ATI was caught optimizing Quake3. In theory, this is a *good* thing. Quake3 is used by a lot of people, and was/is the engine for many of the games that people buy top end video cards for
Lets put this in another context
Microsoft was caught optimizing Office XP. In theory, this is a *good* thing. Office XP is used by a lot of people, and was/is the engine for many of the tasks that people buy top end PCs for
Now if you'd said that then the anti-fanboys in the MS-sucks camp would be rating your karma far higher...
Actually the data you get back from a cd drive in audio extract mode is NOT the same as that on the disk.
If you CRC the data you get back and compare with the same rip you get from another brand of drive or ripper it will probably be different.
One of the main reasons is that audio CDs have no positioning information on them. In a data CD part of each data block is an index that allows the drive to know EXACTLY where on the disk it is reading, on an audio CD the whole data block is used to encode the music data. The TOC tells the CD drive where to find the start of the track, and the head starts reading from there. The differences are small enough you don't hear them normally - but in DAE you need to get the head exactly positioned and different drives and rippers combinations will have different accurracies and offsets will achieve this to varying degrees of success.
Yeah but those pasty guys that are experts on Star Trek lore and know wierd backwaters of Perl can also remove your systems/isp/country from the net without breaking into a sweat.
And trust me you can cause more pain to more people by dumping thier net connection than you ever could with a swat team.
First there's the pain for lusers that find thier mail IM and file swappers don't work, then there's the pain in the call centre when harrased techs try to explain to consumers what's going on, then there's the pain felt by the BOFH's with management hovering over thier shoulder, then there is further pain caused by the many minor bumps and niggles and repeats as the systems cope (or not) with the backlog built up in the down time. And after all that, if it was a good one, there are the recriminations on support boards, the calls for compensation, customers leaving, no end of replanning from the management team.
Ahhhh
The beauty is that a good DDOS is a gift that just keeps on giving.
The fact that a large number of law enforcement people have the unfortunate need to shoot people occasionally in thier line of work, and yet are not arrested seems to rather count against your point.
AND MORE IMPORTANTLY, THE GUY IS NOT TAKING ANYTHING
So he fills the tank up with the gas he used then? At least in the analogy he can, with the wireless network he can't be alturistic and leave a few cents to cover the cost of the bandwidth he used and the electricity used to run the systems
The use of an advertised and supported public access WiFi network is not "war-driving" - "war-driving" as derived from "war-dialling" is a very specific activity aimed at finding networks for use regardless of whether that access is authorised. To use a public WiFi network there is no need to snoop the packets, spoof the MAC address etc.
You cannot reasonably equate sitting in a cafe that runs a WAP for its customers to enjoy surfing while the sip thier coffee with someone sitting at the back end of the company carpark late firday night trying to pic up a link to an unsecured WAP on the third floor
Your car analogy is interesting, mainly because all cars sold do have locks, and all WAPs sold have at least some sort of security. In both cases if a user choses not to use the lock then thats thier problem, but in both cases it does not give someone else the right to use it because no precautions are taken.
Now STOP and THINK - if some one takes your personal car for a ride on the one night you forget to lock it after you take the groceries in are you going to
(A)Think - fair enough - I didn't prevent the perp from driving off and its only used half a tank of gas - no problem.
(B)Phone the cops and get them to dust the car for prints and check you X10 camera logs to try and get the perp arrested.
The only thing I hope is that Sony actually has an option to turn off processor sharing, just in case us hapless users don't want to support whatever cause it is that they are studying at the moment
Of course 'hapless consumers' actually buying the hardware from Sony, and buying software licensed by Sony isn't going to help fund Sony's R&D at all - I mean who would run a buisness like that? I'd expect that hardware to just sit on the shelf there being boycotted by all those consumers.
But if Sony provided the net connection for free - would that be a good buisness model?
The main objection I see to distributed computing is people not being compensated in some way for providing thier resources.
If company X provides me with a net connection for nothing to use for what I want, in return for using my hardware for something useful while I'm asleep - then I don't see anything inherently wrong with that principle, I think in fact its great.
Sure if it happens I'd like to know what I'm helping out with, but that doesn't invalidate the idea.
It might even be a great idea for ISPs - have the option of reducing your bandwidth bills by allwoing the ISP to pool your spare clock cycles for commercial work.
I'm not sure that this would stand up in court as DHCP is AFAIK not a recognised authorisation system.
Its just a way of automatically allocating a pool of IP address to machines so that they can communicate on the network.
Now I agree if the network doesn't have any further authentication then thats a bad thing - but I think it would be a hard thing to equate a DHCP grant with an explicit authorisation to use thier network.
A analog from the real world - if I walk up to an office building and get buzzed into reception, then it doesn't automatically mean the company has explicitly invited me into the whole building. They should have pass locks on the other doors, they should have a member of staff who's job it is to check who I'm coming to see and if I'm authorised to be there - but if they don't and I go rummaging through the offices, using thier phones, reading thier documents I'd still expect a trip to the police station if I get caught. Saying 'but the receptionist buzzed me in so I'm authorized to do this' is not going to be my first choice of defence.
In other news its also my responsibility to make sure I'm wearing a flak jacket to protect my personal system from someone discharging a lawfully held firearm in a public place when I visit the US.
Leaving my car unlocked might be regarded as reckless - and might invalidate my insurance under a duty of care clause. But its still theft if you open the door and drive away in it.
And actually there are laws in most legislations to stop you walking in to someone's house - I'd start looking under 'Trespass'
I don't keep my wallet in a digitally locked safe in my back pocket either - its still wrong for you come up and pull it out to get at my money.
Its even more wrong for you to walk just behind me with a huge placard in bright orange with a huge arrow pointing at my pocket with the words "Look this guy's wallet is here, come grab his money"
And I wonder why I hardly read slashdot these days...
Re:That's all very well but
on
AAC vs. OGG vs. MP3
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
This is similar to the phenomenon that photographers will tell you about: The human eye/brain system is very good at correcting for color cast. Cameras record the true color (within the bounds of the film type and latitude), so the cast is visible in the photo when it wasn't in the original scene. But photographers learn to see the full color and can't ignore a color cast, just a musicians learn to hear all the sound and can't easily ignore background noise
Well this photographer will tell you differently.
If you use film stock then a very important part of the printing process is setting the filters to give the correct colour balance - either by hand or by bulk scanning the film and normalizing to 18% grey.
On a digital camera or video camera you have to set the white balance so the camera electronics know the reference to record the colour signal against.
Neither film nor CCDs/CMOS sensors have anywhere near the dynamic range of the human eye, so they record a substantially less accurate picture with either the highlights or shadows saturated out.
The only way of accurately scientifically measuring the scene is with a multispectral scanning radiometer - as used in remote sensing.
Speaking as a sound engineer I find it difficult to agree with your stance about this odd entity 'the music' - every stage of the process should be as flat as possible unless it is an artistic decision to change it. So if I'm recording a live event I should use the best mics, with the flatest response, use the recording device with the flatest response on most headroom, and then master the recording. Now at this stage I can play around with the EQ on the recording and make an artistic decision on the timbre and tone of the sound - because I have not predisposed myself one way or the other by colouring the sound I recorded. I don't disagree that a doctored sound might sound better, but it is not more accurate.
In the real world systems aren't perfect, and those that are close cost a lot of money. Now you have to make a decision of what makes the best sense with your budget. Now some mics and recording systems colour the sound in a pleasing and predicateble way - it sounds like the setup you settled on does. A lot of people forget that the post production of a recording or the setup of the PA at live gigs is a very important part of the music creation process, guitars drums and keyboards may be your instruments of choice, but for a sound engineer the instruments of choice are mics gates EQs compressors and sound desks - in producing a recorded work both the musicians and engineers are important - would the Beatles work have been the same if it hadn't been for the creativity of the Abbey Road engineers who broke from the tradition of 'perfect reproduction' and started working with the musicians to create new ways of presenting the sound - probably not.
In your example the rolloff at high frequency is a common effect with high volume PAs - at high SPLs your ears get tired and the high frequencies are affected first. Most people can relate to that slightly muted feeling to thier hearing after a particularly good gig - so the slightly muted nature of the mic that you use matches people recollection of live gigs. Interestingly popular mics for live work will not be the same as those for live work - even with the same instrument and musical style.
What I find interesting is that I am sure I recall in the early days of 'Broadband' in the UK that OFTEL used the 500 kbps mark.
Then the government of the day made some election claim about 'Broadband Britain' and how much takeup they were going to push for.
Now I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but if OFTEL lowered the speed of what it called 'Broadband' to the same speed as channel bonded stock 2 channel ISDN then that suddenly means a lot more of the data links in use are 'Broadband' and the government wouldn't look quite so daft, nor actually have to do anything in terms of investing or legislating to try and ensure a decent availablity of good quality 'Broadband' technology...
The real threat right now is spammers, not file traders
Define the threat you are talking about. Thats the problem, no-one ever does.
If you regard excesive traffic that threatens the stability of the local network as a threat then I can tell you from first hand experience that the bandwidth consummed by spam is vastly less than that consummed by P2P technologies in most ISPs
Is something that affects and in some way or another harm or could harm us all
The one sure way of harming a network is flooding it with traffic. P2P is far more effective at that than spam. Spam floods may disable mail servers as they choke on the load, but rarely do they effect the underlying network.
First let me state that I absolutely agree with the sensible approach you are taking. Basing a policy around taking action against users that threaten the resource itself is sensible, clear and as you say does not involve any content based issues.
For instance a department ftping a large amount of image data may very well be legitimate, but if it threatens the stability of the network for other users then you can ask them to throttle thier use or schedule it at quieter times.
Now my slight disagreement
Law enforcement is the job of the police, not sys-admins
You see the problem here is that sys-admins DO need to enforce the law sometimes. For instance if, as in the EU, there are laws on the protection of private data, then you as an admin need to enforce the access and auditing to that data. Its not the job of the local police force.
You need to enforce the laws about computer security, and assist any law enforcement in bringing a prosecution against those that break into the systems under your care.
I have no doubt at some level you do inspect your traffic for anomolous events that might be indicative of compromised machines and attacks on your systems. And again I am sure that you have in place audit systems checking file areas for SUID scripts, rootkit evidence and the like.
I think that as a sys-admin you do have a grey area here in that you do have some legal responsibilites to both protect your users and also to police them
I mean this thing had less computing power than your average calculator and yet it managed to be useful for thirty years?
And this is something we tend to lose sight of, we've become so conditioned to believe that something somehow becomes less capable than it originally was as time passes.
A screwdriver today will still do the job it did 100 years ago.
No - I'm not. But I do make a value judgment, and that judgement is that I'd prefer my privacy to be in the hands of a legally accountable entity, rather than trusting someone who may not even be traceable.
I hold various radio licenses in the UK and I can show you the agreements I have to sign that make me legally accountable for protecting any information I am privy to in the use of those licenses.
In fact its one of the biggest difficulties in setting up internet tunnels and access points for radio packet data networks.
I also work in the service industry side of telecoms - I can show you some pretty stringent legal agreements that have to be worked within in this industry designed to protect your privacy.
Can you explain how my privacy is likely to be any better in a network run by hundreds of people with no legal accountabilty and no way to verify thier trustworthyness?
Or put it this way, would you be happy to hand your credit card details, home address, and other identity numbers on the back of your buisness card to every single person that attends a Linux Conference - because those are the sort of people who will be running those nodes, and that will be the kind of data you will at some point send via the systems under thier care.
A very great number of enlightened, trustworthy and down right honest people run linux/bsd systems for the good of the community, but then again its also the platform used by some of the most untrustworthy people on the net who would delight on being able to use your details to run up credit buying hardware for thier own purposes.
In all these discussions I never see any proposal to seperate the good geek from the bad geek. Assuming all geeks are rosy cheeked wholesome people is just as dangerous as believing every single government worker is out to get you.
Errr - do you have any idea of the size of traffic carried by backhaul telcos?
Or the very very serious iron needed in switches and management systems to make sure it works?
And who gets to decide the routing priority in these networks?
Who gets to warrant the privacy of data? Telecoms companies are bound by some pretty strong laws to protect the privacy of the voice and data traffic they carry - home supported APs wont.
the core mission of the IEEE should be offended by the blatent Un-American nature of the DMCA and take a stand
Errr - the IEEE is an international organisation - hence the 'I' in the name.
So the 'core mission' of the IEEE is to promote the International aspects of standardisation etc.
For issues purely pertaining to one specifice country ther are regional groups. For the US this is IEEE-USA, and its this group that is raising the discusion papers.
Forgive me as a UK outsider but the US normally takes a very dim view of International organisations that try to influence its domestic policy - cf current discussion the UN or the Kyoto agreements.
Are you really calling for an Non-US organisation to define what US Patriotism is and isn't?
The IEEE will always be wishy washy as it has to deall with all countriee - the region groups such as IEEE-USA need to campaign on country specific issues.
I might agree with you that the main IEEE may need to take a stand on the way some elements of the US are trying to extend the reach and use of the DMCA outside of US territory, such as happened in the Elcomsoft case. However even here it is probably a compaign that would be more succesful if carried out by the American members of the IEEE.
Why is there this persistan assumption that the last mile is the ONLY problem
ON ITS OWN extra bandwidth won't help, 3G mobile data is struggling in Europe because no one can find a compelling reason to have that much bandwidth on the move.
There has to be other changes as well to drive this - I can't sell someone an expensive fast link if thier web browsing gets not very much faster.
If I browse a website that runs on a T1 link, there is no point me having greater bandwidth than a T1 link.
So say Joe Public gets 10Mb ethernet to his home - is it really going to improve things if the server bandwidth is not upgraded?
Why is there this persistan assumption that the last mile is the ONLY problem?
The current economics of ISPs works because they can share an expensive guarenteed rate pipe amongst a number of customers.
If the bandwidth to the customer becomes comparable to the bandwidth to the ISP, and the customer demands the use of that bandwidth 24/7, then the dynamics change and the price rises.
Over in the UK we are already seeing bandwidth restrictions on DSL ISPs, because 24/7 users are saturating the ISP's pipe.
Its only going to work if the backhaul services used by ISPs also increase at the same capacity\cost ratio.
Slashdot Mirror
Nope - you will still get minor bit corruption from jitter correction and error correction, some from the drive, some from the extract tool.
Not much - and hopefully none - but probably still there.
ATI was caught optimizing Quake3. In theory, this is a *good* thing. Quake3 is used by a lot of people, and was/is the engine for many of the games that people buy top end video cards for
Lets put this in another context
Microsoft was caught optimizing Office XP. In theory, this is a *good* thing. Office XP is used by a lot of people, and was/is the engine for many of the tasks that people buy top end PCs for
Now if you'd said that then the anti-fanboys in the MS-sucks camp would be rating your karma far higher...
ROFL
(What was your IP again - purely for *ahem* research reasons)
Actually the data you get back from a cd drive in audio extract mode is NOT the same as that on the disk.
If you CRC the data you get back and compare with the same rip you get from another brand of drive or ripper it will probably be different.
One of the main reasons is that audio CDs have no positioning information on them. In a data CD part of each data block is an index that allows the drive to know EXACTLY where on the disk it is reading, on an audio CD the whole data block is used to encode the music data. The TOC tells the CD drive where to find the start of the track, and the head starts reading from there. The differences are small enough you don't hear them normally - but in DAE you need to get the head exactly positioned and different drives and rippers combinations will have different accurracies and offsets will achieve this to varying degrees of success.
Yeah but those pasty guys that are experts on Star Trek lore and know wierd backwaters of Perl can also remove your systems/isp/country from the net without breaking into a sweat.
:)
And trust me you can cause more pain to more people by dumping thier net connection than you ever could with a swat team.
First there's the pain for lusers that find thier mail IM and file swappers don't work, then there's the pain in the call centre when harrased techs try to explain to consumers what's going on, then there's the pain felt by the BOFH's with management hovering over thier shoulder, then there is further pain caused by the many minor bumps and niggles and repeats as the systems cope (or not) with the backlog built up in the down time. And after all that, if it was a good one, there are the recriminations on support boards, the calls for compensation, customers leaving, no end of replanning from the management team.
Ahhhh
The beauty is that a good DDOS is a gift that just keeps on giving.
Truly Cthulhu is amongst us
Shooting people is NEVER legal
The fact that a large number of law enforcement people have the unfortunate need to shoot people occasionally in thier line of work, and yet are not arrested seems to rather count against your point.
AND MORE IMPORTANTLY, THE GUY IS NOT TAKING ANYTHING
So he fills the tank up with the gas he used then? At least in the analogy he can, with the wireless network he can't be alturistic and leave a few cents to cover the cost of the bandwidth he used and the electricity used to run the systems
The use of an advertised and supported public access WiFi network is not "war-driving" - "war-driving" as derived from "war-dialling" is a very specific activity aimed at finding networks for use regardless of whether that access is authorised. To use a public WiFi network there is no need to snoop the packets, spoof the MAC address etc.
You cannot reasonably equate sitting in a cafe that runs a WAP for its customers to enjoy surfing while the sip thier coffee with someone sitting at the back end of the company carpark late firday night trying to pic up a link to an unsecured WAP on the third floor
Your car analogy is interesting, mainly because all cars sold do have locks, and all WAPs sold have at least some sort of security. In both cases if a user choses not to use the lock then thats thier problem, but in both cases it does not give someone else the right to use it because no precautions are taken.
Now STOP and THINK - if some one takes your personal car for a ride on the one night you forget to lock it after you take the groceries in are you going to
(A)Think - fair enough - I didn't prevent the perp from driving off and its only used half a tank of gas - no problem. (B)Phone the cops and get them to dust the car for prints and check you X10 camera logs to try and get the perp arrested.
The only thing I hope is that Sony actually has an option to turn off processor sharing, just in case us hapless users don't want to support whatever cause it is that they are studying at the moment
Of course 'hapless consumers' actually buying the hardware from Sony, and buying software licensed by Sony isn't going to help fund Sony's R&D at all - I mean who would run a buisness like that? I'd expect that hardware to just sit on the shelf there being boycotted by all those consumers.
But if Sony provided the net connection for free - would that be a good buisness model?
The main objection I see to distributed computing is people not being compensated in some way for providing thier resources.
If company X provides me with a net connection for nothing to use for what I want, in return for using my hardware for something useful while I'm asleep - then I don't see anything inherently wrong with that principle, I think in fact its great.
Sure if it happens I'd like to know what I'm helping out with, but that doesn't invalidate the idea.
It might even be a great idea for ISPs - have the option of reducing your bandwidth bills by allwoing the ISP to pool your spare clock cycles for commercial work.
I'm not sure that this would stand up in court as DHCP is AFAIK not a recognised authorisation system.
Its just a way of automatically allocating a pool of IP address to machines so that they can communicate on the network.
Now I agree if the network doesn't have any further authentication then thats a bad thing - but I think it would be a hard thing to equate a DHCP grant with an explicit authorisation to use thier network.
A analog from the real world - if I walk up to an office building and get buzzed into reception, then it doesn't automatically mean the company has explicitly invited me into the whole building. They should have pass locks on the other doors, they should have a member of staff who's job it is to check who I'm coming to see and if I'm authorised to be there - but if they don't and I go rummaging through the offices, using thier phones, reading thier documents I'd still expect a trip to the police station if I get caught. Saying 'but the receptionist buzzed me in so I'm authorized to do this' is not going to be my first choice of defence.
An interesting argument.
In other news its also my responsibility to make sure I'm wearing a flak jacket to protect my personal system from someone discharging a lawfully held firearm in a public place when I visit the US.
Leaving my car unlocked might be regarded as reckless - and might invalidate my insurance under a duty of care clause. But its still theft if you open the door and drive away in it.
And actually there are laws in most legislations to stop you walking in to someone's house - I'd start looking under 'Trespass'
I don't keep my wallet in a digitally locked safe in my back pocket either - its still wrong for you come up and pull it out to get at my money.
Its even more wrong for you to walk just behind me with a huge placard in bright orange with a huge arrow pointing at my pocket with the words "Look this guy's wallet is here, come grab his money"
And I wonder why I hardly read slashdot these days...
This is similar to the phenomenon that photographers will tell you about: The human eye/brain system is very good at correcting for color cast. Cameras record the true color (within the bounds of the film type and latitude), so the cast is visible in the photo when it wasn't in the original scene. But photographers learn to see the full color and can't ignore a color cast, just a musicians learn to hear all the sound and can't easily ignore background noise
Well this photographer will tell you differently.
If you use film stock then a very important part of the printing process is setting the filters to give the correct colour balance - either by hand or by bulk scanning the film and normalizing to 18% grey.
On a digital camera or video camera you have to set the white balance so the camera electronics know the reference to record the colour signal against.
Neither film nor CCDs/CMOS sensors have anywhere near the dynamic range of the human eye, so they record a substantially less accurate picture with either the highlights or shadows saturated out.
The only way of accurately scientifically measuring the scene is with a multispectral scanning radiometer - as used in remote sensing.
Speaking as a sound engineer I find it difficult to agree with your stance about this odd entity 'the music' - every stage of the process should be as flat as possible unless it is an artistic decision to change it. So if I'm recording a live event I should use the best mics, with the flatest response, use the recording device with the flatest response on most headroom, and then master the recording. Now at this stage I can play around with the EQ on the recording and make an artistic decision on the timbre and tone of the sound - because I have not predisposed myself one way or the other by colouring the sound I recorded. I don't disagree that a doctored sound might sound better, but it is not more accurate.
In the real world systems aren't perfect, and those that are close cost a lot of money. Now you have to make a decision of what makes the best sense with your budget. Now some mics and recording systems colour the sound in a pleasing and predicateble way - it sounds like the setup you settled on does. A lot of people forget that the post production of a recording or the setup of the PA at live gigs is a very important part of the music creation process, guitars drums and keyboards may be your instruments of choice, but for a sound engineer the instruments of choice are mics gates EQs compressors and sound desks - in producing a recorded work both the musicians and engineers are important - would the Beatles work have been the same if it hadn't been for the creativity of the Abbey Road engineers who broke from the tradition of 'perfect reproduction' and started working with the musicians to create new ways of presenting the sound - probably not.
In your example the rolloff at high frequency is a common effect with high volume PAs - at high SPLs your ears get tired and the high frequencies are affected first. Most people can relate to that slightly muted feeling to thier hearing after a particularly good gig - so the slightly muted nature of the mic that you use matches people recollection of live gigs. Interestingly popular mics for live work will not be the same as those for live work - even with the same instrument and musical style.
What I find interesting is that I am sure I recall in the early days of 'Broadband' in the UK that OFTEL used the 500 kbps mark.
Then the government of the day made some election claim about 'Broadband Britain' and how much takeup they were going to push for.
Now I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but if OFTEL lowered the speed of what it called 'Broadband' to the same speed as channel bonded stock 2 channel ISDN then that suddenly means a lot more of the data links in use are 'Broadband' and the government wouldn't look quite so daft, nor actually have to do anything in terms of investing or legislating to try and ensure a decent availablity of good quality 'Broadband' technology...
Actually in all seriousness there is something here that you don't often see acknowledged.
How much filesharing goes on via 'SneakerNet' and not via P2P?
School age children I know swap music files ripped as MP3 on cheap CD-Rs in the school grounds.
I mean why bother spending several hours on your Dad's computer when you can just swap in class next day?
The real threat right now is spammers, not file traders
Define the threat you are talking about. Thats the problem, no-one ever does.
If you regard excesive traffic that threatens the stability of the local network as a threat then I can tell you from first hand experience that the bandwidth consummed by spam is vastly less than that consummed by P2P technologies in most ISPs
Is something that affects and in some way or another harm or could harm us all
The one sure way of harming a network is flooding it with traffic. P2P is far more effective at that than spam. Spam floods may disable mail servers as they choke on the load, but rarely do they effect the underlying network.
First let me state that I absolutely agree with the sensible approach you are taking. Basing a policy around taking action against users that threaten the resource itself is sensible, clear and as you say does not involve any content based issues.
For instance a department ftping a large amount of image data may very well be legitimate, but if it threatens the stability of the network for other users then you can ask them to throttle thier use or schedule it at quieter times.
Now my slight disagreement
Law enforcement is the job of the police, not sys-admins
You see the problem here is that sys-admins DO need to enforce the law sometimes. For instance if, as in the EU, there are laws on the protection of private data, then you as an admin need to enforce the access and auditing to that data. Its not the job of the local police force.
You need to enforce the laws about computer security, and assist any law enforcement in bringing a prosecution against those that break into the systems under your care.
I have no doubt at some level you do inspect your traffic for anomolous events that might be indicative of compromised machines and attacks on your systems. And again I am sure that you have in place audit systems checking file areas for SUID scripts, rootkit evidence and the like.
I think that as a sys-admin you do have a grey area here in that you do have some legal responsibilites to both protect your users and also to police them
I mean this thing had less computing power than your average calculator and yet it managed to be useful for thirty years?
And this is something we tend to lose sight of, we've become so conditioned to believe that something somehow becomes less capable than it originally was as time passes.
A screwdriver today will still do the job it did 100 years ago.
Are you really sure about your privacy?
No - I'm not. But I do make a value judgment, and that judgement is that I'd prefer my privacy to be in the hands of a legally accountable entity, rather than trusting someone who may not even be traceable.
I hold various radio licenses in the UK and I can show you the agreements I have to sign that make me legally accountable for protecting any information I am privy to in the use of those licenses.
In fact its one of the biggest difficulties in setting up internet tunnels and access points for radio packet data networks.
I also work in the service industry side of telecoms - I can show you some pretty stringent legal agreements that have to be worked within in this industry designed to protect your privacy.
Can you explain how my privacy is likely to be any better in a network run by hundreds of people with no legal accountabilty and no way to verify thier trustworthyness?
Or put it this way, would you be happy to hand your credit card details, home address, and other identity numbers on the back of your buisness card to every single person that attends a Linux Conference - because those are the sort of people who will be running those nodes, and that will be the kind of data you will at some point send via the systems under thier care.
A very great number of enlightened, trustworthy and down right honest people run linux/bsd systems for the good of the community, but then again its also the platform used by some of the most untrustworthy people on the net who would delight on being able to use your details to run up credit buying hardware for thier own purposes.
In all these discussions I never see any proposal to seperate the good geek from the bad geek. Assuming all geeks are rosy cheeked wholesome people is just as dangerous as believing every single government worker is out to get you.
Errr - do you have any idea of the size of traffic carried by backhaul telcos?
Or the very very serious iron needed in switches and management systems to make sure it works?
And who gets to decide the routing priority in these networks?
Who gets to warrant the privacy of data? Telecoms companies are bound by some pretty strong laws to protect the privacy of the voice and data traffic they carry - home supported APs wont.
Yes I agree this is way cool.
But if this group is anything like the small Amuteur Radio groups I used to work with thier budget is zip/nada.
So we link thier page, hosted at www.globalgold.co.uk, from the main story.
Anyonw here going to help out with thier excess charges??
Think people how you would feel if you had to spend the budget for your next 250 quid access point on excess hosting charges instead.
The commercial and news site links - fair game - but is it really fair to hit the little guys, did we really need that link on the front page?
the core mission of the IEEE should be offended by the blatent Un-American nature of the DMCA and take a stand
Errr - the IEEE is an international organisation - hence the 'I' in the name.
So the 'core mission' of the IEEE is to promote the International aspects of standardisation etc.
For issues purely pertaining to one specifice country ther are regional groups. For the US this is IEEE-USA, and its this group that is raising the discusion papers.
Forgive me as a UK outsider but the US normally takes a very dim view of International organisations that try to influence its domestic policy - cf current discussion the UN or the Kyoto agreements.
Are you really calling for an Non-US organisation to define what US Patriotism is and isn't?
The IEEE will always be wishy washy as it has to deall with all countriee - the region groups such as IEEE-USA need to campaign on country specific issues.
I might agree with you that the main IEEE may need to take a stand on the way some elements of the US are trying to extend the reach and use of the DMCA outside of US territory, such as happened in the Elcomsoft case. However even here it is probably a compaign that would be more succesful if carried out by the American members of the IEEE.
Which is why I state quite clearly:
Why is there this persistan assumption that the last mile is the ONLY problem
ON ITS OWN extra bandwidth won't help, 3G mobile data is struggling in Europe because no one can find a compelling reason to have that much bandwidth on the move.
There has to be other changes as well to drive this - I can't sell someone an expensive fast link if thier web browsing gets not very much faster.
Have you ever set up an SSH tunnel?
Yep
In other words, your point is without merit unless he works somewhere where *using* SSH would set off bells.
Like my company - hard firewall, web and ftp proxy only with full content filtering - SSH used by under 5 people... which was my point.
My apologies for keeping the word 'tunnel' in my discussion to keep it in context, when I was refering to SSH itself.
But that does rather rely on you being able to SSH tunnel out - frankly rather abvious at the firewall if you are the only one doing it.
"Hmmm, Mike's set up an SSH tunnel between his desktop and an IP address in the range of an ISP - I wonder what *valid* reason he's doing that for..."
Yes but as I'm at work OUTSIDE OF THE HOURS I'M PAID FOR I figure fairs fair.
Extra bandwidth is not the universal pancea.
If I browse a website that runs on a T1 link, there is no point me having greater bandwidth than a T1 link.
So say Joe Public gets 10Mb ethernet to his home - is it really going to improve things if the server bandwidth is not upgraded?
Why is there this persistan assumption that the last mile is the ONLY problem?
The current economics of ISPs works because they can share an expensive guarenteed rate pipe amongst a number of customers.
If the bandwidth to the customer becomes comparable to the bandwidth to the ISP, and the customer demands the use of that bandwidth 24/7, then the dynamics change and the price rises.
Over in the UK we are already seeing bandwidth restrictions on DSL ISPs, because 24/7 users are saturating the ISP's pipe.
Its only going to work if the backhaul services used by ISPs also increase at the same capacity\cost ratio.