And please, if you want to criticize do so, this is a bare outline of an idea, not a carefully crafted thing. Point out the flaws, and offer solutions, if they occur to you. Of course. That said, here's my take on it.
Your system looks very strong, and very robust. It lacks deniability, and decentralization is difficult, but otherwise, it works. I'm a bit tired right now, so I'll probably think of things later, and add them to my system, and tell you of them, assuming this conversation is still going.
Routing is an incredibly delicate process. Routing without a central authority is damn near impossible. The Internet uses ARPA to distribute IP addresses, and thusly, they can track down each IP to its owner.
With the VPN system you propose, you still need a central authority to allocate IPs. A central authority is a single point of failure, if you haven't gotten that yet. It's a single point of accountability. If you can get away from that single point, then you open yourself up to spoofing, spamming, authority hijacking, and all sorts of bad things. (This is a point of weakness, fill it in, and you'll have a much stronger system.)
The current method of anonymous routing is P2P flooding. This, obviously, doesn't scale well. I haven't figured out anything better. Freenet has a significantly optimized flooding algo, but it still relies on flooding to some extent. O(log n) compared to O(n) or something along those lines. IP is much closer to O(1), although you could make an argument for it being O(n/c) with a very large c. (That would mean that the IP wouldn't scale well for values that are orders of magnitude higher than c.) No rigorous proofs here, so keep that grain of salt handy.
The thing that gets me, is what sort of social policy should there be?
This relates strongly to a project I'm thinking on right now. It (obviously) isn't anywhere near complete. But you may be able to cull some interesting ideas from it. I hope you find it helpful.
Assuming an anonymous network, create "virtual countries" with laws of their own. You create an anonymous virtual identity. That virtual identity can be a citizen of a virtual country. By being a citizen, you gain access to the resources of the county. (Bandwidth, access controls, distributed content, etc.) This makes virtual citizenship more of a choice matter, than a "That's where I happen to live" matter.
Assuming some kind of enforcement mechanism for the laws, and access treaties, you can develop a nice system. Virtual Country A has laws against spam. Virtual Country A agrees to exchange traffic with Virtual Country B, as long as Virtual Country B doesn't send any spam to Virtual Country A. You've got a nice trust system. A Virtual Country is responsible for the actions of its citizens, and thusly has a collective bargaining strength.
You also can create Virtual Countries with strong Intellectial Property laws, and enforce that with treaties. If a country wants to ignore IP, then they lose access to the websites of that country that enforces IP with treaties.
And you'd be able to enforce things like your "emergency broadcast system" service. inside a specific virtual country (and, again, by treaties, if necessary.)
I haven't gotten into the punishment for breaking laws yet. All I can think of is rescinding citizenship. This, obviously, doesn't provide enough granularity. And creating a new identity is also a rather difficult problem.
I would suggest sending donations to help her finance her campaign, to show the people in power that we really do have a strong community. I mean, even if she only gets 10% of the vote, that's enough to shake things up, so that they can't ignore us anymore. And the better she does, the better we do. If, against the odds, she wins, we've got ourselves a really strong political voice. Not just her, but the fact that we put her in office.
But I looked, and I couldn't find any contact info. Not so much as an email address. I guess we're stuck donating to the EFF instead.
I've been thinking about this problem for quite some time. My thoughts aren't quite ready for publishing, but I did get quite a bit of information first.
Some links: GNUNet This is aimed at a being an anonymous backbone, of sorts, but is currently being developed more towards the P2P file sharing aspect. That said, the papers on their website are fascinating.
Freenet This is more of an anonymous content publishing network. A partial solution.
Please reply to tell me if these are what you're looking for.
It was rather difficult finding this. Everything I found was either not specifically relevant, or conflicting. This reference seems to be the most clear description.
Basically, it says that only the owner of the program is allowed to make a temporary copy, but a licensor is not. link.Google's PDF to HTML of the link
And, a link on software copyright that I thought was interesting, but doesn't specifically relate to anything. link
Actually, it may be too late. If there are a significant number of contributoes, each with their own copyright on a portion of the code, you need to get everyone to agree to assign their individual copyrights away. Convincing them to do so is the easy part. But first you need to track them down.
License violations may fall into civil court, since they may or may not be actual copyright violations.
Ah, but they're distributing it without license to distribute it. That definitely is a copyright violation.
Copyright law gives you certain rights with respect to computer software. The GPL gives you additional rights. If you don't agree to the GPL, you can still use the code, without a license, but you don't gain any of the additional rights the GPL grants you.
The notices they send regarding domain transfers look remarkably like spam. They want you to think the notices they send are spam. Check the logs on the SMTP server, if you can. And, of course, make sure *all* of the contact information is valid. Double check. Then check again.
But given that you've tried several times, and your new registrar couldn't help you, You're probably in the "Our database is fucked so that you can't do that, and there is now way to fix it." group. I had a friend who's domain expired three years ago, yet Verisign wouldn't let the record expire, so he couldn't register it with a new registrar. With Verisign, that's par for the course.
To transfer to another registrar, make sure you're all paid up, and then go to the registrar you want to transfer to, and tell them what domains you want to transfer.
In short, to transfer a domain, the registration can't be expired, then it's fairly simple. Of course, if any problems occur during the transfer, they don't try too hard to fix them, and nobody else can.
A thought I just had; Multiplayer cooperative games, like Tribes 2, you're going to want the team to be able to communicate with each other easily, probably by sitting near each other (shared headsets have their problems). But you don't want a team to be able to overhear the competing team talking to each other.
I saw a device at Comdex in '96 that created a "sound bubble". Really nice sound for those under the parabolic reflector, but no sound outside the bubble. That would clean up noise pollution nicely, assuming they still exist.
I started coding when I was six years old, in BASIC. At that point, I was in special ed, and remedial everything. Then. my father got me hooked on programming. I learned to read just so I could read the learning BASIC book that came with the computer. I quickly climbed out of special ed. These days, I'm literally a genius, high IQ and whatnot. I was in the 99th percentile according to the SATs and ACTs.
I was thinking about it a few days ago, and I owe everything to computers. With algebra as second nature,... I don't know how to finish this, other than, algebra is definitely a gateway to higher learning.
I'd love to hear similar stories, if anyone has them.
To counter all this Microsoft Taiwan is increasing its PR efforts, including numerous donations of computers and 1-dollar (3 US cents) MS software licenses to schools and non-profits.
In other news, Taiwanese schools are reporting significant profit from reselling Microsoft licenses.
I would do that, but the flavour of regexp I'm using, (built into IMail), doesn't seem to support character classes. But your first idea sounds good. IOW, filter for src="http://\d{2,3}
Your newsfeed is almost definitely pre-filtered, probably by your ISP, using (mostly) Cleanfeed. Lurk in nanau for a couple weeks, and you'll get a pretty solid picture of everything. (You'll also get lots of flames, trolls, floodbots, cancelbots, sporgeries, and everything else that makes Usenet fun.)
ISPs get hit with dictionary attacks to find usernames. They find an ISP, and mail every possible username they can come up with. These emails have some kind of web bug or somesuch in them, so that they can tell the good email addresses. They then have a fairly complete list of all email addresses at a given ISP. (Or at least those email accounts that use Outlook & OE) Another method they use is to send their messages to every domain, using a few of the more common usernames, (ie. sales, info, support) (Also, for the sake of completeness, harvesting whois info, crawling web pages, scraping usenet posts, web forms, and "contests" of various sorts.)
I recently set our mail server to block all messages that contain <img src="http://\d{2,3}\. This has cut down the amount of spam we get by a good 90%. There are still some messages that have height tags or otherwise don't fit the regexp.
Wow, I never heard about this before. It sounds great.
On a related note, I just spent the day servicing a server that lost a number of fans all at once. I've never seen anything like it. The box had lost the CPU fan, the power supply fan, the case fan, and one of the bay fans, and it was still running! Swapped all of the fans out for new ones, and the machine booted up just fine.
And to the person who said that dead CPUs make a hideous grinding noise, I can't hear that "hideous grinding noise" over the rest of the noise in a busy server room. Dead fans are found during scheduled checks.
Just filter on an automatically spell-corrected version of the text. This has a side benefit of increasing the amount of research done on spell-correction.
Slashdot Mirror
And please, if you want to criticize do so, this is a bare outline of an idea, not a carefully crafted thing. Point out the flaws, and offer solutions, if they occur to you.
Of course. That said, here's my take on it.
Your system looks very strong, and very robust. It lacks deniability, and decentralization is difficult, but otherwise, it works. I'm a bit tired right now, so I'll probably think of things later, and add them to my system, and tell you of them, assuming this conversation is still going.
Routing is an incredibly delicate process. Routing without a central authority is damn near impossible. The Internet uses ARPA to distribute IP addresses, and thusly, they can track down each IP to its owner.
With the VPN system you propose, you still need a central authority to allocate IPs. A central authority is a single point of failure, if you haven't gotten that yet. It's a single point of accountability. If you can get away from that single point, then you open yourself up to spoofing, spamming, authority hijacking, and all sorts of bad things. (This is a point of weakness, fill it in, and you'll have a much stronger system.)
The current method of anonymous routing is P2P flooding. This, obviously, doesn't scale well. I haven't figured out anything better. Freenet has a significantly optimized flooding algo, but it still relies on flooding to some extent. O(log n) compared to O(n) or something along those lines. IP is much closer to O(1), although you could make an argument for it being O(n/c) with a very large c. (That would mean that the IP wouldn't scale well for values that are orders of magnitude higher than c.) No rigorous proofs here, so keep that grain of salt handy.
The thing that gets me, is what sort of social policy should there be?
This relates strongly to a project I'm thinking on right now. It (obviously) isn't anywhere near complete. But you may be able to cull some interesting ideas from it. I hope you find it helpful.
Assuming an anonymous network, create "virtual countries" with laws of their own. You create an anonymous virtual identity. That virtual identity can be a citizen of a virtual country. By being a citizen, you gain access to the resources of the county. (Bandwidth, access controls, distributed content, etc.) This makes virtual citizenship more of a choice matter, than a "That's where I happen to live" matter.
Assuming some kind of enforcement mechanism for the laws, and access treaties, you can develop a nice system. Virtual Country A has laws against spam. Virtual Country A agrees to exchange traffic with Virtual Country B, as long as Virtual Country B doesn't send any spam to Virtual Country A. You've got a nice trust system. A Virtual Country is responsible for the actions of its citizens, and thusly has a collective bargaining strength.
You also can create Virtual Countries with strong Intellectial Property laws, and enforce that with treaties. If a country wants to ignore IP, then they lose access to the websites of that country that enforces IP with treaties.
And you'd be able to enforce things like your "emergency broadcast system" service. inside a specific virtual country (and, again, by treaties, if necessary.)
I haven't gotten into the punishment for breaking laws yet. All I can think of is rescinding citizenship. This, obviously, doesn't provide enough granularity. And creating a new identity is also a rather difficult problem.
I would suggest sending donations to help her finance her campaign, to show the people in power that we really do have a strong community. I mean, even if she only gets 10% of the vote, that's enough to shake things up, so that they can't ignore us anymore. And the better she does, the better we do. If, against the odds, she wins, we've got ourselves a really strong political voice. Not just her, but the fact that we put her in office.
But I looked, and I couldn't find any contact info. Not so much as an email address. I guess we're stuck donating to the EFF instead.
I've been thinking about this problem for quite some time. My thoughts aren't quite ready for publishing, but I did get quite a bit of information first.
Some links:
GNUNet
This is aimed at a being an anonymous backbone, of sorts, but is currently being developed more towards the P2P file sharing aspect. That said, the papers on their website are fascinating.
Freenet
This is more of an anonymous content publishing network. A partial solution.
Please reply to tell me if these are what you're looking for.
http://shells.open-notwork.net seems more applicable.
It was rather difficult finding this. Everything I found was either not specifically relevant, or conflicting. This reference seems to be the most clear description.
Basically, it says that only the owner of the program is allowed to make a temporary copy, but a licensor is not. link. Google's PDF to HTML of the link
And, a link on software copyright that I thought was interesting, but doesn't specifically relate to anything. link
Why would anyone dig around in the trashcans of a tech company? It's not like they'd find anything worthwhile.
Actually, it may be too late. If there are a significant number of contributoes, each with their own copyright on a portion of the code, you need to get everyone to agree to assign their individual copyrights away. Convincing them to do so is the easy part. But first you need to track them down.
License violations may fall into civil court, since they may or may not be actual copyright violations.
Ah, but they're distributing it without license to distribute it. That definitely is a copyright violation.
Copyright law gives you certain rights with respect to computer software. The GPL gives you additional rights. If you don't agree to the GPL, you can still use the code, without a license, but you don't gain any of the additional rights the GPL grants you.
Heavy Lifter? Great! Now to get the extraterrestrial mining science science advance, all we need is to research the low orbit freighter.
Or whatever. It's been so long since I played Outpost.
Why not just create a new ADV POLITICAL: subject prefix for political spam? That would solve the problem nicely.
ADV
ADV ADULT
ADV POLITICAL
ADV NONPROFIT
If there are any more groups that think their shit don't stink, give them their own subject line heading.
You missed a word. IF the format catches on, expect future releases to work on an SACD ONLY.
The notices they send regarding domain transfers look remarkably like spam. They want you to think the notices they send are spam. Check the logs on the SMTP server, if you can. And, of course, make sure *all* of the contact information is valid. Double check. Then check again.
But given that you've tried several times, and your new registrar couldn't help you, You're probably in the "Our database is fucked so that you can't do that, and there is now way to fix it." group. I had a friend who's domain expired three years ago, yet Verisign wouldn't let the record expire, so he couldn't register it with a new registrar. With Verisign, that's par for the course.
To transfer to another registrar, make sure you're all paid up, and then go to the registrar you want to transfer to, and tell them what domains you want to transfer.
In short, to transfer a domain, the registration can't be expired, then it's fairly simple. Of course, if any problems occur during the transfer, they don't try too hard to fix them, and nobody else can.
A thought I just had; Multiplayer cooperative games, like Tribes 2, you're going to want the team to be able to communicate with each other easily, probably by sitting near each other (shared headsets have their problems). But you don't want a team to be able to overhear the competing team talking to each other.
I saw a device at Comdex in '96 that created a "sound bubble". Really nice sound for those under the parabolic reflector, but no sound outside the bubble. That would clean up noise pollution nicely, assuming they still exist.
As far as computers are concerned:
Laptops generally have a direct DC in, but that probably isn't relevant in this case.
Google returns MPBS1 - ATX DC-DC 12 Volt Car Power Supply, but not much else. (at least for the minimal searches I've done.)
I agree.
I started coding when I was six years old, in BASIC. At that point, I was in special ed, and remedial everything. Then. my father got me hooked on programming. I learned to read just so I could read the learning BASIC book that came with the computer. I quickly climbed out of special ed. These days, I'm literally a genius, high IQ and whatnot. I was in the 99th percentile according to the SATs and ACTs.
I was thinking about it a few days ago, and I owe everything to computers. With algebra as second nature,... I don't know how to finish this, other than, algebra is definitely a gateway to higher learning.
I'd love to hear similar stories, if anyone has them.
To counter all this Microsoft Taiwan is increasing its PR efforts, including numerous donations of computers and 1-dollar (3 US cents) MS software licenses to schools and non-profits.
In other news, Taiwanese schools are reporting significant profit from reselling Microsoft licenses.
I would do that, but the flavour of regexp I'm using, (built into IMail), doesn't seem to support character classes. But your first idea sounds good. IOW, filter for
src="http://\d{2,3}
Your newsfeed is almost definitely pre-filtered, probably by your ISP, using (mostly) Cleanfeed. Lurk in nanau for a couple weeks, and you'll get a pretty solid picture of everything. (You'll also get lots of flames, trolls, floodbots, cancelbots, sporgeries, and everything else that makes Usenet fun.)
You wouldn't happen to have a Perl script or somesuch that does this, would you?
And if not, where should I send it to if I write one? It seems a trivial bit of Perl would do the trick, unless there is a good reason not to.
ISPs get hit with dictionary attacks to find usernames. They find an ISP, and mail every possible username they can come up with. These emails have some kind of web bug or somesuch in them, so that they can tell the good email addresses. They then have a fairly complete list of all email addresses at a given ISP. (Or at least those email accounts that use Outlook & OE) Another method they use is to send their messages to every domain, using a few of the more common usernames, (ie. sales, info, support) (Also, for the sake of completeness, harvesting whois info, crawling web pages, scraping usenet posts, web forms, and "contests" of various sorts.)
I recently set our mail server to block all messages that contain
<img src="http://\d{2,3}\.
This has cut down the amount of spam we get by a good 90%. There are still some messages that have height tags or otherwise don't fit the regexp.
Thank you ever so much. I hadn't realized there were more BOFHs out. Another night's productivity down the drain.
<grumble> <grumble>
Wow, I never heard about this before. It sounds great.
On a related note, I just spent the day servicing a server that lost a number of fans all at once. I've never seen anything like it. The box had lost the CPU fan, the power supply fan, the case fan, and one of the bay fans, and it was still running! Swapped all of the fans out for new ones, and the machine booted up just fine.
And to the person who said that dead CPUs make a hideous grinding noise, I can't hear that "hideous grinding noise" over the rest of the noise in a busy server room. Dead fans are found during scheduled checks.
My first thoughts on reading this was an actual robot that tracked down people and delivered IMs to them. One with wheels and such.
Just filter on an automatically spell-corrected version of the text. This has a side benefit of increasing the amount of research done on spell-correction.