It was a Compaq bozo who made the threat...
on
HP Backs Off DMCA Threat
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· Score: 3, Informative
According to the C|Net article, the manager who made the threat (Kent Ferson) came from the Compaq side of the HP/Compaq merger. So I guess you can blame that loser Fiorina for bringing clueless bozos to dilute the HP way...
Even if APs require different IP addresses, you can still bridge them together, and have each one route to a local AP which would then serve that specific area of the cloud, probably using NAT, unless you wanted static servers.
Problem is, how do you coordinate handing out private IP space to a whole bunch of different repeaters (and static servers)? If the idea really takes off, you will probably need a central registry to keep sections of the network from stomping on each other as new APs and their associated users come online.
Ironically, it appears that not being allowed to share wireless internet access without having to pay a hefty licensing fee is helping to drive the growth of non-commercial regional networks in Australia. Most of the networks I've found in the states are for the purpose of sharing someone's broadband. I have yet to find one that is for a neighborhood network that is active and growing. I guess since we can get broadband access for so cheap here, we're not driven to building giant wireless LANs in order to get more bandwidth.
On a different topic, if you bridge access points, can you still control who gets to peer with your bridge? I'm thinking no, unless you filter out their packets, but maybe someone who actually knows how 802.11b works can give a definitive answer...
I have yet to find equivalent groups in US that have actually deployed (most look like bozos trying to make a quick buck off of delivering wireless internet access, or else are community groups putting a lot of info up, but no infrastructure I can peer to immediately:( )
Well, you could set up local clouds/nodes, and node maintainers would be responsible for handing out IP space within their node, as well as linking nodes together, probably via a tunneled link through their personal broadband connection.
Note, that all you're doing is linking nodes via broadband (rather than via modem through the phone networks) - you don't have to link up to the greater internet, and in fact, for liability purposes, you probably wouldn't (except maybe for receiving and getting e-mail for registered users within your node.) You could also cache outside content by demand, so local users could browse static information.
By abstracting node linkage, you could have nodes linking to each other via broadband, via long-range repeaters, a really long cat5 wire, ethernet over barbed wire, or even modems (either landline or Ricochet wireless.) The nice thing about the topology is you can probably borrow the entire network structure from the original Fidonet, replacing the PPP linkups with the link-agnostic node linkage protocol, and slap some limited tcp/ip services on top of it.
So, if you don't have a direct link to the greater internet, what good is a node? Well, you can put together a pretty nifty distributed file library, exchange news and mail without having to hop outside of the local network, members within a given wireless cloud can game against each other, and if there's sufficient bandwidth, game against other nodes, essentially a hybrid between a fidonet node and a distributed virtual LAN.
The coolest thing about this would be the creation of a shadow infrastructure that could route around damage, such as a major backbone collapsing, or fees and censorship. Once the citizen-maintained infrastructure was in place, even if the internet was shut down (either because of war, cyberattack, or because commercial interests have destroyed it), we'd still have pieces that could easily link up and provide service to members of the citizen-net.
I wouldn't be surprised if someone already has a project like this... SO POST LINKS if ya know of any!
A consortium of now bankrupt US ISPs, in control of major portions of the transcontinental backbone, decided to charge Indian ISPs a fee for access to major portal sites such as Amazon, Yahoo, etc., in addition to major corporate sites such as Microsoft, Oracle, and Adobe. When asked why such a fee was necessary, a spokesman for the US ISPs said, "In order to accurately account for our costs, we must ask the Indians to contribute their fair share in exchange for the traffic that we peer for them.
No comment so far from the Internet Service Providers Association of India. The major portals so far are ignoring both groups.
</sarcasm> Are the Indian ISPs really this stupid?
It can also be argued that by publicizing the tire defect, the media exposed Ford to a ton of lawsuits by lawsuit-happy lawyers. If they had only shut up until Ford had covered up the problem, Ford wouldn't have had to spend all that money trying to whitewash their image, laying blame on Firestone, and quietly paying off the families of those killed in firestone/ford related accidents.
Obviously this argument is pure bullshit, and so is the argument that publicizing security holes encourages more people to exploit them. Of course it does - BUT THAT'S NOT THE POINT. The point is to FIX THE PROBLEM so nobody else has to suffer for it! If it takes lawsuits against manufacturers of defective products, or active exploits to illustrate how much of a threat a weakness is, then that's what it has to take!
They explain how they built an ethernet cart for the C64 (unenhanced) and how they not only got a webserver running, but it streams audio, LIVE! Of course, it's sampled at 1 bit 8khz, but still, it's LIVE STREAMING AUDIO!
The Virtual LA Urban Simulation project [ucla.edu] demoed part of their 3D LA using IR4 and the older IR3. They currently have over 1TB of texture and geometry data from Los Angeles, mostly in downtown areas... though they have 20,000 square miles mapped out, 4,000 of which are quite detailed.
Imagine an add-on to the America's Army game - urban warfare, utilizing maps and geometry from the UCLA project. I'm surprised that they're getting funding from NSF only (that's all I saw on the site.) I would have expected at least some DoD or Navy funding given the potential applications for VR training and research (ie, into AI and simulations in an urban environment
Steve Mann, who wrote the compositing code that this Slashdot article is about, is a professor at the University of Toronto, teaching wearable computing, and is the one who had his (non-implanted, despite what the slashdot post says) hardware ripped off in Newfoundland.
I personally like the term "poaching" when referring to these types of practices. Strip mining is nasty, but not necessarily illegal (though it should be.) Poaching, by the very definition is: To take or appropriate something unfairly or illegally.
I can't think of a better way of describing this type of information THEFT, for the gain of the THIEF.
Why put it into orbit? Why not stabilize it at one of the Lagrange points? We're gonna need some rocks in a stable position betweeen Earth and the Moon if we're going to put up resupply stations.
As a shareware author, I can say, unless there's a brainless way of dropping dollars into someone's pocket, that pretty much almost NOBODY is going to compensate you for your work if you offer it to people for free. It's an ugly truth, but people are used to "free" programs, and they're getting used to "free" music. To take the time to put money in an envelope (or fill out that form for PayPal) for something you've already got, is more effort than most people want to make.
On one hand, maybe it's not so bad that everyone thinks your stuff is good enough for them to use - at least they're not stealing your work and passing it off as their own...
You could always pass a law to FORCE the RIAA to put the taxes that they collect on the sale of blank media in the hands of a neutral party, who would parcel out the funds based on "votes" placed by the average user, based on what they were copying. I think people would be much more free with "votes" than they would be with their own hard-earned dollars, just as politicians spend our tax-dollars so freely. As it stands now, it's the RIAA who chooses where the dollars go, from what I understand.
Of course, there's nothing to stop the band from selling their CD download online for a reasonable amount, say $7.50, with the MP3s encoded at 384 instead of 128, and a "try before you buy" version at 64 for trading online. I think people might want to get the "real goods" from a reliable source for that amount, than relying on incomplete downloads and slow connections via P2P. Benefits to the band? No physical media to ship, no production costs per unit, just the cost of bandwidth and the cost of assembling the original album. Sell the physical CD for $16 (with an upgrade from the MP3 version for $9) for those who want the cover art, booklet, etc.
Does anyone know the cost of pre-production for a decent album these days? Including recording engineer, studio time, mike rentals, mastering costs, art, etc? Working backwards from that, you could estimate how many download albums you'd have to sell before you could start turning a profit...
Not true - at least, not for the Playstation I own. There's a $79 module you can buy that plugs into the back that will allow you to play VCDs though. At the time, I too thought it would work - I think the reason is that some PS discs had MPEG video, but when I tried a VCD it just ignored it.
The PS2 I'm sure will allow you to play VCDs - anyone confirm this?
Pay a lecturer for his/her time, get a non-exclusive license to the tape, and GPL it. I think the idea is that there may be more material out there that's freely available, once we find a cheap way of distributing it without resorting to 5th generation copies.
I'm sure that there are organizations who are acting in the public interest who would release their material for next to nothing, as long as they didn't have to front duplication/distribution costs.
Also, there is material in the public domain, either explicitly, or because it's out of copyright. Someone with an eye (or ear) for conservation should make a master of this kind of material before it disappears (material that isn't owned by any one person isn't usually kept with as much care), and release the master via P2P so that it can be maintained in perpetuity by interested archivists, and be available for download by interested users (ala the Gutenberg project.)
Just like how VHS replaced 16mm film (do any teachers know how to thread a reel these days?), the VCD should replace VHS. The reasons why:
VHS tapes get chewed up with use, VCDs don't degrade with repeated playback and if they are damaged, just burn a new copy from your master.
VHS tapes need rewinding, placing wear and tear on capital equipment (VCRs), VCDs don't suffer from this to the same degree.
VCDs can be played by individual students, using a donated computer - no need for those bulky media labs.
VCDs are cheap to mail, so you can trade a bunch of instructional media for less than a dollar.
The only caveat is that the cheapest VHS players are less expensive than the cheapest DVD players (at least, as far as I've seen.)
An additional plus is if this takes off, we can add ANOTHER arena of fair use that uses the "evil" blank CD that the RIAA wants to continue to tax and regulate. The more legit uses we can find for blank CDs, the stronger the argument for banishing the CD tax, and tossing out any notion of regulating recordable media.
At home, I'm spec'ing out a project to convert all analog media that I have (video tapes, audio tapes, etc.) to digital equivalents (VCDs, CDs), and storing copies of them on a big LAN server (MPEGs and MP3s) for my personal library. I expect my tapes to completely degrade in another ten years, so this is one way of safeguarding my investment. On a related topic, does anyone know if there are archived copies of periodical articles, like you can find on microfilm, but on CD?
Why not gang a whole bunch of people together and just get a block from ARIN? Sure, we have to pay a fee every year, but at least we'll be in control of the block.
On a different note, does anyone know why we have to kowtow to ARIN? It hardly seems any more benevolent than the ICANN folks...
Actually, this law is a good thing. We just need to lobby our various congresscritters to amend the bill to read "spammers" instead of "hackers" before it gets passed into law, and we'll be all set 8)
Expert systems are nothing new. MYCIN (a drug interactions expert system) was developed in the 70's. Essentially, they're huge checklists developed by picking physician's brains, to create a system that would model a doctor's diagnosis procedure. However, it looks like only now, with the widespread use of computers, and a way of hooking them all together, is this technology getting into the mainstream.
Keep in mind though, real doctors have to keep updating the system to reflect new technology and new research (something real doctors have to do for themselves.) As such, there will still be demand for the best and brightest - and for the rest, they can use an expert system to help cover the bases (for liability reasons, I envision that final diagnosis will still need to be made by a real, certified doctor.) Too bad real AI, the kind that could make decisions and adapt to new situations (self-learning, possibly self-aware) is still a long ways off...
At least they let you save. Anyone remember Dark Forces? After battling the droid trooper prototype *12* times, each time having to fight my way through the ENTIRE level, I was about ready to go insane. Of course, I always played first person shooters on the most difficult setting...
That's not the way I remember it. What happens is the janitor rediscovers arithmetic and the wonder of wonders - he can do sums in his head FASTER then they can generate them using a calculator (this story was written a goodly number of years ago.) The generals are estatic - instead of using an onboard computer to compute the trajectory of their ballistic missiles, they'll stick human suicide volunteers onto them. Now, all we have to do is to talk to the janitor guy and have him reveal the secret to doing math in one's head and we'll be all set to kick the Soviets hineys.
The janitor, horrified that his hobby will be used to kill human beings, commits suicide (feeding himself to a molecular disassembeler garbage disposal or somesuch.)
YES! This is the story I was thinking about. The US and the USSR are duking it out on the Earth, and the US is losing, so we drop little self-replicating killer-robot/bomb factories from our base on the moon. The factories continue to improve, and we find out to our horror that not only are the little buggers winning the war, they're getting smarter as well...
The classic Berzerker books by Fred Saberhagen come to mind. They repair, build, and attack, they even temporarily make alliances with 'goodlife' to advance their overall goal of destroying all life in the universe. Then there's the Doomsday machine episode in ST:TOS, which was revisited in ST:Voyager with the non-replicating robots who destroyed their creators. There are a bunch more, but I can't remember the author or short story titles.
Slashdot Mirror
According to the C|Net article, the manager who made the threat (Kent Ferson) came from the Compaq side of the HP/Compaq merger. So I guess you can blame that loser Fiorina for bringing clueless bozos to dilute the HP way...
www.seattlewireless.net
Even if APs require different IP addresses, you can still bridge them together, and have each one route to a local AP which would then serve that specific area of the cloud, probably using NAT, unless you wanted static servers.
Problem is, how do you coordinate handing out private IP space to a whole bunch of different repeaters (and static servers)? If the idea really takes off, you will probably need a central registry to keep sections of the network from stomping on each other as new APs and their associated users come online.
Ironically, it appears that not being allowed to share wireless internet access without having to pay a hefty licensing fee is helping to drive the growth of non-commercial regional networks in Australia. Most of the networks I've found in the states are for the purpose of sharing someone's broadband. I have yet to find one that is for a neighborhood network that is active and growing. I guess since we can get broadband access for so cheap here, we're not driven to building giant wireless LANs in order to get more bandwidth.
On a different topic, if you bridge access points, can you still control who gets to peer with your bridge? I'm thinking no, unless you filter out their packets, but maybe someone who actually knows how 802.11b works can give a definitive answer...
So far I've come up with:
:( )
consume.net
and
and a litany of others in Australia.
I have yet to find equivalent groups in US that have actually deployed (most look like bozos trying to make a quick buck off of delivering wireless internet access, or else are community groups putting a lot of info up, but no infrastructure I can peer to immediately
Well, you could set up local clouds/nodes, and node maintainers would be responsible for handing out IP space within their node, as well as linking nodes together, probably via a tunneled link through their personal broadband connection.
Note, that all you're doing is linking nodes via broadband (rather than via modem through the phone networks) - you don't have to link up to the greater internet, and in fact, for liability purposes, you probably wouldn't (except maybe for receiving and getting e-mail for registered users within your node.) You could also cache outside content by demand, so local users could browse static information.
By abstracting node linkage, you could have nodes linking to each other via broadband, via long-range repeaters, a really long cat5 wire, ethernet over barbed wire, or even modems (either landline or Ricochet wireless.) The nice thing about the topology is you can probably borrow the entire network structure from the original Fidonet, replacing the PPP linkups with the link-agnostic node linkage protocol, and slap some limited tcp/ip services on top of it.
So, if you don't have a direct link to the greater internet, what good is a node? Well, you can put together a pretty nifty distributed file library, exchange news and mail without having to hop outside of the local network, members within a given wireless cloud can game against each other, and if there's sufficient bandwidth, game against other nodes, essentially a hybrid between a fidonet node and a distributed virtual LAN.
The coolest thing about this would be the creation of a shadow infrastructure that could route around damage, such as a major backbone collapsing, or fees and censorship. Once the citizen-maintained infrastructure was in place, even if the internet was shut down (either because of war, cyberattack, or because commercial interests have destroyed it), we'd still have pieces that could easily link up and provide service to members of the citizen-net.
I wouldn't be surprised if someone already has a project like this... SO POST LINKS if ya know of any!
A consortium of now bankrupt US ISPs, in control of major portions of the transcontinental backbone, decided to charge Indian ISPs a fee for access to major portal sites such as Amazon, Yahoo, etc., in addition to major corporate sites such as Microsoft, Oracle, and Adobe. When asked why such a fee was necessary, a spokesman for the US ISPs said, "In order to accurately account for our costs, we must ask the Indians to contribute their fair share in exchange for the traffic that we peer for them.
No comment so far from the Internet Service Providers Association of India. The major portals so far are ignoring both groups.
</sarcasm> Are the Indian ISPs really this stupid?
It can also be argued that by publicizing the tire defect, the media exposed Ford to a ton of lawsuits by lawsuit-happy lawyers. If they had only shut up until Ford had covered up the problem, Ford wouldn't have had to spend all that money trying to whitewash their image, laying blame on Firestone, and quietly paying off the families of those killed in firestone/ford related accidents.
Obviously this argument is pure bullshit, and so is the argument that publicizing security holes encourages more people to exploit them. Of course it does - BUT THAT'S NOT THE POINT. The point is to FIX THE PROBLEM so nobody else has to suffer for it! If it takes lawsuits against manufacturers of defective products, or active exploits to illustrate how much of a threat a weakness is, then that's what it has to take!
http://dunkels.com/adam/tfe/
They explain how they built an ethernet cart for the C64 (unenhanced) and how they not only got a webserver running, but it streams audio, LIVE! Of course, it's sampled at 1 bit 8khz, but still, it's LIVE STREAMING AUDIO!
The Virtual LA Urban Simulation project [ucla.edu] demoed part of their 3D LA using IR4 and the older IR3. They currently have over 1TB of texture and geometry data from Los Angeles, mostly in downtown areas... though they have 20,000 square miles mapped out, 4,000 of which are quite detailed.
Imagine an add-on to the America's Army game - urban warfare, utilizing maps and geometry from the UCLA project. I'm surprised that they're getting funding from NSF only (that's all I saw on the site.) I would have expected at least some DoD or Navy funding given the potential applications for VR training and research (ie, into AI and simulations in an urban environment
The gyroscopic effects of a spinning flywheel in your phone would be interesting to observe.
Man trying to control phone while driving: <SMACK> Ow!
The nutcase with the implant is Kevin Warwick, a professor of Cybernetics at Reading University, UK.
Steve Mann, who wrote the compositing code that this Slashdot article is about, is a professor at the University of Toronto, teaching wearable computing, and is the one who had his (non-implanted, despite what the slashdot post says) hardware ripped off in Newfoundland.
THEY ARE NOT THE SAME PERSON.
I personally like the term "poaching" when referring to these types of practices. Strip mining is nasty, but not necessarily illegal (though it should be.) Poaching, by the very definition is:
To take or appropriate something unfairly or illegally.
I can't think of a better way of describing this type of information THEFT, for the gain of the THIEF.
Why put it into orbit? Why not stabilize it at one of the Lagrange points? We're gonna need some rocks in a stable position betweeen Earth and the Moon if we're going to put up resupply stations.
As a shareware author, I can say, unless there's a brainless way of dropping dollars into someone's pocket, that pretty much almost NOBODY is going to compensate you for your work if you offer it to people for free. It's an ugly truth, but people are used to "free" programs, and they're getting used to "free" music. To take the time to put money in an envelope (or fill out that form for PayPal) for something you've already got, is more effort than most people want to make.
On one hand, maybe it's not so bad that everyone thinks your stuff is good enough for them to use - at least they're not stealing your work and passing it off as their own...
You could always pass a law to FORCE the RIAA to put the taxes that they collect on the sale of blank media in the hands of a neutral party, who would parcel out the funds based on "votes" placed by the average user, based on what they were copying. I think people would be much more free with "votes" than they would be with their own hard-earned dollars, just as politicians spend our tax-dollars so freely. As it stands now, it's the RIAA who chooses where the dollars go, from what I understand.
Of course, there's nothing to stop the band from selling their CD download online for a reasonable amount, say $7.50, with the MP3s encoded at 384 instead of 128, and a "try before you buy" version at 64 for trading online. I think people might want to get the "real goods" from a reliable source for that amount, than relying on incomplete downloads and slow connections via P2P. Benefits to the band? No physical media to ship, no production costs per unit, just the cost of bandwidth and the cost of assembling the original album. Sell the physical CD for $16 (with an upgrade from the MP3 version for $9) for those who want the cover art, booklet, etc.
Does anyone know the cost of pre-production for a decent album these days? Including recording engineer, studio time, mike rentals, mastering costs, art, etc? Working backwards from that, you could estimate how many download albums you'd have to sell before you could start turning a profit...
Not true - at least, not for the Playstation I own. There's a $79 module you can buy that plugs into the back that will allow you to play VCDs though. At the time, I too thought it would work - I think the reason is that some PS discs had MPEG video, but when I tried a VCD it just ignored it.
The PS2 I'm sure will allow you to play VCDs - anyone confirm this?
Pay a lecturer for his/her time, get a non-exclusive license to the tape, and GPL it. I think the idea is that there may be more material out there that's freely available, once we find a cheap way of distributing it without resorting to 5th generation copies.
I'm sure that there are organizations who are acting in the public interest who would release their material for next to nothing, as long as they didn't have to front duplication/distribution costs.
Also, there is material in the public domain, either explicitly, or because it's out of copyright. Someone with an eye (or ear) for conservation should make a master of this kind of material before it disappears (material that isn't owned by any one person isn't usually kept with as much care), and release the master via P2P so that it can be maintained in perpetuity by interested archivists, and be available for download by interested users (ala the Gutenberg project.)
Just like how VHS replaced 16mm film (do any teachers know how to thread a reel these days?), the VCD should replace VHS. The reasons why:
VHS tapes get chewed up with use, VCDs don't degrade with repeated playback and if they are damaged, just burn a new copy from your master.
VHS tapes need rewinding, placing wear and tear on capital equipment (VCRs), VCDs don't suffer from this to the same degree.
VCDs can be played by individual students, using a donated computer - no need for those bulky media labs.
VCDs are cheap to mail, so you can trade a bunch of instructional media for less than a dollar.
The only caveat is that the cheapest VHS players are less expensive than the cheapest DVD players (at least, as far as I've seen.)
An additional plus is if this takes off, we can add ANOTHER arena of fair use that uses the "evil" blank CD that the RIAA wants to continue to tax and regulate. The more legit uses we can find for blank CDs, the stronger the argument for banishing the CD tax, and tossing out any notion of regulating recordable media.
At home, I'm spec'ing out a project to convert all analog media that I have (video tapes, audio tapes, etc.) to digital equivalents (VCDs, CDs), and storing copies of them on a big LAN server (MPEGs and MP3s) for my personal library. I expect my tapes to completely degrade in another ten years, so this is one way of safeguarding my investment. On a related topic, does anyone know if there are archived copies of periodical articles, like you can find on microfilm, but on CD?
Why not gang a whole bunch of people together and just get a block from ARIN? Sure, we have to pay a fee every year, but at least we'll be in control of the block.
On a different note, does anyone know why we have to kowtow to ARIN? It hardly seems any more benevolent than the ICANN folks...
Actually, this law is a good thing. We just need to lobby our various congresscritters to amend the bill to read "spammers" instead of "hackers" before it gets passed into law, and we'll be all set 8)
Expert systems are nothing new. MYCIN (a drug interactions expert system) was developed in the 70's. Essentially, they're huge checklists developed by picking physician's brains, to create a system that would model a doctor's diagnosis procedure. However, it looks like only now, with the widespread use of computers, and a way of hooking them all together, is this technology getting into the mainstream.
Keep in mind though, real doctors have to keep updating the system to reflect new technology and new research (something real doctors have to do for themselves.) As such, there will still be demand for the best and brightest - and for the rest, they can use an expert system to help cover the bases (for liability reasons, I envision that final diagnosis will still need to be made by a real, certified doctor.) Too bad real AI, the kind that could make decisions and adapt to new situations (self-learning, possibly self-aware) is still a long ways off...
At least they let you save. Anyone remember Dark Forces? After battling the droid trooper prototype *12* times, each time having to fight my way through the ENTIRE level, I was about ready to go insane. Of course, I always played first person shooters on the most difficult setting...
That's not the way I remember it. What happens is the janitor rediscovers arithmetic and the wonder of wonders - he can do sums in his head FASTER then they can generate them using a calculator (this story was written a goodly number of years ago.) The generals are estatic - instead of using an onboard computer to compute the trajectory of their ballistic missiles, they'll stick human suicide volunteers onto them. Now, all we have to do is to talk to the janitor guy and have him reveal the secret to doing math in one's head and we'll be all set to kick the Soviets hineys.
The janitor, horrified that his hobby will be used to kill human beings, commits suicide (feeding himself to a molecular disassembeler garbage disposal or somesuch.)
YES! This is the story I was thinking about. The US and the USSR are duking it out on the Earth, and the US is losing, so we drop little self-replicating killer-robot/bomb factories from our base on the moon. The factories continue to improve, and we find out to our horror that not only are the little buggers winning the war, they're getting smarter as well...
The classic Berzerker books by Fred Saberhagen come to mind. They repair, build, and attack, they even temporarily make alliances with 'goodlife' to advance their overall goal of destroying all life in the universe. Then there's the Doomsday machine episode in ST:TOS, which was revisited in ST:Voyager with the non-replicating robots who destroyed their creators. There are a bunch more, but I can't remember the author or short story titles.