they want just by sending a letter. Shit, even cash transactions are recorded on video and linked to serial numbers embedded in the bills.
I mean really, if you value your privacy above systems like electronic banking and efficient trade, then you have no choice to buy a shack in Montana and sever all ties with civilization. RFID, however, is not the kind of thing you can stop society from adopting. And if you think our government will volutarily track valuable goods any less than than they track legal tender, you're in for a big surprise.
LOL...
Seriously though, take a look at the cool sculptures.
That's simple. While waiting to be seated, each of your customers would receive an injection containing an RFID tying them to your restaurant. Then their feces would be inspected later to determine what food had been consumed, and the system would report back to your inventory control process.
I didn't realize RFID tags could be turned off. Are they not basically passive "reflectors", powered by the scanner's signal?
Anyway - from a privacy perspective there is much to fear about how RFID will be misued. However, as a geek I can not overlook the incredible myriad of practical uses for them. To be pragmatic about it, I'm quite sure that such uses will override the privacy concerns in the long run, just as credit cards have done to cash, for example. The best we can do, I think, is to push for sane privacy legislation like we don't have for banking.
I mean, how cool would it be if you ran a restaurant, for example, and you never had to keep track of what food to order? Your garbage can would just detect that your chef had thrown a tomato can, and add a new can of tomatoes to the next delivery. I can think of a thousand practical uses for RFID and I suggest that any geek with foresight should be thinking not about how to stop RFID, but how to protect our privacy in a world which will inevitably be filled with billions of the little things.
I 2nd that... they never dry out and they're very reliable. They also get stolen from the office a lot which is not necessarily a good thing, but at least a testament to them not sucking.
Yes it costs a lot of money to replace the system. It also costs a lot of money to maintain ancient copper bundles and have guys sitting out at a box all afternoon fiddling with punchdown blocks and rewiring huge cable junctions just to install/repair one line.
We are a point where replacing the outdated infrastructure will pay off quickly in reduced maintenance cost an increased margins on better services (on demand video delivery etc). Unfortunately the telcos blew all their money during the boom trying to prop up the ancient infrastructure with kludgy hacks like DSL.
However, just because you can buy an 8-port consumer grade, made by Linksys, switch for $60 does NOT mean that the telcos can get a carrier class switch for the same price
It was an analogy - I'm not suggesting that SBC can run the phone system on linksys equipment, jackass.
But the rest of the world has moved to packet switching while the telcos are holding on to their channellized services and custom features like frame relay and inter-LATA crap because it LETS THEM KEEP THEIR PRICES HIGH. DSL/T1/T3 are so insanley inefficient and that's exactly how SBC likes it.
Why not run a big data pipe out to every B box and a switched port to each customer from there? No, that would work too well and be too cheap to service. How would they continue to justify all the revenue that the PUC guarantees them? How would they employ 60000 phone monkies if the service were so simple and reliable that it didn't need supporting? How would they stifle competition for phone service when people can just buy a simple high-speed data circuit and get their voice service from someone else?
It's clear to me that the telcos have no incentive to offer cheap data services (100Mbps+) even though it is possible and with today's technology it would be CHEAPER than delivering a single voice line.
Why do everyone hate the telcos?
I'll tell you why I hate the telcos:
1) The service is absurdly overpriced for what you get. I can go to fry's a pick up a commodity 100mbps switch for less than $10 per port, but can I get decent data service to my house for less than $60/mo? No.
2) Yes my basic phone service is quite reliable and I can always dial 911. That's because the California PUC requires it, and there are very stiff penalties for failing to deliver this minimal level of service. But what if I want to block telemarketers? What if I want reliable data service? What if I want a phone bill I can understand? What if I want to be able to call a support rep who can help? There are no fines for failing to provide these things, and as a government-imposed monopoly providing an essential service, they have no reason to improve service in these areas.
Communications technology has improved enormously in the last 20 years. But is SBC spending my $80/mo rolling trucks to pull fiber and install high-speed switches in neighborhoods? No, they're out repairing ancient 100-pair copper cables using outdated tools and labor imported from Canada because all their experienced techs have quit due to getting fucked on pay and retirement benefits even during the telecom boom.
What about data services for my business? Why should a meager 1.5Mbps in each direction, used occasionally, cost more almost ten times what the average home user pays to fill the pipe with pr0n and mp3s?
And a final bit of context: I used to own an ISP during the late 90's. Sold it for a pretty penny, but it was a money-losing business and a pain in the ass to run. The biggest impediment to my success was the fucking phone companies. I'm paying $1K per month for each of a dozen T1 lines, but can I get a knowledgeable person on the phone to help me troubleshoot a line problem? No. Can I get a tech out on 1 hrs notice when my service goes down, no. That wasn't the worst of it either. When DSL became available, I had to pay Covad to pay PacBell to get service to my customer, while PacBell was allowed to offer the service in direct competition at a lower price than my own cost just to get a line out the customer. Fuck the phone companies. I am so glad that my livelihood does not depend on their services any more.
I remember when everybody just said "apple". Then they came out with that blasted //e and you had an "openapple" and a "closedapple".
I'll keep my 64K and 40 columns, thank you very much.
Really you had two questions: "why haven't they released this", and "why won't this go into the mainline kernel". Two totally different questions. I addressed the first. We can discuss the second if/when the code is released. :)
exactly!
Exactly what? Do you agree with me or are you just very confused?
I would suggest that you read the GPL. It makes no distinction between software for PCs versus software for embedded systems. It just says you have to ditribute the source to whomever you distribute a binary. What is confusing about that?
and this is different than linksys how?
When I buy a linksys router I am gettting linux binaries running on the system.
FSMLabs sells RTLinux, a real-time version of linux. i'm sure that they are doing their duty and distributing the source of the RTLinux kernel. wouldn't their additions to the kernel become GPL, and be able to be integrated into the main-line kernel?
At this point there is no reason to doubt that when they release these changes in the form of a product, we'll get source.
They only have to distribute their source to whomever they distribute a binary, if and when they do so. Under the GPL you do not bear the burden of publishing, distributing, and supporting source changes that you made for your own use, or changes which you have not yet distributed.
Go RTFA - several points: You don't just simply "load an image into memory" and have a running system. This is why properly supporting APM is difficult on any machine. All your hardware needs to be reinitialized. Network connections need to be reestablished (getting IP and so on), file systems need to be remounted, there are all kinds of timer-driven things that need special handling, and so on and so forth.
What these guys are doing is optimizing for embedded systems - where the kernel is hardwired for exactly the same hardware every time. You don't need to probe, and you don't need to guess what state the hardware is in - it's a closed system and it's the same at every power-on. Furthermore there are all kinds of things you can initialize simultaneously when you can optimimize for a deterministic environment - if your video system wants a moment to do a POST, you can spend that time initializing a network interface, for example.
Also, the definition of "boot time" for this dicussion is the time until the first application-level code runs. That's something like only 1/3 to 1/2 of the boot time for a typical linux server or desktop that you're thinking of. Most of the time is spent bringing up userland services and loading the graphical environment. There's a big savings on big workstation in flushing RAM to disk, but not so much for small embedded systems, where application state is very minimal (eg a Tivo, or a wireless router).
You make it sound like the spammers were so shrewd as to design this ingenious "attack" scheme into the virus from the start. I highly doubt that.
There is no evidence that the SoBig virus was written by spammers, or even that the RBL DDOS is intentional. To me it looks like the RBLs simply can't handle the load from trying to filter out this virus, plain and simple.
Perhaps an improvement to filtering tools would be to rely as much as possible on bayesian and rule-base filters, and only contact an external RBL (or other rule) if the score is borderline. Right now they're hitting the RBLs for every single message even if it would fail the most simple filter. I imagine the problem is just that everyone's mail server can easily handle 1000x the current level of crap, but the RBLs can't.
I'm honestly not sure if it was a joke or not, but the first thing that came to mind when I read the article was that it sounded like a problem in the DC-DC power supply. I've heard that sort of audible "static" noise coming from a switching supply when the caps go bad.
I would agree that probably replacing a single inductor or cap would fix this.
If I were a scientist, I'd try to identify people based on their butt prints!
No two skid marks are the same, I suppose.
PCMCIA != Cardbus. PCMCIA is ISA, Cardbus is PCI. Mechanically they're the same, but electrically the only significant thing they have in common is the location of the power pins. Host interfaces need a special layer of logic and auto-detection to support both, since ISA uses separate address and data buses, while PCI is a biriectional 32-bit bus plus a bunch of control lines.
At any rate, I see absolutely no need for yet another serial interface. We already have SD cards, and for smarter/bigger devices, something in a similar fomr factor as PCMCIA but using USB or Firewire would be perfect. No need to reinvent the wheel. All you end up with when you needlessly reinvent the wheel is a bunch of half-baked hardware with poor OS support. By the time any of it actually gets mature enough to work right, we'll already be moving on to something else. Shit, USB barely even works as intended on most OSes.
Ethernet is not broadband. Broadband does not mean "fast".
It uses a 0-bit key, which you enter by clicking the single mouse button.
Logitch is the undisputed king of mice... despite being dirt cheap, they feel good, have a nice click, and work forever.
But what about keyboards? Last time I went to Fry's looking for a keyboard, they did not have ONE SINGLE FULL SIZE KEYBOARD AT ANY PRICE that wasn't either stupidly large with ergonimic styling, or littered with special "Internet" keys. I bought the Memorex one because it was the sanest looking thing I could find. Took the thing home, plugged it in, and 30 minutes later I accidentally hit one of the special keys and it shut down my whole damned machine. So I used a pair of pliers to lift up the rubber button and then cut it off with a razor... but it looked stupid and every time I used the thing, my ass would twitch over the fact that this POS was the best keyboard I could find.
That is, until somebody mentioned the old IBM keyboards and how great they were. I'm not affiliated with these guys... just a happy customer. Please check out www.pckeyboard.com. They (Unicomp) bought the original design from IBM and are still producing it. As far as I know it is the only full-size keyboard you can buy with a standard layout, no bullshit, and actual buckling-spring keys. Costs fifty bucks, weighs about three pounds so it doesn't slide all over your desk, indestructible, and has keys that are very satisfying to type on.
I got one for each of my PCs and one for my Mac (used a PS2-USB converter dongle). It is absolutely AMAZING how much faster you can type when you use the exact same keyboard everywhere, and it's not a sucky keyboard. My raw typing speed is about the same as before but I make way less typos so overall speed is maybe 10-20% higher.
Kazaa could easily confuse a 12 year old into thinking that she could have unlimited downloads for $29.95
Did you READ MY POST AT ALL? The whole point I was trying to make is that you CAN get legiitmate music for cheap, ergo the girl was not out of line in her understanding of Kazaa's offer.
Perhaps I was too subtle....
eMusic is owned by Vivendi Universal.
I'll admit, that's news to me. But if it's the only way I can legally get good music for a fair price, I'm game. RIAA: I'm done buying CDs for $15+ a pop. Please tally one more vote for emusic.
I might've bought one except for sean adam's past rants against antispammer tools and how bad using block lists to fight spammers is.
AC, how about a rebuttal? I am very anti-spam, but still prepared to voice my concerns over the problems with blacklists such as SPEWS.
What bitrate were the MP3s? I'd join a subscription service, but I'm afraid of poor quality.
:)
It's not bad... the stuff they've had on there for a long time is 128 CBR, but the newer stuff is higher bit-rate VBR (160+). Anything beyond a 128-190 average VBR bitrate, and you're beginning to approach the ability to capture an insect fart. For some that may be important - personally, I listen to the music and not so much the codec.