I'm sorry, but given the size, location, and use of blank space to make that text the ONLY thing that wasn't on my screen (running in 1280x1024), I can't call the notice obvious by any means.
Hmmm... It looks like he's using the same text size, location, and color for the legal notice as law.lsu.edu is. Which is not to say he's copying their "look & feel" - let's be honest, none of this is innovative web design - but rather, to point out that he's meeting their standard of notice.
I mean, is this a double standard? Corporations, banks, and car salesman get by with the smallest of small print, orthewordsruntogethersonoonecanhearthem, but the poor law student is suddenly being "deceptive" for doing the same thing?
And as for the page size, look at it - it's designed for 800x600 pages, which is why its so tall and narrow. If we weren't all slashdot geeks, we might be in the normal world where 1280x1024 is not all that common. I don't find the length of the page deceptive, I find the page engineered for a more common and backwards-compatible display resolution.
clickety-clickety-click
Oh, wait. The page, however, does dynamically resize itself to always keep the notice just over the edge of the bottom. That is a little deceptive, and probably unfortunate for the student if it comes up in court.
I still think that we accept a much sneakier level of notice from corporations on a daily basis than this, though. Cough, couch, EULA.
how do you as a person who is responible for dumping old equipment ensure that your company erases sensitive data so that it cannot be recovered by anyone.
I'll give you the 5-second summary:
You can't erase it so that it can never be recovered.
But you can make it expensive/impractical to recover.
Previous/. threads have gone on at length on the various creative ways people who care (gov't, military) destroy the hardware utterly. If you overwrite each bit on the disk several times, though, it'll require expensive hardware analysis to recover anything - which is beyond most criminals.
It's the same old issue - risk equals value times danger. The danger that someone will send your disk to hardware analysis isn't that great for most people, so wiping it a few times is probably good enough.
One good way to wipe - stick a bootable Linux CD in (I like Bootable Business Card myself) and 'dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/hda'. Lather, rinse, repeat - or better yet, put it in a bash 'for' or tcsh 'foreach' loop. It takes a while.
Want to verify you're wiping everything? Use/dev/zero instead of/dev/random for one pass, then do 'hexdump/dev/hda' which should run for a while and then report that it found nothing but 0's on the disk.
I was suprised to see an @Stake employee bring a Mac to a presentation, but he explained that they used Mac because the greater FireWire support meant they could do forensic imaging onto external disks a hell of alot faster.
I agree completely - it's a little stupid to expect decades of muscle memory to change within 15 days. Frankly, I think the real lesson is that it only takes 15 days for such massively ingrained learning to start being corrected!
Sure, they learned to deal with naseau within 3 days - that's 72 hours of constant, unremitting weightlessness, awake and asleep, that they are adjusting to. I'll bet the 15 days of playing catch was more like 15 or 30 hours, spread out over the two weeks, so there's no comparison.
It seems to me that this story is hitting slashdot because, well, it hit slashdot.
The original was passed around a few small mailing lists, where it got some comment but nothing big. Then it hit slashdot a month ago, and the number of places I saw it popping up increased. I also saw a story about DJB cranking at some reporter for misunderstanding the exact nature of the information, which tells me that someone thought it was suddenly big enough to have a reporter look into.
And now, perhaps based on all this "publicity," Lucky Green or whoever is setting up discussion of it at some conference and revoking his old key. Note that he didn't do it a month ago, when the story was on all the crypto lists - presumably the more attention it got, the more real it became.
Maybe I'm off base here, but I think this is one of those examples of the media gestalt manipulating and being manipulated by the media consumers - the story had to get big before it could be taken seriously, and it had to be taken seriously before it could get big... and the slashdot story a month ago was probably one of the bigger steps along the way.
The slashdot effect... It isn't just for websites anymore!
For most, the internet is their encyclopedia. When I want to know about something, I turn to the internet first (granted not all of the information is good...or decent for that matter).
The thing that gets me is that I find myself doing things on the Internet, that I can't imagine what I would have done before it. And not new and weird things, but disgustingly ordinary things
Case in point: A few months ago I overloaded a wheelbarrow and popped the tire off the rim. Now, I have an air compressor, so I had the means to inflate it. I knew, vaguely, that on tires with no inner tube, you basically just blow it up so that the tire itself seals against the rim. I had no idea how.
I spent 20 minutes trying different methods of inflating, holding the tire, spinning the tire, etc. etc... to no avail. I went to Google, spent <2 minutes searching, and found the solution: wrap a rope or strap around the middle of the tire, squeezing it outward on both sides, THEN pump air. Worked on the first try.
What would I have done 20 years ago? Asked around among my neighbors, probably. Not succeeded. Maybe called some buddies. Probably would have had to drive out to the nearest service station and pay $5 for someone to laugh at me.
So, it isn't neccessarily the Encyclopedic knowledge that amazes me... it is the trivial-yet-useful knowledge that you can find.
Since WHQL stands for Windows Hardware Quality Labs, it's not actually all that useful for verifying SOFTWARE installations on Windows. Hardware and Drivers, yes, but not Software.
Perhaps you're thinking of their code-signing stuff for ActiveX?
If you are able to store data in the slack space of binary executables, you're presumably root, in which case why not secure your data in a more sensible way.
Unless, of course, you're just "borrowing" root access from the chappie who actually owns the box.
A skilled attacker will hide as many signs of his intrusion as possible. This is one more method he may use, to avoid file integrity checkers like Tripwire, AIDE, and FCheck.
As for what he's hiding? Let's say he puts a trojan sshd in place to grab passwords - those passwords could be conveniently hidden until Bad Guy can come around and collect them.
Instead he cranked out more fodder, really for nothing more than to continue milking money out of the franchise. Looks like it's continuing.
Let me take this opportunity to say this: Thank god that Peter Jackson filmed all three LOtR at once. Read why before you mod me offtopic:
Lucas had a dream. He made Star Wars. It was... a little campy, in retrospect, but rollicking fun nonetheless.
Years pass.
Lucas made The Empire Strikes Back. It was much more serious. Darker. There's Dagobah and stuff. The sets, the effects, the tone all change. Why? Because Lucas now had better technology, and a different expectation to film for.
Years pass.
Lucas made Return of the Jedi. It was serious, yet fluffy. Dark, yet light. Wonderful effects, of course, now that years have passed. But again, the tone had shifted to become completely different. It reflected years of hindsight and expectations that affected the original artistic vision.
And it's only getting worse with the prequels.
Which is why I'm glad Peter Jackson shot all three LOtR films in one big go. Sure, the CGI is going to still be cranked out for a while. Editing can be affected by time. But overall, he has the chance to make a coherent hole of the trilogy, which is something I don't feel Lucas has been able to do with the time he's had. As Prufrock would say, time for a hundred visions and revisions...
So I guess that Lucas is flattering The Fifth Element. Or am I the only one who had a little deja vu with the "speeding through three dimensional traffic patterns with futuristic cars, followed by vertical plunge shot?"
Also, blocking slashdot referrals? No class.
Requiring quicktime pro for the large screen trailer? No class.
They aren't aiming at consumers, but at businesses.
I don't see that on their site - where are you seeing it?
The definition on their Sputnikology page seems to imply both consumers and businesses:
Sputnik Affiliate
A person or company that sets up a Sputnik Gateway and shares unused bandwidth with others. Sputnik Affiliates get priority roaming access across all Sputnik Gateways.
I don't know if the ISPs will be pissed off or not....If anything, it should make the consumer broadband ISPs happy, since it restricts unauthorized use.
That depends on who is running the gateway. If the ISP is running the gateway, great, happy ISP. If Joe Blow with a cable modem sets this up and allows anyone in the Sputnik network to use his connectivity, the ISP will be less happy.
Look at the Sputnik Sign Up page. Doesn't look like they're only planning on working with the ISPs...
(Arguably, this use would conflict with the "not-for-profit" clause of most high-speed internet access agreements. So the ISPs probably do have a leg to stand on. God knows they can't build a decent mail server, but they do know how to litigate...)
Slashdot must be the Kevin Bacon of the online world...
Is it, or is it not, easy?
on
Wireless Mania
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
"Conventional wisdom" says that hooking up to WiFi networks on the fly is as easy as falling off the turnip cart. But as the Salon article notes, for the average joe that isn't the case.
I'm not down at "average" - I eat TCP/IP for breakfast - but I haven't figured out wireless yet, either. I've got a ZoomAir card but none of the interesting software (NetStumbler mostly, but others too) seems to support it. I'm probably just missing some totally basic groundwork, and making it too complex because I'm used to delving details.
What's the general experience? Is this stuff easy and I'm just on the wrong page? Or are the only people who're surfing like mad the people who understand this shit inside out?
Can anyone recommend wireless primers for regular usage as well as um, more 'dynamic' usage?
...Microsoft has bought and paid for their ability to avoid punishment. After years of staying out of the whole political fray and assuming they didn't need to play that game, Microsoft is getting down to business. If you thought they were bad when they didn't care, wait until you see what they can do with politicians in their pocket.
Yes, but would you take style advice from this man?
I've never understood the cult of Nielson. "Pretentious" is the word that comes first to mind. "Pompous" is another, when he rips into a site he dislikes.
One of the interesting conclusions in the article, they say the increased liability of a speeding car amounts to about $0.37 in insurance cost, not the $150 they were charging. Why is it then that my insurance gets to jack my rates two hundred bucks a year when I get one lousy ticket?
If you get caught speeding, your insurance agency knows that you speed, and you drive that car all the time. If a rental car is speeding, then the insurance agency knows that one of the multitude of people who drove that car speeds, but cannot expect the next X renters to speed.
It can't be a decent mailserver if the administrative staff who configure the network can't get it right.
The point is, many decent sysadmins run decent mail servers and - wait for it - have no control over their DNS. DNS is often handled by incompetent ISPs (I don't want to name names but it starts with two U's...)
As other people here have said, blacklists can be bad but most often only need some patience to get off of.
What's far more annoying, in my opinion, is those sites who've configured their mail server to be utterly anal about DNS. Forward mapping, reverse mapping, no underscores, etc. etc. Since many otherwise decent mailservers are stuck with ISP "What's DNS?" level support, this can be a pain in the ass for completely innocent victims.
The author's point is correct - while any Open Source package may have been audited, it isn't neccesarily audited well or at all.
But flash-back to the recent announcement of the Sardonix Security Portal, which aims to be a central clearinghouse for tracking audits and auditors. The goal is to have a list of 1) what's been audited, 2) who audited it, and 3) what that particular auditor's track record is on other software - were holes found after they said it was clean?
Obviously this is a new project, and it's founded on the ashes of an earlier effort that didn't get much involvement, but it's a big step in the right direction and it's got DARPA funding. And it probably will do much better jobs with Open Source software than with Closed Source.
>and share infrastructure with the power and cable companies every day.
Can you elaborate on this?
Utility poles, specifically. Also, demarc points are often shared between phone and cable at customer premises - even most houses.
This may sound trivial, but I think it's significant. Not only do they share the poles, but they don't necessarily have personnel on hand to oversee that sharing as they do at the CO. Also, one could argue that poles have overall higher maintenance issues than COs, given their exposure to weather and trees.
I was speaking in the larger context of "the bits business," which encompasses voice, data, and video. My primary argument is that the MSO's are invading RBOC's core revenue stream (telephony) in an unregulated environment, but that regulation imposed on RBOC's puts them at a competitive disadvantage when they contemplate going after the cable companies by offering video programming...
I see your point, but I don't feel that this ruling achieves that goal, because rather than specifically approach the problem of loosening regulatory issues in the specific areas of non-voice traffic, this ruling hands them a huge unrelated advantage in an area they've already made moot by "creative work order fulfillment."
Of course, I may be biased, as anyone will note having read any of my opinions on the RBOCs.
my cable operator (AT&T). They made a decision to invest the capital to be able to do this because they know they won't be forced to give up space in their cabinets for their competitors' equipment.
On the other hand, the phone companies built most of their infrastructure out with financing partially based on taxes ("Universal service fees"), and share infrastructure with the power and cable companies every day. I don't believe the RBOCs should own the COs, period.
telephone companies... have dragged their feet deploying it over concerns that they will not reap the full benefits of the substantial capital investment required.
Not at all! Firstly, the telephone companies have not dragged their feet over any development where they had competition (consider DSL vs. ISDN - the latter withered on the vine (no competition), the former they announced record signups as their competition all went bankrupt because they couldn't get wiring orders fulfilled in a timely manner... odd, that.) Secondly, if the phone companies have problems with advanced technologies, it should be kept in mind that POTS is often their preferred area of expertise. Phone companies like phone stuff - it's congenital.
"Should the FCC reclassify digital subscriber lines (DSL) as an information service as opposed to a traditional wire-line service, it could effectively loosen federal rules that require Bell companies and other incumbent carriers to offer their competitors equal access to the telecommunications networks they control."
What the hell? After the Bells displayed their ability to cut of CLECs like they were batting down baby seals within the existing rules?
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sorry, but given the size, location, and use of blank space to make that text the ONLY thing that wasn't on my screen (running in 1280x1024), I can't call the notice obvious by any means.
Hmmm... It looks like he's using the same text size, location, and color for the legal notice as law.lsu.edu is. Which is not to say he's copying their "look & feel" - let's be honest, none of this is innovative web design - but rather, to point out that he's meeting their standard of notice.
I mean, is this a double standard? Corporations, banks, and car salesman get by with the smallest of small print, orthewordsruntogethersonoonecanhearthem, but the poor law student is suddenly being "deceptive" for doing the same thing?
And as for the page size, look at it - it's designed for 800x600 pages, which is why its so tall and narrow. If we weren't all slashdot geeks, we might be in the normal world where 1280x1024 is not all that common. I don't find the length of the page deceptive, I find the page engineered for a more common and backwards-compatible display resolution.
clickety-clickety-click
Oh, wait. The page, however, does dynamically resize itself to always keep the notice just over the edge of the bottom. That is a little deceptive, and probably unfortunate for the student if it comes up in court.
I still think that we accept a much sneakier level of notice from corporations on a daily basis than this, though. Cough, couch, EULA.
If its Mac OS X I wouldn't be surprised at all...
It was indeed OS X.
My Dell Inspiron 8100 has Firewire... if anyone wants to donate an external disk I'll research how well it works on XP and Linux... ;>
how do you as a person who is responible for dumping old equipment ensure that your company erases sensitive data so that it cannot be recovered by anyone.
I'll give you the 5-second summary:
Previous /. threads have gone on at length on the various creative ways people who care (gov't, military) destroy the hardware utterly. If you overwrite each bit on the disk several times, though, it'll require expensive hardware analysis to recover anything - which is beyond most criminals.
It's the same old issue - risk equals value times danger. The danger that someone will send your disk to hardware analysis isn't that great for most people, so wiping it a few times is probably good enough.
One good way to wipe - stick a bootable Linux CD in (I like Bootable Business Card myself) and 'dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/hda'. Lather, rinse, repeat - or better yet, put it in a bash 'for' or tcsh 'foreach' loop. It takes a while.
Want to verify you're wiping everything? Use /dev/zero instead of /dev/random for one pass, then do 'hexdump /dev/hda' which should run for a while and then report that it found nothing but 0's on the disk.
I was suprised to see an @Stake employee bring a Mac to a presentation, but he explained that they used Mac because the greater FireWire support meant they could do forensic imaging onto external disks a hell of alot faster.
I agree completely - it's a little stupid to expect decades of muscle memory to change within 15 days. Frankly, I think the real lesson is that it only takes 15 days for such massively ingrained learning to start being corrected!
Sure, they learned to deal with naseau within 3 days - that's 72 hours of constant, unremitting weightlessness, awake and asleep, that they are adjusting to. I'll bet the 15 days of playing catch was more like 15 or 30 hours, spread out over the two weeks, so there's no comparison.
It seems to me that this story is hitting slashdot because, well, it hit slashdot.
The original was passed around a few small mailing lists, where it got some comment but nothing big. Then it hit slashdot a month ago, and the number of places I saw it popping up increased. I also saw a story about DJB cranking at some reporter for misunderstanding the exact nature of the information, which tells me that someone thought it was suddenly big enough to have a reporter look into.
And now, perhaps based on all this "publicity," Lucky Green or whoever is setting up discussion of it at some conference and revoking his old key. Note that he didn't do it a month ago, when the story was on all the crypto lists - presumably the more attention it got, the more real it became.
Maybe I'm off base here, but I think this is one of those examples of the media gestalt manipulating and being manipulated by the media consumers - the story had to get big before it could be taken seriously, and it had to be taken seriously before it could get big... and the slashdot story a month ago was probably one of the bigger steps along the way.
The slashdot effect... It isn't just for websites anymore!
For most, the internet is their encyclopedia. When I want to know about something, I turn to the internet first (granted not all of the information is good...or decent for that matter).
The thing that gets me is that I find myself doing things on the Internet, that I can't imagine what I would have done before it. And not new and weird things, but disgustingly ordinary things
Case in point: A few months ago I overloaded a wheelbarrow and popped the tire off the rim. Now, I have an air compressor, so I had the means to inflate it. I knew, vaguely, that on tires with no inner tube, you basically just blow it up so that the tire itself seals against the rim. I had no idea how.
I spent 20 minutes trying different methods of inflating, holding the tire, spinning the tire, etc. etc... to no avail. I went to Google, spent <2 minutes searching, and found the solution: wrap a rope or strap around the middle of the tire, squeezing it outward on both sides, THEN pump air. Worked on the first try.
What would I have done 20 years ago? Asked around among my neighbors, probably. Not succeeded. Maybe called some buddies. Probably would have had to drive out to the nearest service station and pay $5 for someone to laugh at me.
So, it isn't neccessarily the Encyclopedic knowledge that amazes me... it is the trivial-yet-useful knowledge that you can find.
WHQL Certification.
Since WHQL stands for Windows Hardware Quality Labs, it's not actually all that useful for verifying SOFTWARE installations on Windows. Hardware and Drivers, yes, but not Software.
Perhaps you're thinking of their code-signing stuff for ActiveX?
...if the government hadn't worked so hard to limit Microsoft's ability to innovate.
If you are able to store data in the slack space of binary executables, you're presumably root, in which case why not secure your data in a more sensible way.
Unless, of course, you're just "borrowing" root access from the chappie who actually owns the box.
A skilled attacker will hide as many signs of his intrusion as possible. This is one more method he may use, to avoid file integrity checkers like Tripwire, AIDE, and FCheck.
As for what he's hiding? Let's say he puts a trojan sshd in place to grab passwords - those passwords could be conveniently hidden until Bad Guy can come around and collect them.
Instead he cranked out more fodder, really for nothing more than to continue milking money out of the franchise. Looks like it's continuing.
Let me take this opportunity to say this: Thank god that Peter Jackson filmed all three LOtR at once. Read why before you mod me offtopic:
Lucas had a dream. He made Star Wars. It was... a little campy, in retrospect, but rollicking fun nonetheless.
Years pass.
Lucas made The Empire Strikes Back. It was much more serious. Darker. There's Dagobah and stuff. The sets, the effects, the tone all change. Why? Because Lucas now had better technology, and a different expectation to film for.
Years pass.
Lucas made Return of the Jedi. It was serious, yet fluffy. Dark, yet light. Wonderful effects, of course, now that years have passed. But again, the tone had shifted to become completely different. It reflected years of hindsight and expectations that affected the original artistic vision.
And it's only getting worse with the prequels.
Which is why I'm glad Peter Jackson shot all three LOtR films in one big go. Sure, the CGI is going to still be cranked out for a while. Editing can be affected by time. But overall, he has the chance to make a coherent hole of the trilogy, which is something I don't feel Lucas has been able to do with the time he's had. As Prufrock would say, time for a hundred visions and revisions...
So I guess that Lucas is flattering The Fifth Element. Or am I the only one who had a little deja vu with the "speeding through three dimensional traffic patterns with futuristic cars, followed by vertical plunge shot?"
Also, blocking slashdot referrals? No class.
Requiring quicktime pro for the large screen trailer? No class.
Yet another "milk the shoddy trilogy" moment.
They aren't aiming at consumers, but at businesses.
I don't see that on their site - where are you seeing it?
The definition on their Sputnikology page seems to imply both consumers and businesses:
Sputnik Affiliate
A person or company that sets up a Sputnik Gateway and shares unused bandwidth with others. Sputnik Affiliates get priority roaming access across all Sputnik Gateways.
I don't know if the ISPs will be pissed off or not....If anything, it should make the consumer broadband ISPs happy, since it restricts unauthorized use.
That depends on who is running the gateway. If the ISP is running the gateway, great, happy ISP. If Joe Blow with a cable modem sets this up and allows anyone in the Sputnik network to use his connectivity, the ISP will be less happy.
Look at the Sputnik Sign Up page. Doesn't look like they're only planning on working with the ISPs...
(Arguably, this use would conflict with the "not-for-profit" clause of most high-speed internet access agreements. So the ISPs probably do have a leg to stand on. God knows they can't build a decent mail server, but they do know how to litigate...)
Slashdot must be the Kevin Bacon of the online world...
"Conventional wisdom" says that hooking up to WiFi networks on the fly is as easy as falling off the turnip cart. But as the Salon article notes, for the average joe that isn't the case.
I'm not down at "average" - I eat TCP/IP for breakfast - but I haven't figured out wireless yet, either. I've got a ZoomAir card but none of the interesting software (NetStumbler mostly, but others too) seems to support it. I'm probably just missing some totally basic groundwork, and making it too complex because I'm used to delving details.
What's the general experience? Is this stuff easy and I'm just on the wrong page? Or are the only people who're surfing like mad the people who understand this shit inside out?
Can anyone recommend wireless primers for regular usage as well as um, more 'dynamic' usage?
...Microsoft has bought and paid for their ability to avoid punishment. After years of staying out of the whole political fray and assuming they didn't need to play that game, Microsoft is getting down to business. If you thought they were bad when they didn't care, wait until you see what they can do with politicians in their pocket.
I'm the Bill you owe - Billingate
Yes, but would you take style advice from this man?
I've never understood the cult of Nielson. "Pretentious" is the word that comes first to mind. "Pompous" is another, when he rips into a site he dislikes.
One of the interesting conclusions in the article, they say the increased liability of a speeding car amounts to about $0.37 in insurance cost, not the $150 they were charging. Why is it then that my insurance gets to jack my rates two hundred bucks a year when I get one lousy ticket?
If you get caught speeding, your insurance agency knows that you speed, and you drive that car all the time. If a rental car is speeding, then the insurance agency knows that one of the multitude of people who drove that car speeds, but cannot expect the next X renters to speed.
It can't be a decent mailserver if the administrative staff who configure the network can't get it right.
The point is, many decent sysadmins run decent mail servers and - wait for it - have no control over their DNS. DNS is often handled by incompetent ISPs (I don't want to name names but it starts with two U's...)
As other people here have said, blacklists can be bad but most often only need some patience to get off of.
What's far more annoying, in my opinion, is those sites who've configured their mail server to be utterly anal about DNS. Forward mapping, reverse mapping, no underscores, etc. etc. Since many otherwise decent mailservers are stuck with ISP "What's DNS?" level support, this can be a pain in the ass for completely innocent victims.
The author's point is correct - while any Open Source package may have been audited, it isn't neccesarily audited well or at all.
But flash-back to the recent announcement of the Sardonix Security Portal, which aims to be a central clearinghouse for tracking audits and auditors. The goal is to have a list of 1) what's been audited, 2) who audited it, and 3) what that particular auditor's track record is on other software - were holes found after they said it was clean?
Obviously this is a new project, and it's founded on the ashes of an earlier effort that didn't get much involvement, but it's a big step in the right direction and it's got DARPA funding. And it probably will do much better jobs with Open Source software than with Closed Source.
>and share infrastructure with the power and cable companies every day.
Can you elaborate on this?
Utility poles, specifically. Also, demarc points are often shared between phone and cable at customer premises - even most houses.
This may sound trivial, but I think it's significant. Not only do they share the poles, but they don't necessarily have personnel on hand to oversee that sharing as they do at the CO. Also, one could argue that poles have overall higher maintenance issues than COs, given their exposure to weather and trees.
I was speaking in the larger context of "the bits business," which encompasses voice, data, and video. My primary argument is that the MSO's are invading RBOC's core revenue stream (telephony) in an unregulated environment, but that regulation imposed on RBOC's puts them at a competitive disadvantage when they contemplate going after the cable companies by offering video programming...
I see your point, but I don't feel that this ruling achieves that goal, because rather than specifically approach the problem of loosening regulatory issues in the specific areas of non-voice traffic, this ruling hands them a huge unrelated advantage in an area they've already made moot by "creative work order fulfillment."
Of course, I may be biased, as anyone will note having read any of my opinions on the RBOCs.
my cable operator (AT&T). They made a decision to invest the capital to be able to do this because they know they won't be forced to give up space in their cabinets for their competitors' equipment.
On the other hand, the phone companies built most of their infrastructure out with financing partially based on taxes ("Universal service fees"), and share infrastructure with the power and cable companies every day. I don't believe the RBOCs should own the COs, period.
telephone companies... have dragged their feet deploying it over concerns that they will not reap the full benefits of the substantial capital investment required.
Not at all! Firstly, the telephone companies have not dragged their feet over any development where they had competition (consider DSL vs. ISDN - the latter withered on the vine (no competition), the former they announced record signups as their competition all went bankrupt because they couldn't get wiring orders fulfilled in a timely manner... odd, that.) Secondly, if the phone companies have problems with advanced technologies, it should be kept in mind that POTS is often their preferred area of expertise. Phone companies like phone stuff - it's congenital.
"Should the FCC reclassify digital subscriber lines (DSL) as an information service as opposed to a traditional wire-line service, it could effectively loosen federal rules that require Bell companies and other incumbent carriers to offer their competitors equal access to the telecommunications networks they control."
What the hell? After the Bells displayed their ability to cut of CLECs like they were batting down baby seals within the existing rules?
What world is the FCC living in?