I Canada we have this thing called PIPEDA (http://www.privcom.gc.ca/legislation/02_06_01_01_ e.asp) which is designed to prevent these sorts of things, and carries fines up to $100,000 (which I don't think is enough to convince some companies to care)
First off, I wish the author/poster had pointed out that this is a _draft_ and that it has not been published.
Anyways, what is so scary about this? Any ISP between any two hosts that are transmitting packets to one another could intercept those packets, and they always could.
I'm sure you all know that what is being described could probably be accomplished by a *nix box running tcpdump if it receives copies of all the packets. However, I don't think very much high-end telco/ISP equipment was really designed to duplicate packets to someone other than the intended recipient. I guess cisco intends on adding this feature in to some switching equipment, so they've been doing their research.
I think the point of this draft is an in-depth explanation as to what the Lawful Intercept requirement really means on a technical level.
I just don't see this thing as such a big deal after reading the document and really thinking about it. How the hell did this article even get posted?
Learning Graffiti actually made my handwriting more legible. But, my handwriting is/was also exceptionally horrid. When I got my Palm, it took me about a week to get used to Graffiti and be able to use it without looking at what my stylus was doing.
What about if every ISP had a white list of mail servers to accept mail from? Mind you, that would require a central authority, which I think is a bad thing. But, what if this authority was chartered by the IETF and controlled by the public (and *not* privatized/commercialized/whatever like ICANN)? I don't know, maybe someone could expand on this idea.
> So instead of buying SCSI drives, you save money by getting cheaper, > faster, but less dependable IDE drives and then shell out the price > difference to adapt it to your slower SCSI bus. This seems like the > worst of both worlds to me. Am I missing something?
The seek time on most SCSI drives is a lot better than that of any IDE drives manufactured around the same time period. I do agree that IDE is cheaper and less dependable, but it's not (usually) faster.
I think these devices would be very useful on most servers with a RAID-5 array where cost and redundancy/reliability are more important than speed. Even with a slower storage medium, your bottleneck is most likely going to be the network. And, you could probably buy about 5 or 6 IDE drives for the price of 3 SCSI drives. This can give you a lot more redundancy.
Hopefully the price comes down a bit, then I would consider using these in some situations.
Take a look at http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-eastlake -xxx-03.txt
This draft goes over many aspects of having to implement.xxx/.porn TLDs and/or a specific range of IPs for porn sites. The authors conclusion is:
The concept that a single top level domain name, such as.xxx, or a
single IP address bit, could be allocated and become the mandatory
home of "adult" or "offensive" material world wide is hopeless
nonsense.
Global agreement on what sort of material should be in such a ghetto
is impossible. In the world wide context, the use of a single
category or small number of categories is absurd. The implementation
of a reasonable size label that could encompass the criterion of the
many communities of the world, such as 300 bits, is impossible at the
domain name or IP address level and will remain so for the
foreseeable future. Besides technical impossibility, such a mandate
would be an illegal forcing of speech in some jurisdictions and for
domain names faces severe linguistic problems.
Nevertheless, the concept of a plethora of independent reviewers,
some of which might be governmental agencies, and the ability of
those accessing information to select and utilize ratings assigned by
such reviewers, is possible.
I heard a story about a year ago of a guy that was charging people 25 cents to use his telephone because the payphone across the street was broken. Bell sued him for reselling his telephone service without an agreement. I can't find any references to this, and I don't know which carrier, but I think it was Bell Canada. It wouldn't surprise me if all/most carriers have some kind of terms regarding resale of your services.
> 1> Documentation is usually 2nd priority. In my world, if there's no > documentation, there's no product.
I think both groups of software (open/closed) are in the same boat here.
When it comes to free documentation, I've seen a lot of proprietary/closed source with horrible documentation. How much documentation does Microsoft give you? A little book. Other companies are very good with their documentation. Then, I've also seen many open source projects that give you a few hundred pages worth of documentation right on the website. At the same time, there are numerous open source projects with little or no documentation. It all depends on the individual peice of software.
When it comes to solving problems pertaining to either Windows, *nix or any other software, I almost always use the same resources; mailing lists, knowledge bases and google. Albeit, not all proprietary software companies provide these resources, but I think quite a few do. Pretty much every open source project that is active has some kind of discussion group available.
Also, you can buy a book on just about anything. Further, there are probably hundreds of companies that would gladly take your money to provide technical support for the software you use.
> > 2> The product is usually 2nd rate. Because there's often no money on > the line, my experience has been that the programmers take less > accountability for their efforts. Big bug? Guess you have to wait until > the programmer (or someone else) gets around to it. Big bug in a program > you paid thousands of dollars for? My experience is that enough screaming > can get you a patch in very little time.
Isn't any other peice of software the same way? Proprietary vendors can take just as long as open source projects, if not longer, to create patches. The advantage to having the source code is that you can try to fix it yourself.
> > 3> The user interace is lacking severely. Bigger companies hire people > who specialize in usability to the design the UI. Open-source projects > have HORRID user interfaces (A perfect example of this would be Request > Tracker -- the software rocks.. the documentation sucks, and the awkward > user interface effectively makes the product useless for large-scale > deployments).
Agreed. I think a lot of this is to do with marketting pressure. Obviously the people who are behind open source projects are technically oriented. If there is no marketting, sales or management people to push for a better interface, it will probably become a lower priority.
> > Open-source definitely has it's place. It's fabulous for the "quick fix > it" jobs and the "I've got lots of time on my hands to figure it out and > fix any problems I find" solutions. Sadly, however, my experience has been > that this stuff is only truely free if your time is worthless. > > Don't get me wrong.. I love open-source software. I wouldn't be able to > do my job without it -- but with these drawbacks, it will never take the > place of the mission-critical elements where I can hold someone > responsible with I don't get what I need.:) (yes, those things cost > money -- sometimes money needs to be spent).
I guess it depends how you want to define mission-critical. How many ISPs depend on Apache?
The MS-DOS 6.2 source code is out there, but it's not publicily available, obviously.:) I can't see Microsoft ever releasing the source code, but you never know.
> Actually yes, many things... I know of companies that still use DOS for > many things to this day for accounting, customer tracking, or other > important tasks.
I work for an IT firm that used to be really into selling and supporting Point of Sale systems (Touch screens, Cash drawers, Receipt printers, Magnetic card readers, LCD displays on a pole, etc.. lots of cool stuff:) )
These all ran on MS-DOS and were networked using LANtastic. It took less than 15 seconds to boot a station, and they almost never crashed.
We still service about 5 or 6 resturaunts from a major chain in Canada that use these systems to this day, with 3+ stations each. They usually only call every year or two when some hardware goes bad.
m105 = same price, more functionality?
on
Open Source Studies
·
· Score: -1, Offtopic
The Zire is the same price as the m105 (atleast in Canada, at FutureShop and RadioShack). According to Palm's Comparison Chart, the main differences are memory, display and software support.
The Zire seems to just be strictly for an address book, to-do list, etc. It also does not appear to have e-mail capabilities.
The Zire supports PalmOS 4.0, while the m105 only supports up to PalmOS 3.5. Anyone know what the major differences between these two version?
I just bought an m125 on sale at RadioShack for $219CAD+tax ($250CAD total). The differences between the m105 and the m125 are plug-in expansion cards, snap-on peripherals and PalmOS 4.0 support.
Personally, I have always thought Palms were useless, but it's another toy:)
I'm subscribed to receive the weekly routing table from an APNIC router in Japan. A new one is due tomorrow, but this is last Fridays':
Percentage of available address space announced: 31.7
Percentage of allocated address space announced: 60.0
Percentage of available address space allocated: 52.8
Basically, 52.8% of the total IPv4 space (I do not know if this includes RFC1918 space, Class D/Multicast space, etc, etc, but I think it does) has been allocated between the RIR's (Regional Internet Registrars), which are ARIN, APNIC and RIPE. 60% of THAT allocated space is space is being announced ("used" you could say, but not technically - this gets too confusing to explain here, read up on BGP4). Also it tells you that 31.7% of the total (allocated or not) IPv4 space is being announced.
I guess the "real" statistic is that 31.7% of the IPv4 space is being used. This does not count the space assigned to major providers that they have not assigned to their customers. It depends what you want to look at.
There was either an RFC or an IETF draft recently by someone that went over all of this. I think the authors estimate was in the 40's for percentage of address space being used. I'll be dammed if I can find it now! I wish I had it in my saved-messages box.
Anyways, I find it highly unlikely that IPv4 space will run out by 2005.
On the other hand, it seems to me that with the way ARIN has been assigning IPv6 space and how "easy" they are making it, we're going to run out just as fast. I have not read their requirements that much, only briefly, and I know they require you to participate in the 6bone project for atleast 3 months. I believe that was one of the 6bone's requirements as well before you are given your own "test space", you have to find someone to assign you space temproarily.
One RIR I do like is RIPE. Their current requirements for getting IPv4 space includes things such as having to prove that you cannot use RFC 1918 space and do NAT. I think ARIN is following in their footsteps. I'm pretty sure atleast most major providers are doing that. I'd say check out their forms if you are interested.
I am well too tired right now to go reference any of this stuff, so I'm probably wrong on some things. However:
- We will *should not* be out of IPv4 space by 2005 according to current trends. - I think the RIR's (Regional Internet Registrar's) need to be as careful with IPv6 space as they are being with IPv4 space or else we will could be in the same boat in another 10-20 years.
Slashdot Mirror
I Canada we have this thing called PIPEDA (http://www.privcom.gc.ca/legislation/02_06_01_01_ e.asp) which is designed to prevent these sorts of things, and carries fines up to $100,000 (which I don't think is enough to convince some companies to care)
First off, I wish the author/poster had pointed out that this is a _draft_ and that it has not been published.
Anyways, what is so scary about this? Any ISP between any two hosts that are transmitting packets to one another could intercept those packets, and they always could.
I'm sure you all know that what is being described could probably be accomplished by a *nix box running tcpdump if it receives copies of all the packets. However, I don't think very much high-end telco/ISP equipment was really designed to duplicate packets to someone other than the intended recipient. I guess cisco intends on adding this feature in to some switching equipment, so they've been doing their research.
I think the point of this draft is an in-depth explanation as to what the Lawful Intercept requirement really means on a technical level.
I just don't see this thing as such a big deal after reading the document and really thinking about it. How the hell did this article even get posted?
Unless you can show us some mail archives, or some other kind of "proof", I will consider this to be a very bad joke.
Learning Graffiti actually made my handwriting more legible. But, my handwriting is/was also exceptionally horrid. When I got my Palm, it took me about a week to get used to Graffiti and be able to use it without looking at what my stylus was doing.
I was thinking about this the other day ...
What about if every ISP had a white list of mail servers to accept mail from? Mind you, that would require a central authority, which I think is a bad thing. But, what if this authority was chartered by the IETF and controlled by the public (and *not* privatized/commercialized/whatever like ICANN)? I don't know, maybe someone could expand on this idea.
hmmmmmm, and *now* I see the link to the google cache. Atleast the article is meant to be humourous, not something half-serious. :)
Call me a troll, but what is so special about this? :) Their server appears to be down, so I can't read the article to find out.
> So instead of buying SCSI drives, you save money by getting cheaper,
> faster, but less dependable IDE drives and then shell out the price
> difference to adapt it to your slower SCSI bus. This seems like the
> worst of both worlds to me. Am I missing something?
The seek time on most SCSI drives is a lot better than that of any IDE drives manufactured around the same time period. I do agree that IDE is cheaper and less dependable, but it's not (usually) faster.
I think these devices would be very useful on most servers with a RAID-5 array where cost and redundancy/reliability are more important than speed. Even with a slower storage medium, your bottleneck is most likely going to be the network. And, you could probably buy about 5 or 6 IDE drives for the price of 3 SCSI drives. This can give you a lot more redundancy.
Hopefully the price comes down a bit, then I would consider using these in some situations.
Take a look at http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-eastlake -xxx-03.txt
.xxx/.porn TLDs and/or a specific range of IPs for porn sites. The authors conclusion is:
.xxx, or a
This draft goes over many aspects of having to implement
The concept that a single top level domain name, such as
single IP address bit, could be allocated and become the mandatory
home of "adult" or "offensive" material world wide is hopeless
nonsense.
Global agreement on what sort of material should be in such a ghetto
is impossible. In the world wide context, the use of a single
category or small number of categories is absurd. The implementation
of a reasonable size label that could encompass the criterion of the
many communities of the world, such as 300 bits, is impossible at the
domain name or IP address level and will remain so for the
foreseeable future. Besides technical impossibility, such a mandate
would be an illegal forcing of speech in some jurisdictions and for
domain names faces severe linguistic problems.
Nevertheless, the concept of a plethora of independent reviewers,
some of which might be governmental agencies, and the ability of
those accessing information to select and utilize ratings assigned by
such reviewers, is possible.
I got $50CAD ..
I heard a story about a year ago of a guy that was charging people 25 cents to use his telephone because the payphone across the street was broken. Bell sued him for reselling his telephone service without an agreement. I can't find any references to this, and I don't know which carrier, but I think it was Bell Canada. It wouldn't surprise me if all/most carriers have some kind of terms regarding resale of your services.
Just something to keep in mind.
> 1> Documentation is usually 2nd priority. In my world, if there's no
:) (yes, those things cost
> documentation, there's no product.
I think both groups of software (open/closed) are in the same boat here.
When it comes to free documentation, I've seen a lot of proprietary/closed source with horrible documentation. How much documentation does Microsoft give you? A little book. Other companies are very good with their documentation. Then, I've also seen many open source projects that give you a few hundred pages worth of documentation right on the website. At the same time, there are numerous open source projects with little or no documentation. It all depends on the individual peice of software.
When it comes to solving problems pertaining to either Windows, *nix or any other software, I almost always use the same resources; mailing lists, knowledge bases and google. Albeit, not all proprietary software companies provide these resources, but I think quite a few do. Pretty much every open source project that is active has some kind of discussion group available.
Also, you can buy a book on just about anything. Further, there are probably hundreds of companies that would gladly take your money to provide technical support for the software you use.
>
> 2> The product is usually 2nd rate. Because there's often no money on
> the line, my experience has been that the programmers take less
> accountability for their efforts. Big bug? Guess you have to wait until
> the programmer (or someone else) gets around to it. Big bug in a program
> you paid thousands of dollars for? My experience is that enough screaming
> can get you a patch in very little time.
Isn't any other peice of software the same way? Proprietary vendors can take just as long as open source projects, if not longer, to create patches. The advantage to having the source code is that you can try to fix it yourself.
>
> 3> The user interace is lacking severely. Bigger companies hire people
> who specialize in usability to the design the UI. Open-source projects
> have HORRID user interfaces (A perfect example of this would be Request
> Tracker -- the software rocks.. the documentation sucks, and the awkward
> user interface effectively makes the product useless for large-scale
> deployments).
Agreed. I think a lot of this is to do with marketting pressure. Obviously the people who are behind open source projects are technically oriented. If there is no marketting, sales or management people to push for a better interface, it will probably become a lower priority.
>
> Open-source definitely has it's place. It's fabulous for the "quick fix
> it" jobs and the "I've got lots of time on my hands to figure it out and
> fix any problems I find" solutions. Sadly, however, my experience has been
> that this stuff is only truely free if your time is worthless.
>
> Don't get me wrong.. I love open-source software. I wouldn't be able to
> do my job without it -- but with these drawbacks, it will never take the
> place of the mission-critical elements where I can hold someone
> responsible with I don't get what I need.
> money -- sometimes money needs to be spent).
I guess it depends how you want to define mission-critical. How many ISPs depend on Apache?
The MS-DOS 6.2 source code is out there, but it's not publicily available, obviously. :) I can't see Microsoft ever releasing the source code, but you never know.
> Actually yes, many things... I know of companies that still use DOS for
.. lots of cool stuff :) )
> many things to this day for accounting, customer tracking, or other
> important tasks.
I work for an IT firm that used to be really into selling and supporting Point of Sale systems (Touch screens, Cash drawers, Receipt printers, Magnetic card readers, LCD displays on a pole, etc
These all ran on MS-DOS and were networked using LANtastic. It took less than 15 seconds to boot a station, and they almost never crashed.
We still service about 5 or 6 resturaunts from a major chain in Canada that use these systems to this day, with 3+ stations each. They usually only call every year or two when some hardware goes bad.
OT, but vi doesn't need any arrow keys :)
H = left
J = down
K = up
L = right
The Zire is the same price as the m105 (atleast in Canada, at FutureShop and RadioShack). According to Palm's Comparison Chart, the main differences are memory, display and software support.
:)
The Zire seems to just be strictly for an address book, to-do list, etc. It also does not appear to have e-mail capabilities.
The Zire supports PalmOS 4.0, while the m105 only supports up to PalmOS 3.5. Anyone know what the major differences between these two version?
I just bought an m125 on sale at RadioShack for $219CAD+tax ($250CAD total). The differences between the m105 and the m125 are plug-in expansion cards, snap-on peripherals and PalmOS 4.0 support.
Personally, I have always thought Palms were useless, but it's another toy
If you are in Ontario, take a look at http://www.gov.on.ca/LAB/es/ese.htm
I'm sure the other provinces have some similar.
I'm subscribed to receive the weekly routing table from an APNIC router in Japan. A new one is due tomorrow, but this is last Fridays':
Percentage of available address space announced: 31.7
Percentage of allocated address space announced: 60.0
Percentage of available address space allocated: 52.8
Basically, 52.8% of the total IPv4 space (I do not know if this includes RFC1918 space, Class D/Multicast space, etc, etc, but I think it does) has been allocated between the RIR's (Regional Internet Registrars), which are ARIN, APNIC and RIPE. 60% of THAT allocated space is space is being announced ("used" you could say, but not technically - this gets too confusing to explain here, read up on BGP4). Also it tells you that 31.7% of the total (allocated or not) IPv4 space is being announced.
I guess the "real" statistic is that 31.7% of the IPv4 space is being used. This does not count the space assigned to major providers that they have not assigned to their customers. It depends what you want to look at.
There was either an RFC or an IETF draft recently by someone that went over all of this. I think the authors estimate was in the 40's for percentage of address space being used. I'll be dammed if I can find it now! I wish I had it in my saved-messages box.
Anyways, I find it highly unlikely that IPv4 space will run out by 2005.
On the other hand, it seems to me that with the way ARIN has been assigning IPv6 space and how "easy" they are making it, we're going to run out just as fast. I have not read their requirements that much, only briefly, and I know they require you to participate in the 6bone project for atleast 3 months. I believe that was one of the 6bone's requirements as well before you are given your own "test space", you have to find someone to assign you space temproarily.
One RIR I do like is RIPE. Their current requirements for getting IPv4 space includes things such as having to prove that you cannot use RFC 1918 space and do NAT. I think ARIN is following in their footsteps. I'm pretty sure atleast most major providers are doing that. I'd say check out their forms if you are interested.
I am well too tired right now to go reference any of this stuff, so I'm probably wrong on some things. However:
- We will *should not* be out of IPv4 space by 2005 according to current trends.
- I think the RIR's (Regional Internet Registrar's) need to be as careful with IPv6 space as they are being with IPv4 space or else we will could be in the same boat in another 10-20 years.
Just my CDN$0.02