I recently wrote this paper for a university class, describing the basic architecture of Gnutella and Freenet, to offer some technical insights into how these P2P networks tick. I think it's a good read, if you have a chance:) Personally, I gained a new appreciation for these systems while doing the research. Conditions of use and abstract here.
What I wish people could see is that P2P networks don't have to be about illegal content, just as FTP and IRC are not just about warez. Reliable P2P can become a core internet technology of the future. Imagine fast downloads of just about any large media (e.g. slackware CDs, public domain broadcasts/recordings, etc.).
Of course, if you're still using "A=26,B=25,C=24..."
Funny you should mention this. My friend develops software. He released a program that used registration keys based on the summation of the ASCII values of the registrant's name, mod something. There was a key generation out on the net within a week! The poor guy didn't have a single user actually purchase the software though:(
List is an old DOS utility, but I still find it useful. Very compact file browser, viewer, including search capabilities and ascii/hex display and probably other things I've never discovered. It does do long filenames; type '1' during the file list.
If you have network access you may also benefit from jbmail (ok, I wrote it...) but this little mail app will do POP3 and SMTP including full SSL (provided by OpenSSL), all in about 500 KB. I run it on 90 MHz Pentiums connected over slow links, great for pulling mail with minimum frills.
After so many years of 'web programming' advancement, the big guys are coming around full circle and striving to simplify the appearance of their web sites.
"Whoa! Look what I discovered. We can do this without an image map"...
The point he's making is that this is a corruption of capitalism
So what you're saying is that, in a way, companies that keep the prices of LCDs artificially high are communists and maayyybe terrorists?
Seriously though, if I could find a nice but inexpensive LCD monitor I'd buy one in a heartbeat. It's on my list of things to buy.
Works great, ultimate linux demo (more than demo?)
on
Knoppix 3.2 Available
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I downloaded and burned the English Knoppix CD, and booted it up... I'm using it right now, listening to streaming audio and working on my homework (from a data partition on my hard drive) using OpenOffice.
This is great, because I get to try out the new XFree86 without bothering to install it on my HD. Fonts look better than before.
You know what wouldn't be too crazy... leave a knoppix CD in public workstations and have a computer startup the OS, connect to the network (DHCP) automatically. You're ready to go. You've got web browsing and Open Office, and multimedia.
I think the updated term for all of this is "global climate change", not just warming. Climate change certainly does involve melting of glaciers and warming of water bodies but it's also linked to more frequent flooding, drought, and unpredictable/extreme whether. Global air and water bodies interact in complicated ways, and it's reasonable to assume that an irregularity in one component can influence irregularities in related components.
Since there's enough evidence to suggest that burning fossil fuels affects climate change, and also the sun is getting hotter, this is all the more reason that we must control our consumption (the former variable, within our control). Anything less would be reckless.
I've set up a number of Internet and LAN servers, including one for my own business. What I like the most about slackware is its simplicity and transparency in installation and configuration. I can reliably get an installation up and running properly in very little time, and configuration and customization is easy - all off 1 CD, in one go.
Pat Volkerding has done a great job with this distribution; it really is carefully put together. I've been a fan since version 7 and I have already purchased Slackware 9 to show my support. If you like Slackware, please buy a copy from the Slackware Store to help keep the project alive.
There's a nice word for a legal system that deals unreasonable punishment for minor offences: Draconian. It appears that this went out of fashion in the 6th century B.C.
It is unfortunate that users often pick weak passwords. One of the student Win2K servers we run at our university got hacked because a remote attacker guessed a local password (=$username). However, we did learn one thing from the experience - we (or rather, I) firewalled our LAN from the internet behind a linux box. It could have been a BSD box, or a Linksys router -- who cares. This is kind of OT anyway.
I firmly believe that the more heterogeneous we keep the mix of systems running on the internet, the more resilient the internet will be to any type of attack. It's like an ecological system in which different beasts catch different bugs -- but hardly ever do they all catch the same bug in the same way, at the same time. Now isn't that smart? I really think the United States and other concerned countries should invest in encouraging diversity of computer systems in order to reduce general vulnerability to a 'cyberterrorism' or whatever attacks.
In either case, to see how our Internet is currently faring check out the Internet Storm Center. Increased probes from this worm were immediately visible on the site. Also worth a read is McAfee's details on this worm.
I'm involved with P2P research at my university. I think once people start the see the greater implications of the technology they won't be so quick to label it as a black/grey (this is a knee-jerk reaction from the music industry that may last yet for a few years).
P2P is a solution to massive content distribution; any kind of content. And there are different scales. P2P may show itself in many ways in the near future, whether you're chillin' to SomaFM, backing up your data to/from a redudant multipeer network, or maybe distributing large content from a web site and benefiting from clients' bandwidth for peer to peer redistribution.
Is the U.S. Department of Homeland Security also going to try and take care of software developed internationally?
For example, it seems that a lot of OpenSSH development is done in Canada and Germany. And the server is run out of Canada.
The OpenSSL team looks primarily international too (UK, Germany, Sweden, New Zealand). There server is managed by Brits and Swedes.
Actually... I think you'll find that a lot of crypto software is based outside the US. Probably due to constraints placed on crypto development in the last decade.
If there's one reason my family is still using Microsoft products, it's because their damn OS runs older software versions and supports older hardware. It runs an older copy of Office. It is nicely backwards compatible.
If they get rid of that, there will be nothing holding us back from a complete shift to either Linux or MacOS. And I will go out of my way to help everyone I know switch too.
To make such a strong statement, I think he's growing fearful in the face of growing linux use in both the home and server market . . . or he's just B.S.'ing everyone, which kind of works in the business world. It's just a polite way of sucking c0ck.
Why is it that it seems these days every new distro is based upon Slackware?!?!
I turn to slackware whenever I need to get a reliable system running in little time. I think slackware stands out because it has maintained a particularly clean and transparent configuration style. I see this as being the most flexible distro - and hence, a nice basis for other distros.
And it works beautifully, through loadable kernel modules. In this respect I think linux is superior to Windows. I spent hours this weekend trying to reinstall a Windows system that insisted on guessing and providing "the best" driver for my hardware. With linux I can use modprobe to load the exact appropriate driver I need, and these drivers are standard across all distros (kernel version specific however).
I've set up a mirror here, but decreased the quality on the images to hopefully prevent destruction of my site;)
Beautiful simple things
on
Snowflake Photos
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Nice to see stuff like this fly across slashdot on occasion. Helps me take a moment to appreciate all the cool design that was here long before and will remain long after us humans:)
I really think that one of the very nice things happening in anti-spam these days is the increasing use of local, independent processing power rather than centralized network queries (like realtime blacklists).
A growing number of projects are implementing Bayesian filtering techniques for example. I personally love spamprobe, but there are many others. Some, like spamprobe go server side and others are even client-side. They work equally well by filtering spam based examples you train it with. In the 4 months I've been using it, I've achieved 97.6% accuracy. And no DNS queries, no load to any other site but my disk & CPU.
Anyway, the advantage of this sort of filtering is that you do all the decision making locally, and no data flies across the internet. Remember, what we have in abundance is processing power. But network resources should be conserved.
There's a lot that can be said for being careful. We're not 100% sure about global climate change (please use this term instead of 'warming') but there's a good chance that what we're doing has a negative impact on the environment. So we must do something about it.
I'm twenty-something myself, and I'm starting to get awfully pissed off at the older generation that's leaving this world in a gawd-awful mess. If you're going to leave a wake of destruction as you try to stuff your coffin full of money I'm going to have to ask you to step aside.
I like to think our new generation is more aware of the environmental problems and solutions. It's great to see this shift towards renewable energy sources.
Slashdot Mirror
I recently wrote this paper for a university class, describing the basic architecture of Gnutella and Freenet, to offer some technical insights into how these P2P networks tick. I think it's a good read, if you have a chance :) Personally, I gained a new appreciation for these systems while doing the research. Conditions of use and abstract here.
What I wish people could see is that P2P networks don't have to be about illegal content, just as FTP and IRC are not just about warez. Reliable P2P can become a core internet technology of the future. Imagine fast downloads of just about any large media (e.g. slackware CDs, public domain broadcasts/recordings, etc.).
List is an old DOS utility, but I still find it useful. Very compact file browser, viewer, including search capabilities and ascii/hex display and probably other things I've never discovered. It does do long filenames; type '1' during the file list.
If you have network access you may also benefit from jbmail (ok, I wrote it...) but this little mail app will do POP3 and SMTP including full SSL (provided by OpenSSL), all in about 500 KB. I run it on 90 MHz Pentiums connected over slow links, great for pulling mail with minimum frills.
After so many years of 'web programming' advancement, the big guys are coming around full circle and striving to simplify the appearance of their web sites.
"Whoa! Look what I discovered. We can do this without an image map"...
Seriously though, if I could find a nice but inexpensive LCD monitor I'd buy one in a heartbeat. It's on my list of things to buy.
I downloaded and burned the English Knoppix CD, and booted it up... I'm using it right now, listening to streaming audio and working on my homework (from a data partition on my hard drive) using OpenOffice.
This is great, because I get to try out the new XFree86 without bothering to install it on my HD. Fonts look better than before.
You know what wouldn't be too crazy... leave a knoppix CD in public workstations and have a computer startup the OS, connect to the network (DHCP) automatically. You're ready to go. You've got web browsing and Open Office, and multimedia.
I think the updated term for all of this is "global climate change", not just warming. Climate change certainly does involve melting of glaciers and warming of water bodies but it's also linked to more frequent flooding, drought, and unpredictable/extreme whether. Global air and water bodies interact in complicated ways, and it's reasonable to assume that an irregularity in one component can influence irregularities in related components.
Since there's enough evidence to suggest that burning fossil fuels affects climate change, and also the sun is getting hotter, this is all the more reason that we must control our consumption (the former variable, within our control). Anything less would be reckless.
I've set up a number of Internet and LAN servers, including one for my own business. What I like the most about slackware is its simplicity and transparency in installation and configuration. I can reliably get an installation up and running properly in very little time, and configuration and customization is easy - all off 1 CD, in one go.
Pat Volkerding has done a great job with this distribution; it really is carefully put together. I've been a fan since version 7 and I have already purchased Slackware 9 to show my support. If you like Slackware, please buy a copy from the Slackware Store to help keep the project alive.
There's a nice word for a legal system that deals unreasonable punishment for minor offences: Draconian. It appears that this went out of fashion in the 6th century B.C.
It is unfortunate that users often pick weak passwords. One of the student Win2K servers we run at our university got hacked because a remote attacker guessed a local password (=$username). However, we did learn one thing from the experience - we (or rather, I) firewalled our LAN from the internet behind a linux box. It could have been a BSD box, or a Linksys router -- who cares. This is kind of OT anyway.
I firmly believe that the more heterogeneous we keep the mix of systems running on the internet, the more resilient the internet will be to any type of attack. It's like an ecological system in which different beasts catch different bugs -- but hardly ever do they all catch the same bug in the same way, at the same time. Now isn't that smart? I really think the United States and other concerned countries should invest in encouraging diversity of computer systems in order to reduce general vulnerability to a 'cyberterrorism' or whatever attacks.
In either case, to see how our Internet is currently faring check out the Internet Storm Center. Increased probes from this worm were immediately visible on the site. Also worth a read is McAfee's details on this worm.
I'm involved with P2P research at my university. I think once people start the see the greater implications of the technology they won't be so quick to label it as a black/grey (this is a knee-jerk reaction from the music industry that may last yet for a few years).
P2P is a solution to massive content distribution; any kind of content. And there are different scales. P2P may show itself in many ways in the near future, whether you're chillin' to SomaFM, backing up your data to/from a redudant multipeer network, or maybe distributing large content from a web site and benefiting from clients' bandwidth for peer to peer redistribution.
Is the U.S. Department of Homeland Security also going to try and take care of software developed internationally?
For example, it seems that a lot of OpenSSH development is done in Canada and Germany. And the server is run out of Canada.
The OpenSSL team looks primarily international too (UK, Germany, Sweden, New Zealand). There server is managed by Brits and Swedes.
Actually... I think you'll find that a lot of crypto software is based outside the US. Probably due to constraints placed on crypto development in the last decade.
If there's one reason my family is still using Microsoft products, it's because their damn OS runs older software versions and supports older hardware. It runs an older copy of Office. It is nicely backwards compatible.
If they get rid of that, there will be nothing holding us back from a complete shift to either Linux or MacOS. And I will go out of my way to help everyone I know switch too.
oop sorry, didn't realize that was UNIX and not Linux. Never mind :)
To make such a strong statement, I think he's growing fearful in the face of growing linux use in both the home and server market . . . or he's just B.S.'ing everyone, which kind of works in the business world. It's just a polite way of sucking c0ck.
I've set up a mirror here, but decreased the quality on the images to hopefully prevent destruction of my site ;)
Nice to see stuff like this fly across slashdot on occasion. Helps me take a moment to appreciate all the cool design that was here long before and will remain long after us humans :)
I really think that one of the very nice things happening in anti-spam these days is the increasing use of local, independent processing power rather than centralized network queries (like realtime blacklists).
A growing number of projects are implementing Bayesian filtering techniques for example. I personally love spamprobe, but there are many others. Some, like spamprobe go server side and others are even client-side. They work equally well by filtering spam based examples you train it with. In the 4 months I've been using it, I've achieved 97.6% accuracy. And no DNS queries, no load to any other site but my disk & CPU.
Anyway, the advantage of this sort of filtering is that you do all the decision making locally, and no data flies across the internet. Remember, what we have in abundance is processing power. But network resources should be conserved.
There's a lot that can be said for being careful. We're not 100% sure about global climate change (please use this term instead of 'warming') but there's a good chance that what we're doing has a negative impact on the environment. So we must do something about it.
I'm twenty-something myself, and I'm starting to get awfully pissed off at the older generation that's leaving this world in a gawd-awful mess. If you're going to leave a wake of destruction as you try to stuff your coffin full of money I'm going to have to ask you to step aside.
I like to think our new generation is more aware of the environmental problems and solutions. It's great to see this shift towards renewable energy sources.Foreign oil funds dictators and terrorism.
:)
Renewable energy (wind, hydro, solar) creates local industries and reduces reliance on foreign energy sources.
It makes political, economic, and ecological sense