And in semi-industrial areas, property near railroad tracks is hot. "Telco hotels" like to locate there, because even if there isn't fiber in the easements now, it's easy to get it there.
So now I wonder what would happen if residents with railroad tracks in their backyard wanted to lease dark fiber. The telcos normally bitch about the expense of running fiber to the customer, but what if it's already there?
Next thing you know, the El Cheapo apartments next to the tracks will be a big thing among geeks who want to be the lowest-ping bastards on the server. This has serious potential.
I wouldn't say "all we'll ever need", but I think you're on the right track. The number of strands might remain about the same, but the glass will continue to get better.
Ten years ago, polarization mode dispersion compensation was unheard of. Ergo, modern equipment that's PMD-sensitive doesn't like running on old fiber, at least not over reasonable distances. There are a few efforts to change the situation. Kestrel, for instance, makes a machine called the Talon that they claim is immune to the effects of PMD because of its RF-like design. Nifty, but rare.
The general push in the industry is towards more-demanding systems, OC192 is all over the place now, with OC768 in the wings. And that's just over one WDM channel. Yes, we'll see more channels in DWDM systems. Yes, we'll see faster TDM systems. And yes, most of this stuff will require even cleaner, purer glass.
The fiber that's in the ground is good for today's and maybe tomorrow's systems, but not next week's, unless there's a real demand for tolerant machines like the Talon. The fact that the dark fiber out there is now essentially free might fuel some of that demand, but trust me: Given the choice between making a fast, finicky, expensive system (that forces the provider to upgrade their outside plant), versus making a fast, robust, tolerant system (that places more engineering burden on the manufacturer), they'll always pick the former.
Hence, in 7 years we'll see fiber crews out there again, replacing cables that've never been more than a few percent utilized, with the Next Big Thing in photonics. Watch.
Another way to use some of this fiber would be to lower co-lo costs. Imagine if almost anyone could lease rack space at the local CO or telco hotel, where the fiber already runs. Nevermind the fact that the unwashed masses haven't a clue what to do with singlemode fiber, the details will sort themselves out. I'd get an apartment next-door to the CO, if I could get a fiber pair from here to downtown for next to nothing. Plunk an old OC-12 on that sucker, sell tributaries to my neighbors, heh.. Gnutella would never be the same. Buahaha.
It sounds like the laws of all member nations are logically-ANDed together to produce the most restrictive mask. I'd be interested to see what horrible combinations this would produce.
What if one country's law explicitly requires an action, and another's law explicitly prohibits it? Probably depends on whose guns are bigger.
Will traditional ad-blocking software work with this? If they're flashing ads into my BIOS so that I see sponsorship messages during boot, I don't think the Junkbusters are going to be able to stop it.
Anyone think it'd be feasible to hijack this system and use it to provide greater USER configurability, custom logos during boot, and so on?
This frightens me, not just because it's happening already, but because it looks like the shape of things to come.
It looks like the computer companies are taking lessons from the cell phone industry. Your computer will soon render itself useless unless you're sending money into the appropriate chain.
Phoenix to your ISP: "Hey, we're gonna switch your user to our ISP unless you pay us not to."
Your ISP: "Hey, you can't do that!"
Phoenix: "We just did."
In addition, if you thought you got telemarketing calls and junk-mail NOW, just wait! Phoenix knows which batches of mobos were shipped to which retailers. Now they'll know exactly where those computers are being used. Paying in cash is futile, you WILL be tracked. Changing your browser's start page is futile, your PC WILL contact someone. Not using Outlook is futile, you WILL have programs installed on your computer without your consent.
Also, I doubt this thing can be made secure. How long until someone figures out a way to overflow the BIOS and install arbitrary code into the Flash chip? The ultimate BackOrifice involves control from the moment the machine's powered on.
Only massive public outcry, like that which surrounded the Pentium III serial number, will persuade companies not to do this.
News-trinos: Tiny headlines, carrying almost no weight, which move at the speed of light. Only extremely rarely does a newstrino cause an observable reaction.
Think about it. How many particles pass through Slashdot's submission queue, and only about 10 per day are picked up by the detectors?
Pronto is an SBC project, and it's utter bullshit. By the time they finish with it, we'll all be too old to care about DSL.
The idea behind Pronto is to replace all the old SLC's with DSL-capable ones, specifically the Alcatel/DSC brand Litespan 2012. It may be different equipment in other areas.
In the meantime, bother them to provision you a T1 circuit and bill it like it was a DSL. Even the older SLC's can handle T1.
Yup, I'm looking at the Litespan 2012 docs now, and it has HDSL channel units. At the very least, I guarantee the telco can give you a T1, because even the older DLC's support DS1 channels.
Cblood has it right in a previous comment, your local telco can do it, they're just not allowed to, because then they'd have to let everyone else do it. Write a letter to your state's commerce department, one to the FTC, and one to the FCC. Explain how much easier it would be if the CLEC's were allowed to resell service from the ILEC's DLCs in this situation.
I've been using one of these to pay for my Earthlink account for several months now. It doesn't care what billing info you enter, the card will validate with anything.
Exactly.. The NSA's not stupid enough to get caught. OTDR's aren't cheap either, and it's not like you leave one connected to the line. Although with bidirectional DWDM, I suppose it would be possible. The problem with common OTDR equipment is that it sends out a very strong pulse, and it's not usually a specific narrow wavelength. This would break most DWDM schemes, causing them to flip over onto the protection side of the ring. I don't know about the output isolation of DWDM units either, whether there's enough channel separation to allow an OTDR unit to perceive its own signal coming back among the noise.
It should be possible to design a dedicated-purpose OTDR that could be left connected to a DWDM unit's spare channel, and periodically scan the line. IANA Optical Engineer, and I don't know whether receivers are sensitive enough to resolve reflected signals with the necessary resolution. (I'm thinking erbium?)
Assuming that most undersea cable operators have redundant paths and protection switching, they could take a circuit down, OTDR the thing, and bring it back up, but why? There's no profit for them in this. Most SONET receivers, at least the big Nortel ones, will report their received light level in software. That's a good enough indication of impending cable problems, and it doesn't involve poking at an already-fragile circuit.
I've heard the expression "code ninja" countless times. Many of my peers view programming as a martial art. The NY Times itself has used the phrase "cyber samurai", referring to Shimomura.
The Obfuscated C contest, or any programming contest, is a perfect example here. Compare vegetable mosaics, where something absurd or unexpected, viewed from a distance, produces an aesthetically pleasing (or at least intriguing) result.
Also mention the "sig programs" that some programmers include in their signatures. Most are obfuscated, and their expressiveness is the exact reason that they are included in signatures.
Personally, in high school, I could look over a program listing and tell who wrote it. Even if the line-numbering (yes, this was BASIC) was standardized and comments had been removed, the structure of the code said something about the author. Just a few weeks into the course, distinct programming styles emerged.
Code can be more expressive than most speech. Sometimes the essence of art is in doing without, and the strict syntax rules of a programming language can force an author to find creative ways to accomplish a task that might be easily described in a looser language like English. This is art beyond the shadow of a doubt.
The article is talking about a fuel processor, which produces the hydrogen which is then fed into a fuel cell. The fuel cell itself is existing tech, the innovation here is the processor.
Seems to me that this would have great applications elsewhere, say in remotely-located weather stations.
I'm sure a lot of geeks loathed their gym teachers. Here's my reason. I personally still hate Sue Reynolds, (East Detroit school district, Michigan) because she didn't believe asthma was a real condition.. "Oh, that's just another word for sissy kids." I wish that rather than stopping in the middle of a run and collapsing on the floor, I'd kept going to the point where I passed out. Maybe if I'd been hospitalized, that demon of a woman wouldn't still be working there. Instead, I got myself disciplined for insubordination.
On a lighter note, I have to pay tribute to my HS biology teacher. Lotte Geller was the best, she challenged me unlike any other teacher. In a room that was part greenhouse, part lab, part classroom, and part candy store, my classmates and I got some of the best teaching around. The class I was enrolled in was just the basic 9th grade bio, but there was nothing basic about it. When I was done with the normal coursework, we'd talk about everything, my favorite topics included the folded structure of proteins and DNA, and the mechanisms by which genes were selected to be expressed. When Lotte didn't know something, it was up to me to find out and report back. Her stack of Scientific American back issues was at my disposal. I secretly suspect that sometimes she feigned gaps in her knowledge just to get me to do the research, because when I'd return from the library, she'd discuss my findings with a suspicious amount of background.
I can't say enough good things about Lotte. For years I'd been less than enthusiastic about school, to say the least. Her class was the first that I really cared about, where I was disappointed in myself if I let down the teacher or my classmates.
My class met immediately after her AP Biopsychology class, and I'd usually pass some of those students in the hall as they were leaving. "We talked about you again today", they'd say. Apparently I was a favorite example when certain conditions came up in class.
I've been kicking myself lately for not having taken more bio courses in school, as Lotte insisted I should. Of course, the public school I transferred to didn't offer anything at the level I wanted to take, and I didn't go to college. If I do ever get off my ass and pursue biology, it'll be because of Lotte. May she rest in peace.
You should have a HardSID card in your PC. Because sometimes, emulation just doesn't cut it.
http://www.hardsid.com/
Having blown up my own SID chip at the age of 11 while trying to wire it directly to an amplifier (to avoid the distortion caused by the RF mod/dem stages of the TV), I can claim to be a true fan of the sound these chips make. The emulation you'll find now is pretty good, but very CPU-intensive. Still, nothing beats the real thing.
P.S. I don't get money from these guys; I don't even know them. I just think it's cool.
FYI, SCSI and IEEE1394 have already approved something similar without controversy. It's still hard to say whether the CP proposal will become part of the ATA standard
A fiber can carry most anything you throw at it. Modern fiber optic systems use "Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing", or DWDM, which is a fancy term for "several signals on one fiber, each using its own color, and a prism at each end to split things up".
In order to reach the press release bandwidth, you'd need to toss an OC-192 on every possible wavelength of every fiber in the cable. Riiight. Keep in mind that these beasts are managed by corporations, which are political by their very nature. Efficiency is not their strong point. Also remember that this whole network was designed for circuit-based telecommunications traffic, not the packets most Slashdotters are familiar with. The process of making the twain meet is not a straightforward one.
Most telco networks don't run at anywhere near 100% utilization. Admittedly, wet cable is expensive stuff, so it's not often wasted. But if anyone believes that the ring could carry that amount of traffic NOW, all I can say is, stick to your software and avoid telco networks, for everyone's benefit.
Furthermore, fiber of this sort doesn't directly affect the internet. You don't simply jam a transcontinental fiber into your Ethernet card, folks. Packet and circuit networks don't get along with each other. First, you cram your packets into an ATM stream, then you wrap the ATM data in a SONET transport layer. If you're using a really big ATM switch, you might be dealing with as much as an OC-48's worth of bandwith in one chunk here. But we're not done yet...
See, you don't want to plug that OC-48 straight into the fiber, because then what would happen when you want to add more? So you're going to use the signals coming from your routers as tributaries to feed a big honkin' optical terminal like an OC-192. All the SONET payloads from the various tributary interfaces will be concatenated and shot out the high speed side. The lasers in said terminal will be tuned to a particular wavelength, and used to feed a DWDM coupler. Finally, the multicolored signal will head to the beach and go for a swim. Several Erbium-doped amplifiers later, (search for EDFA and do some reading!) the signal emerges in another continent and the whole process reverses itself.
Keep in mind that any one company probably doesn't buy bandwidth in chunks larger than OC-12. Your packets will move more freely, yes, but nobody's gonna be seeing 120 Gigabits any time soon. The amount of paperwork, and the sheer number of companies that're involved in simply setting up one circuit, is phenomenal.
Oh, and as far as survivability goes, that's old news. SONET was designed from the ground up to incorporate a redundant ring architecture. The data's always transmitted over two fibers at once, and the receiving device picks the cleaner of the two incoming streams. Network planners are careful to route the two paths diversely, so no one failure can bring down the ring. Ideally, someone can backhoe an entire fiber conduit and not knock down any traffic because every ring served by that conduit was ALSO served by another one on the other side of town. Ditto goes for undersea cables.
I'm this close to setting up a little site to introduce computer geeks to telco concepts, so y'all don't keep swallowing these press releases whole. Anyone wanna help?
The Attorney General's release was entirely devoid of facts surrounding the hardware failure. I'm curious why it was mentioned at all. Is it being implied that the attack caused the hardware to fail, or anything similar?
I'm also interested, if you can comment at this time, in exactly what transpired at the "meeting" that was mentioned. I can't speak for the accused, but I think it'd be pretty stupid to meet with the admin of a box I'd just compromised. I'd only do so in good faith, perhaps to help the admin patch the hole, etc. Can you tell us whether Salcedo was summoned to the meeting by legal means, or whether he came forth on his own? This is crucial, I think, to the public's understanding of the case.
Calm down. I see where you're coming from, but let's look at this logically:
Breaking and entering causes real damage. Someone has to pay to replace or repair what got broken during the entry. Trespassing, on the other hand, is just sneaking in through an existing hole. When someone cracks the security of a system, they haven't physically touched anything. They've just found a hole that was always there, and exploited it. The hole was caused by the software designer who didn't bounds-check, or the system admin who didn't secure something. The cracker didn't cause the hole, and if it gets fixed after the crack, then it needed fixing in the first place.
Follow me so far? That's Salcedo's case.
Now let's talk about what happens once someone's in. Malicious destruction of property is when you deliberately go break things just to break them, and it has a monetary value assigned to it. Vandalism is kid stuff, it's stupid, and it's usually trivial to clean up. So let's say some intruder changes some HTML. The sum total cleanup effort involves restoring the previous versions of the pages, which most vandals just rename in the first place.
Sounds like Salens is being charged with a FELONY, think about it, a felony, for defacing a web site from his own Earthlink account. Stupid, yes, but not a felony.
He's anything but a script kiddie, trust me. I know the guy. What bothers me is that the "meeting" with the M-net people doesn't sound anything like what he described. I'll post specifics when I get a chance to talk to him.
What bothers me is this line: On May 31, while Salcedo had access to the M-Net system, the system crashed and did not recover.
That's what they're charging him with. The hardware took a shit shortly after he got in, and they're using/that/ as the monetary basis for the charges. They're a nonprofit with essentially no budget. They had no way to fund new hardware, until this came along. Hey, let's blame it on the guy who/approached us/ and told us about a security hole!
I have in my hand a copy of the AT&T Standard Technical Training Course, job aid 9, special services telephone handbook. Dated September 1978, this book makes absolutely no mention whatsoever of out-of-band signaling. It's a great review of signalling units for the various carrier systems, trouble-clearing procedures on 2- and 4-wire circuits, so on and so forth.. but everything's still VF signaling. (Even right down to the little note about using 2604 Hz test tones: "Do not measure at this frequency if 2600 Hz signaling units are used in the layout. Instead, interpolate from the values measured at 2504 and 2704 Hz.")
Yes, the switch to SS7 did happen, but guessing from the evidence in my hand, it wasn't until later.
I'm not familiar with the SoftSwitch, but I'm guessing it's a best-route selector for data circuits? Given the intelligence required to run one, it sounds like it probably performs error correction too. Damn, I spend too much time with transport and not enough time with switching.
Here's another question, since you might know: There seems to be so much publicly available info about the intricate workings of IP networks, tutorials on everyone's products, etc etc.. But there's absolutely nothing out there about the real deep telco stuff. Is it because/everything/ is bound by an NDA? Or is there just not enough interest to warrant writing a set of basic texts on the subject? Everything I can find dates from the early dawn of ESS, and was apparently written in 40-column mode on an Apple//. I'm just looking for something a bit broader and more juicy than the ss7 overview I've found.
Reminds me of this article about high-availability (99.999% uptime) telco systems, specifically Motorola developing a flavor of Linux to meet those needs.
Today's article isn't about the telephone system at all.. It really looks like a bunch of back-patting because someone did the nice thing and open-sourced their old code. But how often have you heard Linux developers say "Gee, I'd really like to write an IVR app, if only there were good tools available.." C'mon folks. All that happens on NT, and I don't see a great deal of interest in changing that. As the article stated, it's not exactly a glamorous headline-filled buzzword-compliant field like e-commerce or streaming web content.
Sure, this code will prove useful to someone.. but I don't see it being the foundation of anything big any time soon. I hope to be proven wrong.
I've always wanted something that I could just walk around with, or mount on my car, that would just digitize everything I saw. Give it a GPS and link it to other units owned by other people, so eventually every piece of an entire city might be "Seen" by one of these critters, and it'd all be mapped on a central server farm. If all the devices can recognize corners and distance and stuff, and automatically break down the geometric primitives that make up our world, and assign the appropriate textures to them, we'd have...
Automatic Quake maps for every place you've ever been!
Not to mention, instant surveillance for the spooks. Forget taking a few pictures and trying to by-hand extrapolate where the secret passages in a building are. Just wander through it with a mapping briefcase, and in the resulting data look for unusually thick walls and stuff.
I'm not sure either whether it counts as optimism or pessimism. Look at how much wall street has fallen in love with the phrase "dot com". ICANN's role in the future could actually matter a lot. They could do a great deal of good, evil, or nothing. My guess is evil, unless we get some really great people on the board. That's why it bugs me that, as the article points out, there's no big education campaign to see who the candidates are and where they stand. How about a temporary, special section of Slashdot, with weekly interviews of the top 20 or 30 candidates? I bet someone with server space and bandwidth out there is just dying to download Slashcode and set this up. (Yeah, I'm karma whoring. But I legitimately think it might work!)
Slashdot Mirror
And in semi-industrial areas, property near railroad tracks is hot. "Telco hotels" like to locate there, because even if there isn't fiber in the easements now, it's easy to get it there.
So now I wonder what would happen if residents with railroad tracks in their backyard wanted to lease dark fiber. The telcos normally bitch about the expense of running fiber to the customer, but what if it's already there?
Next thing you know, the El Cheapo apartments next to the tracks will be a big thing among geeks who want to be the lowest-ping bastards on the server. This has serious potential.
I wouldn't say "all we'll ever need", but I think you're on the right track. The number of strands might remain about the same, but the glass will continue to get better.
Ten years ago, polarization mode dispersion compensation was unheard of. Ergo, modern equipment that's PMD-sensitive doesn't like running on old fiber, at least not over reasonable distances. There are a few efforts to change the situation. Kestrel, for instance, makes a machine called the Talon that they claim is immune to the effects of PMD because of its RF-like design. Nifty, but rare.
The general push in the industry is towards more-demanding systems, OC192 is all over the place now, with OC768 in the wings. And that's just over one WDM channel. Yes, we'll see more channels in DWDM systems. Yes, we'll see faster TDM systems. And yes, most of this stuff will require even cleaner, purer glass.
The fiber that's in the ground is good for today's and maybe tomorrow's systems, but not next week's, unless there's a real demand for tolerant machines like the Talon. The fact that the dark fiber out there is now essentially free might fuel some of that demand, but trust me: Given the choice between making a fast, finicky, expensive system (that forces the provider to upgrade their outside plant), versus making a fast, robust, tolerant system (that places more engineering burden on the manufacturer), they'll always pick the former.
Hence, in 7 years we'll see fiber crews out there again, replacing cables that've never been more than a few percent utilized, with the Next Big Thing in photonics. Watch.
Another way to use some of this fiber would be to lower co-lo costs. Imagine if almost anyone could lease rack space at the local CO or telco hotel, where the fiber already runs. Nevermind the fact that the unwashed masses haven't a clue what to do with singlemode fiber, the details will sort themselves out. I'd get an apartment next-door to the CO, if I could get a fiber pair from here to downtown for next to nothing. Plunk an old OC-12 on that sucker, sell tributaries to my neighbors, heh.. Gnutella would never be the same. Buahaha.
It sounds like the laws of all member nations are logically-ANDed together to produce the most restrictive mask. I'd be interested to see what horrible combinations this would produce.
What if one country's law explicitly requires an action, and another's law explicitly prohibits it? Probably depends on whose guns are bigger.
Will traditional ad-blocking software work with this? If they're flashing ads into my BIOS so that I see sponsorship messages during boot, I don't think the Junkbusters are going to be able to stop it.
Anyone think it'd be feasible to hijack this system and use it to provide greater USER configurability, custom logos during boot, and so on?
Or calling 911 when you're not looking, like Japanese phones are doing now.
This frightens me, not just because it's happening already, but because it looks like the shape of things to come.
It looks like the computer companies are taking lessons from the cell phone industry. Your computer will soon render itself useless unless you're sending money into the appropriate chain.
Phoenix to your ISP: "Hey, we're gonna switch your user to our ISP unless you pay us not to."
Your ISP: "Hey, you can't do that!"
Phoenix: "We just did."
In addition, if you thought you got telemarketing calls and junk-mail NOW, just wait! Phoenix knows which batches of mobos were shipped to which retailers. Now they'll know exactly where those computers are being used. Paying in cash is futile, you WILL be tracked. Changing your browser's start page is futile, your PC WILL contact someone. Not using Outlook is futile, you WILL have programs installed on your computer without your consent.
Also, I doubt this thing can be made secure. How long until someone figures out a way to overflow the BIOS and install arbitrary code into the Flash chip? The ultimate BackOrifice involves control from the moment the machine's powered on.
Only massive public outcry, like that which surrounded the Pentium III serial number, will persuade companies not to do this.
News-trinos: Tiny headlines, carrying almost no weight, which move at the speed of light. Only extremely rarely does a newstrino cause an observable reaction.
Think about it. How many particles pass through Slashdot's submission queue, and only about 10 per day are picked up by the detectors?
Pronto is an SBC project, and it's utter bullshit. By the time they finish with it, we'll all be too old to care about DSL.
The idea behind Pronto is to replace all the old SLC's with DSL-capable ones, specifically the Alcatel/DSC brand Litespan 2012. It may be different equipment in other areas.
In the meantime, bother them to provision you a T1 circuit and bill it like it was a DSL. Even the older SLC's can handle T1.
Yup, I'm looking at the Litespan 2012 docs now, and it has HDSL channel units. At the very least, I guarantee the telco can give you a T1, because even the older DLC's support DS1 channels.
Cblood has it right in a previous comment, your local telco can do it, they're just not allowed to, because then they'd have to let everyone else do it. Write a letter to your state's commerce department, one to the FTC, and one to the FCC. Explain how much easier it would be if the CLEC's were allowed to resell service from the ILEC's DLCs in this situation.
http://www.7eleven.com/internetcard/
I've been using one of these to pay for my Earthlink account for several months now. It doesn't care what billing info you enter, the card will validate with anything.
Exactly.. The NSA's not stupid enough to get caught. OTDR's aren't cheap either, and it's not like you leave one connected to the line. Although with bidirectional DWDM, I suppose it would be possible. The problem with common OTDR equipment is that it sends out a very strong pulse, and it's not usually a specific narrow wavelength. This would break most DWDM schemes, causing them to flip over onto the protection side of the ring. I don't know about the output isolation of DWDM units either, whether there's enough channel separation to allow an OTDR unit to perceive its own signal coming back among the noise.
It should be possible to design a dedicated-purpose OTDR that could be left connected to a DWDM unit's spare channel, and periodically scan the line. IANA Optical Engineer, and I don't know whether receivers are sensitive enough to resolve reflected signals with the necessary resolution. (I'm thinking erbium?)
Assuming that most undersea cable operators have redundant paths and protection switching, they could take a circuit down, OTDR the thing, and bring it back up, but why? There's no profit for them in this. Most SONET receivers, at least the big Nortel ones, will report their received light level in software. That's a good enough indication of impending cable problems, and it doesn't involve poking at an already-fragile circuit.
How about this one: Obtain a program which produces CSS-like output. Encode some kiddy porn with it. Distribute same.
In order to bust anyone for it, the Feds will have to prove that the file contains prohibited material, requiring a copy of CSS for themselves!
I've heard the expression "code ninja" countless times. Many of my peers view programming as a martial art. The NY Times itself has used the phrase "cyber samurai", referring to Shimomura.
The Obfuscated C contest, or any programming contest, is a perfect example here. Compare vegetable mosaics, where something absurd or unexpected, viewed from a distance, produces an aesthetically pleasing (or at least intriguing) result.
Also mention the "sig programs" that some programmers include in their signatures. Most are obfuscated, and their expressiveness is the exact reason that they are included in signatures.
Personally, in high school, I could look over a program listing and tell who wrote it. Even if the line-numbering (yes, this was BASIC) was standardized and comments had been removed, the structure of the code said something about the author. Just a few weeks into the course, distinct programming styles emerged.
Code can be more expressive than most speech. Sometimes the essence of art is in doing without, and the strict syntax rules of a programming language can force an author to find creative ways to accomplish a task that might be easily described in a looser language like English. This is art beyond the shadow of a doubt.
The article is talking about a fuel processor, which produces the hydrogen which is then fed into a fuel cell. The fuel cell itself is existing tech, the innovation here is the processor.
Seems to me that this would have great applications elsewhere, say in remotely-located weather stations.
I'm sure a lot of geeks loathed their gym teachers. Here's my reason. I personally still hate Sue Reynolds, (East Detroit school district, Michigan) because she didn't believe asthma was a real condition.. "Oh, that's just another word for sissy kids." I wish that rather than stopping in the middle of a run and collapsing on the floor, I'd kept going to the point where I passed out. Maybe if I'd been hospitalized, that demon of a woman wouldn't still be working there. Instead, I got myself disciplined for insubordination.
On a lighter note, I have to pay tribute to my HS biology teacher. Lotte Geller was the best, she challenged me unlike any other teacher. In a room that was part greenhouse, part lab, part classroom, and part candy store, my classmates and I got some of the best teaching around. The class I was enrolled in was just the basic 9th grade bio, but there was nothing basic about it. When I was done with the normal coursework, we'd talk about everything, my favorite topics included the folded structure of proteins and DNA, and the mechanisms by which genes were selected to be expressed. When Lotte didn't know something, it was up to me to find out and report back. Her stack of Scientific American back issues was at my disposal. I secretly suspect that sometimes she feigned gaps in her knowledge just to get me to do the research, because when I'd return from the library, she'd discuss my findings with a suspicious amount of background.
I can't say enough good things about Lotte. For years I'd been less than enthusiastic about school, to say the least. Her class was the first that I really cared about, where I was disappointed in myself if I let down the teacher or my classmates.
My class met immediately after her AP Biopsychology class, and I'd usually pass some of those students in the hall as they were leaving. "We talked about you again today", they'd say. Apparently I was a favorite example when certain conditions came up in class.
I've been kicking myself lately for not having taken more bio courses in school, as Lotte insisted I should. Of course, the public school I transferred to didn't offer anything at the level I wanted to take, and I didn't go to college. If I do ever get off my ass and pursue biology, it'll be because of Lotte. May she rest in peace.
You should have a HardSID card in your PC. Because sometimes, emulation just doesn't cut it.
http://www.hardsid.com/
Having blown up my own SID chip at the age of 11 while trying to wire it directly to an amplifier (to avoid the distortion caused by the RF mod/dem stages of the TV), I can claim to be a true fan of the sound these chips make. The emulation you'll find now is pretty good, but very CPU-intensive. Still, nothing beats the real thing.
P.S. I don't get money from these guys; I don't even know them. I just think it's cool.
Anyone have details about this?
A fiber can carry most anything you throw at it. Modern fiber optic systems use "Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing", or DWDM, which is a fancy term for "several signals on one fiber, each using its own color, and a prism at each end to split things up".
In order to reach the press release bandwidth, you'd need to toss an OC-192 on every possible wavelength of every fiber in the cable. Riiight. Keep in mind that these beasts are managed by corporations, which are political by their very nature. Efficiency is not their strong point. Also remember that this whole network was designed for circuit-based telecommunications traffic, not the packets most Slashdotters are familiar with. The process of making the twain meet is not a straightforward one.
Most telco networks don't run at anywhere near 100% utilization. Admittedly, wet cable is expensive stuff, so it's not often wasted. But if anyone believes that the ring could carry that amount of traffic NOW, all I can say is, stick to your software and avoid telco networks, for everyone's benefit.
Furthermore, fiber of this sort doesn't directly affect the internet. You don't simply jam a transcontinental fiber into your Ethernet card, folks. Packet and circuit networks don't get along with each other. First, you cram your packets into an ATM stream, then you wrap the ATM data in a SONET transport layer. If you're using a really big ATM switch, you might be dealing with as much as an OC-48's worth of bandwith in one chunk here. But we're not done yet...
See, you don't want to plug that OC-48 straight into the fiber, because then what would happen when you want to add more? So you're going to use the signals coming from your routers as tributaries to feed a big honkin' optical terminal like an OC-192. All the SONET payloads from the various tributary interfaces will be concatenated and shot out the high speed side. The lasers in said terminal will be tuned to a particular wavelength, and used to feed a DWDM coupler. Finally, the multicolored signal will head to the beach and go for a swim. Several Erbium-doped amplifiers later, (search for EDFA and do some reading!) the signal emerges in another continent and the whole process reverses itself.
Keep in mind that any one company probably doesn't buy bandwidth in chunks larger than OC-12. Your packets will move more freely, yes, but nobody's gonna be seeing 120 Gigabits any time soon. The amount of paperwork, and the sheer number of companies that're involved in simply setting up one circuit, is phenomenal.
Oh, and as far as survivability goes, that's old news. SONET was designed from the ground up to incorporate a redundant ring architecture. The data's always transmitted over two fibers at once, and the receiving device picks the cleaner of the two incoming streams. Network planners are careful to route the two paths diversely, so no one failure can bring down the ring. Ideally, someone can backhoe an entire fiber conduit and not knock down any traffic because every ring served by that conduit was ALSO served by another one on the other side of town. Ditto goes for undersea cables.
I'm this close to setting up a little site to introduce computer geeks to telco concepts, so y'all don't keep swallowing these press releases whole. Anyone wanna help?
The Attorney General's release was entirely devoid of facts surrounding the hardware failure. I'm curious why it was mentioned at all. Is it being implied that the attack caused the hardware to fail, or anything similar?
I'm also interested, if you can comment at this time, in exactly what transpired at the "meeting" that was mentioned. I can't speak for the accused, but I think it'd be pretty stupid to meet with the admin of a box I'd just compromised. I'd only do so in good faith, perhaps to help the admin patch the hole, etc. Can you tell us whether Salcedo was summoned to the meeting by legal means, or whether he came forth on his own? This is crucial, I think, to the public's understanding of the case.
Calm down. I see where you're coming from, but let's look at this logically:
Breaking and entering causes real damage. Someone has to pay to replace or repair what got broken during the entry. Trespassing, on the other hand, is just sneaking in through an existing hole. When someone cracks the security of a system, they haven't physically touched anything. They've just found a hole that was always there, and exploited it. The hole was caused by the software designer who didn't bounds-check, or the system admin who didn't secure something. The cracker didn't cause the hole, and if it gets fixed after the crack, then it needed fixing in the first place.
Follow me so far? That's Salcedo's case.
Now let's talk about what happens once someone's in. Malicious destruction of property is when you deliberately go break things just to break them, and it has a monetary value assigned to it. Vandalism is kid stuff, it's stupid, and it's usually trivial to clean up. So let's say some intruder changes some HTML. The sum total cleanup effort involves restoring the previous versions of the pages, which most vandals just rename in the first place.
Sounds like Salens is being charged with a FELONY, think about it, a felony, for defacing a web site from his own Earthlink account. Stupid, yes, but not a felony.
He's anything but a script kiddie, trust me. I know the guy. What bothers me is that the "meeting" with the M-net people doesn't sound anything like what he described. I'll post specifics when I get a chance to talk to him.
/that/ as the monetary basis for the charges. They're a nonprofit with essentially no budget. They had no way to fund new hardware, until this came along. Hey, let's blame it on the guy who /approached us/ and told us about a security hole!
What bothers me is this line: On May 31, while Salcedo had access to the M-Net system, the system crashed and did not recover.
That's what they're charging him with. The hardware took a shit shortly after he got in, and they're using
I have in my hand a copy of the AT&T Standard Technical Training Course, job aid 9, special services telephone handbook. Dated September 1978, this book makes absolutely no mention whatsoever of out-of-band signaling. It's a great review of signalling units for the various carrier systems, trouble-clearing procedures on 2- and 4-wire circuits, so on and so forth.. but everything's still VF signaling. (Even right down to the little note about using 2604 Hz test tones: "Do not measure at this frequency if 2600 Hz signaling units are used in the layout. Instead, interpolate from the values measured at 2504 and 2704 Hz.")
/everything/ is bound by an NDA? Or is there just not enough interest to warrant writing a set of basic texts on the subject? Everything I can find dates from the early dawn of ESS, and was apparently written in 40-column mode on an Apple //. I'm just looking for something a bit broader and more juicy than the ss7 overview I've found.
Yes, the switch to SS7 did happen, but guessing from the evidence in my hand, it wasn't until later.
I'm not familiar with the SoftSwitch, but I'm guessing it's a best-route selector for data circuits? Given the intelligence required to run one, it sounds like it probably performs error correction too. Damn, I spend too much time with transport and not enough time with switching.
Here's another question, since you might know: There seems to be so much publicly available info about the intricate workings of IP networks, tutorials on everyone's products, etc etc.. But there's absolutely nothing out there about the real deep telco stuff. Is it because
Reminds me of this article about high-availability (99.999% uptime) telco systems, specifically Motorola developing a flavor of Linux to meet those needs.
Today's article isn't about the telephone system at all.. It really looks like a bunch of back-patting because someone did the nice thing and open-sourced their old code. But how often have you heard Linux developers say "Gee, I'd really like to write an IVR app, if only there were good tools available.." C'mon folks. All that happens on NT, and I don't see a great deal of interest in changing that. As the article stated, it's not exactly a glamorous headline-filled buzzword-compliant field like e-commerce or streaming web content.
Sure, this code will prove useful to someone.. but I don't see it being the foundation of anything big any time soon. I hope to be proven wrong.
I've always wanted something that I could just walk around with, or mount on my car, that would just digitize everything I saw. Give it a GPS and link it to other units owned by other people, so eventually every piece of an entire city might be "Seen" by one of these critters, and it'd all be mapped on a central server farm. If all the devices can recognize corners and distance and stuff, and automatically break down the geometric primitives that make up our world, and assign the appropriate textures to them, we'd have...
Automatic Quake maps for every place you've ever been!
Not to mention, instant surveillance for the spooks. Forget taking a few pictures and trying to by-hand extrapolate where the secret passages in a building are. Just wander through it with a mapping briefcase, and in the resulting data look for unusually thick walls and stuff.
I'm not sure either whether it counts as optimism or pessimism. Look at how much wall street has fallen in love with the phrase "dot com". ICANN's role in the future could actually matter a lot. They could do a great deal of good, evil, or nothing. My guess is evil, unless we get some really great people on the board. That's why it bugs me that, as the article points out, there's no big education campaign to see who the candidates are and where they stand. How about a temporary, special section of Slashdot, with weekly interviews of the top 20 or 30 candidates? I bet someone with server space and bandwidth out there is just dying to download Slashcode and set this up. (Yeah, I'm karma whoring. But I legitimately think it might work!)