Adding in those two requirements greatly enlarges the potential pool of passwords. Even if you assume only numbers will be used in addition to letters and not all the punctuation marks, you're still increasing your password base by several orders of magnitude.
I would have to disagree.
Forcing the use of both upper and lower case letters actually restricts the possible combinations by at least half! (Disclaimer: this is all based on an OAC finite math course i took a few years back) Let's assume 4 character passwords, because the math is simpler: Total number of possible passwords (26 LC, 26 UC, 10 #) = 62^4 = 14776336 total passwords. because of the need to have at least ONE non-letter, the following is now true = 62*62*62*10 = 2383280 We just ELIMINATED 12 MILLION possible passwords! Now, since one letter MUST be opposite case (and not a number) we are at: = 62*62*26*10 = 999440 Well, there goes another 1.3 MILLION passwords! Out of 14 MILLION passwords, there are now only 1 MILLION acceptable passwords based on the critera. Now, on longer passwords, the effect of these constraints should be proportionally less.
I'm in the Waterdown/Hamilton area, Fido's GSM coverage is great. (up in waterdown, it's the only carrier with decent signal strength)... my only gripe is the AMPS module : It drops calls, sounds horrible, drains battery, misses calls, and costs way too much.
I ditched my AMPS module 3 months ago and got a pager... at least now when I drive in the nether-regions (between GSM & AMPS signals) it doesn't take 60 seconds to pick up signal again... it always happens right when someone's trying to call, too.
Has anyone used the GSM data services yet? I'm thinking about getting the kit, but what kind of speeds can you expect with it?
5190 : Beautiful phone, coverage is amazing most of the time.
I had it working underground in Copps Coliseum in Hamilton under about 30' of concrete in a bad signal part of town... only a couple of bugs with it, it wouldn't place calls on one side of the hall, but would receive everywhere:-)
The best thing about it: GSM! Even on minimal signal strength (when NO bars show up) I can hear and talk fine!
Now if only Microcell would put a tower up to cover the 5 miles between highway corridors where I live:-(
Just out of personal experience, the most important skill any potential candidate can have for ANY position at all is:
A willingness and ability to learn.
We recently hired an employee to do Linux / PERL work, not because of his skills (no PERL at the time) but because he was willing to go learn it over the weekend. So far, he's worked out better than we had even hoped.
Sure you can put some rubbery calculater type buttons on the watch, but just think of how long it would take to build a linux kernel on it
"make install ; make dep ; make zlilo ; make packages ; make packages_install"
76 letters and punctuation, about 2 seconds to figure out which of the ALPHABETICALLY ARRANGED letters to push, 12 backspaces to correct for when you try to type too fast,
and it takes longer to type out than to actually do the compile !!!
Where everyone walks around with a wristwatch size computer weighing 2 oz. capable of connecting to the global pervasive network wirelessly, with a bazillion byte hard disk, 1 TerraHertz (THz) processor, but still has....
...
a keyboard that weighs 2 LBS, and is larger than my arm!
For all the legal attempts to restrict network content to a balkanized area, the internet will continue to be free. It is simply not feasible to add enough filters to the interconnect points to effectively control all routes in and out of a country. All it takes is a few people close to the border with wireless routing equipment and an urge to "live on the edge". An alternate solutions (albeit slower) would be to simply dial up into the other country and create a router.
Then when someone has some free time, they will inevitably develop some selective routing software in the genre of napster the allows cross border hopping to those with the software.
I just read through the release myself, and it appears that MS is using this only for SERVERS. While I'm not too much of a MS fan, I do know that routinely our servers are filled with multiple backups of workstations or data simply because someone's in a rush to get something done and they don't check to see if the stuff is already ON THE SERVER! (ugh)
Depending on the data stored on your servers, this actually could free up 80-90% (our service department uses their server solely for temporary customer backups, which are 95% identical)
Now the biggest question to be asked is:
Will this work reliably, or is it just another bug-ridden "feature" ?
Other than games, graphics-intensive stuff, or other multimedia, I don't know what you'd need a $4000 laptop for. I will probably get a docking station for the added comfort when I'm at home, however.
It's all in the screen. Going Active/TFT makes the screen usable for long periods of time. In the past year, I've tried out a number of units (as they come through inventory:-) - IBM 365 XD (P120/10"DSTN) - AST Ascentia A (P120/12"TFT) - NEC Versa 6060 (P166/12"TFT) - IBM 380E (P150/12"DSTN) - IBM 390X (PII400/15"TFT)
Guess which one I like the best? I found the AST the most usable, since I could bring it off-site, and work in the evenings, but it's speed was driving me insane. All the others (including the NEC) had horrible displays that were dim & washed out.
Don't compromise on the screen! If you do, you'll regret it later.
I had exactly opposite experience with cyrix chips. We sold about 50 systems based on cyrix PR-233 chips, no issues except for 3 or 4 DOA chips (slightly higher than normal, but both Intel and AMD have been 2-3 DOA for every 50 we get).
In fact, our main DNS server runs on an MII/300 processor right now. Never had a problem with it. The only problem I have with cyrix is they don't rate by clock speed, which confuses customers: the MII/300 only runs at 233Mhz!
Canadian Company Provides Web Security Countermeasure
Flamborough, Ontario, February 15, 2000
While corporate Technology executives meet with President Clinton's staff at the White House to discuss the recent catastrophic Denial of Service problems for web business, a small Canadian company today announced the pending release of a solution.
In order to be a successful countermeasure the cooperation and adaptation by the infrastructure industry will be necessary. Platformed on the GateWeaver VPN Firewall server, the company expects to have its newest "Crossing Guard" module in the mass market channel by mid March. The offering will be in two formats: Software only and an Integrated Hardware device.
The GateWeaver products are compatible with Macintosh, Microsoft Windows, Unix operating systems and Novell networks.
Crossing Guard is an initiative to combat the recent increase of DoS (Denial of Service) attacks that have been responsible for Internet server downtime. The key to defeating a DoS attack is to push the attack as far from the victimized server as possible, preferably right back to the initiating client. This allows the server to continue servicing its clientele quickly and efficiently.
Crossing Guard works to provide a "breathing window" during a Denial of Service attack to isolate attackers and initiate a response. By working with ISPs and backbone providers, an attacked server can request a reprieve from the closest Crossing Guard to the attacker, stopping the packet storm in its tracks. This reprieve will last for 60 minutes: enough time to contact network providers for more thorough response, while not limiting the freedom of the net or disconnecting a large gateway that serves many clients.
When an attack is detected, either through server unresponsiveness or more proactive network monitoring tools the system administrator logs into the local Crossing Guard server which attempts to contact the next upstream Crossing Guard to the attacker through the primary network connection and failing that through a backup connection. Each Crossing Guard will relay the countermeasure request as far up the tree as able so as to limit the bandwidth consumed by the attack to as short a distance as possible.
Each Crossing Guard will store the request for later review as well as notify system administrators in each network the attack is passing through of the countermeasure and provide contact information for the attacked server administrator to arrange for a more permanent protection solution.
The Crossing Guard specification is expected to be released to the Internet community for peer review and implementation. Our goal is to create a solution that scales from the largest intercontinental provider down to the smallest local ISP. With this in mind, the GateWeaver implementation of Crossing Guard will be available as a software product free of charge to local ISPs.
All hardware vendors, network providers, ISPs, and Businesses doing Business on the Web are invited to join in developing a self regulating solution to contain and deter against Denial of Service attacks.
GateWeaver.com has made available a free distribution version of its firewall-VPN software. The company anticipates releasing the software version of Crossing Guard in the same manner.
Contact Information
www.gateweaver.ca www.gateweaver.com
The Manor Group Ltd. Chris Maxwell Cmaxwell@themanor.net 905-689-2001 Phone 877-manor-99 Toll Free
As much as we would all love to have fibre installed to every house and business, at this current time it's just not economical, especially in smaller city centres. While there is fibre running through my area (just outside Hamilton, Ontario) the local loop cost is over $300/month excluding bandwidth (depends on ISP), and that's just for 1meg bandwidth.
With the telco's, it's over $1000/month just for local loop T1, and business ADSL is $500/month... just not feasible for only bandwidth.
There's a provider around here rolling out wireless 2-3meg for well under that, and it includes professional web hosting, etc... They're called WDSL Inc.
I've been on both sides of the fence in this issue: I've had domain names stolen out from under (yes, we switched to CRYPT-PW right quick) us using a fake email address.
I also am having trouble with a clients domain that is registered to a provider that no longer exists... NONE of the email addresses are valid, and forging them hasn't worked yet either.
Just like most things, it works wrong when life's good, and works even worse when life's bad.
What is needed is a great, small keyboard: I saw one a few years ago called the microwriter... 5 main keys and 2 shift keys, it emulated a full 101 key (no dumb windows keys at that time) keyboard... I tried it out at a comdex show, and could almost touch type it in 10 minutes!
The unfortunate thing is portability is a compromise of size and functionality.
I'll never have a 21" display on a laptop, or be able to plug an ISA development card into a laptop under 15 lbs (there are some industrial models that do this).
The only question is: how much use can you sacrifice for being able to wear it in your watch?
Regardless of the mystical shroud around government spooks, I really question the feasability of this kind of monitoring... the rate that we are pushing data on the backbone is astronomical, and we have achieved that by reducing the amount of packets that must be processed. Technologies like CEF or flow switching on Cisco routers speed packet processing up by touching as few of them as possible and switching as many as possible through ASICs. This doesn't give you a whole lot of room for surveillance equipment.
The only place for feasible monitoring would be on Ethernets or Fast Ethernets that connect server farms, and that would require the placement of monitoring devices at every server farm... not likely to go unnoticed.
This is true if the monitoring agency wants to monitor ALL traffic, but why not just grab TCP header info on new connections? I don't think that any government particularly cares to read all the slashdot comments I'm reading today, but if they have the URL's i'm using, they can go back at any time and recreate what I was doing.
The headers can't be more than 10 or 15% of the throughput on a line, which dramatically decreases the hardware needed to monitor a connection.
The other question is how many interconnects are there into a country? Yes, you can always use an international phone call to create your own, but usually there's only 3 or 4 external switching points (in Canada, there's Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver for most everything) as everything tends to congregate in star-type networks. With only 3 or 4 physical locations, it sure makes it easier to monitor as well!
While I agree that copyright laws are necessary to protect the interests of authors, and comments are technically covered under this, the original intent of copyright laws are to protect the profits of the author so he/she can make a living from writing.
Is anyone here making a living by posting comments to slashdot, and need their livelyhood protected?
Do we need to introduce a "not for profit" clause allowing redistribution? (so as to protect sites like slashdot from being plundered for their comments?)
hmmm.
Re:What am I missing?
on
RNA Computer
·
· Score: 1
The article made reference to the 7 city travelling salesman problem, which appears to have trillions of possible solutions. The DNA computations took about a week to finish before finding the correct solution.
On a regular computer, if you had a pre-generated list of solutions, all prepared beforehand for processing, wouldn't a standard PC be able to evaluate this same problem in a week?
Does anyone know how long it takes to synthisize trillions of DNA or RNA strands?
One other thing to think about is DSSS vs FHSS - these are two variants of spread spectrum (direct sequence and frequency hopping) - cards can be 802.11 compatible and use either, but the two types cannot communicate... DSSS appears to be winning for 802.11 (2 Mbps version) but there's some questionmark over the allocation of spectrum for 802.11b DSSS (but I could have mis-remembered that last bit).
The problem with DSSS is that it uses 26 out of 78 available frequencies in the ISM band (un-regulated). Although some vendors are claiming that they can have 11 channels, what this means is the Starting frequency can be from frequency 1 to frequency 11. It also means that if you don't start on frequency *1* you are limited to only *2* channels in the entire spectrum. This covers ALL users of wireless in your physical area.
ISM Frequencies (2.4Ghz) 1-----------26------------52-----------78
note that there is no room for a third channel in the bandwidth available.
This also means that if you have ANY external interference (microwave ovens, etc) in the path of connections, then your available bandwidth will be seriously restricted.
With FHSS, this is not nearly as much of an issue, since it jumps between all 78 frequencies, and if busy, just picks another. Theoretically the limit is 26 overlapping networks, but in reality this is probably limited to about 16 before units spend more time colliding (like ethernet) than transmitting.
Wireless internet access in southern ontario now! WDSL Inc.
I needed to get a link up between our two buildings for about a month (waiting to move), bought an Access Point, Station Adapter and a PCMCIA card (for me!). Hung two low gain directional antennas out the window and away we went.
Full 2mbit connection with one antenna masking taped to a second floor window, across a mall (about 3 blocks) to the second antenna, screwed into a board hanging out of a third floor window over 1/2 mile away.
I did some load testing on it just to see what the throughput was using QCheck. 1.3 - 1.5 Mbit real-life transfer rates. According to the survey software, the QoS is barely "Low" because of the bad positioning of the antennas. (contractor should be showing up this week to put up proper masts).
This stuff is unbelieveable. I took my laptop across the street (about 800ft through 2 sets of double-paned glass) to Tim Hortons for coffee, and had 3Mbit connection to the LAN. It was just as fast as my wired connection (marginally busy 10Mbit ethernet).
One of our clients is starting to offer Wireless Internet Access in Southern Ontario... check out WDSL Inc.
In at least 3 of these places, wireless networking is going to be used. Since we're in a mixed environment (Windows, Mac, Linux) we have no option but to use Lucent's cards. (do we?)
No... Breezecom also has drivers for those O/S's (they even have ones for the HP Journada)
- have the ability to surf the net in each of those places.
Just hook up a Breezecom AP-10 to each LAN, set it to "roaming" mode and you're done.
- be able to "see" the pc's on the lans of the distributed locations, as though they were on thesame lan. (VPN) - use crypto to secure the VPN. - use a transparent proxy setup to mask the forced use of a proxy for webtraffic.
GateWeaver has a good VPN solution... sets up connections with 1024bit RSA, then switches to 128bit BlowFish to run. Does cross-subnet browsing for WinBlows clients (SMB/NetBeui)
- have the ability to use the laptops in each of the locations transparently. (3 locations with wireless) - i'm hesitating to use dhcp on the lan/vpn: to avoid being stranded if a node goes down, all the routers must deal out ip's to their own lans. They have to watch it not to step on each other's toes in the vpn though.
Best suggestion : set each internal LAN to use its own subnet (ie 10.0.1.0, 10.0.2.0, 10.0.3.0, etc), VPN them together and have DHCP assign IP addresses to the laptops (this way they get the right router gateway address... you don't want to tunnel crypto to another site and then go open wire because the wrong gateway is set).
Your 486 boxes will probably not have the horse power for VPN crypto... I've seen 128bit run nicely on a P-166, but nothing lower than that yet.
Wireless Internet in Southern Ontario available NOW! WDSL Inc.
802.11 doesn't specify FH (Frequency Hopping) or DS (Direct Sequencing). DS is what's taking over.
DS will not take over for the following reasons:
1. Although very fast, each DS cell uses a full 1/3 of the ISM bandwidth, and depending on interference this usually means a maximum of TWO co-located networks. While this may not mean much, right now, if you're in an office tower, and you have 2 neighbors running DS wireless lan's, you're out of luck. You need to be completely out of range to start a new cell (and not just the 11mb cell that everyone talks about, its only 150ft, i'm talking about the 1000-3000ft 1mb cell that is the faded signal propogation.
FH systems can have up to 26 co-located cells (or networks), although only about 10 is practical before speed drops off.
2. DS is very sensitive to interference. Fire up a DS wireless lan (lucent, wavelan, etc) and it'll work fine in a room. Now fire up a couple of FH lan devices, and you'll find that the DS link drops out pretty quick. (BTW - it's completely legal to do this, and there's nothing you can do if someone decides to jam your network).
3. DS doesn't do roaming very well. By this I mean inter-network, such as you would see with a wireless internet provider... with FH, you can be doing 60mph in a car and keep your connection running 2mbit and depending on conditions/hardware 3mbit.
DS works really well in high-power situations like long distance links, but the power limitations of ISM severely restrict its useability. FH, although slightly slower can handle hundreds of users in the same area on multiple networks without choking.
Wireless internet in southern ontario available NOW! WDSL Inc.
DEFS: DS = Direct Sequence, FH = Frequency Hopping
Slashdot Mirror
Adding in those two requirements greatly enlarges the potential pool of passwords. Even if you assume only numbers will be used in addition to letters and not all the punctuation marks, you're still increasing your password base by several orders of magnitude.
I would have to disagree.
Forcing the use of both upper and lower case letters actually restricts the possible combinations by at least half! (Disclaimer: this is all based on an OAC finite math course i took a few years back) Let's assume 4 character passwords, because the math is simpler: Total number of possible passwords (26 LC, 26 UC, 10 #) = 62^4 = 14776336 total passwords. because of the need to have at least ONE non-letter, the following is now true = 62*62*62*10 = 2383280 We just ELIMINATED 12 MILLION possible passwords! Now, since one letter MUST be opposite case (and not a number) we are at: = 62*62*26*10 = 999440 Well, there goes another 1.3 MILLION passwords! Out of 14 MILLION passwords, there are now only 1 MILLION acceptable passwords based on the critera. Now, on longer passwords, the effect of these constraints should be proportionally less.
I'm in the Waterdown/Hamilton area, Fido's GSM coverage is great. (up in waterdown, it's the only carrier with decent signal strength) ... my only gripe is the AMPS module : It drops calls, sounds horrible, drains battery, misses calls, and costs way too much.
... at least now when I drive in the nether-regions (between GSM & AMPS signals) it doesn't take 60 seconds to pick up signal again ... it always happens right when someone's trying to call, too.
I ditched my AMPS module 3 months ago and got a pager
Has anyone used the GSM data services yet? I'm thinking about getting the kit, but what kind of speeds can you expect with it?
5190 : Beautiful phone, coverage is amazing most of the time.
... only a couple of bugs with it, it wouldn't place calls on one side of the hall, but would receive everywhere :-)
:-(
I had it working underground in Copps Coliseum in Hamilton under about 30' of concrete in a bad signal part of town
The best thing about it: GSM! Even on minimal signal strength (when NO bars show up) I can hear and talk fine!
Now if only Microcell would put a tower up to cover the 5 miles between highway corridors where I live
Just out of personal experience, the most important skill any potential candidate can have for ANY position at all is:
A willingness and ability to learn.
We recently hired an employee to do Linux / PERL work, not because of his skills (no PERL at the time) but because he was willing to go learn it over the weekend. So far, he's worked out better than we had even hoped.
Cheers
Sure you can put some rubbery calculater type buttons on the watch, but just think of how long it would take to build a linux kernel on it
"make install ; make dep ; make zlilo ; make packages ; make packages_install"
76 letters and punctuation, about 2 seconds to figure out which of the ALPHABETICALLY ARRANGED letters to push, 12 backspaces to correct for when you try to type too fast,
and it takes longer to type out than to actually do the compile !!!
:-)
cheers
Welcome to the future folks ...
....
:-)
Where everyone walks around with a wristwatch size computer weighing 2 oz. capable of connecting to the global pervasive network wirelessly, with a bazillion byte hard disk, 1 TerraHertz (THz) processor, but still has
...
a keyboard that weighs 2 LBS, and is larger than my arm!
just my 2 cents
cheers
For all the legal attempts to restrict network content to a balkanized area, the internet will continue to be free. It is simply not feasible to add enough filters to the interconnect points to effectively control all routes in and out of a country. All it takes is a few people close to the border with wireless routing equipment and an urge to "live on the edge". An alternate solutions (albeit slower) would be to simply dial up into the other country and create a router.
Then when someone has some free time, they will inevitably develop some selective routing software in the genre of napster the allows cross border hopping to those with the software.
We will not be silenced or restriced!
There's a very simple alternative to handle a situation like this:
Host your E-Commerce server in Canada (or any other country for that matter).
This will take money out of the US economy, which concerns politicians and lawmakers.
This takes it out of US jurisdiction, which concerns politicians and lawmakers.
This adversely affects US hosting companies, which may or may not include Amazon's own upstream provider, which definately concerns Amazon.
Although this does not address the main issue, it does raise awareness, and forces many more companies into the fray to protect their wallets.
Just a thought
Now if only I could get the drivers for the Rage 128 to work right.
Ever seen the "Flying Windows" screen saver crash? Always fun!
I just read through the release myself, and it appears that MS is using this only for SERVERS. While I'm not too much of a MS fan, I do know that routinely our servers are filled with multiple backups of workstations or data simply because someone's in a rush to get something done and they don't check to see if the stuff is already ON THE SERVER! (ugh)
Depending on the data stored on your servers, this actually could free up 80-90% (our service department uses their server solely for temporary customer backups, which are 95% identical)
Now the biggest question to be asked is:
Will this work reliably, or is it just another bug-ridden "feature" ?
Other than games, graphics-intensive stuff, or other multimedia, I don't know what you'd need a $4000 laptop for. I will probably get a docking station for the added comfort when I'm at home, however.
:-)
It's all in the screen. Going Active/TFT makes the screen usable for long periods of time. In the past year, I've tried out a number of units (as they come through inventory
- IBM 365 XD (P120/10"DSTN)
- AST Ascentia A (P120/12"TFT)
- NEC Versa 6060 (P166/12"TFT)
- IBM 380E (P150/12"DSTN)
- IBM 390X (PII400/15"TFT)
Guess which one I like the best? I found the AST the most usable, since I could bring it off-site, and work in the evenings, but it's speed was driving me insane. All the others (including the NEC) had horrible displays that were dim & washed out.
Don't compromise on the screen! If you do, you'll regret it later.
I had exactly opposite experience with cyrix chips. We sold about 50 systems based on cyrix PR-233 chips, no issues except for 3 or 4 DOA chips (slightly higher than normal, but both Intel and AMD have been 2-3 DOA for every 50 we get).
In fact, our main DNS server runs on an MII/300 processor right now. Never had a problem with it. The only problem I have with cyrix is they don't rate by clock speed, which confuses customers: the MII/300 only runs at 233Mhz!
Oh well, what do you expect for $50 CDN per chip?
This is great ... up until we get consumers trying to install the SBLive distribution on top of the ABit distribution to get both to work ...
just think of the tech support calls!
Canadian Company Provides Web Security Countermeasure
Flamborough, Ontario, February 15, 2000
While corporate Technology executives meet with President Clinton's staff
at the White House to discuss the recent catastrophic Denial of Service
problems for web business, a small Canadian company today announced the
pending release of a solution.
In order to be a successful countermeasure the cooperation and adaptation
by the infrastructure industry will be necessary. Platformed on the
GateWeaver VPN Firewall server, the company expects to have its newest
"Crossing Guard" module in the mass market channel by mid March. The
offering will be in two formats: Software only and an Integrated Hardware
device.
The GateWeaver products are compatible with Macintosh, Microsoft Windows,
Unix operating systems and Novell networks.
Crossing Guard is an initiative to combat the recent increase of DoS
(Denial of Service) attacks that have been responsible for Internet server
downtime. The key to defeating a DoS attack is to push the attack as far
from the victimized server as possible, preferably right back to the
initiating client. This allows the server to continue servicing its
clientele quickly and efficiently.
Crossing Guard works to provide a "breathing window" during a Denial of
Service attack to isolate attackers and initiate a response. By working
with ISPs and backbone providers, an attacked server can request a
reprieve from the closest Crossing Guard to the attacker, stopping the
packet storm in its tracks. This reprieve will last for 60 minutes:
enough time to contact network providers for more thorough response, while
not limiting the freedom of the net or disconnecting a large gateway that
serves many clients.
When an attack is detected, either through server unresponsiveness or more
proactive network monitoring tools the system administrator logs into the
local Crossing Guard server which attempts to contact the next upstream
Crossing Guard to the attacker through the primary network connection and
failing that through a backup connection. Each Crossing Guard will relay
the countermeasure request as far up the tree as able so as to limit the
bandwidth consumed by the attack to as short a distance as possible.
Each Crossing Guard will store the request for later review as well as
notify system administrators in each network the attack is passing through
of the countermeasure and provide contact information for the attacked
server administrator to arrange for a more permanent protection solution.
The Crossing Guard specification is expected to be released to the Internet
community for peer review and implementation. Our goal is to create a
solution that scales from the largest intercontinental provider down to the
smallest local ISP. With this in mind, the GateWeaver implementation of
Crossing Guard will be available as a software product free of charge to
local ISPs.
All hardware vendors, network providers, ISPs, and Businesses doing
Business on the Web are invited to join in developing a self regulating
solution to contain and deter against Denial of Service attacks.
GateWeaver.com has made available a free distribution version of its
firewall-VPN software. The company anticipates releasing the software
version of Crossing Guard in the same manner.
Contact Information
www.gateweaver.ca
www.gateweaver.com
The Manor Group Ltd.
Chris Maxwell
Cmaxwell@themanor.net
905-689-2001 Phone
877-manor-99 Toll Free
As much as we would all love to have fibre installed to every house and business, at this current time it's just not economical, especially in smaller city centres. While there is fibre running through my area (just outside Hamilton, Ontario) the local loop cost is over $300/month excluding bandwidth (depends on ISP), and that's just for 1meg bandwidth.
... just not feasible for only bandwidth.
With the telco's, it's over $1000/month just for local loop T1, and business ADSL is $500/month
There's a provider around here rolling out wireless 2-3meg for well under that, and it includes professional web hosting, etc... They're called WDSL Inc.
I've been on both sides of the fence in this issue: I've had domain names stolen out from under (yes, we switched to CRYPT-PW right quick) us using a fake email address.
... NONE of the email addresses are valid, and forging them hasn't worked yet either.
I also am having trouble with a clients domain that is registered to a provider that no longer exists
Just like most things, it works wrong when life's good, and works even worse when life's bad.
What is needed is a great, small keyboard: I saw one a few years ago called the microwriter ... 5 main keys and 2 shift keys, it emulated a full 101 key (no dumb windows keys at that time) keyboard ... I tried it out at a comdex show, and could almost touch type it in 10 minutes!
The unfortunate thing is portability is a compromise of size and functionality.
I'll never have a 21" display on a laptop, or be able to plug an ISA development card into a laptop under 15 lbs (there are some industrial models that do this).
The only question is: how much use can you sacrifice for being able to wear it in your watch?
Regardless of the mystical shroud around government spooks, I really question the feasability of this kind of monitoring
The only place for feasible monitoring would be on Ethernets or Fast Ethernets that connect server farms, and that would require the placement of monitoring devices at every server farm
This is true if the monitoring agency wants to monitor ALL traffic, but why not just grab TCP header info on new connections?
I don't think that any government particularly cares to read all the slashdot comments I'm reading today, but if they have the URL's i'm using, they can go back at any time and recreate what I was doing.
The headers can't be more than 10 or 15% of the throughput on a line, which dramatically decreases the hardware needed to monitor a connection.
The other question is how many interconnects are there into a country? Yes, you can always use an international phone call to create your own, but usually there's only 3 or 4 external switching points (in Canada, there's Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver for most everything) as everything tends to congregate in star-type networks. With only 3 or 4 physical locations, it sure makes it easier to monitor as well!
While I agree that copyright laws are necessary to protect the interests of authors, and comments are technically covered under this, the original intent of copyright laws are to protect the profits of the author so he/she can make a living from writing.
Is anyone here making a living by posting comments to slashdot, and need their livelyhood protected?
Do we need to introduce a "not for profit" clause allowing redistribution? (so as to protect sites like slashdot from being plundered for their comments?)
hmmm.
The article made reference to the 7 city travelling salesman problem, which appears to have trillions of possible solutions. The DNA computations took about a week to finish before finding the correct solution.
On a regular computer, if you had a pre-generated list of solutions, all prepared beforehand for processing, wouldn't a standard PC be able to evaluate this same problem in a week?
Does anyone know how long it takes to synthisize trillions of DNA or RNA strands?
Ahh, but by digitally transferring it, you also transfer the watermark embedded in it, which can be used to track down exactly who purchased it.
:-(
The only way to remove the watermark (without reverse engineering the addition method) is to transfer it as analog.
One other thing to think about is DSSS vs FHSS - these are two variants of spread spectrum (direct sequence and frequency hopping) - cards can be 802.11 compatible and use either, but the two types cannot communicate... DSSS appears to be winning for 802.11 (2 Mbps version) but there's some questionmark over the allocation of spectrum for 802.11b DSSS (but I could have mis-remembered that last bit).
The problem with DSSS is that it uses 26 out of 78 available frequencies in the ISM band (un-regulated). Although some vendors are claiming that they can have 11 channels, what this means is the Starting frequency can be from frequency 1 to frequency 11. It also means that if you don't start on frequency *1* you are limited to only *2* channels in the entire spectrum. This covers ALL users of wireless in your physical area.
ISM Frequencies (2.4Ghz)
1-----------26------------52-----------78
3 channels
|-----------||------------||------------|
....wlan1........wlan2..........wlan3
2 channels
|-----------| |-----------|
......wlan1............wlan2
note that there is no room for a third channel in the bandwidth available.
This also means that if you have ANY external interference (microwave ovens, etc) in the path of connections, then your available bandwidth will be seriously restricted.
With FHSS, this is not nearly as much of an issue, since it jumps between all 78 frequencies, and if busy, just picks another. Theoretically the limit is 26 overlapping networks, but in reality this is probably limited to about 16 before units spend more time colliding (like ethernet) than transmitting.
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1/2 mile ad-hoc link!
... check out WDSL Inc.
I needed to get a link up between our two buildings for about a month (waiting to move), bought an Access Point, Station Adapter and a PCMCIA card (for me!). Hung two low gain directional antennas out the window and away we went.
Full 2mbit connection with one antenna masking taped to a second floor window, across a mall (about 3 blocks) to the second antenna, screwed into a board hanging out of a third floor window over 1/2 mile away.
I did some load testing on it just to see what the throughput was using QCheck. 1.3 - 1.5 Mbit real-life transfer rates. According to the survey software, the QoS is barely "Low" because of the bad positioning of the antennas. (contractor should be showing up this week to put up proper masts).
This stuff is unbelieveable. I took my laptop across the street (about 800ft through 2 sets of double-paned glass) to Tim Hortons for coffee, and had 3Mbit connection to the LAN. It was just as fast as my wired connection (marginally busy 10Mbit ethernet).
One of our clients is starting to offer Wireless Internet Access in Southern Ontario
In at least 3 of these places, wireless networking is going to be used. Since we're in a mixed environment (Windows, Mac, Linux) we have no option but to use Lucent's cards. (do we?)
... Breezecom also has drivers for those O/S's (they even have ones for the HP Journada)
... sets up connections with 1024bit RSA, then switches to 128bit BlowFish to run. Does cross-subnet browsing for WinBlows clients (SMB/NetBeui)
... you don't want to tunnel crypto to another site and then go open wire because the wrong gateway is set).
... I've seen 128bit run nicely on a P-166, but nothing lower than that yet.
No
- have the ability to surf the net in each of those places.
Just hook up a Breezecom AP-10 to each LAN, set it to "roaming" mode and you're done.
- be able to "see" the pc's on the lans of the distributed locations, as though they were on thesame lan. (VPN)
- use crypto to secure the VPN.
- use a transparent proxy setup to mask the forced use of a proxy for webtraffic.
GateWeaver has a good VPN solution
- have the ability to use the laptops in each of the locations transparently. (3 locations with wireless)
- i'm hesitating to use dhcp on the lan/vpn: to avoid being stranded if a node goes down, all the routers must deal out ip's to their own lans. They have to watch it not to step on each other's toes in the vpn though.
Best suggestion : set each internal LAN to use its own subnet (ie 10.0.1.0, 10.0.2.0, 10.0.3.0, etc), VPN them together and have DHCP assign IP addresses to the laptops (this way they get the right router gateway address
Your 486 boxes will probably not have the horse power for VPN crypto
Wireless Internet in Southern Ontario available NOW! WDSL Inc.
802.11 doesn't specify FH (Frequency Hopping) or DS (Direct Sequencing). DS is what's taking over.
... with FH, you can be doing 60mph in a car and keep your connection running 2mbit and depending on conditions/hardware 3mbit.
DS will not take over for the following reasons:
1. Although very fast, each DS cell uses a full 1/3 of the ISM bandwidth, and depending on interference this usually means a maximum of TWO co-located networks. While this may not mean much, right now, if you're in an office tower, and you have 2 neighbors running DS wireless lan's, you're out of luck. You need to be completely out of range to start a new cell (and not just the 11mb cell that everyone talks about, its only 150ft, i'm talking about the 1000-3000ft 1mb cell that is the faded signal propogation.
FH systems can have up to 26 co-located cells (or networks), although only about 10 is practical before speed drops off.
2. DS is very sensitive to interference. Fire up a DS wireless lan (lucent, wavelan, etc) and it'll work fine in a room. Now fire up a couple of FH lan devices, and you'll find that the DS link drops out pretty quick. (BTW - it's completely legal to do this, and there's nothing you can do if someone decides to jam your network).
3. DS doesn't do roaming very well. By this I mean inter-network, such as you would see with a wireless internet provider
DS works really well in high-power situations like long distance links, but the power limitations of ISM severely restrict its useability. FH, although slightly slower can handle hundreds of users in the same area on multiple networks without choking.
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DEFS: DS = Direct Sequence, FH = Frequency Hopping