Wow, that's actually pretty cool. I use Speakeasy too, and wouldn't mind sharing the connection... what would be nice is if you could control the amount of bandwidth useable by "guest" users vs. "registered" users. I'd probably be much more willing to open up my AP if that were allowed, but as it is, I'm stuck out in the 'burbs, where folks aren't nearly as likely to be strolling down the street in need of an open hotspot.
If you use a linux box as a router, traffic shaping is pretty easy. Given that the Linksys APs run linux and have several projects building firmware for them, you could probably get one of them to shape traffic.
Still, my suggestion is to open it up and see what happens. I'ver never noticed a big bandwidth hog; from what my neighbors have said they just use it when their connection is down or when they're using the laptop in the one part of their house where their AP doesn't reach.
Dear moderators: rating a normal post down to a zero using "Overrated" is ridiculous. If you've got an actual issue with it, let me know what it is. Thanks.
How do you tell if the open access point belongs to a government agent. At least at the ISP i know it isn't owned by the goverment, although they may be cooperating. With an open access point, it could belong directly to the government.
In which case, given the various PATRIOT powers, I don't see it as any worse. A random access point is only possibly controlled by G-men, and only possibly associated with me. My hardwired internet connection is certainly secretly tappable, and provably associated with me. Thanks to the Bush administration, I get all the paranoia I need right in my living room.
If you had to pay for bandwidth based on how much you used, people wouldn't do share.
Yes, if ISPs ever start charging for web-site hosting based on usage, the internet would be decimated. Nobody would put up personal pages or blogs or their quirky projects anymore.
Even with SSL, there's possibile MITM attacks that can be done.
Gosh, if I'm using an ancient version of IE, I'm going to sweat that one.
Are you really willing to trust a random individual with your privacy. I know that ISPs are capable of the same, but at least you have a contract with them.
I'd guess it's much safer trusting a random individual than an ISP. The traffic I care about is already encrypted, so my worries are a) people with serious resources, or b) people doing traffic analysis (e.g., to learn who I communicate with).
The primary boogiemen here are high-end black hat hackers and my own dear government. To both of them, an ISP's core is a clear target, whereas a random wireless node is a) less likely to yield value, b) unlikely to have good logs, and c) not clearly associated with me.
Not that I care either way; I have fixed-IP DSL which I use and share happily, and I'm glad to use random wireless nodes. But when I do care, the open wireless node is the modern equivalent of the randomly-chosen payphone.
If some wonderful neighbor of mine has picked that exact moment to download the latest IT Crowd episode (great show by the way!), then my ability to do the job for which I am paid would suffer.
If I could be sure everyone would only use it for browsing, email, IM and the odd bit of downloading then I'd be for it, other than that, I would rather not risk it.
My tip: try it and find out. It probably won't happen. If you're really worried, you could set up a splash page or traffic shaping. Or, here's a crazy idea, talk to your neighbors.
certain ISP services (mainly SMTP servers for outgoing mail) don't require any authentication as the ISP assumes that who ever has physical access to the connection is the authorized user.
If people whose profession is computer security still think that physical access is either 100% secure or the only way people connect to the internet, then the are hopeless fools.
Then they'll be regulated as a monopoly because no one will be able to argue with a straight face that there is a free market for telecoms. With monopoly status, they won't be able to argue that they are being forced to cut their prices down to unsustainable levels.
It unfortunately won't play out that way. They will consolidate down to two players, who will then offer approximately the same deal. Politicians can then claim that the market is competitive, and the two players can do almost as well as monopolies. Not that anybody involved would know capitalism if it bit them on the ass; what they call "capitalism" is externally an oligarchy and internally basically feudalism.
It's sad, really. It reminds me of the kids who just play games with all the cheats enabled. The real fun (and the real benefit) isn't winning; it's the challenge.
Basically, there are massive density economies in delivering cellular service (e.g. it's better to use a higher percentage of the capacity of one expensive tower vs. having four separate expensive towers running at lower utilization rates), and as such, there are efficiency gains that can come out of such mergers.
If those are really big economies of scale for infrastructure, then let the phone companies merge their tower operations into a new company or two and buy service from that. I don't see any reason to keep restricting consumer choice. Everybody I know either hates their cell carrier or has been with them a short enough time that they just don't hate them yet.
Anybody know anything about their encrypted binary? I can't figure out what they were trying to achieve with that. Some sort of misguided anti-hax0r protection? Or perhaps they're trying to conceal something...
I'm having trouble understanding what this optimization that used the special features of Intel chips (presumably their high power) was. It looks from the patch that they just check who the manufacturer is, and if it is not AMD, they pretend your computer doesn't have the power to host 10 participants.
My guess, like yours, is that this is blatant marketing crap. But it would be nice to see some tests of how many people can be usefully conferenced on different hardware. Skype is a CPU pig, and it's possible that they really have optimized it for some Intel-specific feature.
I don't care if society as a whole is better off if it's because China made shitloads of money and I lost a bit less than they gained.
Trade mainly happens when it's more valuable for both parties to trade. The case you should be mainly worried about is if China makes shitloads of money and so do Americans, but you're not one of the Americans who made money.
Hey! This is Slashdot. You have to argue vigorously for a while and then just stop responding if you run out of ways to change the topic. Admitting error isn't allowed.
More seriously: thanks for being straightforward. It's never easy!
Except those "few" american factory workers, of course. They're probably still on Tandy 386's or something. Exchanging the livelihood of a citizen in your own country for the opportunity to purchase a non-essential good is rather shrewd, isn't it? It's almost as though you're valuing your ability to consume over the ability of those factory workers to you know, eat and live in a house.
Except that a) I pay taxes to help support them when they lose their jobs, b) there are additional government programs, created at the same time as the lowered trade barriers, to help retrain them in non-manufacturing jobs, c) other people, much poorer than American factory workers, now have jobs that they didn't, and d) using those cheap computers, I am creating jobs elsewhere.
The notion that trade costs particular jobs is true. But if you look at the numbers, trade has increased massively, but unemployment is about the same. If trade were really all that dangerous, there would be about 7 people left working in the US. Somehow, though, that isn't the case.
Why would a chinese or indian buy an American product when they can buy something made in their own country by people making one tenth what our workers make?
"Cheaper" is only one criterion that people use when shopping. Another is "better". Most of the MP3 players are cheaper than the iPod. Which one do people buy?
Interestingly, a similar things applies to factory labor. Their workers may make 10% of what our factory workers do, but they are a fair bit less productive because they're not as well educated. For example, read about GE's best aircraft engine factory.
We can't beat them at low-end manufacturing. But if we keep investing in education, in creativity, in continuous improvement, we can beat them in other ways. And everybody wins thereby.
You should damn well listen to the refrain and understand the numbers - something is going seriously wrong in America. The middle class is falling apart under increasing costs (college, health care, no pensions) while the absolute top has received nearly all of the benefits of outsourcing, increased productivity, and the last thirty years of economic growth.
Which has exactly nothing to do with whether or not trade is a good idea. The numbers demonstrate that trade makes societies richer. Whether that makes individuals richer is up to the society.
And that's whatkills me about the various anti-trade movements. They are wasting all their political capital to make society poorer, rather ways to divert the increase in wealth to help the poor.
Right now, we're in a race to the bottom because we aren't putting any barriers on countries without the same worker protections or environmental protections that we have.
I often hear this argument, but never from anybody who can explain to me why the richest states in the US are generally the ones with the highest worker and environmental protections. There's nothing to stop those sinister degenerates in Alabama and Mississippi from stealing all the good jobs we Californians have. Would you advocate cutting off that trade, too?
Next time you have ramen for dinner and think "woe is me", know that there are people who would kill you in a heartbeat for your $0.10 dinner.
Just for the record, the people willing to kill for ramen generally don't have the tools or the stamina to do it in a heartbeat. That takes a well-nourished person with a knife or a gun. Especially since your heart rate will go up during the process, expect it to take four or five hundred heartbeats.
"No form of protectionism has ever been good, labor or otherwise."
Oh really? How is it, then, that Finland, which has had cradle-to-grave socialism for around 100 years has the most competitive economy [weforum.org]? The United States is second, but Canada ranks 3rd, Australia 5th, and Norway 6th -- each of which have extensive social program.
I think you're confused. Protectionism is where you block trade. That has nothing to do with socialism.
Personally, I think free markets and government support of workers can go together well. I think the US underinvests in its workforce. The damage is especially obvious with our poor record on child poverty, which has long-lasting effects.
At some point, there are no industries left. Anyone that doesn't see that is a fool.
Wow, you should get together with that guy who supposedly said in 1899 that the patent office should be closed because there was nothing left to invent.
Things have been getting better since the Renaissance. Perhaps we will run out of industries someday, but you'll have to provide some strong proof if you want to believe it will happen soon. The Internet is just getting started, biotech is like computers in 1960, and nanotech is decades behind that. Robotics has only made it to the home vacuum cleaner, space travel is in its infancy, and we still get most of our power from fossil fuels.
Americans may or may not be at the forefront of any of these. But we could be if we choose. For the industries we have led, it's because we were bold, innovative, and open. You want to see what protectionism gets you? Look at any low-end GM product in the late 70s. The Japanese deserved to kick our asses. And even if GM never learned much from it, many other US industries did.
Corporations will just pay private citizens to make their donations and do their lobbying. This changes nothing.
This is like saying contribution limits are useless. That's incorrect. Sometimes people do try to get around them; sometimes those people go to jail.
Requiring people to not be affiliated with a corporation in order to influence their representatives means that the corporate employed have fewer rights than the non-corporate employed, which is arguably a violation of equal rights.
That's not necessarily the case. You as a private citizen can do whatever you like with your money. But there are limits to what a corporation can pay you to do. They can't, for example, pay you to vote a certain way. Extending that to make it illegal for them to pay you to use your other powers as a citizen doesn't seem a big stretch.
The only people who really benefit from offshoring are the business owners who can costs by firing American workers and replacing them with cheap overseas labor. There may be more wealth, but it's all concentrated in a few hands.
Tempting to believe, but wrong.
It sounds like you understand one important part that others fail to get, the principle of Comparative Advantage, which is why trade creates wealth.
But there's more to it. Look, for example, at the computer you typed this on. Although computers were all initially made here, they're now almost all made overseas. By your theory, this would mean that the companies that started that are swimming in dough. But they're not; most of them are gone, the people in that business are struggling, and computer prices are forever reaching new lows. Why? Because it's mainly the consumers that capture the benefits.
A few American factory workers lost. But we all gained much cheaper hardware, a much larger gain.
Bush can't understand what's it's like for an ordinary family to suffer the devastation of unemployment because he's never lived through it.
Yes, and that is indeed a problem.
Adjustments because of trade happen all the time, not just international trade. Amazon and their ecommerce ilk have undoubtedly put out of business many small stores, and countless people who used to take telephone and mail-in catalog orders. I'm sure that Yahoo and Google have decimated the ranks of people who used to answer Directory Assistance calls. The American worker probably has much more cause to hate California than India.
The solution isn't to stop trade and innovation. The solution is to tax the well off to pay for unemployment benefits and retraining. You can't outlaw winning and losing, but you can make sure the winners pay enough so that the losers can be winners again.
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Wow, that's actually pretty cool. I use Speakeasy too, and wouldn't mind sharing the connection... what would be nice is if you could control the amount of bandwidth useable by "guest" users vs. "registered" users. I'd probably be much more willing to open up my AP if that were allowed, but as it is, I'm stuck out in the 'burbs, where folks aren't nearly as likely to be strolling down the street in need of an open hotspot.
If you use a linux box as a router, traffic shaping is pretty easy. Given that the Linksys APs run linux and have several projects building firmware for them, you could probably get one of them to shape traffic.
Still, my suggestion is to open it up and see what happens. I'ver never noticed a big bandwidth hog; from what my neighbors have said they just use it when their connection is down or when they're using the laptop in the one part of their house where their AP doesn't reach.
Dear moderators: rating a normal post down to a zero using "Overrated" is ridiculous. If you've got an actual issue with it, let me know what it is. Thanks.
How do you tell if the open access point belongs to a government agent. At least at the ISP i know it isn't owned by the goverment, although they may be cooperating. With an open access point, it could belong directly to the government.
In which case, given the various PATRIOT powers, I don't see it as any worse. A random access point is only possibly controlled by G-men, and only possibly associated with me. My hardwired internet connection is certainly secretly tappable, and provably associated with me. Thanks to the Bush administration, I get all the paranoia I need right in my living room.
If you had to pay for bandwidth based on how much you used, people wouldn't do share.
Yes, if ISPs ever start charging for web-site hosting based on usage, the internet would be decimated. Nobody would put up personal pages or blogs or their quirky projects anymore.
Even with SSL, there's possibile MITM attacks that can be done.
Gosh, if I'm using an ancient version of IE, I'm going to sweat that one.
Are you really willing to trust a random individual with your privacy. I know that ISPs are capable of the same, but at least you have a contract with them.
I'd guess it's much safer trusting a random individual than an ISP. The traffic I care about is already encrypted, so my worries are a) people with serious resources, or b) people doing traffic analysis (e.g., to learn who I communicate with).
The primary boogiemen here are high-end black hat hackers and my own dear government. To both of them, an ISP's core is a clear target, whereas a random wireless node is a) less likely to yield value, b) unlikely to have good logs, and c) not clearly associated with me.
Not that I care either way; I have fixed-IP DSL which I use and share happily, and I'm glad to use random wireless nodes. But when I do care, the open wireless node is the modern equivalent of the randomly-chosen payphone.
If some wonderful neighbor of mine has picked that exact moment to download the latest IT Crowd episode (great show by the way!), then my ability to do the job for which I am paid would suffer.
If I could be sure everyone would only use it for browsing, email, IM and the odd bit of downloading then I'd be for it, other than that, I would rather not risk it.
My tip: try it and find out. It probably won't happen. If you're really worried, you could set up a splash page or traffic shaping. Or, here's a crazy idea, talk to your neighbors.
certain ISP services (mainly SMTP servers for outgoing mail) don't require any authentication as the ISP assumes that who ever has physical access to the connection is the authorized user.
If people whose profession is computer security still think that physical access is either 100% secure or the only way people connect to the internet, then the are hopeless fools.
Just out of interest what does your contract with your ISP have to say about sharing your connection ?
My ISP says it's great. Yet another reason to love Speakeasy.
I left my AP open and named it with my address. I've met a couple of my neighbors that way. It's great!
Then they'll be regulated as a monopoly because no one will be able to argue with a straight face that there is a free market for telecoms. With monopoly status, they won't be able to argue that they are being forced to cut their prices down to unsustainable levels.
It unfortunately won't play out that way. They will consolidate down to two players, who will then offer approximately the same deal. Politicians can then claim that the market is competitive, and the two players can do almost as well as monopolies. Not that anybody involved would know capitalism if it bit them on the ass; what they call "capitalism" is externally an oligarchy and internally basically feudalism.
It's sad, really. It reminds me of the kids who just play games with all the cheats enabled. The real fun (and the real benefit) isn't winning; it's the challenge.
Basically, there are massive density economies in delivering cellular service (e.g. it's better to use a higher percentage of the capacity of one expensive tower vs. having four separate expensive towers running at lower utilization rates), and as such, there are efficiency gains that can come out of such mergers.
If those are really big economies of scale for infrastructure, then let the phone companies merge their tower operations into a new company or two and buy service from that. I don't see any reason to keep restricting consumer choice. Everybody I know either hates their cell carrier or has been with them a short enough time that they just don't hate them yet.
It is in fact de-regulation and intense competition that make this move necessary.
I find this pretty implausible. If they were actually facing real competition, wouldn't they suck slightly less?
Anybody know anything about their encrypted binary? I can't figure out what they were trying to achieve with that. Some sort of misguided anti-hax0r protection? Or perhaps they're trying to conceal something...
I'm having trouble understanding what this optimization that used the special features of Intel chips (presumably their high power) was. It looks from the patch that they just check who the manufacturer is, and if it is not AMD, they pretend your computer doesn't have the power to host 10 participants.
My guess, like yours, is that this is blatant marketing crap. But it would be nice to see some tests of how many people can be usefully conferenced on different hardware. Skype is a CPU pig, and it's possible that they really have optimized it for some Intel-specific feature.
I don't care if society as a whole is better off if it's because China made shitloads of money and I lost a bit less than they gained.
Trade mainly happens when it's more valuable for both parties to trade. The case you should be mainly worried about is if China makes shitloads of money and so do Americans, but you're not one of the Americans who made money.
Are you really this stupid, or are you just trolling? [...] , you dumbass.
Hi! It looks like you aren't interested in having a discussion. Best of luck in doing whatever it is that you're actually after.
I admit it. I was confused. Thank you.
Hey! This is Slashdot. You have to argue vigorously for a while and then just stop responding if you run out of ways to change the topic. Admitting error isn't allowed.
More seriously: thanks for being straightforward. It's never easy!
Except those "few" american factory workers, of course. They're probably still on Tandy 386's or something. Exchanging the livelihood of a citizen in your own country for the opportunity to purchase a non-essential good is rather shrewd, isn't it? It's almost as though you're valuing your ability to consume over the ability of those factory workers to you know, eat and live in a house.
Except that a) I pay taxes to help support them when they lose their jobs, b) there are additional government programs, created at the same time as the lowered trade barriers, to help retrain them in non-manufacturing jobs, c) other people, much poorer than American factory workers, now have jobs that they didn't, and d) using those cheap computers, I am creating jobs elsewhere.
The notion that trade costs particular jobs is true. But if you look at the numbers, trade has increased massively, but unemployment is about the same. If trade were really all that dangerous, there would be about 7 people left working in the US. Somehow, though, that isn't the case.
Why would a chinese or indian buy an American product when they can buy something made in their own country by people making one tenth what our workers make?
"Cheaper" is only one criterion that people use when shopping. Another is "better". Most of the MP3 players are cheaper than the iPod. Which one do people buy?
Interestingly, a similar things applies to factory labor. Their workers may make 10% of what our factory workers do, but they are a fair bit less productive because they're not as well educated. For example, read about GE's best aircraft engine factory.
We can't beat them at low-end manufacturing. But if we keep investing in education, in creativity, in continuous improvement, we can beat them in other ways. And everybody wins thereby.
You should damn well listen to the refrain and understand the numbers - something is going seriously wrong in America. The middle class is falling apart under increasing costs (college, health care, no pensions) while the absolute top has received nearly all of the benefits of outsourcing, increased productivity, and the last thirty years of economic growth.
Which has exactly nothing to do with whether or not trade is a good idea. The numbers demonstrate that trade makes societies richer. Whether that makes individuals richer is up to the society.
And that's whatkills me about the various anti-trade movements. They are wasting all their political capital to make society poorer, rather ways to divert the increase in wealth to help the poor.
Right now, we're in a race to the bottom because we aren't putting any barriers on countries without the same worker protections or environmental protections that we have.
I often hear this argument, but never from anybody who can explain to me why the richest states in the US are generally the ones with the highest worker and environmental protections. There's nothing to stop those sinister degenerates in Alabama and Mississippi from stealing all the good jobs we Californians have. Would you advocate cutting off that trade, too?
Next time you have ramen for dinner and think "woe is me", know that there are people who would kill you in a heartbeat for your $0.10 dinner.
Just for the record, the people willing to kill for ramen generally don't have the tools or the stamina to do it in a heartbeat. That takes a well-nourished person with a knife or a gun. Especially since your heart rate will go up during the process, expect it to take four or five hundred heartbeats.
"No form of protectionism has ever been good, labor or otherwise."
Oh really? How is it, then, that Finland, which has had cradle-to-grave socialism for around 100 years has the most competitive economy [weforum.org]? The United States is second, but Canada ranks 3rd, Australia 5th, and Norway 6th -- each of which have extensive social program.
I think you're confused. Protectionism is where you block trade. That has nothing to do with socialism.
Personally, I think free markets and government support of workers can go together well. I think the US underinvests in its workforce. The damage is especially obvious with our poor record on child poverty, which has long-lasting effects.
At some point, there are no industries left. Anyone that doesn't see that is a fool.
Wow, you should get together with that guy who supposedly said in 1899 that the patent office should be closed because there was nothing left to invent.
Things have been getting better since the Renaissance. Perhaps we will run out of industries someday, but you'll have to provide some strong proof if you want to believe it will happen soon. The Internet is just getting started, biotech is like computers in 1960, and nanotech is decades behind that. Robotics has only made it to the home vacuum cleaner, space travel is in its infancy, and we still get most of our power from fossil fuels.
Americans may or may not be at the forefront of any of these. But we could be if we choose. For the industries we have led, it's because we were bold, innovative, and open. You want to see what protectionism gets you? Look at any low-end GM product in the late 70s. The Japanese deserved to kick our asses. And even if GM never learned much from it, many other US industries did.
Corporations will just pay private citizens to make their donations and do their lobbying. This changes nothing.
This is like saying contribution limits are useless. That's incorrect. Sometimes people do try to get around them; sometimes those people go to jail.
Requiring people to not be affiliated with a corporation in order to influence their representatives means that the corporate employed have fewer rights than the non-corporate employed, which is arguably a violation of equal rights.
That's not necessarily the case. You as a private citizen can do whatever you like with your money. But there are limits to what a corporation can pay you to do. They can't, for example, pay you to vote a certain way. Extending that to make it illegal for them to pay you to use your other powers as a citizen doesn't seem a big stretch.
The only people who really benefit from offshoring are the business owners who can costs by firing American workers and replacing them with cheap overseas labor. There may be more wealth, but it's all concentrated in a few hands.
Tempting to believe, but wrong.
It sounds like you understand one important part that others fail to get, the principle of Comparative Advantage, which is why trade creates wealth.
But there's more to it. Look, for example, at the computer you typed this on. Although computers were all initially made here, they're now almost all made overseas. By your theory, this would mean that the companies that started that are swimming in dough. But they're not; most of them are gone, the people in that business are struggling, and computer prices are forever reaching new lows. Why? Because it's mainly the consumers that capture the benefits.
A few American factory workers lost. But we all gained much cheaper hardware, a much larger gain.
Bush can't understand what's it's like for an ordinary family to suffer the devastation of unemployment because he's never lived through it.
Yes, and that is indeed a problem.
Adjustments because of trade happen all the time, not just international trade. Amazon and their ecommerce ilk have undoubtedly put out of business many small stores, and countless people who used to take telephone and mail-in catalog orders. I'm sure that Yahoo and Google have decimated the ranks of people who used to answer Directory Assistance calls. The American worker probably has much more cause to hate California than India.
The solution isn't to stop trade and innovation. The solution is to tax the well off to pay for unemployment benefits and retraining. You can't outlaw winning and losing, but you can make sure the winners pay enough so that the losers can be winners again.