You are missing the point. None of the machines out there sending spam have "system administrators". They are machines where some luser managed to follow enough directions to install linux with an old open-relay sendmail, or diddled their M$ control panel to enable an open SMTP server. The people with those machines haven't enough clue to check even a single one of your 13 points.
Perhaps they were stupid enough to click on that attachment from their friend, and silently installed a mail proxy which phones home to the waiting spammers. Or they are using outhouse express on win95 or 98 and the trojan is automically launched by the preview pane, and there is no security patch you can throw on their machine because M$ only wants people to upgrade to XP.
There are so few unsecured machines with actual admins, that the spammers have been forced to criminal acts to create open relays. Most of the spam I see these days doesn't come through a poorly admined machine, it comes through a trojan proxy on a windoze box sitting on a DSL line, and now from corporate PCs which create two tunnels through the firewall, one to a hijacked relay machine, and the other spews out spam until the idiots fix their firewall and block outgoing port 25.
Sendmail {spit}, qmail {spit}, and most other major MTAs now come configured out of the box with most of the anti-spammer features enabled. Sendmail even complains and dies if it can't resolve the FQDN of the machine, just to prevent idiot lusers from managing to install it and run it where they are not supposed to.
Your rant dates back to the mid 1990's, you really need to keep up with the problems on the internet today.
So you will be arriving in time for winter, so don't leave Quebec or Ontario for December or January. Maybe for a quick visit to see what SERIOUS winter is all about, but autumn in Quebec is awe inspiring when the leaves change.
Plan a great circle tour, starting on the west coast of California, Disneyland (animatronics), SiliValley (nothing for a tourist to see, make contacts well in advance and get some great tours) head up to BC, then train across to Calgary (almost real cowboys), then further east.
At this point, I should warn you, if you plan on entering the US more than once, you must have a multiple entry visa. Explain it clearly to the US visa officer in simple words, using up to an entire sylable per word. I forget the designation, but I've heard countless stories of people with single entry visas stuck in Montreal or Tijuana (either are quite nice for an adventure) and can't get back to their friends who stayed stateside.
As winter progresses, then head south. Memphis, Miami and Key West, the Kennedy Space Centre (take the expensive day long tour, your geek self will always remember it). Then head back towards the west, NawOrleeens, Texas, the Grand Canyon, Las Vegas, LA.
Don't waste the summer in the south, its hot like Queensland and not very good for backpacking/hitching. And Canada winters are worse than any ever seen down unda (think antarctica, with hockey)
I've walked around in a couple of rooms immediately after Halon tests, with no ill side effects. The first time was specifically monitored by pulmonary/blood specialists to detect harmful chemicals entering the body. From what I could determine from reading their raw reports, nothing did. That was a standard 7% Halon discharge.
The second time was at a company with a really stupid manager who just had to test every part of his new DR plan. In that one the local fire department got involved, so all their firemen could stand around inside and see what occured during a discharge. Walked inside about 20 seconds after the discharge to a room full of white mist, it was a full 10% flood fill test. No side effects from that, except for a pesky hole in the ozone layer which is still following me around today.
The firemen and doctors both pointed out the nasty effects of HF and HBr on the body, and how long and painful the treatment is. Damage to bone structure is permanent, lungs tend to stay scarred, etc. Which is why if you have a Halon discharge into a room with a big, hot fire, its very wise to hold your breath and do everything you can to get to fresh air. Cleanup crews for several days afterwards will have to wear full protective gear until they can neutralise all the HF.
However, there is usually enough oxygen in computer room installations, even with a fire, to breathe long enough to get outside. Inside of U.S. military tanks, the Halon concentration is typically 50%-70%, complete overkill but maybe necessary under battle conditions where turning off aircon, power, and engines would lead to a very dead crew very quickly.
There are quite a few replacements for Halon, none as ruthlessly efficient, but mostly cheaper and all better for the environment.
Maybe up until 1985, but by then I was operating one of at least three modem based UUCP connections to Oz. Mine was a commercial link to Sydney, there was at least one other commercial link from silicon valley to Melbourne. The other admin and I figured there was a 2-5 day delay between the machines in Sydney and Melbourne, and we were duplicating a lot of traffic (but, hey, not our phone bills:-)
Certainly inside of Australia people were mailing tapes/carts back and forth with the latest spool. But any mailing between the U.S. and Oz would have been before 1984, human-nets days.
We ran 1200 baud in 1985, with ~1 hour connect times each day at AT&T pre-MFJ rates, then upgraded to 2400 baud in 1987 and the connect times were around 2 hours per day. By 1988, there were at least 6 or 7 UUCP connections, and at least one NNTP connection over the internet through UCSD. When the NNTP link broke, modem connect times would jump from 10 minutes per day to several hours. I haven't been forced to soil myself with usenet adminning since 1988, so I'm beginning to forget those nightmares.
IPv6 is picking up steam, another push like this is going to make it appear in all new computers a little bit sooner.
In every installation I've rolled out in the last few years, I've specced IPv6 support. Every network, router, interconnect, carrier and transit has had IPv6 working. Not always working very well, but enough that people didn't notice whether their traffic went over IPv6 or v4.
Solaris has had IPv6 for several years, and the current release its on by default, plug it into a network with an IPv6 router and it works. M$ is playing catch up by including it natively in XP, but it still takes some tweaking. The linux distros will have to start making it enabled by default (no more kernel recompiles), but that may be happening as I type this. More and more applications are being written as fully IPv6 aware, and most of the traditional apps like ping, FTP, traceroute and SSH are now re-written to use IPv6 when a AAAA record is returned from a DNS lookup. There still is a lot of work to be done, like fully working dynamic DNS updates, and DHCPng, route servers, and a free (as in everything) certificate system for IPSec. Every new release of every browser should check for IPv6 and use it whenever possible, M$ claims that will happen starting with their next desktop releases.
Where I've seen the most far-sighted development is in the newest generation of GSM mobile phones. All the big players are including IPv6 in their current handset designs, and the carriers are now developing value added services to sell. So its not just each phone is individually addressable, but can roam onto competing carriers networks and still have a globally accessible address. Internally, every carrier in Europe with 2.5G/3G services is running IPv6 for everything (except for a few dinosaurs about to be extinct). The other big area is giving each credit card with a smart chip (anti-fraud and verification chip) a range of IPv6 addresses. When the card is put into a reader or used for an online purchase, the chip will actively participate in the verification step by being uniquely addressable and requesting end-to-end encryption. There were several card manufacturers showing off their tiny IPv6 stacks at a recent smartcard trade show.
As I've pointed out in a post months ago, many ISPs here in Europe are making IPv6 available for early adopters, in the hopes of riding the next wave to some higher margins. I've had clients ask me for advice on getting onto the "new internet", because they didn't want to get left behind on the "old and obsolete internet". Then I point out how they are already on it, and my installations use the "new internet" whenever possible.
IPv6 is here, it works, and soon consumers will make it a "must-have" item when buying a new computer. When that starts happening, then techies with a few years of solid IPv6 experience will be sought after for their skills.
I'll start testing random pond scum to establish parenthood right away. Your job is to test the shark. Almost certainly they weren't married, but their litigious bastard spawn certainly has covered their tracks by devouring them.
if you will have very few connections to the outside world -- few sources of power (at the odd hostel or train station outlet), no internet, and no USB?
Where is this mythical place he is traveling to? Antarctica? Northern Canada? A foot trip across the outback of Australia?
Sounds like an American who has never been more than 50 miles from his hometown, and thinks the rest of the world has no electricity or internet cafes. There are a few wild and savage areas on this planet, but for the most part you can find electricity just about anywhere if you go looking for it, and the internet pops up in the most unexpected areas.
Enough ranting.
Get some of the new 1 and 2 Gig CF cards, and an assortment of 256Mb or 512Mb models. Buy a nice but not too top end camera which can support the 2Gig cards. Make sure the camera is purchased at least a few months before the trip starts, so the learning curve is well past before heading out. Take a few weekends to hike to a neighboring town, taking pictures along the way, and then figure out how to get the photos home without carrying them. Practice trips are a great way to discover how much shit accumulates in the backpack of inexperienced travelers, and how out of shape they are. Practice with the camera will allow for learning the optimum resolution needed for most photos, super hi res for amazing shots where details count, medium res for some shots, and low res for just day to day point and shoot, thanks for the memory pics.
Typically, a traveler will take about 50 photos per day, or enough to fill a CF card in 5-10 days. So 2 or 3 big cards, and 8 to 10 smaller (cheaper) cards will suffice for a month or more. From time to time, take a day off from traveling and do all the administrivia needed, preferably in a good sized town or large city. Find an internet cafe and check email, phone loved ones with updates, write post cards, do laundry, eat a real meal or two, mail trinkets home, get a solid nights sleep, and transfer a bunch of photos home (which also keeps the family and friends happy). My rule is to spend at least two nights in a hotel(not a hostel), which gives a full day to run around with no backpack. (there is an upside to the occasional hotel, it allows you to shag the almost-cute-enough fellow traveler you met in the hostel or on the bus)
There are several ways of getting the photos home, a combination of these is recommended.
Email the photos to a waiting server (no free email services like $h*tmail). When photo attachments come into the mailbox, they get procmailed into a waiting directory with some PHP scripts to make web photo albums, and he can check from any browser they were received before deleting them from his media. Even poorly connected cyber cafes will eventually get the dozens of email messages out of their outbound queue, it may take them a few days. Never attach more than about 1Mb of photos to each outgoing email.
Purchase a small portable PC, with a tiny screen, annoyingly small keyboard, cram the largest HD he can fit in, a USB port and a CF reader, and ethernet. Ignore any cables which come with the cameras, they'll just get fscked up and drivers are generally a bitch. You can get additional CF cards anywhere in the world (not sure about Bhutan, but I bought one in Albania last month). You can also get USB based CF readers most photo places in any major town on the planet, in case the PC or reader gets lost. Don't bother carrying a CD burner, they're too common so you can borrow them as you travel.
If a whole tiny PC is too much to carry/worry about, then just a small USB CF reader you can hook to internet cafe computers will do. Small computers and fancy digital cameras tend to make you stick out in poorer areas, and thus a target for thieves, so don't count on the photos stored on the PC making it home.
Go into a cyber cafe and ask to use his own PC on their internal network. If they allow it, then find out what their outgoing SMTP server is, and use it to relay t
I picked up a 900+ a while ago to see what it would do, in the hopes of filling in some bad coverage areas. First I found out it only does repeater mode with one specific other model, the 614+, but not any other kind of AP. Screwey proprietary protocol, not debugged at all. Fortunately I have a 614+.
First we had all kinds of problems getting it to stay configured, and we never were able to get the 900+ to run a full 24 hours without a problem. Reading the support sites, this is the best we can hope for. Tried various kinds of updates, downgrades, and international firmware. There was also the problem of trying to transfer a large amount of data over the repeater, it would always hang or reboot after 50-100Mbytes of data, which is only a couple of hours of working over an IPSec tunnel. There were problems of bringing up a card and getting a DHCP address over the link, because the 900+ doesn't repeat broadcast traffic, until the 614 has the remote card's MAC address in its arp cache. Time out the arp cache, and the 900+ stops repeating.
I gave the box away to a friend who wanted to play with a WAP, he gave it back to me yesterday.
You can always tell the engineers with no practical hands-on experience. Its not just the inability to solder, drill, or read color codes, but complete lack of clue about components in general.
Like the circuit I once was told to build which had a few 1.2 MegaFarad capacitors sprinkled throughout. I put together a proposal to purchase futures in capacitors to ensure delivery of the whole output of all component manufacturers for the next few decades, so that we would eventually be able to build a single one of our own 1.2MF caps in a large warehouse. The engineer eventually got the point, and went back to his spice simulations and left us to do our jobs. The weird thing is that his spice sim of the circuit was correct, his design was so screwey he needed 1.2MF caps in a few places, it wasn't just a slipped decimal point.
However, I now have a few aerogel caps, 10 Farads or so, but limited to 5.8V breakdown voltage. Great fun to charge for a day and discharge in a few seconds. 4 of them will run a GSM mobile phone for about 2.5 minutes.
The ability to solder a project together, mold plastic, drill holes, etch circuit boards, and certify the result with the FCC/TUV/ART should be a minimum requirement of all EE programs before handing out the certificate.
Get a cable lock for every major component of your setup. If you have a desktop model with a flat screen, secure them both with cable locks. Having a cable lock on the main CPU box also tends to keep the unit closed so RAM and the processor stay put.
Invest in some serious eye-bolts, run through the wall or set firmly into the floor. A little covert drilling to get those eye-bolts firmly secured is absolutely necessary, otherwise your table leg will just end up broken off or your bedframe broken.
Each cable comes with 2 keys, take the spare and label it clearly and leave it with your parents or friends off campus. That way if you lose your keys, you can get the second set sent to you. Never leave your copy of the keys lying around in your desk drawer, otherwise your cables are just one more thing to be easily stolen.
Spilling guinness is a major faux-pas, you must be more careful with your drinks.
This is what I do now. I have an open AP on a specially firewalled port, and it only allows web browsing through a proxy server. All other traffic is blocked, except for a few neighbors who know how to authenticate to my firewall and have less restricted access.
My AP is in the top of the house, with a nice omni antenna on the roof covering my neighborhood. I coordinate with several neighbors so our channels don't overlap. One neighbor in a shielded area has put up a yagi pointed at my omni, and gets a 2Mbps (really about 400kbps throughput) signal, which he repeats to several of his neighbors, using a linux box and 2 APs + 2 antennas. They buy me beers from time to time to pay me back. My neighbors are mostly geeks who want to experiment with wireless routing, and swapping emails between our servers without having to go through the internet.
Some evenings I see as many as 4 or 5 people connected. I feel this is the best use of my internet connection, because I'm providing a service which doesn't cost me much and certainly helps people sitting in the local cafe brun working on term paper research while downing a beer.
I'll second that. APs to APs as distribution is unworkable. There are only 3 channels you can use on 802.11b which don't overlap, and you can't have an AP retransmitting on those or nearby frequencies without dropping your transmission speed to modem levels (or worse).
If you can't pull/hijack some wire pairs from the PoP to outlying buildings, then you will have to go to an 802.11a distribution backbone, with the APs routing/repeating the signals onto 802.11b. That means the APs will be even more expensive with 2 sets of wireless cards and 2 antenna fixtures. Even with a dual system, you still have the problem of 200+ apartments trying to suck up 1.5MBytes/sec of bandwidth divided by 7 APs. Dialup modems will be faster. Your APs most likely will need to have copper connections back to your routing closet/MDF, to keep the airwaves clear for APapartment signals.
If you really want to do this correctly, hire a networking expert to calculate the bandwidth needed for 200+ apartments at peak usage (7:00 PM), and distribute that with a multiport router and 100Mbit/sec switches. Or start with a single set of buildings and a single AP, and grow from there.
Then google up wireless authentication projects, like NoCatAuth, to install on a server between your APs and the internet. You must have authentication, otherwise how can you bitchslap some idiot who continuously DLs the latest linux ISOs? You will almost certainly need to enable WEP or promote cards/drivers that support WPA or newer security protocols to protect neighbors transmissions. There is a lot of security things to consider if you don't want to be on the receiving end of lawsuit happy ex-resident for allowing his precious kiddiepr0n DLs to be intercepted by the nosy lady in apartment 27b.
My normal advice would be to talk to the local telco and see if they would put a DSLAM into the PoP for your complex and then they could sell DSL service. But if Roseville is in SBC territory, then keep dreaming about making a wireless system, its your only chance.
After all the professional sounding advice (you get what you pay for on/.;-), I'm also going to post my real world experience under the also realistic post by JWB
If I still had some mod points, I'd mod this post WAY up. Its one of the first few posts to deal with the original topic.
In places where my clients were worried about spyware/trojans/web tracking/popups, I installed a split DNS with firewall rules blocking outgoing port 53 from all internal networks. The internal DNS server would only be allowed to contact the external, which would then perform the real world lookups. The internal server was made authoritative for hundreds (greps my master file, 322) domains which are known for popups, tracking, and spyware. The server returns a specific IP address which is null-routed at the firewall, and the main firewall returns an ICMP no-route-to-host for every packet heading to MalWareNet. If you don't return an ICMP packet many browsers will block for 10-60 seconds waiting for a response. The PIX was made for actions like this.
There are a few dozen individual IP addresses that need to be blocked at the PIX level after that, for the few hard coded spyware/adware apps that don't bother using DNS. Of course, blocking everything and forcing lusers to use a web proxy can also help in identifying lusers who insist on downloading questionable applets and cruft from the internet. Before switching in a proxy, make sure you have a well explained security policy in place.
Its amazing the comments we get from client's lusers who can surf all day long at work and never see any ads/popups, and then go home to all the unfiltered shit on the internet. It really does make a difference.
the AC the AC has a large and well maintained list of malware sites, and the knowledge to create a relatively secure internet connection. He's available for contract work at reasonable rates anywhere in Europe
I've IPv6 enabled on all my machines, my upstream provider offers IPv6, and most of my former clients have IPv6 rolled out internally. It doesn't buy much for the moment, but I've noticed a large surge in interest over the last year in the techie community to learn all they can about IPv6. I know one guy who is staking his whole future on being the IPv6 guru.
Having been at several RIPE meetings and national Net Operator Group meetings, the biggest problem is getting peering and transit connections negotiated. IPv6 requires many things which were optional in IPv4, like multicast support end-to-end. Many of the clued ISPs and carriers in Europe now have IPv6 internally, and offer it to their clients. Larger ISPs are naturally lagging behind, because the techies have no voice in the business operations of big telcos, and the suits haven't heard enough to start asking their customers if they want it.
There was a chicken and egg problem, where ISPs weren't asking their customers about wanting IPv6, and customers not implementing it because it wasn't offered by IPSs. This has changed quite a bit in the last year, for two reasons. Big telcos rolling out 2.5G/3G mobile phone systems are using IPv6 internally, and smaller ISPs are looking for an edge in these lean times. My upstream ISP made a few announcements on internal mailing lists about offering IPv6 over IPv4 tunnels for testing purposes, and was overwhelmed by the response. They now have a few dedicated cisco routers, and allow a full IPv6 login without needing tunnels. The last I heard, almost 20% of their customers have taken up IPv6, mostly the businesses with clued techies and home experimenters. Other ISPs are now looking to roll out IPv6 soon, but the biggest problem is hammering out the peering/transit issues, not in the offer to customers.
The other delay is waiting for the IPv6 working groups at RIPE to get the registry database objects well defined and implemented, and a few other technical services like route servers and DNSSEC implemented. But the work is ongoing and will take a while until the backend issues get ironed out.
My bet is that, at least in Europe, there will be some mainstream buzz about IPv6 starting in 12 to 18 months. The early adopters like myself already run IPv6 alongside IPv4, most systems have it built in ready to go, and ISPs are getting up to speed.
I've known a few foxpro evangelists over the years. They swear by it for quick and dirty prototypes, but then switch to big reliable systems for the actual projects.
The great thing about FP+/VFP is that a project lead can whip out a semi-working demo prototype in a few days to impress the powers that be. I've seen 6 month projects prototyped in less than 3 days by a good PM, that he can then email around to people as a first look. FP creates a stand-alone application which can just be clicked on and will run on almost any environment.
Prototypes can have working buttons and controls, which can display simple data drawn from the database. There are (what? libraries?) that can simulate a web browser or java applet, ready to go. All in a nice, easy to run self-contained application. It then lets the planners/architects or PMs see what works and what doesn't, and allows rapid changes to be tested. Having a working prototype before actual coding starts can greatly improve the quality of the real project.
But for a production system? Not a chance. Buggy, inefficient, unscalable. And now a M$ product with unreasonable licensing agreements and total lack of support. VFP has its place, early on in product development cycles, or for tiny offices with tiny data sets. That makes it a valuable tool for certain jobs.
the AC
Re:"Young lady, in this house we obey the laws...
on
Energy From Vibrations
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That's the most concise description of many sci-fi fans I think I've ever seen. I think I'll have to file that one away for future use.:)
Signature? What signature?
With slight editing, it fits my new signature. Can't fit in the attribute, though.
Volunteer (you were never in the military, right?) to get on the security policy committee. Spend the next few months adding updates to the security policy which has been pre-approved by senior management. Include in that policy rules for punishing (i.e. instant termination with extreme prejudice) any employee who allows customer data to be leaked to a third party. Make some specific examples, which will highlight those idiots current behaviour.
Once the security policy has been approved and put into place(nobody, but nobody, ever reads those things, trust me on this), loudly announce a new network monitoring program for violations of the security policy. Give it a few days, then show some data on how a third party has been stealing all your customer data through corporate espionage with the help of a internal spy. Approach the CEO with the report, tell him the FBI is waiting for his green light because of the 100's of Millions of $$$ being lost in customer good will (is Mitnicked a verb yet?), but you would prefer to avoid the disasterous bad PR and have him handle it by making the offending party redundant. It helps if you have two burly armed guards standing by in the hallway to escort the marketdroid to the parking lot.
Thank goodness we technical people don't feel that way about marketroids.
You are not engineering. You did not have enough brains or SAT scores to get into a real school, so the only things left were PhysEd and Marketing. Therefore, according to Engineers, you don't know shit from shinola. It doesn't matter if you have a shiny certificate from the Universal Life Church, have sold an ice cream cone to an eskimo in Atlanta in summer, scored in the top ninety-percentile of an IQ test, taught yourself to tie your shoes, and cut your finger on the photocopier yesterday, you are an imbecile because you can't (or are afraid to try) to program.
Yup! Good to know we don't feel that way about marketdroids.
Ok, not anonymous coward, so maybe you (and others) will take this with more than a grain of salt. First hand reporting, no friend of a friend hearsay.
Draper has admitted on several occasions to being gay, and prefering young men. I've known him since soon after he was released from prison (his second or third time when he did hard time in a federal prison), and he's always been rather open about his fondness for young men. But in all those years, I've never seen him going after "little boys", just young guys, 18 to 30.
When he was in prison he had his back broken in a fight because the other inmates considered him to be a child molester. After that he was kept in the prison hospital, and then in isolation until his parole. When I met him he was still wearing a back brace, but that didn't stop him from proposing to go to his apartment for a "massage". Since the people who had introduced us warned me to never be alone with him especially when he mentioned massages, I mostly avoided his attentions. But there were several times when he managed to get me or close friends alone, and then his propositions were rather explicit towards wanting gay sex. At some party in Amsterdam when he was stoned out of his gourd he admitted he was beat up all through high school because he had made passes at some of the other guys.
There was talk, when I first met him, that he was kicked out of the Air Force for being gay. In the USAF he was an electronics technician maintaining microwave repeater towers for phone trunks across Alaska, which is where he learned the basics about manipulating the phone system. He was discharged before he could learn enough to become really dangerous, just mostly dangerous.
He is a poser who was always looking for information to make him look good. He would do anything to learn a technical trick from others, so he could claim it as his own discovery. He always liked to brag, which is why he went to prison after the famous Esquire article. He bragged so much to the reporter about his van full of electronics and ripping off pay phones the feds had no choice but to go after him. His technical abilities are pretty limited, he's always been an outsider to legitimate engineering, and he avoids anyone with in depth knowledge of a subject. For more than two decades he has been hanging around with a young and impressionable crowd, because that is the only place he can be worshipped.
His sexual desire for young men used to be disguised as requests for massages and now the current energy distribution bullshit. He hit on me several times a couple of decades ago, and made me want to stay away from him as much as possible. Other posts are talking about his naive sexual blunderings, just add my voice to that list as a first hand experience. He's a gay, attention seeking freak, not really a phreak.
There are 3 main categories of services you can provide to households over fibre: internet, phone (VoIP), and cable television. Whatever you choose, the city should be just the owner of the conduit, and rent access to competing companies for services.
The internet part is the easiest. The city runs a big router or two (using ATM pipes), and allows a number of competing ISPs to provide IP/IPv6 addresses to customers (require IPv6 as part of the contract with the city, and be hailed as visionaries:-). That way companies like AoHell/TW and local IPSs can each offer different levels of service, such as static IPs, blocks of IP addresses for businesses (and home working geeks), etc. In the home, the customer gets an ethernet port which can be plugged into a switch and feed every computer they want. This then allows "new" consumer goods to be internet connected for very little additional cost.
The city will receive legal hassles if it tries to run its own phone service, and will also get legal hassles if it allows either one or multiple phone companies to offer services. Its just a fact of the b0rken american system that anything a city does will be challenged in the courts by companies who might lose out. My best advice would be to build a telco switch and allow a limited number of companies access to offer services to the citizenry. Then negotiate long term contracts with the area ILECs/CLECs/wannabes to provide local/LD services, calling plans, portable phone numbers, etc to the users, who could then choose which company would provide their IP dialtone. Enforce a standard VoIP phone system, SIP or whatever is the most stable in a few years time. Then the consumers can purchase whichever fancy VoIP phone from ratShack or other electronic stores in the area, or let a phone company include one in their package (local vs. remote voicemail box).
Video is the most promising use of FttH technology, it is just now starting to mature. Cable companies currently use Hybrid Fibre Coax distribution systems, the fibre can carry 800+ channels without distortion, but then the signal is converted into copper in each neighborhood for feeding into the set top boxes. The cost of that conversion equipment is pretty high, but not as high as replacing the copper investment with fibre. If the city were to make each subscriber's fibre available to a small number of cable companies (two or three is enough to keep the prices competitive), then they can't be blackmailed by AT&T like San Francisco. If the city owns and maintains the fibre system, it keeps many, many arguments at bay like who pays for the upgrades, maintenance, etc.
Depending on how many of these services the city finally decides to offer will determine which kind of technology to be installed in the homes and business in the area. Also whether a single or double pair should be pulled to each house (I vote for double at a minimum). Apartment buildings and dorms are a special case, where it might make sense to put in special distribution hubs. The topology is best left to experienced technical people hired directly by the city (fiduciary responsibility) rather than allowing corporate sales slime to make suggestions. Corporations *WILL* do everything in their power to limit the ability to grow or evolve the system in the hopes of locking out their competition. A ban on all non-residents from city council meetings to eliminate astroturfing is highly recommended.
That said, the potential for economic gain is pretty good. I've just viewed the fibre plant of a small town in Portugal, who decided to put FttH of every household as part of a rebuilding of the whole utility infrastructure. They haven't yet even decided what to offer, or which equipment to put in, and the project is still 5-6 years from lighting up. But property prices have been shooting up way faster than other towns in the area because the promise of always on internet connections are drawing all the tech crowd from Lisbon. Expect a similar boom where the tax rate can stay the same (or even drop slightly as a campaign lie^Wpromise), but with a huge increase in property values will result in more money for the council to play with.
No, I held those tiny ones in my hand at CeBit. Integrated antenna. Scanned them with the handheld scanner (with 802.11b link back to a processing terminal running middleware).
The generation of RFID tags from early last year are quite a bit larger, about 2mmX4mmX8mm in size, but with no need for external antennas. The ones I saw were about 3mm in diameter, and 11mm in length. The antennas were printed on some kind of flexible substrate, which was rolled around the chip before the whole thing was sealed in epoxy/plastic. Range of the handheld reader was about 15cm, but they claimed a floor mounted big RF loop for anti-shoplifting could detect all RFID tags going through the doorway. Not just theirs, but most other manufacturers. The firmware of the door sensor could be changed to track as many RFID tags as the owner wanted, and pass the information on to the middleware box.
The company with the small RFID tags claimed they would be in full production by 3Q03. I wanted one of their handheld scanners so I could walk around and detect as many embedded tags as possible (great for freaking out suits in security review meetings), but the pricetag kept me from buying one right then. 450Euros now, dropping to 220Euros for bulk purchases by the end of the year. However, without access to the retail store databases, no way to match up an ID# with tigerstriped string knickers.
Ah, yes. DuPont flamesulate flexible asbestos knickers, crotchless with pink lace trim and a flying windows logo on each buttcheek. Purchased from thinkGeek on December 19, 2001. Using visa card 1723-9911-0293-9935. Also on the order "Strawberry flavoured BSA audit lube, 55 gallon drum", "HelloKitty laptop conversion kit" and a "Windows 2000 for Dummies" book.
Thats the nice thing about a serial number for each and every piece of clothing which will be active for the life of the item. Databases! When you purchase the tiger-striped thongs, that item will forever be associated with your CC# or fidelity card, thus directly with you. Then any store with an RFID scanner near the door or at each checkout stand, can start collecting information on which items of clothing go with which shoppers. Cool huh?
After seeing several companies at CeBit showing off tiny RFID tags, all of them promote the fact that they can't be destroyed by putting them in a microwave, or with other types of high energy RF systems. They have been designed to withstand most easy things thieves/consumers can do to disable them.
Only way to disable them is to locate them in the clothing, and tear them out. Those things are tiny, like smaller than a dried grain of rice, with tiny loops on the ends for threads to hold them in place.
(apologies for the US-centric nature of this post) Americans wonder why people could hate the US so much they flew airplanes into buildings. Americans can't grasp with their limited intelligence and stunted ability to reason why most of the world despises them. They are so out of touch with reality, they have to repeat your little mantra constantly to try to keep the truth at bay. The complete fiction of your post shows exactly why America is in for a long, rough ride over the next decades, until it once again learns humility and respect.
Sure, there's some dumb... laws ad nauseum, but as of right now (forgoing the orwellian near future, for a moment), there is simply no better place to be
Start with the fucked up state of the American justice system, which allows (encourages) large corporations to write the laws. That's the original topic of this thread, the RIAA has turned a simple copyright dispute into a major theft crime, with punishments far exceeding any other property theft crime. Its not just a few laws which are fucked up, its most of them. And its not just americans suffering under those orwellian laws, citizens in other countries also have to fear the long reach of American laws. The FBI, the military, the CIA, and other enforcement groups have kidnapped citizens from all over the world to bring them to the US to stand trial, but the US threatens any country which puts a US citizen on trial. The US constantly demands extradition of other country's citizens, but hasn't once in the last 35 years extradited an American to another country to stand trial.
You live in a country with an incredibly good road system.
America has overextended its road system, which has led to a huge shortfall in maintenance. I've driven around the US twice now, and found the roads away from the interstates to be in appalling shape. Big cities in the poorer parts of the country have really poor maintenance, lack of street signs, non-functional traffic lights, potholes big enough to break axles. Most western countries have far superior road systems, you just have never left the US and driven on truly well kept modern roads.
You have running water. Reliably. You have indoor plumbing.
You obviously don't live in a large east coast city. About 5% of americans in large cities don't have access to indoor plumbing. That figure climbs to about 8% in rural areas. Compare that to the UKs 3% figure, or Denmarks less than 2% figure.
I can drink the water anywhere in this nation without fear.
Then you have never been to western Nevada, where the arsenic in the tap water is well above lethal levels. Or Love Canal. Did you see the movie Erin Brockovitch, about a power company poisoning the water table for a whole bunch of communities in California, which killed hundreds of people over a couple of decades, with the "authorities" ignoring all tests showing how bad the contamination was?
You have readily available food.
Unless you look at statistics on malnutrition in the OECD countries, and realize the US has the highest per capita problem of starvation and lack of proper food distribution. Paradoxically, Americans are the most overweight, and the most obese people on the planet. 69% are overweight, and 32% are obese. The next highest countries have figures like 40% overweight and 12% obese. France has declared a national problem, because 5% of the population are considered obese, when the number had been less than 2% until the last decade.
You have electricity.
Unless you live in the western US, where due to criminal actions by a number of large corporations, the electicity supply over the last few years have brought the US down to 3rd world status for reliability and price. Most of the world has reliable electricity.
You don't have to fear for your life walking down the street (well, in some places, you do, but it's safer here than much of the rest of the world)
Slashdot Mirror
You are missing the point. None of the machines out there sending spam have "system administrators". They are machines where some luser managed to follow enough directions to install linux with an old open-relay sendmail, or diddled their M$ control panel to enable an open SMTP server. The people with those machines haven't enough clue to check even a single one of your 13 points.
Perhaps they were stupid enough to click on that attachment from their friend, and silently installed a mail proxy which phones home to the waiting spammers. Or they are using outhouse express on win95 or 98 and the trojan is automically launched by the preview pane, and there is no security patch you can throw on their machine because M$ only wants people to upgrade to XP.
There are so few unsecured machines with actual admins, that the spammers have been forced to criminal acts to create open relays. Most of the spam I see these days doesn't come through a poorly admined machine, it comes through a trojan proxy on a windoze box sitting on a DSL line, and now from corporate PCs which create two tunnels through the firewall, one to a hijacked relay machine, and the other spews out spam until the idiots fix their firewall and block outgoing port 25.
Sendmail {spit}, qmail {spit}, and most other major MTAs now come configured out of the box with most of the anti-spammer features enabled. Sendmail even complains and dies if it can't resolve the FQDN of the machine, just to prevent idiot lusers from managing to install it and run it where they are not supposed to.
Your rant dates back to the mid 1990's, you really need to keep up with the problems on the internet today.
the AC
So you will be arriving in time for winter, so don't leave Quebec or Ontario for December or January. Maybe for a quick visit to see what SERIOUS winter is all about, but autumn in Quebec is awe inspiring when the leaves change.
Plan a great circle tour, starting on the west coast of California, Disneyland (animatronics), SiliValley (nothing for a tourist to see, make contacts well in advance and get some great tours) head up to BC, then train across to Calgary (almost real cowboys), then further east.
At this point, I should warn you, if you plan on entering the US more than once, you must have a multiple entry visa. Explain it clearly to the US visa officer in simple words, using up to an entire sylable per word. I forget the designation, but I've heard countless stories of people with single entry visas stuck in Montreal or Tijuana (either are quite nice for an adventure) and can't get back to their friends who stayed stateside.
As winter progresses, then head south. Memphis, Miami and Key West, the Kennedy Space Centre (take the expensive day long tour, your geek self will always remember it). Then head back towards the west, NawOrleeens, Texas, the Grand Canyon, Las Vegas, LA.
Don't waste the summer in the south, its hot like Queensland and not very good for backpacking/hitching. And Canada winters are worse than any ever seen down unda (think antarctica, with hockey)
the AC
halon is un-breathable.
Depends on what you mean by "un-breathable."
I've walked around in a couple of rooms immediately after Halon tests, with no ill side effects. The first time was specifically monitored by pulmonary/blood specialists to detect harmful chemicals entering the body. From what I could determine from reading their raw reports, nothing did. That was a standard 7% Halon discharge.
The second time was at a company with a really stupid manager who just had to test every part of his new DR plan. In that one the local fire department got involved, so all their firemen could stand around inside and see what occured during a discharge. Walked inside about 20 seconds after the discharge to a room full of white mist, it was a full 10% flood fill test. No side effects from that, except for a pesky hole in the ozone layer which is still following me around today.
The firemen and doctors both pointed out the nasty effects of HF and HBr on the body, and how long and painful the treatment is. Damage to bone structure is permanent, lungs tend to stay scarred, etc. Which is why if you have a Halon discharge into a room with a big, hot fire, its very wise to hold your breath and do everything you can to get to fresh air. Cleanup crews for several days afterwards will have to wear full protective gear until they can neutralise all the HF.
However, there is usually enough oxygen in computer room installations, even with a fire, to breathe long enough to get outside. Inside of U.S. military tanks, the Halon concentration is typically 50%-70%, complete overkill but maybe necessary under battle conditions where turning off aircon, power, and engines would lead to a very dead crew very quickly.
There are quite a few replacements for Halon, none as ruthlessly efficient, but mostly cheaper and all better for the environment.
the AC
Maybe up until 1985, but by then I was operating one of at least three modem based UUCP connections to Oz. Mine was a commercial link to Sydney, there was at least one other commercial link from silicon valley to Melbourne. The other admin and I figured there was a 2-5 day delay between the machines in Sydney and Melbourne, and we were duplicating a lot of traffic (but, hey, not our phone bills :-)
Certainly inside of Australia people were mailing tapes/carts back and forth with the latest spool. But any mailing between the U.S. and Oz would have been before 1984, human-nets days.
We ran 1200 baud in 1985, with ~1 hour connect times each day at AT&T pre-MFJ rates, then upgraded to 2400 baud in 1987 and the connect times were around 2 hours per day. By 1988, there were at least 6 or 7 UUCP connections, and at least one NNTP connection over the internet through UCSD. When the NNTP link broke, modem connect times would jump from 10 minutes per day to several hours. I haven't been forced to soil myself with usenet adminning since 1988, so I'm beginning to forget those nightmares.
the AC
IPv6 is picking up steam, another push like this is going to make it appear in all new computers a little bit sooner.
In every installation I've rolled out in the last few years, I've specced IPv6 support. Every network, router, interconnect, carrier and transit has had IPv6 working. Not always working very well, but enough that people didn't notice whether their traffic went over IPv6 or v4.
Solaris has had IPv6 for several years, and the current release its on by default, plug it into a network with an IPv6 router and it works. M$ is playing catch up by including it natively in XP, but it still takes some tweaking. The linux distros will have to start making it enabled by default (no more kernel recompiles), but that may be happening as I type this. More and more applications are being written as fully IPv6 aware, and most of the traditional apps like ping, FTP, traceroute and SSH are now re-written to use IPv6 when a AAAA record is returned from a DNS lookup. There still is a lot of work to be done, like fully working dynamic DNS updates, and DHCPng, route servers, and a free (as in everything) certificate system for IPSec. Every new release of every browser should check for IPv6 and use it whenever possible, M$ claims that will happen starting with their next desktop releases.
Where I've seen the most far-sighted development is in the newest generation of GSM mobile phones. All the big players are including IPv6 in their current handset designs, and the carriers are now developing value added services to sell. So its not just each phone is individually addressable, but can roam onto competing carriers networks and still have a globally accessible address. Internally, every carrier in Europe with 2.5G/3G services is running IPv6 for everything (except for a few dinosaurs about to be extinct). The other big area is giving each credit card with a smart chip (anti-fraud and verification chip) a range of IPv6 addresses. When the card is put into a reader or used for an online purchase, the chip will actively participate in the verification step by being uniquely addressable and requesting end-to-end encryption. There were several card manufacturers showing off their tiny IPv6 stacks at a recent smartcard trade show.
As I've pointed out in a post months ago, many ISPs here in Europe are making IPv6 available for early adopters, in the hopes of riding the next wave to some higher margins. I've had clients ask me for advice on getting onto the "new internet", because they didn't want to get left behind on the "old and obsolete internet". Then I point out how they are already on it, and my installations use the "new internet" whenever possible.
IPv6 is here, it works, and soon consumers will make it a "must-have" item when buying a new computer. When that starts happening, then techies with a few years of solid IPv6 experience will be sought after for their skills.
the AC
working with IPng/IPv6 since 1994
I'll start testing random pond scum to establish parenthood right away. Your job is to test the shark. Almost certainly they weren't married, but their litigious bastard spawn certainly has covered their tracks by devouring them.
the AC
if you will have very few connections to the outside world -- few sources of power (at the odd hostel or train station outlet), no internet, and no USB?
Where is this mythical place he is traveling to? Antarctica? Northern Canada? A foot trip across the outback of Australia?
Sounds like an American who has never been more than 50 miles from his hometown, and thinks the rest of the world has no electricity or internet cafes. There are a few wild and savage areas on this planet, but for the most part you can find electricity just about anywhere if you go looking for it, and the internet pops up in the most unexpected areas.
Enough ranting.
Get some of the new 1 and 2 Gig CF cards, and an assortment of 256Mb or 512Mb models. Buy a nice but not too top end camera which can support the 2Gig cards. Make sure the camera is purchased at least a few months before the trip starts, so the learning curve is well past before heading out. Take a few weekends to hike to a neighboring town, taking pictures along the way, and then figure out how to get the photos home without carrying them. Practice trips are a great way to discover how much shit accumulates in the backpack of inexperienced travelers, and how out of shape they are. Practice with the camera will allow for learning the optimum resolution needed for most photos, super hi res for amazing shots where details count, medium res for some shots, and low res for just day to day point and shoot, thanks for the memory pics.
Typically, a traveler will take about 50 photos per day, or enough to fill a CF card in 5-10 days. So 2 or 3 big cards, and 8 to 10 smaller (cheaper) cards will suffice for a month or more. From time to time, take a day off from traveling and do all the administrivia needed, preferably in a good sized town or large city. Find an internet cafe and check email, phone loved ones with updates, write post cards, do laundry, eat a real meal or two, mail trinkets home, get a solid nights sleep, and transfer a bunch of photos home (which also keeps the family and friends happy). My rule is to spend at least two nights in a hotel(not a hostel), which gives a full day to run around with no backpack. (there is an upside to the occasional hotel, it allows you to shag the almost-cute-enough fellow traveler you met in the hostel or on the bus)
There are several ways of getting the photos home, a combination of these is recommended.
Email the photos to a waiting server (no free email services like $h*tmail). When photo attachments come into the mailbox, they get procmailed into a waiting directory with some PHP scripts to make web photo albums, and he can check from any browser they were received before deleting them from his media. Even poorly connected cyber cafes will eventually get the dozens of email messages out of their outbound queue, it may take them a few days. Never attach more than about 1Mb of photos to each outgoing email.
Purchase a small portable PC, with a tiny screen, annoyingly small keyboard, cram the largest HD he can fit in, a USB port and a CF reader, and ethernet. Ignore any cables which come with the cameras, they'll just get fscked up and drivers are generally a bitch. You can get additional CF cards anywhere in the world (not sure about Bhutan, but I bought one in Albania last month). You can also get USB based CF readers most photo places in any major town on the planet, in case the PC or reader gets lost. Don't bother carrying a CD burner, they're too common so you can borrow them as you travel.
If a whole tiny PC is too much to carry/worry about, then just a small USB CF reader you can hook to internet cafe computers will do. Small computers and fancy digital cameras tend to make you stick out in poorer areas, and thus a target for thieves, so don't count on the photos stored on the PC making it home.
Go into a cyber cafe and ask to use his own PC on their internal network. If they allow it, then find out what their outgoing SMTP server is, and use it to relay t
Have you gotten this to work yet?
I picked up a 900+ a while ago to see what it would do, in the hopes of filling in some bad coverage areas. First I found out it only does repeater mode with one specific other model, the 614+, but not any other kind of AP. Screwey proprietary protocol, not debugged at all. Fortunately I have a 614+.
First we had all kinds of problems getting it to stay configured, and we never were able to get the 900+ to run a full 24 hours without a problem. Reading the support sites, this is the best we can hope for. Tried various kinds of updates, downgrades, and international firmware. There was also the problem of trying to transfer a large amount of data over the repeater, it would always hang or reboot after 50-100Mbytes of data, which is only a couple of hours of working over an IPSec tunnel. There were problems of bringing up a card and getting a DHCP address over the link, because the 900+ doesn't repeat broadcast traffic, until the 614 has the remote card's MAC address in its arp cache. Time out the arp cache, and the 900+ stops repeating.
I gave the box away to a friend who wanted to play with a WAP, he gave it back to me yesterday.
the AC
You can always tell the engineers with no practical hands-on experience. Its not just the inability to solder, drill, or read color codes, but complete lack of clue about components in general.
Like the circuit I once was told to build which had a few 1.2 MegaFarad capacitors sprinkled throughout. I put together a proposal to purchase futures in capacitors to ensure delivery of the whole output of all component manufacturers for the next few decades, so that we would eventually be able to build a single one of our own 1.2MF caps in a large warehouse. The engineer eventually got the point, and went back to his spice simulations and left us to do our jobs. The weird thing is that his spice sim of the circuit was correct, his design was so screwey he needed 1.2MF caps in a few places, it wasn't just a slipped decimal point.
However, I now have a few aerogel caps, 10 Farads or so, but limited to 5.8V breakdown voltage. Great fun to charge for a day and discharge in a few seconds. 4 of them will run a GSM mobile phone for about 2.5 minutes.
The ability to solder a project together, mold plastic, drill holes, etch circuit boards, and certify the result with the FCC/TUV/ART should be a minimum requirement of all EE programs before handing out the certificate.
the AC
Get a cable lock for every major component of your setup. If you have a desktop model with a flat screen, secure them both with cable locks. Having a cable lock on the main CPU box also tends to keep the unit closed so RAM and the processor stay put.
Invest in some serious eye-bolts, run through the wall or set firmly into the floor. A little covert drilling to get those eye-bolts firmly secured is absolutely necessary, otherwise your table leg will just end up broken off or your bedframe broken.
Each cable comes with 2 keys, take the spare and label it clearly and leave it with your parents or friends off campus. That way if you lose your keys, you can get the second set sent to you. Never leave your copy of the keys lying around in your desk drawer, otherwise your cables are just one more thing to be easily stolen.
Spilling guinness is a major faux-pas, you must be more careful with your drinks.
the AC
This is what I do now. I have an open AP on a specially firewalled port, and it only allows web browsing through a proxy server. All other traffic is blocked, except for a few neighbors who know how to authenticate to my firewall and have less restricted access.
My AP is in the top of the house, with a nice omni antenna on the roof covering my neighborhood. I coordinate with several neighbors so our channels don't overlap. One neighbor in a shielded area has put up a yagi pointed at my omni, and gets a 2Mbps (really about 400kbps throughput) signal, which he repeats to several of his neighbors, using a linux box and 2 APs + 2 antennas. They buy me beers from time to time to pay me back. My neighbors are mostly geeks who want to experiment with wireless routing, and swapping emails between our servers without having to go through the internet.
Some evenings I see as many as 4 or 5 people connected. I feel this is the best use of my internet connection, because I'm providing a service which doesn't cost me much and certainly helps people sitting in the local cafe brun working on term paper research while downing a beer.
the AC
I'll second that. APs to APs as distribution is unworkable. There are only 3 channels you can use on 802.11b which don't overlap, and you can't have an AP retransmitting on those or nearby frequencies without dropping your transmission speed to modem levels (or worse).
/. ;-), I'm also going to post my real world experience under the also realistic post by JWB
If you can't pull/hijack some wire pairs from the PoP to outlying buildings, then you will have to go to an 802.11a distribution backbone, with the APs routing/repeating the signals onto 802.11b. That means the APs will be even more expensive with 2 sets of wireless cards and 2 antenna fixtures. Even with a dual system, you still have the problem of 200+ apartments trying to suck up 1.5MBytes/sec of bandwidth divided by 7 APs. Dialup modems will be faster. Your APs most likely will need to have copper connections back to your routing closet/MDF, to keep the airwaves clear for APapartment signals.
If you really want to do this correctly, hire a networking expert to calculate the bandwidth needed for 200+ apartments at peak usage (7:00 PM), and distribute that with a multiport router and 100Mbit/sec switches. Or start with a single set of buildings and a single AP, and grow from there.
Then google up wireless authentication projects, like NoCatAuth, to install on a server between your APs and the internet. You must have authentication, otherwise how can you bitchslap some idiot who continuously DLs the latest linux ISOs? You will almost certainly need to enable WEP or promote cards/drivers that support WPA or newer security protocols to protect neighbors transmissions. There is a lot of security things to consider if you don't want to be on the receiving end of lawsuit happy ex-resident for allowing his precious kiddiepr0n DLs to be intercepted by the nosy lady in apartment 27b.
My normal advice would be to talk to the local telco and see if they would put a DSLAM into the PoP for your complex and then they could sell DSL service. But if Roseville is in SBC territory, then keep dreaming about making a wireless system, its your only chance.
After all the professional sounding advice (you get what you pay for on
the AC
66.35.250.150 slashdot.org
198.186.202.135 NS1.VASOFTWARE.COM
198.186.202.136 NS2.VASOFTWARE.COM
66.35.250.12 NS3.VASOFTWARE.COM
Then your life can continue as normal, despite verisign's fuckup.
the AC
If I still had some mod points, I'd mod this post WAY up. Its one of the first few posts to deal with the original topic.
In places where my clients were worried about spyware/trojans/web tracking/popups, I installed a split DNS with firewall rules blocking outgoing port 53 from all internal networks. The internal DNS server would only be allowed to contact the external, which would then perform the real world lookups. The internal server was made authoritative for hundreds (greps my master file, 322) domains which are known for popups, tracking, and spyware. The server returns a specific IP address which is null-routed at the firewall, and the main firewall returns an ICMP no-route-to-host for every packet heading to MalWareNet. If you don't return an ICMP packet many browsers will block for 10-60 seconds waiting for a response. The PIX was made for actions like this.
There are a few dozen individual IP addresses that need to be blocked at the PIX level after that, for the few hard coded spyware/adware apps that don't bother using DNS. Of course, blocking everything and forcing lusers to use a web proxy can also help in identifying lusers who insist on downloading questionable applets and cruft from the internet. Before switching in a proxy, make sure you have a well explained security policy in place.
Its amazing the comments we get from client's lusers who can surf all day long at work and never see any ads/popups, and then go home to all the unfiltered shit on the internet. It really does make a difference.
the AC
the AC has a large and well maintained list of malware sites, and the knowledge to create a relatively secure internet connection. He's available for contract work at reasonable rates anywhere in Europe
I've IPv6 enabled on all my machines, my upstream provider offers IPv6, and most of my former clients have IPv6 rolled out internally. It doesn't buy much for the moment, but I've noticed a large surge in interest over the last year in the techie community to learn all they can about IPv6. I know one guy who is staking his whole future on being the IPv6 guru.
Having been at several RIPE meetings and national Net Operator Group meetings, the biggest problem is getting peering and transit connections negotiated. IPv6 requires many things which were optional in IPv4, like multicast support end-to-end. Many of the clued ISPs and carriers in Europe now have IPv6 internally, and offer it to their clients. Larger ISPs are naturally lagging behind, because the techies have no voice in the business operations of big telcos, and the suits haven't heard enough to start asking their customers if they want it.
There was a chicken and egg problem, where ISPs weren't asking their customers about wanting IPv6, and customers not implementing it because it wasn't offered by IPSs. This has changed quite a bit in the last year, for two reasons. Big telcos rolling out 2.5G/3G mobile phone systems are using IPv6 internally, and smaller ISPs are looking for an edge in these lean times. My upstream ISP made a few announcements on internal mailing lists about offering IPv6 over IPv4 tunnels for testing purposes, and was overwhelmed by the response. They now have a few dedicated cisco routers, and allow a full IPv6 login without needing tunnels. The last I heard, almost 20% of their customers have taken up IPv6, mostly the businesses with clued techies and home experimenters. Other ISPs are now looking to roll out IPv6 soon, but the biggest problem is hammering out the peering/transit issues, not in the offer to customers.
The other delay is waiting for the IPv6 working groups at RIPE to get the registry database objects well defined and implemented, and a few other technical services like route servers and DNSSEC implemented. But the work is ongoing and will take a while until the backend issues get ironed out.
My bet is that, at least in Europe, there will be some mainstream buzz about IPv6 starting in 12 to 18 months. The early adopters like myself already run IPv6 alongside IPv4, most systems have it built in ready to go, and ISPs are getting up to speed.
the AC
Leaving for Barcelona friday
I've known a few foxpro evangelists over the years. They swear by it for quick and dirty prototypes, but then switch to big reliable systems for the actual projects.
The great thing about FP+/VFP is that a project lead can whip out a semi-working demo prototype in a few days to impress the powers that be. I've seen 6 month projects prototyped in less than 3 days by a good PM, that he can then email around to people as a first look. FP creates a stand-alone application which can just be clicked on and will run on almost any environment.
Prototypes can have working buttons and controls, which can display simple data drawn from the database. There are (what? libraries?) that can simulate a web browser or java applet, ready to go. All in a nice, easy to run self-contained application. It then lets the planners/architects or PMs see what works and what doesn't, and allows rapid changes to be tested. Having a working prototype before actual coding starts can greatly improve the quality of the real project.
But for a production system? Not a chance. Buggy, inefficient, unscalable. And now a M$ product with unreasonable licensing agreements and total lack of support. VFP has its place, early on in product development cycles, or for tiny offices with tiny data sets. That makes it a valuable tool for certain jobs.
the AC
That's the most concise description of many sci-fi fans I think I've ever seen. I think I'll have to file that one away for future use. :)
Signature? What signature?
With slight editing, it fits my new signature. Can't fit in the attribute, though.
the AC
Volunteer (you were never in the military, right?) to get on the security policy committee. Spend the next few months adding updates to the security policy which has been pre-approved by senior management. Include in that policy rules for punishing (i.e. instant termination with extreme prejudice) any employee who allows customer data to be leaked to a third party. Make some specific examples, which will highlight those idiots current behaviour.
Once the security policy has been approved and put into place(nobody, but nobody, ever reads those things, trust me on this), loudly announce a new network monitoring program for violations of the security policy. Give it a few days, then show some data on how a third party has been stealing all your customer data through corporate espionage with the help of a internal spy. Approach the CEO with the report, tell him the FBI is waiting for his green light because of the 100's of Millions of $$$ being lost in customer good will (is Mitnicked a verb yet?), but you would prefer to avoid the disasterous bad PR and have him handle it by making the offending party redundant. It helps if you have two burly armed guards standing by in the hallway to escort the marketdroid to the parking lot.
Oh, wait, I've been reading too much BOFH
the AC
Thank goodness we technical people don't feel that way about marketroids.
You are not engineering. You did not have enough brains or SAT scores to get into a real school, so the only things left were PhysEd and Marketing. Therefore, according to Engineers, you don't know shit from shinola. It doesn't matter if you have a shiny certificate from the Universal Life Church, have sold an ice cream cone to an eskimo in Atlanta in summer, scored in the top ninety-percentile of an IQ test, taught yourself to tie your shoes, and cut your finger on the photocopier yesterday, you are an imbecile because you can't (or are afraid to try) to program.
Yup! Good to know we don't feel that way about marketdroids.
the AC
Ok, not anonymous coward, so maybe you (and others) will take this with more than a grain of salt. First hand reporting, no friend of a friend hearsay.
Draper has admitted on several occasions to being gay, and prefering young men. I've known him since soon after he was released from prison (his second or third time when he did hard time in a federal prison), and he's always been rather open about his fondness for young men. But in all those years, I've never seen him going after "little boys", just young guys, 18 to 30.
When he was in prison he had his back broken in a fight because the other inmates considered him to be a child molester. After that he was kept in the prison hospital, and then in isolation until his parole. When I met him he was still wearing a back brace, but that didn't stop him from proposing to go to his apartment for a "massage". Since the people who had introduced us warned me to never be alone with him especially when he mentioned massages, I mostly avoided his attentions. But there were several times when he managed to get me or close friends alone, and then his propositions were rather explicit towards wanting gay sex. At some party in Amsterdam when he was stoned out of his gourd he admitted he was beat up all through high school because he had made passes at some of the other guys.
There was talk, when I first met him, that he was kicked out of the Air Force for being gay. In the USAF he was an electronics technician maintaining microwave repeater towers for phone trunks across Alaska, which is where he learned the basics about manipulating the phone system. He was discharged before he could learn enough to become really dangerous, just mostly dangerous.
He is a poser who was always looking for information to make him look good. He would do anything to learn a technical trick from others, so he could claim it as his own discovery. He always liked to brag, which is why he went to prison after the famous Esquire article. He bragged so much to the reporter about his van full of electronics and ripping off pay phones the feds had no choice but to go after him. His technical abilities are pretty limited, he's always been an outsider to legitimate engineering, and he avoids anyone with in depth knowledge of a subject. For more than two decades he has been hanging around with a young and impressionable crowd, because that is the only place he can be worshipped.
His sexual desire for young men used to be disguised as requests for massages and now the current energy distribution bullshit. He hit on me several times a couple of decades ago, and made me want to stay away from him as much as possible. Other posts are talking about his naive sexual blunderings, just add my voice to that list as a first hand experience. He's a gay, attention seeking freak, not really a phreak.
the AC
There are 3 main categories of services you can provide to households over fibre: internet, phone (VoIP), and cable television. Whatever you choose, the city should be just the owner of the conduit, and rent access to competing companies for services.
:-). That way companies like AoHell/TW and local IPSs can each offer different levels of service, such as static IPs, blocks of IP addresses for businesses (and home working geeks), etc. In the home, the customer gets an ethernet port which can be plugged into a switch and feed every computer they want. This then allows "new" consumer goods to be internet connected for very little additional cost.
The internet part is the easiest. The city runs a big router or two (using ATM pipes), and allows a number of competing ISPs to provide IP/IPv6 addresses to customers (require IPv6 as part of the contract with the city, and be hailed as visionaries
The city will receive legal hassles if it tries to run its own phone service, and will also get legal hassles if it allows either one or multiple phone companies to offer services. Its just a fact of the b0rken american system that anything a city does will be challenged in the courts by companies who might lose out. My best advice would be to build a telco switch and allow a limited number of companies access to offer services to the citizenry. Then negotiate long term contracts with the area ILECs/CLECs/wannabes to provide local/LD services, calling plans, portable phone numbers, etc to the users, who could then choose which company would provide their IP dialtone. Enforce a standard VoIP phone system, SIP or whatever is the most stable in a few years time. Then the consumers can purchase whichever fancy VoIP phone from ratShack or other electronic stores in the area, or let a phone company include one in their package (local vs. remote voicemail box).
Video is the most promising use of FttH technology, it is just now starting to mature. Cable companies currently use Hybrid Fibre Coax distribution systems, the fibre can carry 800+ channels without distortion, but then the signal is converted into copper in each neighborhood for feeding into the set top boxes. The cost of that conversion equipment is pretty high, but not as high as replacing the copper investment with fibre. If the city were to make each subscriber's fibre available to a small number of cable companies (two or three is enough to keep the prices competitive), then they can't be blackmailed by AT&T like San Francisco. If the city owns and maintains the fibre system, it keeps many, many arguments at bay like who pays for the upgrades, maintenance, etc.
Depending on how many of these services the city finally decides to offer will determine which kind of technology to be installed in the homes and business in the area. Also whether a single or double pair should be pulled to each house (I vote for double at a minimum). Apartment buildings and dorms are a special case, where it might make sense to put in special distribution hubs. The topology is best left to experienced technical people hired directly by the city (fiduciary responsibility) rather than allowing corporate sales slime to make suggestions. Corporations *WILL* do everything in their power to limit the ability to grow or evolve the system in the hopes of locking out their competition. A ban on all non-residents from city council meetings to eliminate astroturfing is highly recommended.
That said, the potential for economic gain is pretty good. I've just viewed the fibre plant of a small town in Portugal, who decided to put FttH of every household as part of a rebuilding of the whole utility infrastructure. They haven't yet even decided what to offer, or which equipment to put in, and the project is still 5-6 years from lighting up. But property prices have been shooting up way faster than other towns in the area because the promise of always on internet connections are drawing all the tech crowd from Lisbon. Expect a similar boom where the tax rate can stay the same (or even drop slightly as a campaign lie^Wpromise), but with a huge increase in property values will result in more money for the council to play with.
the AC
No, I held those tiny ones in my hand at CeBit. Integrated antenna. Scanned them with the handheld scanner (with 802.11b link back to a processing terminal running middleware).
The generation of RFID tags from early last year are quite a bit larger, about 2mmX4mmX8mm in size, but with no need for external antennas. The ones I saw were about 3mm in diameter, and 11mm in length. The antennas were printed on some kind of flexible substrate, which was rolled around the chip before the whole thing was sealed in epoxy/plastic. Range of the handheld reader was about 15cm, but they claimed a floor mounted big RF loop for anti-shoplifting could detect all RFID tags going through the doorway. Not just theirs, but most other manufacturers. The firmware of the door sensor could be changed to track as many RFID tags as the owner wanted, and pass the information on to the middleware box.
The company with the small RFID tags claimed they would be in full production by 3Q03. I wanted one of their handheld scanners so I could walk around and detect as many embedded tags as possible (great for freaking out suits in security review meetings), but the pricetag kept me from buying one right then. 450Euros now, dropping to 220Euros for bulk purchases by the end of the year. However, without access to the retail store databases, no way to match up an ID# with tigerstriped string knickers.
the AC
"Flame away, I wear asbestos underwear"
*scans*
Embedded ID tag #67176604192834-01
*searches*
Ah, yes. DuPont flamesulate flexible asbestos knickers, crotchless with pink lace trim and a flying windows logo on each buttcheek. Purchased from thinkGeek on December 19, 2001. Using visa card 1723-9911-0293-9935. Also on the order "Strawberry flavoured BSA audit lube, 55 gallon drum", "HelloKitty laptop conversion kit" and a "Windows 2000 for Dummies" book.
Thats the nice thing about a serial number for each and every piece of clothing which will be active for the life of the item. Databases! When you purchase the tiger-striped thongs, that item will forever be associated with your CC# or fidelity card, thus directly with you. Then any store with an RFID scanner near the door or at each checkout stand, can start collecting information on which items of clothing go with which shoppers. Cool huh?
the AC
After seeing several companies at CeBit showing off tiny RFID tags, all of them promote the fact that they can't be destroyed by putting them in a microwave, or with other types of high energy RF systems. They have been designed to withstand most easy things thieves/consumers can do to disable them.
Only way to disable them is to locate them in the clothing, and tear them out. Those things are tiny, like smaller than a dried grain of rice, with tiny loops on the ends for threads to hold them in place.
the AC
(apologies for the US-centric nature of this post)
... laws ad nauseum, but as of right now (forgoing the orwellian near future, for a moment), there is simply no better place to be
Americans wonder why people could hate the US so much they flew airplanes into buildings. Americans can't grasp with their limited intelligence and stunted ability to reason why most of the world despises them. They are so out of touch with reality, they have to repeat your little mantra constantly to try to keep the truth at bay. The complete fiction of your post shows exactly why America is in for a long, rough ride over the next decades, until it once again learns humility and respect.
Sure, there's some dumb
Start with the fucked up state of the American justice system, which allows (encourages) large corporations to write the laws. That's the original topic of this thread, the RIAA has turned a simple copyright dispute into a major theft crime, with punishments far exceeding any other property theft crime. Its not just a few laws which are fucked up, its most of them. And its not just americans suffering under those orwellian laws, citizens in other countries also have to fear the long reach of American laws. The FBI, the military, the CIA, and other enforcement groups have kidnapped citizens from all over the world to bring them to the US to stand trial, but the US threatens any country which puts a US citizen on trial. The US constantly demands extradition of other country's citizens, but hasn't once in the last 35 years extradited an American to another country to stand trial.
You live in a country with an incredibly good road system.
America has overextended its road system, which has led to a huge shortfall in maintenance. I've driven around the US twice now, and found the roads away from the interstates to be in appalling shape. Big cities in the poorer parts of the country have really poor maintenance, lack of street signs, non-functional traffic lights, potholes big enough to break axles. Most western countries have far superior road systems, you just have never left the US and driven on truly well kept modern roads.
You have running water. Reliably. You have indoor plumbing.
You obviously don't live in a large east coast city. About 5% of americans in large cities don't have access to indoor plumbing. That figure climbs to about 8% in rural areas. Compare that to the UKs 3% figure, or Denmarks less than 2% figure.
I can drink the water anywhere in this nation without fear.
Then you have never been to western Nevada, where the arsenic in the tap water is well above lethal levels. Or Love Canal. Did you see the movie Erin Brockovitch, about a power company poisoning the water table for a whole bunch of communities in California, which killed hundreds of people over a couple of decades, with the "authorities" ignoring all tests showing how bad the contamination was?
You have readily available food.
Unless you look at statistics on malnutrition in the OECD countries, and realize the US has the highest per capita problem of starvation and lack of proper food distribution. Paradoxically, Americans are the most overweight, and the most obese people on the planet. 69% are overweight, and 32% are obese. The next highest countries have figures like 40% overweight and 12% obese. France has declared a national problem, because 5% of the population are considered obese, when the number had been less than 2% until the last decade.
You have electricity.
Unless you live in the western US, where due to criminal actions by a number of large corporations, the electicity supply over the last few years have brought the US down to 3rd world status for reliability and price. Most of the world has reliable electricity.
You don't have to fear for your life walking down the street (well, in some places, you do, but it's safer here than much of the rest of the world)