I think this is a little bit of an exagerration. I sent two emails to my representatives, one to my Congressman and one to a Senator from my state (NC), regarding the appointment of our favorite Attorney General and another regarding privacy concerns with a bill related to the Methamphetamine Proliferation Act, respectively, and received packets in the mail (snail) roughly a week later from both. The congressman sent me an explanation of why he voted against the AG, but was not in the majority (sadly), and the Senator sent me a letter explaning that the rider I was objecting to had been removed, as well as a report on the Meth bill, and another report on Privacy bills.
This largely depends on the representative, their staff, the issue you are referring to and your tone in the letter. I don't think it's appropriate to make broad generalizations like this with little evidence.. the reps are doing the best they can.
Alright, first, ICMP is a necessity. It is the Internet Control Messaging Protocol, and is used to troubleshoot network issues. It does _not_ use much bandwidth, and I seriously doubt it consumes 15-17%, though I do not have stats to back that up. Regardless, even if it does take that much bandwidth, or even 25%, it is a necessary part of the internet. I work at an ISP, doing routing configuration and troubleshooting most of the time, and without free reign to use ICMP however I want (which includes flood pings and extended pings), I could not do my job. This tool could be used to save a lot of time on the internet, actually.. here's a situation I see every day.. some customer has a problem reaching blah.com.. when he runs a traceroute, it goes all the way through my network, and then dies in another isp's network which I have no visibility to. I have to send email or call the other ISP and wait at their whim for them to address the problem, which happens slowly, if not at all most of the time. If Traceloop were inplemented across the board, a lot of time could be saved by Noc employees across the globe, which would mean quicker resolution of internet problems, which would lead to greater stability and speed on the network, which I am sure would help your precious business.
You business people need to realize that you don't own the internet. You pay for a very small amount of bandwidth on the internet, which you can do what you choose with, but you didn't build the internet, you don't maintain the internet and you have no right whatsoever to tell anyone else what to do with their bandwidth.
The only thing I can figure is you're either an idiot or a troll.. if the former is true, please go read Internet Architechtures by Halabi (cisco press book)... it is very useful. If the latter is the case, the fuck right off.
Yes, yes, yes and yes. I attend meetings. I am on the frontline, so I talk to customers all day, every day. i am the primary email contact for my company during the day, and write 20-30 emails to customers and peers every day, and management _prefers_ that I do this rather than others on my shift, because I have recently taken grammar classes, and have a much better command of the language than other, older members of my shift. While younger people may not have the experience that older employees have, they do have an advantage in that their learning has all been recent and fresh in their minds..
the bottom line is that the older generation views us as a threat, and is using whatever power that they have to put down that threat, be it with management tactics, discrimination or the kind of propaganda I've seen in this article.. but if we carry outselves professionally, work as hard as we can and outperform them, we will have the upper hand.
... and while it may not make you wise, it still make you technically competent, which it the only thing you need to get a job in this industry. I don't suspect "teens" are the first ones laid off.. I suspect "people with no talent" are the ones who are laid off, regardless of age. For all your preaching about wisdom, you seem to have fallen into the most unwise of all beliefs, discrimination with no basis.
I'm a 19-year old Network Engineer at a large ISP, and I have been here for a little over a year now... I was hired 4 months after graduating HS (at 18), and haven't really had any problems because of my age.. everyone seems more surprised that I am as young as I am, and treat me with perhaps even more respect than I would get if I were as old as them... I think it all depends on how you carry yourself off, and if you make your age an issue.. if you make your work speak for itself, then no one will have any way to question your age.
Oh man.. I spent days and days on 3k, as a necro mostly.. with this name.. I got my nick from Apoc 4 (another mud which I fled to play 3k) and it has stuck with my until now..
What happened to the good ole' days of ISPs? Back when you could get a _REAL_ IP connection to the net, not some proxied, port-filtered, DHCP line with no storage space and no shell access? Why has is become tantamount to a capital offense to run an FTP/Web server off a residential line? Do ISPs not realize that maybe, just maybe, you might want to get files off your home box, and perhaps not want to set up an public FTP server that would waste all of the bandwidth you're paying for.. and since you're _PAYING FOR IT_, why should it matter to them if you're pegging the line refreshing cnn.com and slashdot all day long, or if you're serving legal MP3s to some friends, or distributing files to other machines/shell accounts.. if you have illegal files being served on an ISP's server, then yeah, they're going to be deleted, and no, you can't bitch about it.. but why the hell has a residential internet line become equal to a castrated internet line?
AS Path prepending is actually the sixth step in the route selection process. It goes like this.. 1. choose the advertisement with the longest subnet mask and then 2. make sure the nexthops are reachable, drop any that aren't 3. among those choices, choose the one with the highest weight (largely unused), then 4, choose the highest localpreference, then 5. prefer any routes that were originated by this router, then 6. prefer the path with the shortest AS_PATH, then you go onto EGP vs. IGP in the origin code, MEDs, Closest-neighbor, and finally as a tiebreaker, the router with the lowest IP address.
Alright.. so first off, this isn't news. Anyone following the NANOG list knows that the routing table is increasing exponentially with the rest of the internet. There isn't anything that can be done about that, realistically. The aggregation Nazis will scream day and night that they can fix the Internet if you would just let them aggregate things properly. Fine, but that would require a total renumbering of the internet, so it isn't at all possible with IPv4, unless everyone out there really feels like renumbering every machine on their network with a publicly addressable IP. Think about that for a minute. They'll scream that they can do it without renumbering, but they're wrong. The routing table is an intricate mesh of advertisements and if everything was aggregated, nothing would work right. BGP's first method of selection of routes is the longest match rule, whereby when you're choosing a route to pass traffic on, you choose the most specific advertisement, eg choose a class C rather than a class B advertisement. If everything was aggregated into/20 or larger blocks, there would be no practical way to load balance traffic in a multihomed environment (when you have transit through more than one ISP).
And secondly, BGP isn't the cause for the routing table growing, it is the cure. There is no way we would still be using IPv4 without BGP. It saved the internet by introducing classless routing.
The answer to this is simple.. upgrade, upgrade, upgrade. There are routers out there that can handle far more than the internet has to throw at them right now.. it's just that Cisco doesn't make them. Juniper does.. check them out. They built a router off some sweet hardware and BSD. You can type 'start shell' in the router and drop to a BSD shell, and they have the route processor to chew through a routing table many times the size of our current table.
ISPs need to keep up with the growth and upgrade their routers, or they will have problems. Much of the instability of the 'net is due to that now, routers get overloaded and reboot and cause all kinds of churn in the network, which overloads other routers, which reload.. you can see the cascading effect. The ISP I work for had to upgrade all of our older routers to 128m of ram and newer route processors.. if all the ISPs did this, there would be no routing table problems. They just don't want to spend the millions they need to to upgrade their infrastructure, unless the users start screaming. So start screaming at your ISP! (unless it's mine.;)
The media/government doesn't want to recognise the obvious pattern here. They preach that drug addiction follows money. While this is a good coincidence and while money enables one to buy more drugs, it's not as if the mystical dot-com dream boy they seem to like to trumpet so much nowadays wakes up the morning after his IPO with a million dollars and having never experimented with drugs before or used drugs, runs out to a shady coffee bar and becomes a cocaine addict. No, this "dot-commer" (god I hate that phrase) used drugs all through high school, college, his first working years and right up to the day when he went IPO. Drugs AND money follow _intelligence_. This is not a beleif.. this is not a spin to put on the situation, this is a fact. And there is nothing wrong with it! The drugs that help these programmers stay up until 6 in the morning enable them to be MUCH more productive! The drugs that these people take on the weekends at parties help these people relax and enjoy themselves much in the same way that alcohol does, and in the same way as alcohol, these drugs must be used in moderation. Sure, there will be the few cases where someone loses control, someone fucks up and takes too much due to stupidity or lack of information about the drug they are taking or through addiction, but that is the exception to the rule. These are the same people that would die 10 years later in a drunk driving accident or because their bodies fail after constant alcoholism, but since this country is so wrapped up in the War on Drugs and Barry McCaffery's holy war of Publicity, the media will take the few exceptions and trumpet them as some sort of endemic.
To quote the prophet Bill Hicks, "If you don't beleive drugs have done some good things for us, do this for me, go home tonight and take all your records, all your tapes and all your CDs and burn them. Because you know all of those artists who have made all of that great music that has enhanced your lives, RRRRRRRRRRRRRRREEEAL fuckin high on drugs."
I'm sitting on a Sun Ultra 10 right now running Solaris 7, and I can testify that Sun's OS is more stable, faster and better supported than Linux on Sparc. Redhat has never been the distro to do unprofitable things or to support unpopular products. They are the most mainstream linux distro, and they have to make choices like this to stay alive. There's nothing wrong with it, it's just a buisness decision. Linux for Sparc isn't going away, just Redhat for Sparc.
yeah, I'm all for stopping the searches across gnutella at the 2nd tier (dsl/cable/isdn, etc) so that modems can d/l (they don't suck that much b/w anyways.. let 'em download..) but don't pollute the rest of the network with advertisements for useless stuff.. even though that is kinda against the whole integrated client/server concept. Sometimes concepts just don't work well in practice.
How about 'has crippled it'? I dunno about the rest of you, but I haven't been able to use Gnutella for a few weeks with any success. The ping-flood problem has taken its toll.. I'm waiting for GnutellaNP protocol though. Hopefully it will follow a more stable network design.
Personally, I'm all for a dynamically-hierachial-by-line-speed design, with OCx/Txs service cable/dsl, serving a pool of modems.. Gnutella has always mirrored the internet in principal, and it's about time it started to mirror the internet physically, or it will never recover.
1). They create large private peering points which are in general overutilized and badly managed. Individual, private peers create just as much bandwidth without concetrating routes into a single facility, which also provides more redundancy.
2). Huh? The Tier 1 ISPs (which InterNap is _not_, the Tier 1 ISP which I am employed by does not consider InterNap a peer, but a customer.) all have meshed BGP backbones these days and diverse paths on their backbone trunks. Network redundancy is a simple matter of planning, and nothing revolutionary.
3). Actually, it's called peering. InterNap has to pay for half of these peers with other Tier 2 and smaller-scale Tier 1 carriers which consider them a peer, and they have to pay for bandwidth from the top ISPs who consider them a customer.
The ISP world is much, much different behind the scenes than it is in the ISP's marketing materials. They in NO way portray a truthful picture of the workings of the Internet backbone.
....and what would they be using Linux for? Routers? I sure hope not. Certainly not switches. How would the desktop machine they use in their Noc or as a statistics monitor affect their backbone performance in any way?
1. True.. 2. Well, you can still _trace_ across any router, the routers just will not be sending the itrace packets, so you will not be able to get any more information about the traceback from this router. Other routers before and after that router which have itrace capability will, however, still report itrace packets. 3. Why would you care about an "odd spoofed packet"? The whole issue here is DDOS attacks, which by their nature have hundreds of thousands of packets, more than enough to get a good traceback. Plus, the more severe and large the DDOS attack is, and therefore the more prominent it is, the easier it will be to trace back.
I don't beleive that the obvious comparison of this tech to that used in GATTACA is all that appropriate.. The climate of this country is such that that kind of screening would be VERY difficult to pass through any sort of government body.. such concepts as inequal opportunity (prop 11 in calif) based on race have had an extremely hard time gaining acceptance, as they should.. Americans have a very difficult time judging people based on their condition at birth.. it's one of the founding tenets of the country. I am speaking of the legal system here.. and I know all of you US-bashers are going to go off about how americans descriminate all the time, etcetcetc, but that is a personal choice that individuals and groups excercise. The system, as it is WRITTEN, does not, in general, discriminate based on birth condition.. so shut the hell up about GATTACA.. anyways.
The thing that initially worried me about this tech is the ability to scan for drug deposits/residues of things which are not deemed as socially acceptable, which can be easily achieved by the excuse of testing for bomb materials, etc.. this is the kind of abuse that I fear will become prevalent due to this technology and others like it. However, while this may in the short-term, if it is ever implemented in airports/schools/businesses/anywhere, be a terrible injustice and a big pain in my ass, in the long term, it will not be tolerated by the people. When the government takes to harrasing the people about things which are generally none of their business (eg, drugs), the fact will come out that EVERYONE has skeletons in their closet. EVERYONE does things that they don't want people to know about. EVERYONE has something to hide, and when/if the government starts exposing the habits of the populace and persecuting, the people will rise and overthrow or change the government.
... is just as much a part of information theory as information distribution. Information wants to be free, whether it is m374lic4_5uXx0r5.mp3 or the log entry show the time, date and IP of the person who downloaded it. This program provides tracking for napster and gnutella. Ok.. big deal. It doesn't comprimise Gnutella in any way other than to provide accounting for file downloads, which isn't such a hard thing to do, since gnutella is a multi-access broadcast media anyways.. all information transmitted on it is pretty much viewable by everyone. This program does nothing to stop people from downloading soungs, files, etc.
Plus, think about it.. if everyone on Gnutella got subpoenas on their doorstep towmorrow for downloading copyrighted information, we would have even more popular support for the cause. The more people the RIAA piss off with these bully tactics, the better off we are.
Ok.. so Jon is saying that we should kill off the old media/new media buzzwords and replace with open media/closed media.. while I personally beleive that this is just an attempt for Katz to somehow tie himself in with the Open Source movement, by becoming an Open Journalist for the Open Media... I'll overlook that for the time being.
Now, Kat'z argument is that closed media has to be purchased, open media is free.. well wait a minute there Jon.. I can walk into my neighborhood coffee shop and pick up a newspaper and read it with my coffee in the morning... without paying a cent. I can also walk to my desk in the morning and read similar news on the web. I do not pay for the content in either of these cases. I can also read the newspaper at home, where I pay a small fee for delivery, content and the physical medium on which it is printed, OR I can walk over to my desk and read similar information on a web page. I pay for my internet access... I pay a fairly signigicant amount per month for the delivery of this content and arguably for the electronic medium on which it is printed.. and the company makes money off me with ad revenues. I don't see so profound of a philosophical different as Mr. Katz between Open and Closed media.
So quit trying to create more memes, do some research, actually give us some CONTENT.
Anybody else out there using Solaris (I'm on 2.6..) and Netscape 4.72? My box seems to not like the evil3d page.. NS just crashed twice in a row when loading this site. Can anyone try and confirm this to be an incompatability with the site/NS 4.72 or is it just my box being a piece?
1. Yes, the route processor has to deal with routing updates and various bookkeeping functions mostly, but to route traffic the router still has to read the dest ip and compare it to the routing table (which is generally done on a processor on the interface cards nowadays, not the RP, but is still an electrical function). If you think you can do this optically, let me know.. I would love to see the details of it.
2. Yeah.. that's basically what I was saying, we will still have to deal with the speed of light as a limitation, but we won't have to deal with the 8ns/bit electrical latency you incurr every time you hit an electrical repeater, ATM switch, etcetcetc..
Alright.. here's my rationale for saying that this cant' do layer 3 lookups.. which is hard to determine conclusively, beause we don't have much information to play with.. luckily we've got some good neural nets upstairs to interpolate with..
To route data, you have to look at the header of the IP packet and read the destination address and then compare it to the routing table and make a decision of which interface will move the data to the destination the quickest. I don't see any way for an optical device to do this. To read an IP header, you have to translate the light pulses to electrical signals and then pass it to the processor to make the routing decision.
The way I see this working is it has several streams of date to move from interface to interface, it knows which interface it has to move them to, and this technology is finding the fastest way for the switch to move multiple streams of data across the backplane simulteneously. It would sort of turn the backplane into a totally optical, neural net based ethernet, as it is in a sense a CSMACD (Carrier-Sense Multiple Access Collision Detect), multiaccess media, with the neural net avoiding collisions and finding the best way to transport the data..
of couse.. my neural net might be returning an invalid result for these inputs..
Slashdot Mirror
I think this is a little bit of an exagerration. I sent two emails to my representatives, one to my Congressman and one to a Senator from my state (NC), regarding the appointment of our favorite Attorney General and another regarding privacy concerns with a bill related to the Methamphetamine Proliferation Act, respectively, and received packets in the mail (snail) roughly a week later from both. The congressman sent me an explanation of why he voted against the AG, but was not in the majority (sadly), and the Senator sent me a letter explaning that the rider I was objecting to had been removed, as well as a report on the Meth bill, and another report on Privacy bills.
This largely depends on the representative, their staff, the issue you are referring to and your tone in the letter. I don't think it's appropriate to make broad generalizations like this with little evidence.. the reps are doing the best they can.
//Phizzy
Alright, first, ICMP is a necessity. It is the Internet Control Messaging Protocol, and is used to troubleshoot network issues. It does _not_ use much bandwidth, and I seriously doubt it consumes 15-17%, though I do not have stats to back that up. Regardless, even if it does take that much bandwidth, or even 25%, it is a necessary part of the internet. I work at an ISP, doing routing configuration and troubleshooting most of the time, and without free reign to use ICMP however I want (which includes flood pings and extended pings), I could not do my job. This tool could be used to save a lot of time on the internet, actually.. here's a situation I see every day.. some customer has a problem reaching blah.com.. when he runs a traceroute, it goes all the way through my network, and then dies in another isp's network which I have no visibility to. I have to send email or call the other ISP and wait at their whim for them to address the problem, which happens slowly, if not at all most of the time. If Traceloop were inplemented across the board, a lot of time could be saved by Noc employees across the globe, which would mean quicker resolution of internet problems, which would lead to greater stability and speed on the network, which I am sure would help your precious business.
You business people need to realize that you don't own the internet. You pay for a very small amount of bandwidth on the internet, which you can do what you choose with, but you didn't build the internet, you don't maintain the internet and you have no right whatsoever to tell anyone else what to do with their bandwidth.
The only thing I can figure is you're either an idiot or a troll.. if the former is true, please go read Internet Architechtures by Halabi (cisco press book)... it is very useful. If the latter is the case, the fuck right off.
//Phizzy
Yes, yes, yes and yes. I attend meetings. I am on the frontline, so I talk to customers all day, every day. i am the primary email contact for my company during the day, and write 20-30 emails to customers and peers every day, and management _prefers_ that I do this rather than others on my shift, because I have recently taken grammar classes, and have a much better command of the language than other, older members of my shift. While younger people may not have the experience that older employees have, they do have an advantage in that their learning has all been recent and fresh in their minds..
the bottom line is that the older generation views us as a threat, and is using whatever power that they have to put down that threat, be it with management tactics, discrimination or the kind of propaganda I've seen in this article.. but if we carry outselves professionally, work as hard as we can and outperform them, we will have the upper hand.
//Phizzy
ah.. but presentation is an integral part to "what I can do".. such as closing HTML braces..
I didn't feel, honestly, that his comment deserved much more thought or criticism, since it is so obviously short-sighted and spiteful.
//Phizzy
... and while it may not make you wise, it still make you technically competent, which it the only thing you need to get a job in this industry. I don't suspect "teens" are the first ones laid off.. I suspect "people with no talent" are the ones who are laid off, regardless of age. For all your preaching about wisdom, you seem to have fallen into the most unwise of all beliefs, discrimination with no basis.
//Phizzy
I may be young, but I know how to post and not look like a jackass.
momo.
//Phizzy
I'm a 19-year old Network Engineer at a large ISP, and I have been here for a little over a year now... I was hired 4 months after graduating HS (at 18), and haven't really had any problems because of my age.. everyone seems more surprised that I am as young as I am, and treat me with perhaps even more respect than I would get if I were as old as them... I think it all depends on how you carry yourself off, and if you make your age an issue.. if you make your work speak for itself, then no one will have any way to question your age.
//Phizzy
Oh man.. I spent days and days on 3k, as a necro mostly.. with this name.. I got my nick from Apoc 4 (another mud which I fled to play 3k) and it has stuck with my until now..
//Phizzy
What happened to the good ole' days of ISPs? Back when you could get a _REAL_ IP connection to the net, not some proxied, port-filtered, DHCP line with no storage space and no shell access? Why has is become tantamount to a capital offense to run an FTP/Web server off a residential line? Do ISPs not realize that maybe, just maybe, you might want to get files off your home box, and perhaps not want to set up an public FTP server that would waste all of the bandwidth you're paying for.. and since you're _PAYING FOR IT_, why should it matter to them if you're pegging the line refreshing cnn.com and slashdot all day long, or if you're serving legal MP3s to some friends, or distributing files to other machines/shell accounts.. if you have illegal files being served on an ISP's server, then yeah, they're going to be deleted, and no, you can't bitch about it.. but why the hell has a residential internet line become equal to a castrated internet line?
//Phizzy
for a fine example of an Aggregation Nazi, see here.
//Phizzy
AS Path prepending is actually the sixth step in the route selection process. It goes like this.. 1. choose the advertisement with the longest subnet mask and then 2. make sure the nexthops are reachable, drop any that aren't 3. among those choices, choose the one with the highest weight (largely unused), then 4, choose the highest localpreference, then 5. prefer any routes that were originated by this router, then 6. prefer the path with the shortest AS_PATH, then you go onto EGP vs. IGP in the origin code, MEDs, Closest-neighbor, and finally as a tiebreaker, the router with the lowest IP address.
//Phizzy
Alright.. so first off, this isn't news. Anyone following the NANOG list knows that the routing table is increasing exponentially with the rest of the internet. There isn't anything that can be done about that, realistically. The aggregation Nazis will scream day and night that they can fix the Internet if you would just let them aggregate things properly. Fine, but that would require a total renumbering of the internet, so it isn't at all possible with IPv4, unless everyone out there really feels like renumbering every machine on their network with a publicly addressable IP. Think about that for a minute. They'll scream that they can do it without renumbering, but they're wrong. The routing table is an intricate mesh of advertisements and if everything was aggregated, nothing would work right. BGP's first method of selection of routes is the longest match rule, whereby when you're choosing a route to pass traffic on, you choose the most specific advertisement, eg choose a class C rather than a class B advertisement. If everything was aggregated into /20 or larger blocks, there would be no practical way to load balance traffic in a multihomed environment (when you have transit through more than one ISP).
;)
And secondly, BGP isn't the cause for the routing table growing, it is the cure. There is no way we would still be using IPv4 without BGP. It saved the internet by introducing classless routing.
The answer to this is simple.. upgrade, upgrade, upgrade. There are routers out there that can handle far more than the internet has to throw at them right now.. it's just that Cisco doesn't make them. Juniper does.. check them out. They built a router off some sweet hardware and BSD. You can type 'start shell' in the router and drop to a BSD shell, and they have the route processor to chew through a routing table many times the size of our current table.
ISPs need to keep up with the growth and upgrade their routers, or they will have problems. Much of the instability of the 'net is due to that now, routers get overloaded and reboot and cause all kinds of churn in the network, which overloads other routers, which reload.. you can see the cascading effect. The ISP I work for had to upgrade all of our older routers to 128m of ram and newer route processors.. if all the ISPs did this, there would be no routing table problems. They just don't want to spend the millions they need to to upgrade their infrastructure, unless the users start screaming. So start screaming at your ISP! (unless it's mine.
//Phizzy
The media/government doesn't want to recognise the obvious pattern here. They preach that drug addiction follows money. While this is a good coincidence and while money enables one to buy more drugs, it's not as if the mystical dot-com dream boy they seem to like to trumpet so much nowadays wakes up the morning after his IPO with a million dollars and having never experimented with drugs before or used drugs, runs out to a shady coffee bar and becomes a cocaine addict. No, this "dot-commer" (god I hate that phrase) used drugs all through high school, college, his first working years and right up to the day when he went IPO. Drugs AND money follow _intelligence_. This is not a beleif.. this is not a spin to put on the situation, this is a fact. And there is nothing wrong with it! The drugs that help these programmers stay up until 6 in the morning enable them to be MUCH more productive! The drugs that these people take on the weekends at parties help these people relax and enjoy themselves much in the same way that alcohol does, and in the same way as alcohol, these drugs must be used in moderation. Sure, there will be the few cases where someone loses control, someone fucks up and takes too much due to stupidity or lack of information about the drug they are taking or through addiction, but that is the exception to the rule. These are the same people that would die 10 years later in a drunk driving accident or because their bodies fail after constant alcoholism, but since this country is so wrapped up in the War on Drugs and Barry McCaffery's holy war of Publicity, the media will take the few exceptions and trumpet them as some sort of endemic.
To quote the prophet Bill Hicks, "If you don't beleive drugs have done some good things for us, do this for me, go home tonight and take all your records, all your tapes and all your CDs and burn them. Because you know all of those artists who have made all of that great music that has enhanced your lives, RRRRRRRRRRRRRRREEEAL fuckin high on drugs."
to get more info on Bill Hicks, check out Sacred Cow Productions
Also, check out SmokeDot, a Slash-based forum on drug information at www.smokedot.org
//Phizzy
I'm sitting on a Sun Ultra 10 right now running Solaris 7, and I can testify that Sun's OS is more stable, faster and better supported than Linux on Sparc. Redhat has never been the distro to do unprofitable things or to support unpopular products. They are the most mainstream linux distro, and they have to make choices like this to stay alive. There's nothing wrong with it, it's just a buisness decision. Linux for Sparc isn't going away, just Redhat for Sparc.
oh well.
//Phizzy
yeah, I'm all for stopping the searches across gnutella at the 2nd tier (dsl/cable/isdn, etc) so that modems can d/l (they don't suck that much b/w anyways.. let 'em download..) but don't pollute the rest of the network with advertisements for useless stuff.. even though that is kinda against the whole integrated client/server concept. Sometimes concepts just don't work well in practice.
//Phizzy
How about 'has crippled it'? I dunno about the rest of you, but I haven't been able to use Gnutella for a few weeks with any success. The ping-flood problem has taken its toll.. I'm waiting for GnutellaNP protocol though. Hopefully it will follow a more stable network design.
Personally, I'm all for a dynamically-hierachial-by-line-speed design, with OCx/Txs service cable/dsl, serving a pool of modems.. Gnutella has always mirrored the internet in principal, and it's about time it started to mirror the internet physically, or it will never recover.
//Phizzy
I hate to burst your bubble, but no.
1). They create large private peering points which are in general overutilized and badly managed. Individual, private peers create just as much bandwidth without concetrating routes into a single facility, which also provides more redundancy.
2). Huh? The Tier 1 ISPs (which InterNap is _not_, the Tier 1 ISP which I am employed by does not consider InterNap a peer, but a customer.) all have meshed BGP backbones these days and diverse paths on their backbone trunks. Network redundancy is a simple matter of planning, and nothing revolutionary.
3). Actually, it's called peering. InterNap has to pay for half of these peers with other Tier 2 and smaller-scale Tier 1 carriers which consider them a peer, and they have to pay for bandwidth from the top ISPs who consider them a customer.
The ISP world is much, much different behind the scenes than it is in the ISP's marketing materials. They in NO way portray a truthful picture of the workings of the Internet backbone.
....and what would they be using Linux for? Routers? I sure hope not. Certainly not switches. How would the desktop machine they use in their Noc or as a statistics monitor affect their backbone performance in any way?
//Phizzy
1. True..
2. Well, you can still _trace_ across any router, the routers just will not be sending the itrace packets, so you will not be able to get any more information about the traceback from this router. Other routers before and after that router which have itrace capability will, however, still report itrace packets.
3. Why would you care about an "odd spoofed packet"? The whole issue here is DDOS attacks, which by their nature have hundreds of thousands of packets, more than enough to get a good traceback. Plus, the more severe and large the DDOS attack is, and therefore the more prominent it is, the easier it will be to trace back.
Read the article.
//Phizzy
I don't beleive that the obvious comparison of this tech to that used in GATTACA is all that appropriate.. The climate of this country is such that that kind of screening would be VERY difficult to pass through any sort of government body.. such concepts as inequal opportunity (prop 11 in calif) based on race have had an extremely hard time gaining acceptance, as they should.. Americans have a very difficult time judging people based on their condition at birth.. it's one of the founding tenets of the country. I am speaking of the legal system here.. and I know all of you US-bashers are going to go off about how americans descriminate all the time, etcetcetc, but that is a personal choice that individuals and groups excercise. The system, as it is WRITTEN, does not, in general, discriminate based on birth condition.. so shut the hell up about GATTACA.. anyways.
The thing that initially worried me about this tech is the ability to scan for drug deposits/residues of things which are not deemed as socially acceptable, which can be easily achieved by the excuse of testing for bomb materials, etc.. this is the kind of abuse that I fear will become prevalent due to this technology and others like it. However, while this may in the short-term, if it is ever implemented in airports/schools/businesses/anywhere, be a terrible injustice and a big pain in my ass, in the long term, it will not be tolerated by the people. When the government takes to harrasing the people about things which are generally none of their business (eg, drugs), the fact will come out that EVERYONE has skeletons in their closet. EVERYONE does things that they don't want people to know about. EVERYONE has something to hide, and when/if the government starts exposing the habits of the populace and persecuting, the people will rise and overthrow or change the government.
I hope.
//Phizzy
... is just as much a part of information theory as information distribution. Information wants to be free, whether it is m374lic4_5uXx0r5.mp3 or the log entry show the time, date and IP of the person who downloaded it. This program provides tracking for napster and gnutella. Ok.. big deal. It doesn't comprimise Gnutella in any way other than to provide accounting for file downloads, which isn't such a hard thing to do, since gnutella is a multi-access broadcast media anyways.. all information transmitted on it is pretty much viewable by everyone. This program does nothing to stop people from downloading soungs, files, etc.
Plus, think about it.. if everyone on Gnutella got subpoenas on their doorstep towmorrow for downloading copyrighted information, we would have even more popular support for the cause. The more people the RIAA piss off with these bully tactics, the better off we are.
//Phizzy
Ok.. so Jon is saying that we should kill off the old media/new media buzzwords and replace with open media/closed media.. while I personally beleive that this is just an attempt for Katz to somehow tie himself in with the Open Source movement, by becoming an Open Journalist for the Open Media... I'll overlook that for the time being.
Now, Kat'z argument is that closed media has to be purchased, open media is free.. well wait a minute there Jon.. I can walk into my neighborhood coffee shop and pick up a newspaper and read it with my coffee in the morning... without paying a cent. I can also walk to my desk in the morning and read similar news on the web. I do not pay for the content in either of these cases. I can also read the newspaper at home, where I pay a small fee for delivery, content and the physical medium on which it is printed, OR I can walk over to my desk and read similar information on a web page. I pay for my internet access... I pay a fairly signigicant amount per month for the delivery of this content and arguably for the electronic medium on which it is printed.. and the company makes money off me with ad revenues. I don't see so profound of a philosophical different as Mr. Katz between Open and Closed media.
So quit trying to create more memes, do some research, actually give us some CONTENT.
Thank you,
//Phizzy
This was a wired story.. here is a link.
//Phizzy
Anybody else out there using Solaris (I'm on 2.6..) and Netscape 4.72? My box seems to not like the evil3d page.. NS just crashed twice in a row when loading this site. Can anyone try and confirm this to be an incompatability with the site/NS 4.72 or is it just my box being a piece?
Thanks,
//Phizzy
1. Yes, the route processor has to deal with routing updates and various bookkeeping functions mostly, but to route traffic the router still has to read the dest ip and compare it to the routing table (which is generally done on a processor on the interface cards nowadays, not the RP, but is still an electrical function). If you think you can do this optically, let me know.. I would love to see the details of it.
2. Yeah.. that's basically what I was saying, we will still have to deal with the speed of light as a limitation, but we won't have to deal with the 8ns/bit electrical latency you incurr every time you hit an electrical repeater, ATM switch, etcetcetc..
//Phizzy
Alright.. here's my rationale for saying that this cant' do layer 3 lookups.. which is hard to determine conclusively, beause we don't have much information to play with.. luckily we've got some good neural nets upstairs to interpolate with..
To route data, you have to look at the header of the IP packet and read the destination address and then compare it to the routing table and make a decision of which interface will move the data to the destination the quickest. I don't see any way for an optical device to do this. To read an IP header, you have to translate the light pulses to electrical signals and then pass it to the processor to make the routing decision.
The way I see this working is it has several streams of date to move from interface to interface, it knows which interface it has to move them to, and this technology is finding the fastest way for the switch to move multiple streams of data across the backplane simulteneously. It would sort of turn the backplane into a totally optical, neural net based ethernet, as it is in a sense a CSMACD (Carrier-Sense Multiple Access Collision Detect), multiaccess media, with the neural net avoiding collisions and finding the best way to transport the data..
of couse.. my neural net might be returning an invalid result for these inputs..
//Phizzy