Given that spammers can create thousands of Yahoo accounts automatically with a 35% success rate, it's become rather useless to rely upon Yahoo to shut them down on a complaint - there are probably more created each hour than Yahoo can disable per day.
Of course, SPF has been a disappointment, too; too many companies who say they support its use also don't want to risk having anyone bounce their mail, so they put a "soft fail" parameter into their SPF strings - they list all the acceptable servers, but tell you to accept it from anywhere, in case they missed something. Haven't checked if eBay/Paypal has fixed this in the last couple of months, but Hotmail hasn't, and neither has AOL.
The majority of phishing and pharmacy mail coming to two accounts on my system are coming in with legitimate DKIM signatures... from Yahoo itself. With their CAPTCHA being broken several months ago (even if they only discovered it last month), the amount of "legitimate" Yahoo-domain mail with has been running at least 30 messages per day to one of those accounts.
When Iran announced that "all" the internet was cut to their country, I thought, "How convenient..." The other "breaks" in the news makes a break that cuts all Iranians from outside influence (and the ability to talk about what is going on in their country) could easily be explained away to the citizens... without affecting any "recruiting efforts" outside Iran. In fact, it would be an aid; "Look what they did! They cut us off from the outside world, to prevent us from presenting the truth!"
So, yes, there are people who have much to gain by cutting cables to Arab countries, besides George Bush and the CIA.
I wonder how much longer it will take to "repair" access for Iran than the other countries?
... Windows Update tells me that the only update I need is "Windows Genuine Advantage", which I don't want, anyway. No other updates needed, since Microsoft told me that WGA wasn't necessary to get security updates... just "new features".
... this story has been up for about 20 hours, and NO ONE has put together the fact that, while Thimerosal was withdrawn in 1999, George Bush started his bid to become president that same year, which should explain everything! Isn't that the standard answer here on/. for every world problem?
Command line version works to trigger the NSI registration. I looked up "hillary2012.com" and "hillaryclinton2012.com", both were available. 5 minutes later, going to www.networksolutions.com and entering "hillary2012" and "hillaryclinton2012" shows that the.com,.net,.org,.us, and.info versions are suddenly registered, and.mobi is registered for hillary2012. This is fun...
And where I live, you can't receive the HD broadcasts without a minimum 100' tower, and a very high-gain antenna. A customer of mine lives on one of the highest points of the ridge between my house and Chicago, and he has plenty of digital signals arriving at the antenna jack. With a 40' tower two miles away (50 miles from the transmitter), getting the analog signals isn't static-free. There's not even a trace of the digital signals, broadcast from remote sites, half the distance away...
Of course, it doesn't really matter - I have yet to see one of this mythical tuner/converters in any store, at any price. I've found a few places online that say they can get them for $100 and up... and 3-4 weeks lead time. It would be simpler and faster (and probably cheaper) to get an HD tuner card for the computer!
Silly person, this is all a result of George Bush's efforts to accelerate global warming by increasing the profits of his Big Oil buddies, by pushing to reach Peak Oil and cause a global recession!
Non-compete has existed for decades, long before DRM. It would make a lot more sense to reverse the comparison, but some people have no concept of what came before their own awakening to the ways of the world...
Yeah, 4 hours would have been nice... but it took 14 hours before my download rate was consistently higher than the upload rate, and almost 24 before the total download exceeded the total uploaded. I'm trying for both the 32 and 64 bit versions.
If there was a way to "know" that an email purported to be from paypal, most of these services would already block it due to Paypal's SPF records.
Not true - paypal.com and ebay.com both end their SPF record with "~all" (i.e., "softfail any address not listed"), which won't be bounced by most SPF implementations. Until they change it to "-all" (which they probably do because they're not really sure they've covered all machines that could send legitimate mail for paypal.com), you can not safely bounce improperly sourced messages. The same problem exists for hotmail.com/msn.com, and a great number of other domains that get regularly used for forged return addresses. gmail.com's SPF ends in "?all", or "neutral" - they don't care if a gmail.com address is spoofed.
Not to mention I'm getting spam through now that has forged DomainKey information...
But they do $inputHash == $hash, and you can use the serialized syntax to make $inputHash = true;, which means that it will == any non-zero-length string. Very annoying gotchas like this can make PHP a nightmare.
Strange, I'm looking at the code for phpBB2 v2.0.22 in my editor right now, and there is no occurrence of code like you mention. That sort of problem was cleared up well over a year ago, when it was first revealed to be a problem. In every case where unserialize() is used, its output is assigned to an array, and then pieces of that array are compared to the variables in other arrays. If someone attempts to "stuff" a value in to replace the MD5 retrieved from the database, it would not be used. To use your example, it would be stuffed into $sessiondata['inputHash'], not into $inputHash.
This is not to say that a lot of hacks (aka "MODs") do not play loose with unserialize()... but some of them make far worse errors. And, of course, there are a great many people running versions of phpBB (and other apps) that are far older, and still have the bug.
One of my pet peeves with PHP is that if I decide to disable URLs for include and require, it eliminates any possibility of making outbound connections. I have several applications where programs sanitize data from clients, then format and submit it to a remote XML server via HTTPS. Those servers would cease to function if I blocked URL open for includes, which is one of the most common ways of taking over a server with certain PHP applications installed. Of course, the fact that we control all the software on these servers (no third-party sites) means there little chance of that particular vector, but it would be nice if they had separate controls for opening a file resource and a include source... It will be interesting to see if that makes the list.
We gave up the idea of private medical records when we accepted the idea of others paying for our health care.
In ancient times, when we took care of ourselves, no one knew our medical history.
Then we asked others to take care of us, and they wrote things down to keep track of what they'd done to/for you, and "medical records" were born. But only the "doctor" needed them, so they were still relatively private. Plus, few people cared.
"Clinics" and "hospitals" meant that more people were giving you health care, so they got access to your records, but still, few people really wanted them, anyway.
Then, the "insurance company" was born. Insurance companies insisted upon records to prove you weren't trying to defraud them. When they got into the business of paying the doctors ("health insurance"), they wanted those records, too. And people started to get concerned, but not that many.
Then people decided that the government should replace insurance companies, to "make it fair", but governments like records even more than insurance companies, so they wanted the medical records, too.
Now that "the government" is becoming "most of Europe" is not the time to decide that you object to the government having your health records.
Very strange. I've found that spammers try the secondary MX first, hoping that it has lower filtering than the primary. The higher the MX priority, the higher the probability that it will be the FIRST to be hit. That's why my secondary MX records point to the strictest server in our "cluster"... For a while, it pointed to one that refused ALL mail!
It's funny how the Google apologists are always around on Slashdot to defend Google's (a private company) right to screw anyone,...
It's also funny how the Google haters are also here to throw stones at every little perceived problem with how Google works. It's funny how they also seem to use Google a lot, despite of them. I wonder why that is. Could it be that Google does what they want it to do? And, is it Google's problem that so many sites have come to the conclusion that their very existence is tied to their Google page rank? If you do not like how Google works, don't use them, and use your site's robots.txt file to exclude them from indexing your site. The more people who use other search engines, the less "power" Google (or any other search engine) has over "the market".
In this particular case, Google gave the webmaster sufficient information to discover the problem. If it wasn't enough for "other honest webmasters", then they aren't particularly competent, in my opinion, which would tend to affect how I felt about their information being relevant, too. A lot of people spend a lot of effort trying to scam their way to the top of the page ranks. And it looks like Google is spending a lot of effort to keep the game "honest".
Google has no stake in my using their service, other than wanting to display advertising to me, just like a TV or radio station. Given that the website in question here is not a paid advertiser on Google, I don't see where they have a responsibility to do anything special for them. Their responsibility is to make money for their stockholders, the same as any other corporation. Their "niche" for doing this is to sell advertising that is displayed to people who willingly come to their site. Their way of making people come to their site willingly is to index pages in as "honest" a way as they can figure out to do. Refusing to index a particular site for dishonest links, whether intentional by the owner or not, makes them more desirable to most of their users.
And a few dozen people bitching about it in a front page story on Slashdot doesn't hurt, either.
It can make a significant perceptial difference, if not a difference in how things actually pan out. Things like the REA (Rural Electrification Agency) tax are "hidden"; they're actually taxes levied against utilities, who then pass them through to us as part of those "federal taxes" listed on the bill. People don't care about taxes levied against evil utilities, even ignoring the fact that they're paying them indirectly. The so-called "Gore tax" was an increase in the "Universal Services" fee levied against the telcos when its mandate to "provide telephone service to rural areas" had its definition expanded to include "extended universal service support for any school, library and rural health clinic". When telcos announced that they planned on itemizing this extra levy on phone bills, the FCC went nuts. They didn't want it known just how big the bill was going to be, and still don't.
Even itemizing it as an income tax item is "safe", because people who work for others don't consider their gross pay to be a real number - only the net take-home pay means anything. There's a reason we have payroll withholding in this country - only the evil wealthy (anyone making more than $50K a year) realize just how much is being taken off their plates. Do factory workers really believe that the "employer share" of FICA and MED aren't coming out of their pay? Yes, they do, and the government wants it to stay that way.
Many vegetables bought out of their proper season are not providing you the *nutrition* that you would be eating them for.
Not everything is eaten for nutritional values. Pizza, for example, is hardly the pinacle of Man's acheviement in realm of good nutrition, but that doesn't stop many people from liking it. Personally, I'm mildly allergic to your example crop, tomatoes. I don't eat them for their nutrition, I eat them (in moderation) for their flavour, as part of other dishes. And, having grown up on a farm, handling them from seed through dinner table, I know what they're supposed to taste like... Frankly, what's available in stores today are an adequate substitute, for the uses I put them to.
If they want to tax it they can, unless they are voted out of office.
Good luck, though, getting their replacements to repeal the tax. Unless a tax has a "sunset" provision, it's with you "forever". Do we still need a "Rural Electrification Program", with its 70-year-old tax, in today's market? Yes, if you're the government, because once the goal of a program is almost met, the goal is changed, so that it can never reach an end.
But the only thing politicians will "sunset" are tax relief and laws they want to say the were on the "right side" of now, but then campaign against later...
The fiber (basically cardboard) portion has been selected for to make a tomato that grows fast, is pest resistant, doesn't spoil, doesn't bruise, and basically has about 20% of the "good" stuff compared to a tomato that does spoil and bruise.
Yes, but you don't have to live within 50 miles of an active tomato farm to get them anymore, either. Or only have them during certain months, because they won't stay "good" for the time it takes to ship them from one part of the world (where the season allows them to grow) to your part of the world (where it's too cold or too dry to grow them). These changes in agriculture are lamented by many, but there would not be so many people to lament them if the changes had NOT taken place.
If you need to have "the real thing", it's available to you. Either grow it yourself, go where it is grown, or pay the premium price for the expedited handling to transport a more fragile crop to your door, so that you can savour that extra flavour. Oh, you're poor, and can't afford that option? Well, you can still have a tomato (and products made from them) within your budget, just with "less flavour". If you had never tasted the natural, you probably wouldn't miss the difference... Just as I'd be happy with more of the major "greatest pizza in the world" places, if I hadn't been spoiled by the pizza my dad made!
True, there is no way to guarantee uptime completely, because it all involves wires or radio or something else that can fail in ways that you're not going to be able to fix quickly. Our T1s aren't bonded for reliability, but for speed... a fractional fiber just wasn't available to that site, so multiple T1s is the only way to increase speed. We're hosting, not surfing, so uplink speed is our bottleneck.
But bonded DSLs have the same problem that a single DSL has - no guarantee of service. Period. And you can have one for each of 40 different ISPs, but they're all routed through the same phone company to get to your premises, which can fail. Our E911 centers have redundant feeds, taking different routes from the telco switch to the center... And we had one taken out completely by a high voltage line that fell and melted the (buried) fiber trunk to the telco switch.
One of our sites had "business cable" for its internet connection for years. At that time, the 95% uptime wasn't too bad. Now panic sets in to management if someone can't reach the sites for 5 minutes in the middle of the night, so that site has fiber plus a backup T1.
Strange - why would you expect companies to step down from decent DSL speeds to T1 rates.
When you need reliability, you have to give up on DSL/cable, because no DSL or cable provider is going to give you service guarantees. If a DSL/cable line doesn't provide it's advertised 2Mb/s download throughput, that's too bad; you might be able to negotiate your bill down. And if it goes down, it's going to be you reporting it to your ISP, not the other way around...
But a T1 circuit (generally) has both through throughput and uptime guarantees written into the contract. And automated monitoring of its performance, and fast notification that something's wrong, 24 hours a day. I've had DSL circuits be out for days; the longest a T1 circuit was down was 8 hours, and there were severe financial penalties proscribed for that event.
That's not to say a T1 circuit is perfect; we use a bonded pair of them to feed one site. One went down, due to an incident with a trencher. Verizon promptly fixed it... by moving the circuit to another pair that tested good in the cable. Guess which pair got used... If you guessed the pair that the second circuit lived on, you'd be right, and it went down. This went on for a day, alternating which circuit was up and down, until one of our people met the Verizon tech at the repair site. "You do know that there are TWO T1 circuits here, don't you?" "Oooops..."
Can't ride it on the sidewalk because it's classed as a vehicle.
Hmm.. that has some interesting implications regarding a previous poster's discussion of falling off of one while trying to joust with it, drunk... Illinois (and probably other states) use "motor vehicle" in their definition of DUI, so that it applies to things like electric carts and such.
If the article is all there is on this subject, then Segway hasn't accomplished much since the scooter was finished. They've thought about a lot of potentially neat things, but they're still just that - thoughts.
Makes me want to run right out and put all my money into just about anything except Segway!
Slashdot Mirror
Given that spammers can create thousands of Yahoo accounts automatically with a 35% success rate, it's become rather useless to rely upon Yahoo to shut them down on a complaint - there are probably more created each hour than Yahoo can disable per day. Of course, SPF has been a disappointment, too; too many companies who say they support its use also don't want to risk having anyone bounce their mail, so they put a "soft fail" parameter into their SPF strings - they list all the acceptable servers, but tell you to accept it from anywhere, in case they missed something. Haven't checked if eBay/Paypal has fixed this in the last couple of months, but Hotmail hasn't, and neither has AOL.
The majority of phishing and pharmacy mail coming to two accounts on my system are coming in with legitimate DKIM signatures... from Yahoo itself. With their CAPTCHA being broken several months ago (even if they only discovered it last month), the amount of "legitimate" Yahoo-domain mail with has been running at least 30 messages per day to one of those accounts.
When Iran announced that "all" the internet was cut to their country, I thought, "How convenient..." The other "breaks" in the news makes a break that cuts all Iranians from outside influence (and the ability to talk about what is going on in their country) could easily be explained away to the citizens... without affecting any "recruiting efforts" outside Iran. In fact, it would be an aid; "Look what they did! They cut us off from the outside world, to prevent us from presenting the truth!"
So, yes, there are people who have much to gain by cutting cables to Arab countries, besides George Bush and the CIA.
I wonder how much longer it will take to "repair" access for Iran than the other countries?
... Windows Update tells me that the only update I need is "Windows Genuine Advantage", which I don't want, anyway. No other updates needed, since Microsoft told me that WGA wasn't necessary to get security updates... just "new features".
Yeah, right....
... this story has been up for about 20 hours, and NO ONE has put together the fact that, while Thimerosal was withdrawn in 1999, George Bush started his bid to become president that same year, which should explain everything! Isn't that the standard answer here on /. for every world problem?
Command line version works to trigger the NSI registration. I looked up "hillary2012.com" and "hillaryclinton2012.com", both were available. 5 minutes later, going to www.networksolutions.com and entering "hillary2012" and "hillaryclinton2012" shows that the .com, .net, .org, .us, and .info versions are suddenly registered, and .mobi is registered for hillary2012. This is fun...
I wonder if they've filed against Verizon for all the phone features they disable, like the ability to create your own ring tones?
And where I live, you can't receive the HD broadcasts without a minimum 100' tower, and a very high-gain antenna. A customer of mine lives on one of the highest points of the ridge between my house and Chicago, and he has plenty of digital signals arriving at the antenna jack. With a 40' tower two miles away (50 miles from the transmitter), getting the analog signals isn't static-free. There's not even a trace of the digital signals, broadcast from remote sites, half the distance away... Of course, it doesn't really matter - I have yet to see one of this mythical tuner/converters in any store, at any price. I've found a few places online that say they can get them for $100 and up... and 3-4 weeks lead time. It would be simpler and faster (and probably cheaper) to get an HD tuner card for the computer!
Silly person, this is all a result of George Bush's efforts to accelerate global warming by increasing the profits of his Big Oil buddies, by pushing to reach Peak Oil and cause a global recession!
Non-compete has existed for decades, long before DRM. It would make a lot more sense to reverse the comparison, but some people have no concept of what came before their own awakening to the ways of the world...
Yeah, 4 hours would have been nice... but it took 14 hours before my download rate was consistently higher than the upload rate, and almost 24 before the total download exceeded the total uploaded. I'm trying for both the 32 and 64 bit versions.
If there was a way to "know" that an email purported to be from paypal, most of these services would already block it due to Paypal's SPF records.
Not true - paypal.com and ebay.com both end their SPF record with "~all" (i.e., "softfail any address not listed"), which won't be bounced by most SPF implementations. Until they change it to "-all" (which they probably do because they're not really sure they've covered all machines that could send legitimate mail for paypal.com), you can not safely bounce improperly sourced messages. The same problem exists for hotmail.com/msn.com, and a great number of other domains that get regularly used for forged return addresses. gmail.com's SPF ends in "?all", or "neutral" - they don't care if a gmail.com address is spoofed.
Not to mention I'm getting spam through now that has forged DomainKey information...
But they do $inputHash == $hash, and you can use the serialized syntax to make $inputHash = true;, which means that it will == any non-zero-length string. Very annoying gotchas like this can make PHP a nightmare.
Strange, I'm looking at the code for phpBB2 v2.0.22 in my editor right now, and there is no occurrence of code like you mention. That sort of problem was cleared up well over a year ago, when it was first revealed to be a problem. In every case where unserialize() is used, its output is assigned to an array, and then pieces of that array are compared to the variables in other arrays. If someone attempts to "stuff" a value in to replace the MD5 retrieved from the database, it would not be used. To use your example, it would be stuffed into $sessiondata['inputHash'], not into $inputHash.
This is not to say that a lot of hacks (aka "MODs") do not play loose with unserialize()... but some of them make far worse errors. And, of course, there are a great many people running versions of phpBB (and other apps) that are far older, and still have the bug.
One of my pet peeves with PHP is that if I decide to disable URLs for include and require, it eliminates any possibility of making outbound connections. I have several applications where programs sanitize data from clients, then format and submit it to a remote XML server via HTTPS. Those servers would cease to function if I blocked URL open for includes, which is one of the most common ways of taking over a server with certain PHP applications installed. Of course, the fact that we control all the software on these servers (no third-party sites) means there little chance of that particular vector, but it would be nice if they had separate controls for opening a file resource and a include source... It will be interesting to see if that makes the list.
We gave up the idea of private medical records when we accepted the idea of others paying for our health care.
In ancient times, when we took care of ourselves, no one knew our medical history.
Then we asked others to take care of us, and they wrote things down to keep track of what they'd done to/for you, and "medical records" were born. But only the "doctor" needed them, so they were still relatively private. Plus, few people cared.
"Clinics" and "hospitals" meant that more people were giving you health care, so they got access to your records, but still, few people really wanted them, anyway.
Then, the "insurance company" was born. Insurance companies insisted upon records to prove you weren't trying to defraud them. When they got into the business of paying the doctors ("health insurance"), they wanted those records, too. And people started to get concerned, but not that many.
Then people decided that the government should replace insurance companies, to "make it fair", but governments like records even more than insurance companies, so they wanted the medical records, too.
Now that "the government" is becoming "most of Europe" is not the time to decide that you object to the government having your health records.
Very strange. I've found that spammers try the secondary MX first, hoping that it has lower filtering than the primary. The higher the MX priority, the higher the probability that it will be the FIRST to be hit. That's why my secondary MX records point to the strictest server in our "cluster"... For a while, it pointed to one that refused ALL mail!
.... are the ever-increasing hardware requirements of the new "operating system" costing consumers?
It's funny how the Google apologists are always around on Slashdot to defend Google's (a private company) right to screw anyone, ...
It's also funny how the Google haters are also here to throw stones at every little perceived problem with how Google works. It's funny how they also seem to use Google a lot, despite of them. I wonder why that is. Could it be that Google does what they want it to do? And, is it Google's problem that so many sites have come to the conclusion that their very existence is tied to their Google page rank? If you do not like how Google works, don't use them, and use your site's robots.txt file to exclude them from indexing your site. The more people who use other search engines, the less "power" Google (or any other search engine) has over "the market".
In this particular case, Google gave the webmaster sufficient information to discover the problem. If it wasn't enough for "other honest webmasters", then they aren't particularly competent, in my opinion, which would tend to affect how I felt about their information being relevant, too. A lot of people spend a lot of effort trying to scam their way to the top of the page ranks. And it looks like Google is spending a lot of effort to keep the game "honest".
Google has no stake in my using their service, other than wanting to display advertising to me, just like a TV or radio station. Given that the website in question here is not a paid advertiser on Google, I don't see where they have a responsibility to do anything special for them. Their responsibility is to make money for their stockholders, the same as any other corporation. Their "niche" for doing this is to sell advertising that is displayed to people who willingly come to their site. Their way of making people come to their site willingly is to index pages in as "honest" a way as they can figure out to do. Refusing to index a particular site for dishonest links, whether intentional by the owner or not, makes them more desirable to most of their users.
And a few dozen people bitching about it in a front page story on Slashdot doesn't hurt, either.
What difference does that make?
It can make a significant perceptial difference, if not a difference in how things actually pan out. Things like the REA (Rural Electrification Agency) tax are "hidden"; they're actually taxes levied against utilities, who then pass them through to us as part of those "federal taxes" listed on the bill. People don't care about taxes levied against evil utilities, even ignoring the fact that they're paying them indirectly. The so-called "Gore tax" was an increase in the "Universal Services" fee levied against the telcos when its mandate to "provide telephone service to rural areas" had its definition expanded to include "extended universal service support for any school, library and rural health clinic". When telcos announced that they planned on itemizing this extra levy on phone bills, the FCC went nuts. They didn't want it known just how big the bill was going to be, and still don't.
Even itemizing it as an income tax item is "safe", because people who work for others don't consider their gross pay to be a real number - only the net take-home pay means anything. There's a reason we have payroll withholding in this country - only the evil wealthy (anyone making more than $50K a year) realize just how much is being taken off their plates. Do factory workers really believe that the "employer share" of FICA and MED aren't coming out of their pay? Yes, they do, and the government wants it to stay that way.
Many vegetables bought out of their proper season are not providing you the *nutrition* that you would be eating them for.
Not everything is eaten for nutritional values. Pizza, for example, is hardly the pinacle of Man's acheviement in realm of good nutrition, but that doesn't stop many people from liking it. Personally, I'm mildly allergic to your example crop, tomatoes. I don't eat them for their nutrition, I eat them (in moderation) for their flavour, as part of other dishes. And, having grown up on a farm, handling them from seed through dinner table, I know what they're supposed to taste like... Frankly, what's available in stores today are an adequate substitute, for the uses I put them to.
If they want to tax it they can, unless they are voted out of office.
Good luck, though, getting their replacements to repeal the tax. Unless a tax has a "sunset" provision, it's with you "forever". Do we still need a "Rural Electrification Program", with its 70-year-old tax, in today's market? Yes, if you're the government, because once the goal of a program is almost met, the goal is changed, so that it can never reach an end.
But the only thing politicians will "sunset" are tax relief and laws they want to say the were on the "right side" of now, but then campaign against later...
The fiber (basically cardboard) portion has been selected for to make a tomato that grows fast, is pest resistant, doesn't spoil, doesn't bruise, and basically has about 20% of the "good" stuff compared to a tomato that does spoil and bruise.
Yes, but you don't have to live within 50 miles of an active tomato farm to get them anymore, either. Or only have them during certain months, because they won't stay "good" for the time it takes to ship them from one part of the world (where the season allows them to grow) to your part of the world (where it's too cold or too dry to grow them). These changes in agriculture are lamented by many, but there would not be so many people to lament them if the changes had NOT taken place.
If you need to have "the real thing", it's available to you. Either grow it yourself, go where it is grown, or pay the premium price for the expedited handling to transport a more fragile crop to your door, so that you can savour that extra flavour. Oh, you're poor, and can't afford that option? Well, you can still have a tomato (and products made from them) within your budget, just with "less flavour". If you had never tasted the natural, you probably wouldn't miss the difference... Just as I'd be happy with more of the major "greatest pizza in the world" places, if I hadn't been spoiled by the pizza my dad made!
True, there is no way to guarantee uptime completely, because it all involves wires or radio or something else that can fail in ways that you're not going to be able to fix quickly. Our T1s aren't bonded for reliability, but for speed... a fractional fiber just wasn't available to that site, so multiple T1s is the only way to increase speed. We're hosting, not surfing, so uplink speed is our bottleneck.
But bonded DSLs have the same problem that a single DSL has - no guarantee of service. Period. And you can have one for each of 40 different ISPs, but they're all routed through the same phone company to get to your premises, which can fail. Our E911 centers have redundant feeds, taking different routes from the telco switch to the center... And we had one taken out completely by a high voltage line that fell and melted the (buried) fiber trunk to the telco switch.
One of our sites had "business cable" for its internet connection for years. At that time, the 95% uptime wasn't too bad. Now panic sets in to management if someone can't reach the sites for 5 minutes in the middle of the night, so that site has fiber plus a backup T1.
Strange - why would you expect companies to step down from decent DSL speeds to T1 rates.
When you need reliability, you have to give up on DSL/cable, because no DSL or cable provider is going to give you service guarantees. If a DSL/cable line doesn't provide it's advertised 2Mb/s download throughput, that's too bad; you might be able to negotiate your bill down. And if it goes down, it's going to be you reporting it to your ISP, not the other way around...
But a T1 circuit (generally) has both through throughput and uptime guarantees written into the contract. And automated monitoring of its performance, and fast notification that something's wrong, 24 hours a day. I've had DSL circuits be out for days; the longest a T1 circuit was down was 8 hours, and there were severe financial penalties proscribed for that event.
That's not to say a T1 circuit is perfect; we use a bonded pair of them to feed one site. One went down, due to an incident with a trencher. Verizon promptly fixed it... by moving the circuit to another pair that tested good in the cable. Guess which pair got used... If you guessed the pair that the second circuit lived on, you'd be right, and it went down. This went on for a day, alternating which circuit was up and down, until one of our people met the Verizon tech at the repair site. "You do know that there are TWO T1 circuits here, don't you?" "Oooops..."
Can't ride it on the sidewalk because it's classed as a vehicle.
Hmm.. that has some interesting implications regarding a previous poster's discussion of falling off of one while trying to joust with it, drunk... Illinois (and probably other states) use "motor vehicle" in their definition of DUI, so that it applies to things like electric carts and such.
If the article is all there is on this subject, then Segway hasn't accomplished much since the scooter was finished. They've thought about a lot of potentially neat things, but they're still just that - thoughts.
Makes me want to run right out and put all my money into just about anything except Segway!