This article is published in a higher education journal, but is filled with grammatical mistakes and doesn't have a consistent flow of ideas. There are enough technical mistakes to make me grit my teeth.
I have a feeling Simson was talking about creating privacy friendly policies about log files, and during that discussion he related that protocols like FTP leave traces in log files. The author of this article then misunderstood what he was talking about and came up with a standard troll leader.
And any article with a good troll headline gets posted to/. where we can all get off the subject and onto better discussions like the goodness of SSH.
but I've never seen a troll story submission before....
So you must be new to slashdot. Welcome.
Many stories on/. appear to be trolls. It can't be helped, it shows the editorial bent of the site creators. Most of us don't care, since we share much the same bent as cmdrtaco and hemos.
There has been several reports on the financial news channels in the last few weeks about how IGI has also worked for M$.
The claims are that M$ has also used IGI for dirty work to dig up information on people involved in lawsuits with M$. Its what IGI does best, there is no reason why Oracle couldn't use them as well. They are mercenaries, they'll dig up dirt for any price, and they have no loyalties to anyone except the highest bidder.
And I don't see this as a newsworthy story. This type of action goes on all the time in the corporate world./. has decided to highlight it because the fight against M$'s criminal actions is making headlines right now, but that doesn't make this a unique situation.
As mattdm pointed out in an early post, its "the imminent death of the internet":-) slashtroll style.
All the article talks about is bandwidth shaping by products like Packeteer, who make a cool little box. I regularly put in packeteer boxes to shape bandwidth so legitimate customers get what they pay for, and the bandwidth hogs are throttled back to reasonable rates. Although the box can be configured as a firewall, it really shines in packet shaping. I can easily configure it to choke every flow from every user, then open up bigger pipes for legitimate applications. The whingey napster users still can DL their metallica, but it takes them longer than going out to buy the CD:-)
The university mentioned in the article is doing just that, limiting napster without breaking it, which would have the students screaming at them for censorship.
The tricks swb mentioned, like domainjacking, makes it tough for the (l)users to break your network, and gives the appearance of complying with corporate legal contracts. But the open nature of the internet still allows determined intelligent users to continue using the internet. Domainjacking is easily defeated by users who either stuff their own hosts file with the address of napster, or run yet another DNS server which ignores the 'jacked one, or tunnel around the firewall block.
OC-768 exists for short haul ATM and SONET connections inside a data centre. That is not a big deal in the communications world.
Getting OC-768 DWDM with all of its little tricks to run for such a long distance between end points makes the promise of bigger and better backbones a reality. There are a ton of technical problems keeping the leading and trailing edges of the pulses of every different wavelength of light from degrading and interfering, and somehow managing to recover all the signals at the far end. 700Kms covers most any reasonable distance in Europe.
It would be nice if/. posted links to a real news story, rather than print a company press release with no further informations for us to look at. This story surface a few months ago when a european partner of Qwest and Nortel were showing the technology at a trade show in Germany. They had a couple of spools of fibre totalling about 20kms, and were pumping some incredible level of data across it. They had also done a real world test between two German cities with a fibre running along side some train tracks.
And while you are investing, Lucent, Nortel, and all the major carriers too:-)
I don't think this will work how you think it will work. The application code will never be transferred, only a java or C-sharp applet which can be cached locally. Communication will be HTTP carrying XML (unless they come up with a XTTP:// URI) between the client machine and the ASP.
The documents will be stored at a number of ASP/data warehouses spread out all over the place. It will be many companies, each paying license royalties to M$, and passing those costs on to consumers.
The applet on the (l)user's machine will be an XML browser which will perform some of the front end GUI functions and provide for quick response time. To the user, it should look no differently than running an application locally, except that many of the critical functions will run on the ASP servers, and not locally. That will prevent pirating of the whole application.
The communications stream will be encrypted, not so much to protect against intercept, but to prevent open source XML browsers from getting a copy of the data. The M$ XML browsers will not have a copy and paste function. You wont be able to copy the data you have typed in, so you can't paste your information in the window of a local text editor and save your work as part of a move to open source. The M$ XML front end will only allow you to crosslink the data to other documents or M$ approved applications.
When the open source scoundrels crack the XML format of people's documents, and create an XML browser that can retrieve those documents and save them in a truly open format, M$ can just go and change the XML format and push out new browser applets. Just what is happening with the Instant Messenger wars AOL and M$ are fighting. The access protocols change slightly every few hours, and the users have to grab an updated copy of IM just to keep using the service. Having java/cool applets as the front end makes the download automatic.
Right, that was my point. I've collected windoze user passwords as part of a security project, and it was amazing to see how many (l)users continued to use very weak passwords even after an employee education program. So the client had to implement a 3rd party password management application which assigned "good" passwords, but that failed when all the secretaries started writing their password on post-it notes and leaving them on the bottom of the keyboard.
Out in the real world of mom and pop (l)users, where there is no forced education programs, they will continue to use weak passwords. This means they can go from a computer at home to a friends house and enter their logon details, and have access to their baby pictures just as they were home. Now, their friend's kid has installed a keyboard logging utility, and now has their logon details, and can access their data as well. What about dishonest cybercafes? University computers?
Expect M$ to slowly evolve this.net idea from a curiosity to a required method of storing user data, with the only access to the proprietary XML document encoding via M$ products.
Now scale the problems AOL are having with 13 million users to a M$ sized operation with 100+ million users. See where many opportunities for abuse start to open up, no matter how well they think they have secured the user's data?
If M$ has their way, they would love to force all business users onto a per use license with ever increasing fees, and they can hold the company data hostage because it is held in a completely proprietary M$ format, and the data is physically held on M$ controlled machines. Even if a company wanted to move from the M$ world to an open source world, M$ could force them to sign a multi-year agreement to gain access to their data. And even if they could intercept the data, the XML would only be interpretable by M$ applications.
From the people who brought us Outlook, with its multi-billion dollar damages due to lack of security, now bring us a central place to store everyone's files.
Expect the word "hacker" to take another tarnishing when.net gets cracked.
It doesn't matter how many bits of encryption they use, when the average windoze (l)user's password is their first name. So there will be many cracks of this system, and some of them will be embarassing.
And what happens if some (l)user decides to use this at work, so they can take their work home with them. Now a company's secrets are stored on a M$ server, where just about any one can peruse them. M$ will claim somewhere in the fine print they must review all content on a regular basis to prevent illegal material from being stored, and if they just happen to see a competitor's secrets, we can trust them to not take advantage of it.
Now corporate firewalls will have to block access to this site, as with the other new net services offering the same thing. I doubt.net will ever become very successful unless M$ uses its monopoly power to force everyone to use their servers.
the AC
Useless telnet, not useful but very amusing
on
Quickiefest 2000
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· Score: 2
As it said on the page, its great for configuring cisco routers. So I grabbed it and now the whole NOC is grabbing copies as I type. It certainly has the best idea for a telnet function I've seen in a long time. Good for a laugh.
Now, if we can only port it over to some unix management stations, this telnet client will rule the day for monitoring the boring log output from some machines. On NT, it eats 100% of the CPU, and it is missing basic VT102 keys to make it useful. But for the price, one can't complain.
You can bet genetic scientists are looking at experimenting with this gene on humans.
If similar genes are found in the human genome, then there will be a lot of clandestine experimentation to find the "higher intelligence" switch. Once there is sufficient scientific proof of children with IQ>150 on a regular basis, the race will be on to market gene therapy for couples to ensure their children are super-geniuses, who will all go out and found dot.coms and make a fortune.
We can hope that when the majority of the human race has increased intelligence, education, health care, space exploration, and other necessary programs all get the support they deserve without evil politicing stealing away resources.
But in the short term, it will bring a whole new level of meaning to "haves" and "have-nots". Gattaca anyone?
Well, "very" may be an overstatement, but there are quite a number of cables crossing the atlantic. There are around 40 active links currently being operated, and 200+ ancient links.
Every year sees at least one more fibre project being laid down between north america and northern europe. The most recent added 2.56Gbps, the next few years should see 20 to 50 times that capacity. If you ever get to see a map of all the lines resting on the bottom of the atlantic, it is truly impressive. I haven't seen a truly acurate map published, the acurate maps are a closely guarded secret shared between all the cable layers.
For a distributed project, especially if you truly want to serve us Europeans, is a very good idea. But don't count on just getting any internet connection in europe and hoping to have any kind of response time from late afternoon until midnight. The links hauling internet traffic get saturated as everyone gets home and starts surfing for that fine american pr0n:-)
If the project is truly as important to your company's revenue, then lease a dedicated chunk of bandwidth from europe to your main servers. It will be worth every bit you pay for it to haul your HTML to the european servers, and then have it served up over local internet connections.
I think what I meant was that controlling the robot would be kind of easy and natural, mimicing the movements and limits of a human upper torso. A 'naut could get proficient in a short period of time, thus implying a very steep learning curve of a few basic operations.
Thats opposed to some incredibly complex control systems I've seen, which tried to do too many things in a non-intuitive way. Creeping featurism out of control, and a rabid marketing team pushing the monstrosity out the door. Go read risks for some nightmarish ideas.
Is Stigmata available on DVD yet? I've poked around a few online sellers, and can't find it available in either zone 1 or 2.
So if the film is not yet available on DVD, it probably has never been pressed onto DVD. That means deCSS could NOT possibly be involved in this case of pirating a copyrighted work.
I hope the honorable Mr. Garbus cleverly works this into the trial at some point, to invalidate these statements by the MPAA.
Also, the statement "and has not yet opened anywhere else in the world." seems kind of false. Stigmata has been playing in Europe, but then, we don't count:-) I believe the MPAA doesn't represent the interests of the European distributors, so maybe one of those censored statements qualified this perjury.
Given the tone of the deposition, I'll place my money on 2600 et. al.
This looks like a great design. Nothing too radical to confuse astronauts controlling it. Learning curve should be fairly shallow.
But it could benefit by adding a couple of arms designed for a limited grasp and hold function. An operator could position one of these extra arm to hold an object in place, hit a freeze button, then go back to using the two prehensile arms.
I wish I had one of these for work around the house. So many times I wished I could have 4 or 5 arms to get a quick and dirty job done:-)
the AC
And are we forgetting the chainsaw and BFG hand attachments, sold separately:-)
If you are going with multiple analog modem connections, look into MultiLink PPP, RFC1717. There are a number of PPP implementations that offer it. I've seen it on some linux boxes, and I'm sure I've used it on an OpenBSD box once.
If both of the sites are served off of the same central office, get a pair of DSL modems, and you should be able to get around 512kbps between the two sites. The DSL modems should not set you back more than the 4 or 6 analog modems you would have bought anyways.
Then ask the phone company to install "an unloaded dry copper pair" to be connected between the sites.
If you tell them it is for data lines, you'll pay more for higher speed lines. If you say you are using it for an alarm system, that is probably the cheapest tariff you can pay, but be aware that if the phone company has no sense of humour and finds you shipping high speed data across it, they'll either bill you or cut your service.
And stay away from BGP, it can do load balancing, but by the time you learn enough to implement it correctly you'll be too valuable to stay in your current job:-)
There is good reason to be paranoid about the WIPO and their sources of funding.
When the WIPO was created, it was entirely funded by IP holder interests. This includes the MPAA, Sony, Disney, Time Warner, and many others.
The WIPO web pages used to highlight this as a positive effect, freeing them from the normal funding hassles seen by many other international orgs who have much trouble collecting money from countries who suddenly don't want to pay. Many organisations are struggling because the US congress has stopped payments when they don't agree with an outcome. The US stopped paying the ICITO/GATT, precursor to the WTO, when a decision came down against american banana and beef interests. When the WTO agreed to side with the US, funding was restored. Europeans are very upset, and many far right nationalist politicians are gaining votes by threatening to pull out of the WTO, or declaring economic war against the US. [France is a leader here, since french doctors have shown in several scientific studies that the bovine growth hormones used in most US cattle is a major cause of obesity, and thus outlawed in france. But the WTO has ruled the french health laws do not have priority over free commerce, and ordered france to allow american beef to be sold in france. The french are refusing for now, and the US has started to heavily tax many french goods being imported into the US in retalliation. But many organic US beef farms are getting into the french market, complicating the whole thing]
Back to the WIPO topic. The WIPO is a strange beast. They have tons of money, and are spending it like a.com startup run by teenagers. Their IT and telecoms groups are like disneyland for the people who work there. Top of the line equipment, excessive bandwidth, and perqs that make all other orgs in the geneva area sick with envy. Since they are an international org, the foreign workers don't pay swiss taxes (local workers still have to), and all the pay scales are shifted way up. System admins would normally be on the "functionary" pay scale (US$35k, local taxes), but at the WIPO they start as mid level "administration" (US$75k tax free).
When it became clear the WIPO was forcing treaties on countries just to benefit the IP holders at the expense of citizens rights in many countries, they scoured their web pages of any mention of their funding. Can't be documenting that possibly illegal conflict of interest.
It is very scary that the WIPO has closed door meetings open only to carefully selected delegates who are employed by some of the largest IP holders in the world. The working groups who created the wording of the treaties are run by law firms whose only clients are the main IP holders in the world, Bertelsmann, Sony, Time Warner, and a few others. They have used law students right out of university to create the most outrageous treaties, which carefully bough^H^H^H^H^Hselected politicians then introduce in each country. This results in the elimination of consumer rights in the US, with the DMCA, and similar laws snuck onto the books in other countries.
The Norwegian parliament was looking into how the WIPO treaty laws were passed without any discussion in the Stortget, as a direct result of the media attention around Jon Johansen and the deCSS case. That investigation into some corrupt politicians coupled with some other scandals (internal to Norway, not related to the WIPO) brought down the parliament earlier this year, and they are still figuring out how to clean up the corporate corruption of the political process. Any Norwegians are welcome to add comments to this, my norsk is not well enough to follow the daily papers.
Could you describe what neat technological feats you are planning to maintain robust connectivity, and whether you will get creative in the future with your routing?
Assuming you start with a single microwave connection to the coast, it makes routing easy, but leaves you open to any number of problems others have already addressed.
Later you may have some expensive backup satellite connections and you might lay down an undersea fibre link to both the british and continental coasts (you could resell the excess bandwidth with no problem, could be nicely profitable).
Do you envisage pushing the technological envelope to keep your connectivity going when you have multiple connections? Some tricks along the lines of asymetric routing tables, discontiguous EBGP AS path switching, or encrypted vpn tunnels to sympathetic ISPs in a shell game of anonymizing hops like zero knowledge? How closely are you working with your upstream providers to head off problems?
Would you consider reselling vpn endpoints so people could tunnel traffic out of oppressive countries without the local authorities sniffing the traffic for content?
the AC [who should lose karma for excessive use of buzzwords]
You are probably right. I had one ear on the news while typing that, and who knows how accurate talking heads are. Poking around a dozen various news sites on the web shows a dozen different opinions what will happen. Add to that 235 different opinions here on/. and its clear nobody knows much of anything.
I'm just going to ignore the whole thing and go sleep now. Then I'm going to get up in the morning and ignore the whole thing some more. Wake me when they throw gates and balmer into prison:-)
There have been some talking heads on the TV saying just that.
It seems M$ have exactly 4 months in which to declare if they are appealing. The appeals court then has one month to respond whether it will hear the case, deny it, or pass it directly to the supreme court. I expect the appeal to be filed tomorrow, so we could know in a month when the supreme court will get this.
The talking heads are mostly in agreement, the appeals court will drop this hot potato directly to the supreme court. No sense in allowing it to sit around continuing to harm the world economy. I would expect the supreme court will uphold much of what has come out today, but may redress some of the points like separating java from the OS, which is where it belongs.
But the americans had better vote in a democratic majority congress and democratic president, so that a slightly more liberal supreme court judge can get nominated soon. Hmmmmm, Al Gore is the lesser of two evils, when looked at from this angle.
2 names, now available : Wang, Digital:-) or how about jackson-sucks.com and bill-rules.com:-)
the AC wait, are those smileys really necessary today
We don't have to conform to these twisted ideas, we can make our own future. If we're gonna do it together, it takes creating a community for it.
That is what I meant, but you said it much better. I'll plead exhaustion after spending so much time on such a long post:-)
I've had this conversation with many economists before, but always in a social context over beer in the evenings. At one time I had honed my argument to be fairly concise and thought out, but it was never on the professional level of those who do it as a day job. Beer helps the loquaciousness (is that a word in english?), but not the razor edged rationalisation needed to hold the conversation.
With your ideas on violence, I've got some new arguments for friday night.
The wild west was defined by those explorers and early settlers who got there first. What it resembles today is just like every other part of american society, which has its good and bad points. Violence came to the wild west in the form of lawless lawmen, who imposed their own forms of justice on a citizenry who mostly wanted to be left alone. Look at the L.A. police scandals today, they are the results of 90 years of wild west style justice, with no reprisals possible against corrupt cops.
The internet was defined by altruistic university researchers and hackish corporate developers. What it resembles today is a frontier being tamed by greedy corporate bean counters and suits. Violence is coming to the internet in the form of a corrupt judiciary, imposing the will of deep pocket corporations, using the courts as a weapon to punish and kill the opposition. Victory always goes to the rich corporations, and justice is almost never served.
That was what ICANN proposed in a meeting recently..fr is run by INRIA, the french government's network research agency (l'Institut National du Recherche en Informatique et Automatique). It seemed a logical choice when Jon Postel handed out control of the TLDs. INRIA is a mix of altruistic university researchers and profit seeking business interests, but they are overseen by the government's research and economy ministries, and operate for the good of french citizens.
But now the ICANN is proposing yanking TLD control from not-for-profit and government agencies, and giving it to any private company who will sign a binding contract ensuring for-profit operation with a percentage going to ICANN and Network Solutions.
It would be a wry bit of poetic justice to see.fr administered by a british or american company, but do we really want that? The french sure don't.
This issue is one of control, in the absence of any formal agreements. There has been an informal agreement since Jon Postel created the whole domain system, which has been to promote the usefulness of the internet. Now commercial interests would like to destroy that informal agreement, and create an inflexible formal one which promotes only profitability with the flow of money heading back towards whoever controls the root of the DNS tree. Freedom be damned, and ignore sovereignity of other countries to do what they please.
This should lead to a breakup of the current system in the next few years. With any luck, the commercial internet will collapse into obscurity, and the freedom craving internet will flourish with new, open, technological innovation. So get hacking!
I agree. The complete lack of any technical information on the hacking seems pretty suspicious. I do know of at least 6 different ways to get into a windoze machine and do this, but all of them take a little time and effort. Given the detailed amount of other info, I'd expect a little bit on the hacking.
There are other incorrect technical details which would point to this poster being more of a user (ex-spammer) rather than a system administrator. The "blank Bcc: line" comment is wrong, because Bcc: is a function of the MUA, once it gets sent to the MTA over SMTP, every one of those addresses is converted to an RFC821 RCPT command.
I got the exact same feeling from this whole affair as you have, an ex-spammer disgruntled he didn't get paid for something. He/She had some time alone with Rodona's laptop, and copied a bunch of stuff onto some floppies or ftp'ed. With a little fixing up to appear as an agrieved sysadmin to throw his ex-employers off the scent.
Spammers and telemarketers are all fair targets for retribution, whether through hacking or social engineering (the sex survey, FBI hotline, others)
the AC
Basic application of optimal economics
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The Leased Life?
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· Score: 4
This has been accelerating for years.
Centuries ago, possession of a material good meant ownership. Creating a copy required the same effort as creating the original, and a copy could earn the same profit as the original. As the industrial revolution progressed, it became easier to create a copy for less money than the original, but with the same profit. There is a point where selling the copies reaches a plateau for profits. The only way to earn more profit from copying an original work or idea is to ensure people do not own the copy, but are merely renting or leasing for a period of time. If the item continues to have value, then the item should continue to create profit.
This is the basis of modern economics. It has been taught increasingly over the last few decades, and now that those modern economists are in positions of power, they are influencing the laws of nations to tip the balance of profit towards corporations and away from individuals. Moving from the industrial age to the information age is changing the economic model of the world.
Micro$oft, Intel, and many other large information age corporations have been discussing this economic model for more than a decade. The only way to turn revenue from a single purchase to a steady stream of payments is to move towards the ASP model. It has taken a while, but we are now seeing the components start to fit into place. Intel has tested a cryptologically secure ID function in its chips, necessary for CPU locking a license. M$ has changed its entire licensing scheme over the last 10 years, from selling copies of its OS to licensing based on the number of people in an organisation.
The transition will take another decade at least, but expect that all the major players will create a system for extracting larger and larger payments out of corporate IT departments, as well as individuals. If it weren't for larger profits, you wouldn't be seeing everyone moving towards the model.
If you are in charge of an IT department budget, you should be very afraid right about now. Because computing and communication is about to become much more expensive as the only modern applications switch to extortionate licenses. Payments will be on a per kb/hour/use basis, and you will only have access to the user interface of the applications, never having complete control of your systems again.
Free (as in liberty and beer) software is the kid looking at the emporer's clothes, and the major hope for the future in many IT departments. But free (as in liberty) software can, and has been, outlawed in many cases.
The greedy people now in power have sold their votes to the large corporations. They are creating laws such as the DMCA and UCITA to prevent free (as in liberty) software from harming potential future profits by multinationals. Notice how it is becoming illegal to reverse engineer many proprietary formats or functions? It is possible to criminalise free (as in liberty) software, to prevent it from duplicating the efforts of the proprietary world and thereby hurting profits. The people behind these laws are not stupid, they know the laws are not just enough, there must be some precedent setting cases, and they have been chosing their battles carefully. The/. community is well aware of this, which is why the YRO section consistently has the highest number of posts (not counting jonkatz emotional flamebait).
I truly believe as the economic model removes the last vestiges of individuals owning anything, the hackers of society will just come up with bigger, better, faster, and more twisted ideas. Life will go on, but the old ways are dying fast, and the new ways are always being defined by those who get there first.
Slashdot Mirror
This article is published in a higher education journal, but is filled with grammatical mistakes and doesn't have a consistent flow of ideas. There are enough technical mistakes to make me grit my teeth.
/. where we can all get off the subject and onto better discussions like the goodness of SSH.
I have a feeling Simson was talking about creating privacy friendly policies about log files, and during that discussion he related that protocols like FTP leave traces in log files. The author of this article then misunderstood what he was talking about and came up with a standard troll leader.
And any article with a good troll headline gets posted to
the AC
Can you imagine how much money some team of graphics artists got paid to come up with that logo?
Sometimes it seems I'm in the wrong line of work, but then I end up having too much fun one day and it becomes worth it.
the AC
but I've never seen a troll story submission before....
/. appear to be trolls. It can't be helped, it shows the editorial bent of the site creators. Most of us don't care, since we share much the same bent as cmdrtaco and hemos.
So you must be new to slashdot. Welcome.
Many stories on
the AC
There has been several reports on the financial news channels in the last few weeks about how IGI has also worked for M$.
/. has decided to highlight it because the fight against M$'s criminal actions is making headlines right now, but that doesn't make this a unique situation.
The claims are that M$ has also used IGI for dirty work to dig up information on people involved in lawsuits with M$. Its what IGI does best, there is no reason why Oracle couldn't use them as well. They are mercenaries, they'll dig up dirt for any price, and they have no loyalties to anyone except the highest bidder.
And I don't see this as a newsworthy story. This type of action goes on all the time in the corporate world.
the AC
As mattdm pointed out in an early post, its "the imminent death of the internet" :-) slashtroll style.
:-)
All the article talks about is bandwidth shaping by products like Packeteer, who make a cool little box. I regularly put in packeteer boxes to shape bandwidth so legitimate customers get what they pay for, and the bandwidth hogs are throttled back to reasonable rates. Although the box can be configured as a firewall, it really shines in packet shaping. I can easily configure it to choke every flow from every user, then open up bigger pipes for legitimate applications. The whingey napster users still can DL their metallica, but it takes them longer than going out to buy the CD
The university mentioned in the article is doing just that, limiting napster without breaking it, which would have the students screaming at them for censorship.
The tricks swb mentioned, like domainjacking, makes it tough for the (l)users to break your network, and gives the appearance of complying with corporate legal contracts. But the open nature of the internet still allows determined intelligent users to continue using the internet. Domainjacking is easily defeated by users who either stuff their own hosts file with the address of napster, or run yet another DNS server which ignores the 'jacked one, or tunnel around the firewall block.
the AC
OC-768 exists for short haul ATM and SONET connections inside a data centre. That is not a big deal in the communications world.
/. posted links to a real news story, rather than print a company press release with no further informations for us to look at. This story surface a few months ago when a european partner of Qwest and Nortel were showing the technology at a trade show in Germany. They had a couple of spools of fibre totalling about 20kms, and were pumping some incredible level of data across it. They had also done a real world test between two German cities with a fibre running along side some train tracks.
Getting OC-768 DWDM with all of its little tricks to run for such a long distance between end points makes the promise of bigger and better backbones a reality. There are a ton of technical problems keeping the leading and trailing edges of the pulses of every different wavelength of light from degrading and interfering, and somehow managing to recover all the signals at the far end. 700Kms covers most any reasonable distance in Europe.
It would be nice if
the AC
And while you are investing, Lucent, Nortel, and all the major carriers too :-)
I don't think this will work how you think it will work. The application code will never be transferred, only a java or C-sharp applet which can be cached locally. Communication will be HTTP carrying XML (unless they come up with a XTTP:// URI) between the client machine and the ASP.
The documents will be stored at a number of ASP/data warehouses spread out all over the place. It will be many companies, each paying license royalties to M$, and passing those costs on to consumers.
The applet on the (l)user's machine will be an XML browser which will perform some of the front end GUI functions and provide for quick response time. To the user, it should look no differently than running an application locally, except that many of the critical functions will run on the ASP servers, and not locally. That will prevent pirating of the whole application.
The communications stream will be encrypted, not so much to protect against intercept, but to prevent open source XML browsers from getting a copy of the data. The M$ XML browsers will not have a copy and paste function. You wont be able to copy the data you have typed in, so you can't paste your information in the window of a local text editor and save your work as part of a move to open source. The M$ XML front end will only allow you to crosslink the data to other documents or M$ approved applications.
When the open source scoundrels crack the XML format of people's documents, and create an XML browser that can retrieve those documents and save them in a truly open format, M$ can just go and change the XML format and push out new browser applets. Just what is happening with the Instant Messenger wars AOL and M$ are fighting. The access protocols change slightly every few hours, and the users have to grab an updated copy of IM just to keep using the service. Having java/cool applets as the front end makes the download automatic.
the AC
Right, that was my point. I've collected windoze user passwords as part of a security project, and it was amazing to see how many (l)users continued to use very weak passwords even after an employee education program. So the client had to implement a 3rd party password management application which assigned "good" passwords, but that failed when all the secretaries started writing their password on post-it notes and leaving them on the bottom of the keyboard.
.net idea from a curiosity to a required method of storing user data, with the only access to the proprietary XML document encoding via M$ products.
Out in the real world of mom and pop (l)users, where there is no forced education programs, they will continue to use weak passwords. This means they can go from a computer at home to a friends house and enter their logon details, and have access to their baby pictures just as they were home. Now, their friend's kid has installed a keyboard logging utility, and now has their logon details, and can access their data as well. What about dishonest cybercafes? University computers?
Expect M$ to slowly evolve this
Now scale the problems AOL are having with 13 million users to a M$ sized operation with 100+ million users. See where many opportunities for abuse start to open up, no matter how well they think they have secured the user's data?
If M$ has their way, they would love to force all business users onto a per use license with ever increasing fees, and they can hold the company data hostage because it is held in a completely proprietary M$ format, and the data is physically held on M$ controlled machines. Even if a company wanted to move from the M$ world to an open source world, M$ could force them to sign a multi-year agreement to gain access to their data. And even if they could intercept the data, the XML would only be interpretable by M$ applications.
the AC
From the people who brought us Outlook, with its multi-billion dollar damages due to lack of security, now bring us a central place to store everyone's files.
.net gets cracked.
.net will ever become very successful unless M$ uses its monopoly power to force everyone to use their servers.
Expect the word "hacker" to take another tarnishing when
It doesn't matter how many bits of encryption they use, when the average windoze (l)user's password is their first name. So there will be many cracks of this system, and some of them will be embarassing.
And what happens if some (l)user decides to use this at work, so they can take their work home with them. Now a company's secrets are stored on a M$ server, where just about any one can peruse them. M$ will claim somewhere in the fine print they must review all content on a regular basis to prevent illegal material from being stored, and if they just happen to see a competitor's secrets, we can trust them to not take advantage of it.
Now corporate firewalls will have to block access to this site, as with the other new net services offering the same thing. I doubt
the AC
As it said on the page, its great for configuring cisco routers. So I grabbed it and now the whole NOC is grabbing copies as I type. It certainly has the best idea for a telnet function I've seen in a long time. Good for a laugh.
Now, if we can only port it over to some unix management stations, this telnet client will rule the day for monitoring the boring log output from some machines. On NT, it eats 100% of the CPU, and it is missing basic VT102 keys to make it useful. But for the price, one can't complain.
the AC
You can bet genetic scientists are looking at experimenting with this gene on humans.
If similar genes are found in the human genome, then there will be a lot of clandestine experimentation to find the "higher intelligence" switch. Once there is sufficient scientific proof of children with IQ>150 on a regular basis, the race will be on to market gene therapy for couples to ensure their children are super-geniuses, who will all go out and found dot.coms and make a fortune.
We can hope that when the majority of the human race has increased intelligence, education, health care, space exploration, and other necessary programs all get the support they deserve without evil politicing stealing away resources.
But in the short term, it will bring a whole new level of meaning to "haves" and "have-nots". Gattaca anyone?
the AC
Well, "very" may be an overstatement, but there are quite a number of cables crossing the atlantic. There are around 40 active links currently being operated, and 200+ ancient links.
:-)
Every year sees at least one more fibre project being laid down between north america and northern europe. The most recent added 2.56Gbps, the next few years should see 20 to 50 times that capacity. If you ever get to see a map of all the lines resting on the bottom of the atlantic, it is truly impressive. I haven't seen a truly acurate map published, the acurate maps are a closely guarded secret shared between all the cable layers.
For a distributed project, especially if you truly want to serve us Europeans, is a very good idea. But don't count on just getting any internet connection in europe and hoping to have any kind of response time from late afternoon until midnight. The links hauling internet traffic get saturated as everyone gets home and starts surfing for that fine american pr0n
If the project is truly as important to your company's revenue, then lease a dedicated chunk of bandwidth from europe to your main servers. It will be worth every bit you pay for it to haul your HTML to the european servers, and then have it served up over local internet connections.
the AC
You are right. I shouldn't post at 3 AM :-)
I think what I meant was that controlling the robot would be kind of easy and natural, mimicing the movements and limits of a human upper torso. A 'naut could get proficient in a short period of time, thus implying a very steep learning curve of a few basic operations.
Thats opposed to some incredibly complex control systems I've seen, which tried to do too many things in a non-intuitive way. Creeping featurism out of control, and a rabid marketing team pushing the monstrosity out the door. Go read risks for some nightmarish ideas.
the AC
Is Stigmata available on DVD yet? I've poked around a few online sellers, and can't find it available in either zone 1 or 2.
:-) I believe the MPAA doesn't represent the interests of the European distributors, so maybe one of those censored statements qualified this perjury.
So if the film is not yet available on DVD, it probably has never been pressed onto DVD. That means deCSS could NOT possibly be involved in this case of pirating a copyrighted work.
I hope the honorable Mr. Garbus cleverly works this into the trial at some point, to invalidate these statements by the MPAA.
Also, the statement "and has not yet opened anywhere else in the world." seems kind of false. Stigmata has been playing in Europe, but then, we don't count
Given the tone of the deposition, I'll place my money on 2600 et. al.
the AC
This looks like a great design. Nothing too radical to confuse astronauts controlling it. Learning curve should be fairly shallow.
:-)
:-)
But it could benefit by adding a couple of arms designed for a limited grasp and hold function. An operator could position one of these extra arm to hold an object in place, hit a freeze button, then go back to using the two prehensile arms.
I wish I had one of these for work around the house. So many times I wished I could have 4 or 5 arms to get a quick and dirty job done
the AC
And are we forgetting the chainsaw and BFG hand attachments, sold separately
You have several options.
:-)
If you are going with multiple analog modem connections, look into MultiLink PPP, RFC1717. There are a number of PPP implementations that offer it. I've seen it on some linux boxes, and I'm sure I've used it on an OpenBSD box once.
If both of the sites are served off of the same central office, get a pair of DSL modems, and you should be able to get around 512kbps between the two sites. The DSL modems should not set you back more than the 4 or 6 analog modems you would have bought anyways.
Then ask the phone company to install "an unloaded dry copper pair" to be connected between the sites.
If you tell them it is for data lines, you'll pay more for higher speed lines. If you say you are using it for an alarm system, that is probably the cheapest tariff you can pay, but be aware that if the phone company has no sense of humour and finds you shipping high speed data across it, they'll either bill you or cut your service.
And stay away from BGP, it can do load balancing, but by the time you learn enough to implement it correctly you'll be too valuable to stay in your current job
the AC
There is good reason to be paranoid about the WIPO and their sources of funding.
.com startup run by teenagers. Their IT and telecoms groups are like disneyland for the people who work there. Top of the line equipment, excessive bandwidth, and perqs that make all other orgs in the geneva area sick with envy. Since they are an international org, the foreign workers don't pay swiss taxes (local workers still have to), and all the pay scales are shifted way up. System admins would normally be on the "functionary" pay scale (US$35k, local taxes), but at the WIPO they start as mid level "administration" (US$75k tax free).
When the WIPO was created, it was entirely funded by IP holder interests. This includes the MPAA, Sony, Disney, Time Warner, and many others.
The WIPO web pages used to highlight this as a positive effect, freeing them from the normal funding hassles seen by many other international orgs who have much trouble collecting money from countries who suddenly don't want to pay. Many organisations are struggling because the US congress has stopped payments when they don't agree with an outcome. The US stopped paying the ICITO/GATT, precursor to the WTO, when a decision came down against american banana and beef interests. When the WTO agreed to side with the US, funding was restored. Europeans are very upset, and many far right nationalist politicians are gaining votes by threatening to pull out of the WTO, or declaring economic war against the US. [France is a leader here, since french doctors have shown in several scientific studies that the bovine growth hormones used in most US cattle is a major cause of obesity, and thus outlawed in france. But the WTO has ruled the french health laws do not have priority over free commerce, and ordered france to allow american beef to be sold in france. The french are refusing for now, and the US has started to heavily tax many french goods being imported into the US in retalliation. But many organic US beef farms are getting into the french market, complicating the whole thing]
Back to the WIPO topic. The WIPO is a strange beast. They have tons of money, and are spending it like a
When it became clear the WIPO was forcing treaties on countries just to benefit the IP holders at the expense of citizens rights in many countries, they scoured their web pages of any mention of their funding. Can't be documenting that possibly illegal conflict of interest.
It is very scary that the WIPO has closed door meetings open only to carefully selected delegates who are employed by some of the largest IP holders in the world. The working groups who created the wording of the treaties are run by law firms whose only clients are the main IP holders in the world, Bertelsmann, Sony, Time Warner, and a few others. They have used law students right out of university to create the most outrageous treaties, which carefully bough^H^H^H^H^Hselected politicians then introduce in each country. This results in the elimination of consumer rights in the US, with the DMCA, and similar laws snuck onto the books in other countries.
The Norwegian parliament was looking into how the WIPO treaty laws were passed without any discussion in the Stortget, as a direct result of the media attention around Jon Johansen and the deCSS case. That investigation into some corrupt politicians coupled with some other scandals (internal to Norway, not related to the WIPO) brought down the parliament earlier this year, and they are still figuring out how to clean up the corporate corruption of the political process. Any Norwegians are welcome to add comments to this, my norsk is not well enough to follow the daily papers.
the AC
Gaaaack! I just found the nudie photos as well, now that the /. effect is over. So the ex-boyfriend theory floats as well as the ex-employee theory.
Either way, it was someone with physical access to the machines.
the AC
[thats put a damper on my sex drive for a while]
Could you describe what neat technological feats you are planning to maintain robust connectivity, and whether you will get creative in the future with your routing?
Assuming you start with a single microwave connection to the coast, it makes routing easy, but leaves you open to any number of problems others have already addressed.
Later you may have some expensive backup satellite connections and you might lay down an undersea fibre link to both the british and continental coasts (you could resell the excess bandwidth with no problem, could be nicely profitable).
Do you envisage pushing the technological envelope to keep your connectivity going when you have multiple connections? Some tricks along the lines of asymetric routing tables, discontiguous EBGP AS path switching, or encrypted vpn tunnels to sympathetic ISPs in a shell game of anonymizing hops like zero knowledge? How closely are you working with your upstream providers to head off problems?
Would you consider reselling vpn endpoints so people could tunnel traffic out of oppressive countries without the local authorities sniffing the traffic for content?
the AC
[who should lose karma for excessive use of buzzwords]
You are probably right. I had one ear on the news while typing that, and who knows how accurate talking heads are. Poking around a dozen various news sites on the web shows a dozen different opinions what will happen. Add to that 235 different opinions here on /. and its clear nobody knows much of anything.
:-)
I'm just going to ignore the whole thing and go sleep now. Then I'm going to get up in the morning and ignore the whole thing some more. Wake me when they throw gates and balmer into prison
the AC
There have been some talking heads on the TV saying just that.
:-) or how about jackson-sucks.com and bill-rules.com :-)
It seems M$ have exactly 4 months in which to declare if they are appealing. The appeals court then has one month to respond whether it will hear the case, deny it, or pass it directly to the supreme court. I expect the appeal to be filed tomorrow, so we could know in a month when the supreme court will get this.
The talking heads are mostly in agreement, the appeals court will drop this hot potato directly to the supreme court. No sense in allowing it to sit around continuing to harm the world economy. I would expect the supreme court will uphold much of what has come out today, but may redress some of the points like separating java from the OS, which is where it belongs.
But the americans had better vote in a democratic majority congress and democratic president, so that a slightly more liberal supreme court judge can get nominated soon. Hmmmmm, Al Gore is the lesser of two evils, when looked at from this angle.
2 names, now available : Wang, Digital
the AC
wait, are those smileys really necessary today
We don't have to conform to these twisted ideas, we can make our own future. If we're gonna do it together, it takes creating a community for it.
:-)
That is what I meant, but you said it much better. I'll plead exhaustion after spending so much time on such a long post
I've had this conversation with many economists before, but always in a social context over beer in the evenings. At one time I had honed my argument to be fairly concise and thought out, but it was never on the professional level of those who do it as a day job. Beer helps the loquaciousness (is that a word in english?), but not the razor edged rationalisation needed to hold the conversation.
With your ideas on violence, I've got some new arguments for friday night.
The wild west was defined by those explorers and early settlers who got there first. What it resembles today is just like every other part of american society, which has its good and bad points. Violence came to the wild west in the form of lawless lawmen, who imposed their own forms of justice on a citizenry who mostly wanted to be left alone. Look at the L.A. police scandals today, they are the results of 90 years of wild west style justice, with no reprisals possible against corrupt cops.
The internet was defined by altruistic university researchers and hackish corporate developers. What it resembles today is a frontier being tamed by greedy corporate bean counters and suits. Violence is coming to the internet in the form of a corrupt judiciary, imposing the will of deep pocket corporations, using the courts as a weapon to punish and kill the opposition. Victory always goes to the rich corporations, and justice is almost never served.
the AC
That was what ICANN proposed in a meeting recently. .fr is run by INRIA, the french government's network research agency (l'Institut National du Recherche en Informatique et Automatique). It seemed a logical choice when Jon Postel handed out control of the TLDs. INRIA is a mix of altruistic university researchers and profit seeking business interests, but they are overseen by the government's research and economy ministries, and operate for the good of french citizens.
.fr administered by a british or american company, but do we really want that? The french sure don't.
But now the ICANN is proposing yanking TLD control from not-for-profit and government agencies, and giving it to any private company who will sign a binding contract ensuring for-profit operation with a percentage going to ICANN and Network Solutions.
It would be a wry bit of poetic justice to see
This issue is one of control, in the absence of any formal agreements. There has been an informal agreement since Jon Postel created the whole domain system, which has been to promote the usefulness of the internet. Now commercial interests would like to destroy that informal agreement, and create an inflexible formal one which promotes only profitability with the flow of money heading back towards whoever controls the root of the DNS tree. Freedom be damned, and ignore sovereignity of other countries to do what they please.
This should lead to a breakup of the current system in the next few years. With any luck, the commercial internet will collapse into obscurity, and the freedom craving internet will flourish with new, open, technological innovation. So get hacking!
the AC
I agree. The complete lack of any technical information on the hacking seems pretty suspicious. I do know of at least 6 different ways to get into a windoze machine and do this, but all of them take a little time and effort. Given the detailed amount of other info, I'd expect a little bit on the hacking.
There are other incorrect technical details which would point to this poster being more of a user (ex-spammer) rather than a system administrator. The "blank Bcc: line" comment is wrong, because Bcc: is a function of the MUA, once it gets sent to the MTA over SMTP, every one of those addresses is converted to an RFC821 RCPT command.
I got the exact same feeling from this whole affair as you have, an ex-spammer disgruntled he didn't get paid for something. He/She had some time alone with Rodona's laptop, and copied a bunch of stuff onto some floppies or ftp'ed. With a little fixing up to appear as an agrieved sysadmin to throw his ex-employers off the scent.
Spammers and telemarketers are all fair targets for retribution, whether through hacking or social engineering (the sex survey, FBI hotline, others)
the AC
This has been accelerating for years.
/. community is well aware of this, which is why the YRO section consistently has the highest number of posts (not counting jonkatz emotional flamebait).
Centuries ago, possession of a material good meant ownership. Creating a copy required the same effort as creating the original, and a copy could earn the same profit as the original. As the industrial revolution progressed, it became easier to create a copy for less money than the original, but with the same profit. There is a point where selling the copies reaches a plateau for profits. The only way to earn more profit from copying an original work or idea is to ensure people do not own the copy, but are merely renting or leasing for a period of time. If the item continues to have value, then the item should continue to create profit.
This is the basis of modern economics. It has been taught increasingly over the last few decades, and now that those modern economists are in positions of power, they are influencing the laws of nations to tip the balance of profit towards corporations and away from individuals. Moving from the industrial age to the information age is changing the economic model of the world.
Micro$oft, Intel, and many other large information age corporations have been discussing this economic model for more than a decade. The only way to turn revenue from a single purchase to a steady stream of payments is to move towards the ASP model. It has taken a while, but we are now seeing the components start to fit into place. Intel has tested a cryptologically secure ID function in its chips, necessary for CPU locking a license. M$ has changed its entire licensing scheme over the last 10 years, from selling copies of its OS to licensing based on the number of people in an organisation.
The transition will take another decade at least, but expect that all the major players will create a system for extracting larger and larger payments out of corporate IT departments, as well as individuals. If it weren't for larger profits, you wouldn't be seeing everyone moving towards the model.
If you are in charge of an IT department budget, you should be very afraid right about now. Because computing and communication is about to become much more expensive as the only modern applications switch to extortionate licenses. Payments will be on a per kb/hour/use basis, and you will only have access to the user interface of the applications, never having complete control of your systems again.
Free (as in liberty and beer) software is the kid looking at the emporer's clothes, and the major hope for the future in many IT departments. But free (as in liberty) software can, and has been, outlawed in many cases.
The greedy people now in power have sold their votes to the large corporations. They are creating laws such as the DMCA and UCITA to prevent free (as in liberty) software from harming potential future profits by multinationals. Notice how it is becoming illegal to reverse engineer many proprietary formats or functions? It is possible to criminalise free (as in liberty) software, to prevent it from duplicating the efforts of the proprietary world and thereby hurting profits. The people behind these laws are not stupid, they know the laws are not just enough, there must be some precedent setting cases, and they have been chosing their battles carefully. The
I truly believe as the economic model removes the last vestiges of individuals owning anything, the hackers of society will just come up with bigger, better, faster, and more twisted ideas. Life will go on, but the old ways are dying fast, and the new ways are always being defined by those who get there first.
the AC