I just tried it, its busy. Easy way to avoid a slashdotted number is to take the phone off the hook. And the author can only take one call at a time, as opposed to thousands of simultaneous connections against a website.
I'm not sure why xtermz thinks this is a one sided article. I've read it, and it seems to be prety even-handed. There is a problem in the ASIC/FPGA world, with well funded criminals quickly reverse engineering electronic items, and then flooding the market with cheap copies. It hurts the company that spend a lot of R&D money to be ripped off easily, so a number of ASIC and controller manufacuturers are adding clever circuitry to prevent easy hardware copying.
Hardware reverse engineering was getting easier and easier over the last few decades. Its about time it got interesting (in a difficult crossword puzzle kind of way) again.
I'd like to thank Dean Perrit for taking the time and energy to answer slashdot's questions. He was purposefully vague, but the questions (due to the whole/. moderation system) didn't allow a fully fleshed out Q&A session. From his answers, slashdot will still remain divided, but he may have swayed people to one viewpoint or the other.
My original question had a background, which would have taken hours to think out, edit, and make concise and explicit. So my question was posted in haste, and didn't force the type of answer I was hoping for. Especially the "I am not willing to speculate as to what action I would take" bit.
Years ago I took an oath, to "support and defend the Constitution of the U.S. of A against all enemies foreign and domestic". Throughout my career I was questioned on a regular basis on the constitution, what actions were considered "defending", and which would be a violation of my oath. Some of these were taken from local problems which were never fully resolved, such as "If an FBI agent with local clearance for our SIGINT unit were to abuse the equipment to spy on his ex-wife, ex-girlfriend, and the local police investigating the stalking and harrassing charges, what would you do?" We had to state clearly what actions we would take to preserve our oath. Failing to swiftly and lawfully prevent others from violating the constitution was considered a violation of the oath, and a court martialable offense.
Those who have studied the US constitution, and the well documented actions of the FBI to ignore all of the limitations placed upon them, have to question whether advances such as carnivore will continue to violate the constitution. Certainly it is the major cause of concern with the critics of carnivore.
What happens when the FBI approaches an ISP with the demand to install carnivore for an indefinite length of time, and the ISP refuses? What if the ISP instead installs a publically reviewed wiretapping system such as altivore, and allows the FBI agents to access only certain information in return for a valid court order, to protect the fourth amendment? What if the engineers at the ISP were ex-military and took their oath seriously, as I still do, 20+ years after leaving active duty?
I've dealt with rogue FBI agents in the past, and the answer is that individuals inside the ISP would quickly find themselves with many small legal problems. IRS audits, anonymous tips to local police about pedophile activities, "ghost" warrants mysteriously inserted into the NCIC2k database, DEA alerts. When the FBI plays rough, citizens tend to get hurt.
Knowing that the FBI will play dirty to protect themselves, and their ability to ignore constitutional protections guaranteed to all citizens of the US, is what led to my question for Dean Perrit. He clearly knows the reputation of the FBI, knows they operate with impunity from prosecution for their crimes, and he declined to speculate on whether he has the integrity to stand up to the FBI. Given the possiblity he could quickly find himself an "ex-reviewer", his answer is about what I would expect. I also suspect Dean Perrit has never served his country in any manner requiring him to take an oath to defend the constitution, which is why the FBI has chosen him to be a reviewer. He may have no qualms about lying to the US population about the constitutional abuses carnivore will permit the FBI to inflict.
There are many examples where IT problems lead to stress in the workplace./. is filling up with anecdotes of them. Blame the bosses and clueless management is a common theme, and I'll agree.
I've seen IT workers completely depressed because management stupidly imposed quotas and thresholds to measure their productivity. This leads to further complaints from the people they are supposed to be supporting, because the race is to close trouble tickets fast, not fix the problem, or tackle the core of the problem. This leads to a worsening situation spiraling out of control. Management was happy because the statistics showed an ever increasing level of complaints, with a shorter and shorter response time to close out the cases. Average time to open and close a major network failure was 7 minutes, which was completely fictitious.
I didn't last very long there, before I became too depressed by my poor performance. Even though I was the highest level of network support, only taking the cases nobody else could solve, I was still expected to close each case in under 7 minutes. These were cases like building wide outages, dead trunks, replacing burned out equipment. Management had its head up its ass the whole time, and turnover was close to 100% every 6 months. They accounted for the high turnover rate as poaching by other high tech companies.
Slashdotters will agree, 1 in 10 depressed workers would be a low count. Perhaps they are only looking at the workers who have been diagnosed by a professional therapist as severely clinically depressed. A link to a summary of the original study leaves a few too many questions.
But what happens if you are in perfect health, and you take a genetic test and they turn up some high risk factor? Then you can never again get health insurance, or if you can, it will be very expensive and have clauses excluding any disease related to your risk.
The test is only voluntary for now. With hundreds of other diseases waiting for approval to be included on the "statistically accurate" list, it may soon become mandatory for every person to be tested in order to claim health benefits.
This sounds like it will soon become a lose-lose situation for 20%-50% of the british populace, and only win-win for the perfectly healthy. That is not what insurance is about.
It may be time to dismantle the whole insurance industry, and replace it with a "universal coverage" overseen by the government. Something that ensures every citizen gets health care, whether their DNA shows a risk or not. Of course, britian's health coverage is a lousy example of this practice.
Yes, they were white bicycles, the project was first started in 1968. It lasted less than a month.
One of the student leaders is now a city councilman, and has just released a new version of the white bicycle. Very high tech, you can check out a bicycle from any of dozens of kiosks, ride it to another kiosk, and turn it back in. Its something like 1 guilder for 30 minutes. If you don't return it within an hour, then they put it on the stolen list, and then there is some kind of little transmitter built into the frame to help locate it.
I'll be up there next week, so maybe I'll see them.
This memo wasn't supposed to be released until the day after the FTC approved the TWT/AOL merger. Until the approval, they would never think of doing such an evil thing as this.
But once they convince the FTC they don't need any special "force of law" provisions to keep them in line, then they can do whatever they want.
The same types of deals are happening in Europe, or they will once the telco companies manage to corrupt the regulating agencies. Keep an eye on how BT is dealing dirty with colo space in their COs. Watch how FT has locked up the local loop, and charge similar fees to the ISPs who want access to DSL headends.
Packeteer is what you want if you don't have a big, expensive cisco router in place. Their bandwidth shaping technology is some of the best around, and they have tutorials on how to use their purple boxes to limit napster without killing it, very important with dorms full of screaming kids.
If you are lucky enough to have a big, expensive cisco router (not likely on just a T1), then you can play around with QoS, and set up different queues and filters to limit napster traffic. Cisco has a tutorial as well, you should poke around on their site for it.
One of the hardest jobs a techie has to do is convince a clueless boss there is more to a job than a rigged benchmark on a 4-color marketing sheet.
Here are some points to bring up:
Since there are more Apache installations than IIS installations, there are more engineers on the market who understand the technology. You can even throw in a few MCSE horror stories for good measure.
IIS will tie you into an NT platform, and in 5 months (when M$ gets the appellate court to delay their case for a few years) the licensing fees are going to shoot way up. Every major consulting firm has given exactly the same prediction to their largest clients, when M$ wins or delays its antitrust case, licensing fees will increase 2x to 10x, and to reserve a major portion of budget for it. If you choose Apache, later you can switch reasonably painlessly to Solaris, linux, or any other system as costs or management changes dictate.
If you are going to serve only static pages, then IIS wins slightly. If you start to generate dynamic content, Apache blows past IIS. Go search the web for some of the other comparisons.
Apache installations are far more stable than IIS, and there is a lot of anecdotal evidence on the web to help you back this up.
When it comes time to add a custom feature to your web servers, an OSS solution like Apache is likely to have it covered, but with IIS you are at the mercy of M$. If a new feature doesn't exist for IIS, you don't stand a chance of convincing M$ to add it. They have a long history of doing only what they want, not what their customers are demanding.
Get creative, or you will be stuck with IIS, and it will be time to find a new job:-(
If you found that carnivore did more than the FBI is claiming, would you stand up to their threats if you published your results to counter their "edited" report? Would you be willing to lose everything you have to stand up for the rights of Americans, your property, your retirement, your liberty, and your professional reputation? You would be vilified and persecuted by the FBI for your actions, even though you would win the admiration of liberty loving individuals all over America.
Or...
Would you shrug your shoulders, and knowing that some day the truth will out, say nothing if the FBI completely changed your report, and hope that when exposed your reputation is not too badly tarnished?
I don't know about you, but the goals of IT managers and (l)users seldom are the same. This is just a press release for a company that has discovered X windows, or a M$ equivalent, and is using existing cat 5 cable at high speeds.
It harkens back to the days of putting all the mainframes in a single room, and allowing the lusers access to only terminals.
And I'm wondering if they are doing 1Gbps over a single 4 wire cat5 installation, or does this require a pair of cat5 cables to achieve 1Gbps, which is what all the other GigE implementations use?
I must be number 11, tho. Its so nice to be in such distinguished company:-)
The ones I miss are people made a difference, rather than just tons of money. Linus and TB-L made a difference because they were techies, not just to make money. Bill G. and Larry E. are just businessmen in a pissing contest to see who can scam more money off an ignorant public.
I've managed to get in on the tail end of the debate on the 14.4k feed.
Valenti insists he supports fair use, but only when the technology and the laws are changed to only allow proper compensation for the holders of IP for each viewing. Lessig has been questioning about whether libraries lending out DVDs of recent movies would still count as fair use. Valenti contends that everything he is pushing would still allow libraries to lend DVDs for single viewing, but only when the protections are in place to make it illegal or impossible for a library patron to make a copy, just the same way it is currently illegal to copy a book you check out of a library.
Then there was some stuff I missed due to congestion (I'm on the wrong side of the atlantic for this)
Lessig finished up with a question about putting EULA clauses in books or other media to prevent fair use or criticisms, but before Valenti could answer the moderator called for an end to the debate.
Valenti has the smooth, friendly look of an experienced speaker, he doesn't hide behind the podium, he moves around as if he controls the room. Lessig never moved from behind his podium, he seemed a little on the defensive.
It would have been nice for/. to get this posted earlier, but that would have made the/. effect even more severe.
Do you really need 100 Mbps between your home network and the one or two machines on the DMZ? Do you regularly pass huge files between the two? Or are you just a bandwidth snob who doesn't understand that it really doesn't matter when your connection looks like 100M-->10M-->512k-->internet
The cheapest you can find on the market with 100Mbps is going to run you about US$2k, and the most expensive you can get is a cisco pix.
Even a dual 100Mbps NIC linux router will not be able to maintain a high packet rate between the two interfaces, even with a 500 Mhz pentium III powering it. There are just some limitations you will have to accept. Just go for the best priced 10Mbps you can get, and accept the slightly longer transfer times when you make a full dump of your website.
In my place, I've got an outside network consisting of DSL and cable, with two routers and a pix 515. The outside net is 10BaseT, because the total bandwidth to the internet is only about4.5 Mbps. My pix has 6 interfaces: in, out, and 4 DMZ each with a fully routable subnet. The inside is 100Mbps, because that is what we run in this house. But to the DMZs and outside, its all 10Mbps because it doesn't buy us anything to the outside world.
This article (wasn't it on Salon a while back?) highlights some good points in the middle of page 3, about the difficulties of open source projects to coordinate. There are hundreds of different projects each trying to accomplish similar goals, with tons of overlap and many at cross purposes. Without an evangelist like Linus, the gnutella projects are being very inefficient and not making much progress.
But the flip side is that it leaves very few people to attack in a court case, requiring the RIAA to file thousands of suits to make any kind of impact. Many of the small groups could will not have the money to mount a legal defence, so they will fold, providing a bad precedence for the other suits. I have a bad feeling the RIAA lawyers are already considering tactics like this to stomp all over any gnutella/P2P protocol developers.
Until a few well led groups fix the underlying problems with the protocols, gnutella will never replace napster on such a large scale. I'd urge all/. coders to help out with getting a solid protocol library built so any P2P application can easily be built on top of it.
What is your attitude on hackers tearing apart an affordable system to add new functionality and features? Will your company encourage hacking of your game consoles to add functionality, or will you fire off Cease and Desist letters?
When, not if, your cool new console gets hackish add-ons, what would be the coolest features you would like to see? Will you incorporate the best hacks into new games for those who have them? Will you come out with non-game features or applications for those who want to re-use their hardware for other things like controlling robots or network management?
I knew a Belgian guy who invested in a Russian/Latvian code shop. They hired dozens of programmers at similar prices to produce various coding projects. For a while they were earning a ton of money from western companies, but that has been drying up lately as the economics shift.
One of the projects they did was a printer driver, it took 14 programmers about 3 months to code and test the driver. An american friend of mine who codes like crazy was visiting to oversee the results of the project. He mentioned he had, alone, written a similar driver in just a week, but the testing and bug fixes had taken an entire two weeks to get it right. That is the difference in output you might get depending on how well you manage your resources.
The biggest problem is in making sure the work is done to your spec and on schedule. You have to set up a fairly large department just to manage the foreign contract and ensure everything is happening as planned. This doesn't work for short term projects, your company had better have a plan to see this through several years before they see any significant cash savings.
I have a rule that any conversation with Knights Templar in it should be avoided at any cost. Similar to any discussion comparing to Hitler. But you have a few innacuracies in your history.
The Templars were known for accumulating a large amount of wealth because of how they worked. They had set up "temples" at one day intervals along pilgrimage routes from northern europe down to the holy land and all the way to portugal. The temples provided shelter from various thieves along the way, which included many of the local rulers who would try to extract large payments from people on pilgrimage. Because the Templars were associated with the church, they were mostly left alone, but for those who didn't respect the church, the Templars were heavily armed and well trained, and held a pact that any attack on a Templar would be avenged.
The Templars started to become wealthy when merchants realised they could move along with the pilgrims, and be afforded protection from attack and extortion. The Templars would "tax" the merchants a small amount of the goods protected. This eventually lead to the first wide area banking system as others have pointed out.
Since only kings and the church collected money like that at the time, once the Templars started to get rich the other two powers took notice. In 1307, the Pope gave the Francish king, Philip, permission to round up the local Templars and try the leader for heresy and treason, and the king could keep their lands for his troubles.
If you read one of the many treasure hunting books, they imply the Templars were completely surprised by this action and fled into the night with many wagons loaded with treasure, and it is hidden somewhere and yet to be found. The banal reality is that the negotiations between the king and the pope lasted for several years, and the Templars had a good intelligence gathering network in both areas. They knew what was going down, and spirited away their wealth well in advance to many locations. Jacques de Molay, the Grand Master at the time, turned himself in to the king, and defied both the king and pope to give him a fair trial. He had a lot of supporters, but the trial was anything but fair and after 7 years he was burned at the stake for heresy, along with a handful of others. Shades of Goldstein, Johannsen, and supporters? The rest of the Templars were never rounded up, they shed their knightish garb and went underground and called themselves Hospitaliers or returned to their wealthy families.
The Grand Temple was on the eastern edge of Paris, and the streets in the Marais area still bear the names the Templars gave them. I used to live in a building built in 1290 in that area.
Much of the Templar wealth was used over the following century to create the Hospitalier movement in the south of france. The Hospitaliers differed from the Templars only in the names of their buildings, and offered a more Christian raison d'etre, that of sheltering the poor and the sick. The name Hospital and the function continues to this day, unless you are stuck in an american HMO.
A lot more of the wealth went to the Knights of Malta, since they were well protected on their island. The Kights are still one of the wealthiest groups on the planet yet today. Bogart's The Maltese Falcon was based on centuries old rumours of the payments the Knights made to the church and local kings. The Knights of Malta are still so powerful, they have ambassadors to almost every country in the world, and their own seat in the UN.
Just as the king had help in the Templar's time, governments today have willing conspirators in the form of the companies who stand to lose the most from the internet.
But I think your analogy, and Katz's as well, are well placed in this story. The Templars created a communications network on top of the ruins of the Roman empire, which allowed merchants for the first time to safely conduct business further than their local feifdom. When the merchants started getting wealth that couldn't be locally taxed, and the Templars also started to gain wealth and land, the two powers-that-be conspired to eliminate the problem and control it themselves.
The internet today is creating untaxable wealth and threatening the mega-corps who have risen to power by corrupting the whole democratic process in modern countries. They are now fighting to steal away the network so they can make even more money and have more power over people. And they will succeed in some of their efforts. I only hope the internet and the geeks who run it learn their lesson from 1307 and slip quietly away into the night, only to reappear with a new name and only slightly masked purpose.
VISA and AmEx have been kicking around ideas to do something equivalent to one time password cryptocards. This is a simple version of the same idea, without all the fancy hardware. If it works, expect the idea to take off with all the major card issuers.
What will probably happen later on is, you will be given an electronic card, with a special token embedded in the circuitry. When you want to use your credit card number online, instead you push a button and a small display tells you the cryptographically hashed version of the card, valuable for a single use over the next hour or so.
The hash function combines a real time clock value, the token, and a counter for each use.
The servers will have a copy of your token, know the time, and keep a local counter. Then the server can compare the crypto hash of your card. If they match, the transaction is authorised. Then later the billing department matches up your hashed number with the real number, and you see the charge show up on your bill.
There are a ton of other little details which the crypto card industry has worked out, but the system mostly works. Too bad this neat methodology will be patented to death, so only the big boys can play with it.
This has been talked about recently in the EC. Seems that everyone is using every piece of computer equipment to pirate everything under the sun, or so claim BMI and a few other IP holders. But I think some computer groups are starting to fear a large upfront tax causing the consumer market to shrink, so there may be some powerful groups on the side of freedom and/. But BMI has a large influence on german policy, and public debate never comes into it. So expect these new taxes to start slowly in the countries easiest to corrupt (naziland and britland), and then spread to other european countries over the next few years, then the EC will pass the law automatically.
I had given a thought to their attempt to avoid a "media event", which would have made a stir in the crypto and security worlds. But I (and others like yourself) are a cynical bunch:-) Their stock could have taken a slight hit if some ignorant investors suddenly saw headlines about how they no longer have a patent on their golden goose. But most investors have known about the end of their patent for donkey's years now.
the AC
who will shout "We're Free!" on the 20th, and already has a head start on the Drunken Computer Geeks bit
Now we'll have to quickly change the dates for the planned release parties. I've started by opening a large bottle of Domus beer and will proceed to get nothing done the rest of the day.
But this is good news that RSA isn't going to try any kind of tricks to extend their patent or somehow deny us this very valuable algorithm. Expect to see some good implementations of RSA being released into the wild in the next few hours/days.
What simple program can be run on windoze boxes to give a null response to all requests on 127.0.0.1? I know how to do it on my linux boxes, it's called apache (ok, so its not a simple little program, but it works)
I've tried a few free and shareware simple web servers, but none of them are configurable enough to always return a 1x1 clear gif pixel to any request. Mostly they just sit there and eventually time out, which slows browsing to a crawl, especially on the cascaded pages which wait until all banner ads have been fetched before rendering the whole page.
the AC
Was originally an article. Reference?
on
Driving Mr. Albert
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· Score: 2
I read this article when it first appeared a couple years ago. It was entertaining as a story, and the writing was descriptive and clear. But it never tackled any of the deeper questions like/.ers are covering on ethics of carving out a dead corpse's brain and hiding it away. When I heard the author/adventurer was going to rewrite it as a book, I was hopeful he would put some thought into it and at least ask some of the questions, even if he didn't directly draw conclusions. From the J-K review, it sounds disappointing the issues were ignored.
Does anyone have a reference to the original series of articles? It would be interesting to find it published on the web somewhere, but all my searches turn up reviews of the book.
Surprisingly, you might find that cisco has made some advances in AD on unix. You might poke around their website and see if you can turn up anything useful.
To answer your questions,
1. this is true, when win2k workstations are using AD, they lose the ability to access old NT4 and other SMB shares. Even with
3. if at all possible, try to get your own OU and child domain, and you can isolate yourself from many stupid AD administration decisions. Make it clear that a move to AD means that all groups will have to maintain their own servers, rather than just one big central server where a screwup will take everyone down. This will allow for some degree of survivability during AD outages, which will be numerous during the first few years of rollout. Then you can propose a unix based AD/LDAP server for your group.
4. make your requirements that the win2k group accept working with lesser functionality for now, i.e. mixed mode AD, until such time as M$ opens their AD implementation so that every system can profit from those features. Propose running the AD servers on unix (does anyone have any good references?), which will guarantee a level playing field for everyone for now. The "benefits" of moving to win2k are not all that great if it locks everyone into win2k, with the expected increase in licensing fees that M$ does once a company or group makes the fatal switch. It has been well documented before, go find some horror stories in the press or on the web.
5. Only for large amounts of money. I'm not really an AD expert, I'm just supporting some guys who are learning it. In my spare time, I'm studying the security implications of putting all your eggs in one basket, especially when that basket runs on windoze. When AD becomes more widespread, and more critical data and functions are protected by AD, then the hackers will discover many exploits. Can you imagine what would happen to your group if your sole security server were cracked? Every machine would be instantly compromised and the infocriminals would have free reign on all systems without so much as another password prompt to keep them out.
Your best bet is to find some AD server which run on unix, certainly cisco has one that runs on solaris (as part of another product), and propose it to be the main server. And dig up a bunch of horror stories from the URLs already posted here and do your own web search. Trust me, the time you spend now helping steer this disaster in a slightly better direction will help you in the long run.
So M$ is building a custom chip to keep the hardware costs down on their low-cost internet appliance. There is a slightly better version of the story on the Mercury News.
Lots of companies do this when the cost of assembling a bunch of separate components gets to be too expensive. If you know you have a large market, it is cheaper in the long run to invest in designing a custom chip to perform a single function. It eliminates all the overhead cruft of general purpose computers like the intel architecture. In simple economics terms, this is the easy answer.
For those with a suspicious bent towards anything M$ does, it could be a slap at intel or a first step towards creating a computing platform where competitors can't run. They could be trying to make a system with integrated audio/video streams which will only play a proprietary format which M$ controls, and since the codec is in hardware, no competitor could weasel its way onto the box and steal some content marketshare. Your call.
It'll be interesting if these new boxes turn out like closed architectures, like gaming consoles. Why does that sound like a challenge to figure a way to install Linux?:-)
Slashdot Mirror
The opportunity to slashdot a phone number!
I just tried it, its busy. Easy way to avoid a slashdotted number is to take the phone off the hook. And the author can only take one call at a time, as opposed to thousands of simultaneous connections against a website.
I'm not sure why xtermz thinks this is a one sided article. I've read it, and it seems to be prety even-handed. There is a problem in the ASIC/FPGA world, with well funded criminals quickly reverse engineering electronic items, and then flooding the market with cheap copies. It hurts the company that spend a lot of R&D money to be ripped off easily, so a number of ASIC and controller manufacuturers are adding clever circuitry to prevent easy hardware copying.
Hardware reverse engineering was getting easier and easier over the last few decades. Its about time it got interesting (in a difficult crossword puzzle kind of way) again.
the AC
I'd like to thank Dean Perrit for taking the time and energy to answer slashdot's questions. He was purposefully vague, but the questions (due to the whole /. moderation system) didn't allow a fully fleshed out Q&A session. From his answers, slashdot will still remain divided, but he may have swayed people to one viewpoint or the other.
My original question had a background, which would have taken hours to think out, edit, and make concise and explicit. So my question was posted in haste, and didn't force the type of answer I was hoping for. Especially the "I am not willing to speculate as to what action I would take" bit.
Years ago I took an oath, to "support and defend the Constitution of the U.S. of A against all enemies foreign and domestic". Throughout my career I was questioned on a regular basis on the constitution, what actions were considered "defending", and which would be a violation of my oath. Some of these were taken from local problems which were never fully resolved, such as "If an FBI agent with local clearance for our SIGINT unit were to abuse the equipment to spy on his ex-wife, ex-girlfriend, and the local police investigating the stalking and harrassing charges, what would you do?" We had to state clearly what actions we would take to preserve our oath. Failing to swiftly and lawfully prevent others from violating the constitution was considered a violation of the oath, and a court martialable offense.
Those who have studied the US constitution, and the well documented actions of the FBI to ignore all of the limitations placed upon them, have to question whether advances such as carnivore will continue to violate the constitution. Certainly it is the major cause of concern with the critics of carnivore.
What happens when the FBI approaches an ISP with the demand to install carnivore for an indefinite length of time, and the ISP refuses? What if the ISP instead installs a publically reviewed wiretapping system such as altivore, and allows the FBI agents to access only certain information in return for a valid court order, to protect the fourth amendment? What if the engineers at the ISP were ex-military and took their oath seriously, as I still do, 20+ years after leaving active duty?
I've dealt with rogue FBI agents in the past, and the answer is that individuals inside the ISP would quickly find themselves with many small legal problems. IRS audits, anonymous tips to local police about pedophile activities, "ghost" warrants mysteriously inserted into the NCIC2k database, DEA alerts. When the FBI plays rough, citizens tend to get hurt.
Knowing that the FBI will play dirty to protect themselves, and their ability to ignore constitutional protections guaranteed to all citizens of the US, is what led to my question for Dean Perrit. He clearly knows the reputation of the FBI, knows they operate with impunity from prosecution for their crimes, and he declined to speculate on whether he has the integrity to stand up to the FBI. Given the possiblity he could quickly find himself an "ex-reviewer", his answer is about what I would expect. I also suspect Dean Perrit has never served his country in any manner requiring him to take an oath to defend the constitution, which is why the FBI has chosen him to be a reviewer. He may have no qualms about lying to the US population about the constitutional abuses carnivore will permit the FBI to inflict.
the AC
There are many examples where IT problems lead to stress in the workplace. /. is filling up with anecdotes of them. Blame the bosses and clueless management is a common theme, and I'll agree.
I've seen IT workers completely depressed because management stupidly imposed quotas and thresholds to measure their productivity. This leads to further complaints from the people they are supposed to be supporting, because the race is to close trouble tickets fast, not fix the problem, or tackle the core of the problem. This leads to a worsening situation spiraling out of control. Management was happy because the statistics showed an ever increasing level of complaints, with a shorter and shorter response time to close out the cases. Average time to open and close a major network failure was 7 minutes, which was completely fictitious.
I didn't last very long there, before I became too depressed by my poor performance. Even though I was the highest level of network support, only taking the cases nobody else could solve, I was still expected to close each case in under 7 minutes. These were cases like building wide outages, dead trunks, replacing burned out equipment. Management had its head up its ass the whole time, and turnover was close to 100% every 6 months. They accounted for the high turnover rate as poaching by other high tech companies.
Slashdotters will agree, 1 in 10 depressed workers would be a low count. Perhaps they are only looking at the workers who have been diagnosed by a professional therapist as severely clinically depressed. A link to a summary of the original study leaves a few too many questions.
Been there, still recovering,
the AC
But what happens if you are in perfect health, and you take a genetic test and they turn up some high risk factor? Then you can never again get health insurance, or if you can, it will be very expensive and have clauses excluding any disease related to your risk.
The test is only voluntary for now. With hundreds of other diseases waiting for approval to be included on the "statistically accurate" list, it may soon become mandatory for every person to be tested in order to claim health benefits.
This sounds like it will soon become a lose-lose situation for 20%-50% of the british populace, and only win-win for the perfectly healthy. That is not what insurance is about.
It may be time to dismantle the whole insurance industry, and replace it with a "universal coverage" overseen by the government. Something that ensures every citizen gets health care, whether their DNA shows a risk or not. Of course, britian's health coverage is a lousy example of this practice.
the AC
Yes, they were white bicycles, the project was first started in 1968. It lasted less than a month.
One of the student leaders is now a city councilman, and has just released a new version of the white bicycle. Very high tech, you can check out a bicycle from any of dozens of kiosks, ride it to another kiosk, and turn it back in. Its something like 1 guilder for 30 minutes. If you don't return it within an hour, then they put it on the stolen list, and then there is some kind of little transmitter built into the frame to help locate it.
I'll be up there next week, so maybe I'll see them.
the AC
This memo wasn't supposed to be released until the day after the FTC approved the TWT/AOL merger. Until the approval, they would never think of doing such an evil thing as this.
But once they convince the FTC they don't need any special "force of law" provisions to keep them in line, then they can do whatever they want.
The same types of deals are happening in Europe, or they will once the telco companies manage to corrupt the regulating agencies. Keep an eye on how BT is dealing dirty with colo space in their COs. Watch how FT has locked up the local loop, and charge similar fees to the ISPs who want access to DSL headends.
the AC
I'll second that post.
Packeteer is what you want if you don't have a big, expensive cisco router in place. Their bandwidth shaping technology is some of the best around, and they have tutorials on how to use their purple boxes to limit napster without killing it, very important with dorms full of screaming kids.
If you are lucky enough to have a big, expensive cisco router (not likely on just a T1), then you can play around with QoS, and set up different queues and filters to limit napster traffic. Cisco has a tutorial as well, you should poke around on their site for it.
the AC
But then you know that since you are a techie.
:-(
One of the hardest jobs a techie has to do is convince a clueless boss there is more to a job than a rigged benchmark on a 4-color marketing sheet.
Here are some points to bring up:
Since there are more Apache installations than IIS installations, there are more engineers on the market who understand the technology. You can even throw in a few MCSE horror stories for good measure.
IIS will tie you into an NT platform, and in 5 months (when M$ gets the appellate court to delay their case for a few years) the licensing fees are going to shoot way up. Every major consulting firm has given exactly the same prediction to their largest clients, when M$ wins or delays its antitrust case, licensing fees will increase 2x to 10x, and to reserve a major portion of budget for it. If you choose Apache, later you can switch reasonably painlessly to Solaris, linux, or any other system as costs or management changes dictate.
If you are going to serve only static pages, then IIS wins slightly. If you start to generate dynamic content, Apache blows past IIS. Go search the web for some of the other comparisons.
Apache installations are far more stable than IIS, and there is a lot of anecdotal evidence on the web to help you back this up.
When it comes time to add a custom feature to your web servers, an OSS solution like Apache is likely to have it covered, but with IIS you are at the mercy of M$. If a new feature doesn't exist for IIS, you don't stand a chance of convincing M$ to add it. They have a long history of doing only what they want, not what their customers are demanding.
Get creative, or you will be stuck with IIS, and it will be time to find a new job
the AC
If you found that carnivore did more than the FBI is claiming, would you stand up to their threats if you published your results to counter their "edited" report? Would you be willing to lose everything you have to stand up for the rights of Americans, your property, your retirement, your liberty, and your professional reputation? You would be vilified and persecuted by the FBI for your actions, even though you would win the admiration of liberty loving individuals all over America.
Or...
Would you shrug your shoulders, and knowing that some day the truth will out, say nothing if the FBI completely changed your report, and hope that when exposed your reputation is not too badly tarnished?
the AC
I don't know about you, but the goals of IT managers and (l)users seldom are the same. This is just a press release for a company that has discovered X windows, or a M$ equivalent, and is using existing cat 5 cable at high speeds.
It harkens back to the days of putting all the mainframes in a single room, and allowing the lusers access to only terminals.
And I'm wondering if they are doing 1Gbps over a single 4 wire cat5 installation, or does this require a pair of cat5 cables to achieve 1Gbps, which is what all the other GigE implementations use?
the AC
I must be number 11, tho. Its so nice to be in such distinguished company :-)
The ones I miss are people made a difference, rather than just tons of money. Linus and TB-L made a difference because they were techies, not just to make money. Bill G. and Larry E. are just businessmen in a pissing contest to see who can scam more money off an ignorant public.
the AC
I've managed to get in on the tail end of the debate on the 14.4k feed.
/. to get this posted earlier, but that would have made the /. effect even more severe.
Valenti insists he supports fair use, but only when the technology and the laws are changed to only allow proper compensation for the holders of IP for each viewing. Lessig has been questioning about whether libraries lending out DVDs of recent movies would still count as fair use. Valenti contends that everything he is pushing would still allow libraries to lend DVDs for single viewing, but only when the protections are in place to make it illegal or impossible for a library patron to make a copy, just the same way it is currently illegal to copy a book you check out of a library.
Then there was some stuff I missed due to congestion (I'm on the wrong side of the atlantic for this)
Lessig finished up with a question about putting EULA clauses in books or other media to prevent fair use or criticisms, but before Valenti could answer the moderator called for an end to the debate.
Valenti has the smooth, friendly look of an experienced speaker, he doesn't hide behind the podium, he moves around as if he controls the room. Lessig never moved from behind his podium, he seemed a little on the defensive.
It would have been nice for
the AC
Do you really need 100 Mbps between your home network and the one or two machines on the DMZ? Do you regularly pass huge files between the two? Or are you just a bandwidth snob who doesn't understand that it really doesn't matter when your connection looks like 100M-->10M-->512k-->internet
The cheapest you can find on the market with 100Mbps is going to run you about US$2k, and the most expensive you can get is a cisco pix.
Even a dual 100Mbps NIC linux router will not be able to maintain a high packet rate between the two interfaces, even with a 500 Mhz pentium III powering it. There are just some limitations you will have to accept. Just go for the best priced 10Mbps you can get, and accept the slightly longer transfer times when you make a full dump of your website.
In my place, I've got an outside network consisting of DSL and cable, with two routers and a pix 515. The outside net is 10BaseT, because the total bandwidth to the internet is only about4.5 Mbps. My pix has 6 interfaces: in, out, and 4 DMZ each with a fully routable subnet. The inside is 100Mbps, because that is what we run in this house. But to the DMZs and outside, its all 10Mbps because it doesn't buy us anything to the outside world.
the AC
This article (wasn't it on Salon a while back?) highlights some good points in the middle of page 3, about the difficulties of open source projects to coordinate. There are hundreds of different projects each trying to accomplish similar goals, with tons of overlap and many at cross purposes. Without an evangelist like Linus, the gnutella projects are being very inefficient and not making much progress.
/. coders to help out with getting a solid protocol library built so any P2P application can easily be built on top of it.
But the flip side is that it leaves very few people to attack in a court case, requiring the RIAA to file thousands of suits to make any kind of impact. Many of the small groups could will not have the money to mount a legal defence, so they will fold, providing a bad precedence for the other suits. I have a bad feeling the RIAA lawyers are already considering tactics like this to stomp all over any gnutella/P2P protocol developers.
Until a few well led groups fix the underlying problems with the protocols, gnutella will never replace napster on such a large scale. I'd urge all
the AC
What is your attitude on hackers tearing apart an affordable system to add new functionality and features? Will your company encourage hacking of your game consoles to add functionality, or will you fire off Cease and Desist letters?
When, not if, your cool new console gets hackish add-ons, what would be the coolest features you would like to see? Will you incorporate the best hacks into new games for those who have them? Will you come out with non-game features or applications for those who want to re-use their hardware for other things like controlling robots or network management?
the AC
I knew a Belgian guy who invested in a Russian/Latvian code shop. They hired dozens of programmers at similar prices to produce various coding projects. For a while they were earning a ton of money from western companies, but that has been drying up lately as the economics shift.
One of the projects they did was a printer driver, it took 14 programmers about 3 months to code and test the driver. An american friend of mine who codes like crazy was visiting to oversee the results of the project. He mentioned he had, alone, written a similar driver in just a week, but the testing and bug fixes had taken an entire two weeks to get it right. That is the difference in output you might get depending on how well you manage your resources.
The biggest problem is in making sure the work is done to your spec and on schedule. You have to set up a fairly large department just to manage the foreign contract and ensure everything is happening as planned. This doesn't work for short term projects, your company had better have a plan to see this through several years before they see any significant cash savings.
the AC
I have a rule that any conversation with Knights Templar in it should be avoided at any cost. Similar to any discussion comparing to Hitler. But you have a few innacuracies in your history.
The Templars were known for accumulating a large amount of wealth because of how they worked. They had set up "temples" at one day intervals along pilgrimage routes from northern europe down to the holy land and all the way to portugal. The temples provided shelter from various thieves along the way, which included many of the local rulers who would try to extract large payments from people on pilgrimage. Because the Templars were associated with the church, they were mostly left alone, but for those who didn't respect the church, the Templars were heavily armed and well trained, and held a pact that any attack on a Templar would be avenged.
The Templars started to become wealthy when merchants realised they could move along with the pilgrims, and be afforded protection from attack and extortion. The Templars would "tax" the merchants a small amount of the goods protected. This eventually lead to the first wide area banking system as others have pointed out.
Since only kings and the church collected money like that at the time, once the Templars started to get rich the other two powers took notice. In 1307, the Pope gave the Francish king, Philip, permission to round up the local Templars and try the leader for heresy and treason, and the king could keep their lands for his troubles.
If you read one of the many treasure hunting books, they imply the Templars were completely surprised by this action and fled into the night with many wagons loaded with treasure, and it is hidden somewhere and yet to be found. The banal reality is that the negotiations between the king and the pope lasted for several years, and the Templars had a good intelligence gathering network in both areas. They knew what was going down, and spirited away their wealth well in advance to many locations. Jacques de Molay, the Grand Master at the time, turned himself in to the king, and defied both the king and pope to give him a fair trial. He had a lot of supporters, but the trial was anything but fair and after 7 years he was burned at the stake for heresy, along with a handful of others. Shades of Goldstein, Johannsen, and supporters? The rest of the Templars were never rounded up, they shed their knightish garb and went underground and called themselves Hospitaliers or returned to their wealthy families.
The Grand Temple was on the eastern edge of Paris, and the streets in the Marais area still bear the names the Templars gave them. I used to live in a building built in 1290 in that area.
Much of the Templar wealth was used over the following century to create the Hospitalier movement in the south of france. The Hospitaliers differed from the Templars only in the names of their buildings, and offered a more Christian raison d'etre, that of sheltering the poor and the sick. The name Hospital and the function continues to this day, unless you are stuck in an american HMO.
A lot more of the wealth went to the Knights of Malta, since they were well protected on their island. The Kights are still one of the wealthiest groups on the planet yet today. Bogart's The Maltese Falcon was based on centuries old rumours of the payments the Knights made to the church and local kings. The Knights of Malta are still so powerful, they have ambassadors to almost every country in the world, and their own seat in the UN.
Just as the king had help in the Templar's time, governments today have willing conspirators in the form of the companies who stand to lose the most from the internet.
But I think your analogy, and Katz's as well, are well placed in this story. The Templars created a communications network on top of the ruins of the Roman empire, which allowed merchants for the first time to safely conduct business further than their local feifdom. When the merchants started getting wealth that couldn't be locally taxed, and the Templars also started to gain wealth and land, the two powers-that-be conspired to eliminate the problem and control it themselves.
The internet today is creating untaxable wealth and threatening the mega-corps who have risen to power by corrupting the whole democratic process in modern countries. They are now fighting to steal away the network so they can make even more money and have more power over people. And they will succeed in some of their efforts. I only hope the internet and the geeks who run it learn their lesson from 1307 and slip quietly away into the night, only to reappear with a new name and only slightly masked purpose.
the AC
VISA and AmEx have been kicking around ideas to do something equivalent to one time password cryptocards. This is a simple version of the same idea, without all the fancy hardware. If it works, expect the idea to take off with all the major card issuers.
What will probably happen later on is, you will be given an electronic card, with a special token embedded in the circuitry. When you want to use your credit card number online, instead you push a button and a small display tells you the cryptographically hashed version of the card, valuable for a single use over the next hour or so.
The hash function combines a real time clock value, the token, and a counter for each use.
The servers will have a copy of your token, know the time, and keep a local counter. Then the server can compare the crypto hash of your card. If they match, the transaction is authorised. Then later the billing department matches up your hashed number with the real number, and you see the charge show up on your bill.
There are a ton of other little details which the crypto card industry has worked out, but the system mostly works. Too bad this neat methodology will be patented to death, so only the big boys can play with it.
the AC
This has been talked about recently in the EC. Seems that everyone is using every piece of computer equipment to pirate everything under the sun, or so claim BMI and a few other IP holders. But I think some computer groups are starting to fear a large upfront tax causing the consumer market to shrink, so there may be some powerful groups on the side of freedom and /. But BMI has a large influence on german policy, and public debate never comes into it. So expect these new taxes to start slowly in the countries easiest to corrupt (naziland and britland), and then spread to other european countries over the next few years, then the EC will pass the law automatically.
the AC
I had given a thought to their attempt to avoid a "media event", which would have made a stir in the crypto and security worlds. But I (and others like yourself) are a cynical bunch :-) Their stock could have taken a slight hit if some ignorant investors suddenly saw headlines about how they no longer have a patent on their golden goose. But most investors have known about the end of their patent for donkey's years now.
the AC
who will shout "We're Free!" on the 20th, and already has a head start on the Drunken Computer Geeks bit
Now we'll have to quickly change the dates for the planned release parties. I've started by opening a large bottle of Domus beer and will proceed to get nothing done the rest of the day.
But this is good news that RSA isn't going to try any kind of tricks to extend their patent or somehow deny us this very valuable algorithm. Expect to see some good implementations of RSA being released into the wild in the next few hours/days.
the AC
What simple program can be run on windoze boxes to give a null response to all requests on 127.0.0.1? I know how to do it on my linux boxes, it's called apache (ok, so its not a simple little program, but it works)
I've tried a few free and shareware simple web servers, but none of them are configurable enough to always return a 1x1 clear gif pixel to any request. Mostly they just sit there and eventually time out, which slows browsing to a crawl, especially on the cascaded pages which wait until all banner ads have been fetched before rendering the whole page.
the AC
I read this article when it first appeared a couple years ago. It was entertaining as a story, and the writing was descriptive and clear. But it never tackled any of the deeper questions like /.ers are covering on ethics of carving out a dead corpse's brain and hiding it away. When I heard the author/adventurer was going to rewrite it as a book, I was hopeful he would put some thought into it and at least ask some of the questions, even if he didn't directly draw conclusions. From the J-K review, it sounds disappointing the issues were ignored.
Does anyone have a reference to the original series of articles? It would be interesting to find it published on the web somewhere, but all my searches turn up reviews of the book.
the AC
Surprisingly, you might find that cisco has made some advances in AD on unix. You might poke around their website and see if you can turn up anything useful.
To answer your questions,
1. this is true, when win2k workstations are using AD, they lose the ability to access old NT4 and other SMB shares. Even with
3. if at all possible, try to get your own OU and child domain, and you can isolate yourself from many stupid AD administration decisions. Make it clear that a move to AD means that all groups will have to maintain their own servers, rather than just one big central server where a screwup will take everyone down. This will allow for some degree of survivability during AD outages, which will be numerous during the first few years of rollout. Then you can propose a unix based AD/LDAP server for your group.
4. make your requirements that the win2k group accept working with lesser functionality for now, i.e. mixed mode AD, until such time as M$ opens their AD implementation so that every system can profit from those features. Propose running the AD servers on unix (does anyone have any good references?), which will guarantee a level playing field for everyone for now. The "benefits" of moving to win2k are not all that great if it locks everyone into win2k, with the expected increase in licensing fees that M$ does once a company or group makes the fatal switch. It has been well documented before, go find some horror stories in the press or on the web.
5. Only for large amounts of money. I'm not really an AD expert, I'm just supporting some guys who are learning it. In my spare time, I'm studying the security implications of putting all your eggs in one basket, especially when that basket runs on windoze. When AD becomes more widespread, and more critical data and functions are protected by AD, then the hackers will discover many exploits. Can you imagine what would happen to your group if your sole security server were cracked? Every machine would be instantly compromised and the infocriminals would have free reign on all systems without so much as another password prompt to keep them out.
Your best bet is to find some AD server which run on unix, certainly cisco has one that runs on solaris (as part of another product), and propose it to be the main server. And dig up a bunch of horror stories from the URLs already posted here and do your own web search. Trust me, the time you spend now helping steer this disaster in a slightly better direction will help you in the long run.
the AC
So M$ is building a custom chip to keep the hardware costs down on their low-cost internet appliance. There is a slightly better version of the story on the Mercury News.
:-)
Lots of companies do this when the cost of assembling a bunch of separate components gets to be too expensive. If you know you have a large market, it is cheaper in the long run to invest in designing a custom chip to perform a single function. It eliminates all the overhead cruft of general purpose computers like the intel architecture. In simple economics terms, this is the easy answer.
For those with a suspicious bent towards anything M$ does, it could be a slap at intel or a first step towards creating a computing platform where competitors can't run. They could be trying to make a system with integrated audio/video streams which will only play a proprietary format which M$ controls, and since the codec is in hardware, no competitor could weasel its way onto the box and steal some content marketshare. Your call.
It'll be interesting if these new boxes turn out like closed architectures, like gaming consoles. Why does that sound like a challenge to figure a way to install Linux?
the AC