Yes, it most definitely is a problem. You don't notice it _much_ while you're there, but it's distracting and it takes away from the total immersion. Just like the wobbly mirror at umich's cave, or the effects of misaligned projectors, it's a little distraction that you're subconsciously aware of.
Not to mention the lag. You'd think that the big ol' Iris box could keep pace with the inputs, but there's a definite, and annoying, time delay before moving and seeing the results. This is particularly vicious in motion parallax situations, where your body is expecting things to move when you move, and they don't.
Don't get me wrong, Cave quake is very cool. But it has a long way to go until it's as "polished" as the 2d version of Quake.
Ahh, the Cave is probably a lot more fun when it's aligned too. Very cool concept, but it has some implementation details to work out yet. Cords in the way, narrow goggle vision, wobbling mirrors, complicated alignment procedure, uneven brightness, screen viewing angle...
Andrew and I talked about all this the evening I was there. Most of it seems easily solvable.
What disturbs me very greatly is that Slashdot is treating this like a new thing, and nobody's apologized yet for being so blatantly wrong. I'm kicking myself for not reloading Slashdot one more time before going to sleep, so I could've seen this thing when it was freshly posted, gotten first post, and said "it's been done!" before the knuckleheads went off on those boring war tangents..
Rebooting is truly a nasty habit that users have gotten into.
Which brings up another question -- Is Linux really suited to use on laptops? Or NT for that matter? Lawrence Tech here in Michigan wants their students to run NT on their laptops, which seems stupid to me.
Personally, I think GEOS would be better for those, if anyone was still developing it. It doesn't care if you shut down, it boots quickly, and it has very modest hardware requirements. How many of us really need to run a web server while sitting under a tree in a park somewhere?
Excellent point, and I'd certainly say there's a good chance of it. You'd be surprised what kind of equipment has modems just dangling off it without any thought to security.
Back in the day, when dialing was the only way in, people gave it more consideration. But now they think of the internet as the big security threat, and dialins are left open.
I wonder what sort of big iron Visa uses. Probably some Vax that hasn't been touched in 12 years. Heh.
TWINKLE - The Weizmann INstitute's Key Locating Engine
You people need to learn about smartcards. Start at Schlumberger and Litronic (they have a good intro to smartcards.) and go from there. The people at ZeitControl have this cool programmable card that you should look into.
Or their measurements were based on the idea that light always moves at approximately the same speed, given that most of space is a vacuum.
I seem to remember an article on Slashdot about light slowing down as it passes through a Bose-Einstein condensate. Has anyone considered that the "dark matter" out there might also be transparent but dense, such that it slows down light in a similar manner?
We're talking about delaying light for about 2-5 billion years in order to make the math come out right. The researcher in that article thinks she can get it down to 120 feet per hour. If the light from our distant galaxies had to go through a couple lightyears of this goop before it reached us, that would account for the differences.
Yeah, it's easier just to say that there was stuff here before the big bang. But where, then, did it come from? And did it have a hand in creating the big bang?
Hell, I junked my cable modem because the admins were jerks..
Living happily now on a 53k dialup, which has been continuously connected for 397 hours now. (Yes, I connected last year, and it's been online ever since.) My system uptime is 17 days 14:44 21s , and that's on a Windows 95b box.
Speaking of which, anyone know what the record is for such things? And I actually use this system several hours a day, it's not like I just booted it and left it alone so I could claim a long uptime.
Honestly, the bandwidth isn't bad. It's slow, but time is something I have lots of. Flag a dozen MP3's and let it run overnight. I'm mostly an IRC addict, and that'd be happy at 2400.
Yes, and suddenly we're looking at three of everyone's favorite topics:
1) Huge farms of Linux-based machines (doing compression necessary for) 2) Piracy (because we're) 3) Not buying expensive DVD-RW drives.
Because I'm sorry, compressing a layer 3 audio file takes long enough, just imagine the CPU time needed to crunch entire movies. I'm assuming we'll be seeing hardware-assisted encoding boards, which will have some lame sort of copy-protection built in to prevent this sort of thing.
And as luck would have it, the lame protection scheme will also make the compression processors useless under any OS besides Windows, so it'll be the sworn duty of the open source community to defeat said scheme and take more bad press from the ignorant masses.
I've stopped eating at Burger King since they nabbed the Pokèmon contract.
On a related note:
I'm compiling a list of standard units.. football fields, breadboxes, Niagara Fallses, cow-skeletonization minutes, Encyclopediae Brittanica(sp?), Empire State buildings, and anything else that people frequently use as a basis for comparison.
I'm thinking of adding "y2k" as the standard unit of hype, newsmedia-terrorism, consumer foolishness, and general bogosity.
Scroll bars suck. For such a common task, scrolling should have its own buttons. And leaving one hand on PgUp/PgDn, while I use the mouse for other things, is awkward and stupid.
A wheel is actually pretty natural for scrolling. With PgUp/PgDn, the distance you move is determined by the number of times you hit the key. I find that it's more natural to whiz the wheel a larger or smaller amount. (Altho for continuous scrolling, I wish there was something like key-repeat. Perhaps hold/toggle a button and use the wheel to adjust the velocity?)
Five buttons is just plain silly. I wouldn't mind if they'd move the middle button out from under the wheel (trying to click it, I always move the wheel too), but I'm just fine with 3 buttons.
I agree, the original Logitech square "pack of cigarettes" C-4 and C-7 mice were great. Durable as all hell, easily cleaned, good resolution.. If they'd made it possible for the user to replace the cord without breaking the warranty seal, I'd love 'em even more.
I'm a win-weenie myself, and it always seems that the powerful keyboard mappings are only possible under X.
When you hit one of those nontraditional keys, does it just send back a scancode like any other? Some laptops are now coming with stupid extra buttons too, do those work in the same way?
I'm using an IBM clickmonster myself. I finally ditched my old faithful Logitech C-7 series mouse for a $20 Logitech wheel mouse, which I absolutely adore. I want to replace my PgUp and PgDn keys with a wheel now. Maybe my up/down arrows too, with a different acceleration factor.
There's a thought: Is it possible to attach multiple pointing devices to a PC, and map one of them to keyboard functions (have it behave as arrow keys) while leaving the other one with control over the pointer? Then I'll get a foot-trackball..
I agree with the previously stated thoughts on split keyboards only working for a certain typing style. Is there such a thing as a split Dvorak?
I don't know about software and licensing, but it sounds to me like you're reinventing the wheel.
Skydiving formations, orgies, & Buckminster Fuller
on
Sex in Space
·
· Score: 2
Obviously 69 gets a lot easier in zero-G. Same goes for anything that was formerly constrained to 2 dimensions. Circlejerks, for example, could go spherical.
I want to officially coin the term "Buckyfuck" to refer to a 60-person orgy. It would require a large chamber, but I'm sure a civilian space hotel might include such a facility.
And for normal sex in space: Don't worry about getting the controls sticky, just cover the panel with a tarp! Lots of velcro, some bungees, handles and toe-holds, maybe a motorized turntable... I'd pay to see the video too. SAREX would get a lot more interesting if we could hear some moaning every now and then.
The hilarious part comes when they have to document their findings in scientific form.
Cruising around in my Encore one day, although it was the first one I'd ever owned, I was nearly sideswiped by a large pickup truck. After a quick maneuver to avoid it, I commented to my shaken-up passenger: "Have you ever had to dodge a Dodge?"
He shot right back with "We were nearly rammed by a Ram!"
The rest of our two-hour car ride was filled with..
"Have you ever followed a Ranger with a Tracker?"
"I wonder which has better headlights, a beamer [(sp?)sic] or a Laser."
"Which will go farther before its power runs out, the Explorer, the Voyager, the Probe, or the Pathfinder?"
At one point we passed several Cougars and a Jaguar in a fairly tight group, and observed that such creatures usually don't travel in packs. Impalas, however, do. Hmm. Too bad we weren't driving a Safari.
Then we got lazy and continued with "Have you ever flipped an Eagle the bird?" "No, but I got the driver of a Falcon all ruffled once."
My favorite to this day, more so because a locksmith confirmed the hilarity of the situation: "Ever locked your keys inside a Jimmy?"
I wondered if anyone else had that problem. Some words more than others, like "luggage"..
I ought to start a list, because about once a week I find one of those words that just sounds weird.
Now do it portably. Gotcha both beat!
on
Interface Zen
·
· Score: 1
Get this: The ROM Setup program on my laptop has an option for "exchange Caps/Ctrl keys" as well as a "keyclick on/off" which of course just triggers the sound chip every time you hit a key.
Of course the keycaps are identially sized and removable (unusual on a notebook) and the clicking happens at a near-hardware level, so it doesn't even slow things down.
Zenith did a lot of things right in their portables. A DEBUG-like Rom monitor on the early ones, EEPROM-stored bootup/setup passwords on later models, user-swappable screens (with an extension cable(!)) on one line, etc. Too bad their marketing sucked. Even the Fn+Esc "Lock while on" password protection was uniquely useful.
*sniff* Bring back intelligent design, someone, please?
I'm gonna see if I can dig up a copy and play it for new year's. Maybe I can persuade some local radio stations to do the same.
Seriously tho. I believe these fearmongers should be held responsible if chaos breaks out. There's a fine line between the public just being stupid as usual, and the public not knowing much about technology.
If the public is coerced into being stupid, that's one thing, and it serves them right. "Fuck 'em if they can't take a joke." right?
But OTOH, it's realistic to assume that the common person might not understand what makes a system potentially Y2K vulnerable. Therefore I see no difference between the "experts" who predict doom, and the jerks who used to tease the retarded kids in school. In either case, it's taking advantage of the mentally incapable, and it's got to be illegal somehow. I say we rip these doom-sayers some new orifices.
I've been joking about this for ages!
on
License to Surf
·
· Score: 1
Mostly when my mom asks a stupid question, I quip something like "Didn't your computing instructor show you how to save files before the license test?" and the occasional "I'm gonna revoke the computing license of the next moron who forwards a virus-infected attachment."
Anecdotally I love the idea, I'd get such a kick out of being an internet cop. "No more spam for you! Hand it over, Stanford."
When the DES-III contest was announced, but no ciphertext was available yet, d.net asked everyone to install a new version of the client. As soon as RSA released the challenge data, clients around the world immediately started working on it.
Whether this was technically a "start message" from the keymaster, or a "start flag" that clients polled and watched for, I'm not sure. Either way, it accomplished the same thing, which was to begin crunching on the new contest as soon as data was available.
The EXFOLive Fiber Detector, along with the 3MPhotodyne tool work in a similar way: Momentarily bend an optical fiber and catch some of the photons that wander out. They can distinguish between a dark fiber, one with an "optical tone" (1kHz modulated light), and one with a live signal on it. The question is, are there enough photons there to reconstruct the actual signal, or just enough to distinguish it?
At the office end, ADC makes Optical Splitters which are perfect for monitoring optical traffic, just like the MON jacks built into most copper (T-1 and T-3) cross-connect systems. The only problem here is that the NSA has to make their presence known, and might have to present *gasp* a warrant! Technically, it's trivial to get at the signal in question. Whether they can do anything with the data at that point, is a much more difficult question to answer.
Aside from the obvious problem of sifting through all the voice and data traffic on these lines, you need to identify the parties involved in an interesting call. This would require monitoring the SS7 link and possibly having access to the SCP(s) involved. Simply hearing a conversation doesn't do a lot of good unless you know who was speaking.
Photons can and do leak out of fibers. And they can leak in. At the moment, crosstalk isn't an issue, but remember when they ran the first AC powerlines it wasn't either. Look what that stuck us with.
Briefly: The longer a path light takes, the longer it takes to reach its destination. So if some photons go right down the middle of the fiber, while others take a bouncy route off the sides, the edges of each pulse get stretched and blurred. Over short distances (under a kilofoot?) or at low speeds (under a gigabit/s) this isn't an issue, but it quickly becomes a problem when you move from the pansy-ass glass campus Ethernet into the serious bit-pumping that today's telcos do.
Each path that photons can take is called a "mode". I don't know why they picked that word. The fibers that a typical datamonkey is familiar with are "multimode", which means a wide core (125 microns?) of glass, which accomodates lots of bouncing. The fibers that your friendly telcos are burying are "singlemode", which is a much narrower core surrounded by more glass of different refractive indices. The idea is to straighten the light out and get it all traveling along the same path, so that pulse stretching is minimized. Still, the quality of your glass has a lot to do with it.
Now think about the construction of a typical optical cable. The stuff has to be somewhat flexible, to allow for installtion. In order to allow for some curving, the fibers/bundles aren't laid straight in the cable, but they spiral a little bit. This relieves stress when the cable is curved.
The problem here is that the photons are being asked to travel down this several mile long helix of glass, while remaining in as tight a group as possible. You can have one or the other, folks. Every time a fiber bends, a few photons wander off and do mischevious things.
Want to see something nifty? Go see EXFO's "live fiber detector" tool. Next time your phone service actually works, thank these folks for making sure the wrong fiber wasn't cut/disconnected by some technician working from outdated paperwork.
Errors happen for all sorts of reasons. Stray photons are actually the least of them. Imagine the sensitivity of the poor receiver that gets to turn all those bursts back into electricity. Can we say "sensitive to interference"? I thought we could. Most SONET systems achieve an in-service bit error rate well under 10E-10, and some are guaranteed better than 10E-13. How's that stack up against the consumer market, eh?
I need to go learn more about the funky laser those Bell folks used, it sounds like it's more of a color generating toy than a data pumping tool, and I bet the actual bitrates it achieves are laughably slow on each individual wavelength. I don't see DWDM disappearing any time soon.
Besides, none of it matters if the world ends next month. Tee-hee! You should see the disaster plans the telcos are putting together. Stock tip: Buy Dunkin Donuts shares, because telco techs are gonna buy 3 days worth of munchies on the 30th, because they can't leave their appointed sites after that.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, it most definitely is a problem. You don't notice it _much_ while you're there, but it's distracting and it takes away from the total immersion. Just like the wobbly mirror at umich's cave, or the effects of misaligned projectors, it's a little distraction that you're subconsciously aware of.
Not to mention the lag. You'd think that the big ol' Iris box could keep pace with the inputs, but there's a definite, and annoying, time delay before moving and seeing the results. This is particularly vicious in motion parallax situations, where your body is expecting things to move when you move, and they don't.
Don't get me wrong, Cave quake is very cool. But it has a long way to go until it's as "polished" as the 2d version of Quake.
Ahh, the Cave is probably a lot more fun when it's aligned too. Very cool concept, but it has some implementation details to work out yet. Cords in the way, narrow goggle vision, wobbling mirrors, complicated alignment procedure, uneven brightness, screen viewing angle...
Andrew and I talked about all this the evening I was there. Most of it seems easily solvable.
What disturbs me very greatly is that Slashdot is treating this like a new thing, and nobody's apologized yet for being so blatantly wrong. I'm kicking myself for not reloading Slashdot one more time before going to sleep, so I could've seen this thing when it was freshly posted, gotten first post, and said "it's been done!" before the knuckleheads went off on those boring war tangents..
English ---> [pick one] ---> English
Rebooting is truly a nasty habit that users have gotten into.
Which brings up another question -- Is Linux really suited to use on laptops? Or NT for that matter? Lawrence Tech here in Michigan wants their students to run NT on their laptops, which seems stupid to me.
Personally, I think GEOS would be better for those, if anyone was still developing it. It doesn't care if you shut down, it boots quickly, and it has very modest hardware requirements. How many of us really need to run a web server while sitting under a tree in a park somewhere?
Is it just me, or is the timestamp on this posting way off?
Excellent point, and I'd certainly say there's a good chance of it. You'd be surprised what kind of equipment has modems just dangling off it without any thought to security.
Back in the day, when dialing was the only way in, people gave it more consideration. But now they think of the internet as the big security threat, and dialins are left open.
I wonder what sort of big iron Visa uses. Probably some Vax that hasn't been touched in 12 years. Heh.
TWINKLE - The Weizmann INstitute's Key Locating Engine
You people need to learn about smartcards. Start at Schlumberger and Litronic (they have a good intro to smartcards.) and go from there. The people at ZeitControl have this cool programmable card that you should look into.
Or their measurements were based on the idea that light always moves at approximately the same speed, given that most of space is a vacuum.
I seem to remember an article on Slashdot about light slowing down as it passes through a Bose-Einstein condensate. Has anyone considered that the "dark matter" out there might also be transparent but dense, such that it slows down light in a similar manner?
We're talking about delaying light for about 2-5 billion years in order to make the math come out right. The researcher in that article thinks she can get it down to 120 feet per hour. If the light from our distant galaxies had to go through a couple lightyears of this goop before it reached us, that would account for the differences.
Yeah, it's easier just to say that there was stuff here before the big bang. But where, then, did it come from? And did it have a hand in creating the big bang?
Hell, I junked my cable modem because the admins were jerks..
Living happily now on a 53k dialup, which has been continuously connected for 397 hours now. (Yes, I connected last year, and it's been online ever since.) My system uptime is 17 days 14:44 21s , and that's on a Windows 95b box.
Speaking of which, anyone know what the record is for such things? And I actually use this system several hours a day, it's not like I just booted it and left it alone so I could claim a long uptime.
Honestly, the bandwidth isn't bad. It's slow, but time is something I have lots of. Flag a dozen MP3's and let it run overnight. I'm mostly an IRC addict, and that'd be happy at 2400.
How many bytes of data flow over Niagara Falls in a second? Now THAT's memory bandwidth!
Would an Empire State Building worth of magnetic core memory come close to one of these RIMMs?
If you outfitted pirahna with this RAM, would they be able to skeletonize a cow in less than a millifortnight?
For that matter, how many picoY2Ks of hype does this press release contain?
Yes, and suddenly we're looking at three of everyone's favorite topics:
1) Huge farms of Linux-based machines
(doing compression necessary for)
2) Piracy
(because we're)
3) Not buying expensive DVD-RW drives.
Because I'm sorry, compressing a layer 3 audio file takes long enough, just imagine the CPU time needed to crunch entire movies. I'm assuming we'll be seeing hardware-assisted encoding boards, which will have some lame sort of copy-protection built in to prevent this sort of thing.
And as luck would have it, the lame protection scheme will also make the compression processors useless under any OS besides Windows, so it'll be the sworn duty of the open source community to defeat said scheme and take more bad press from the ignorant masses.
I should call myself Nostradamus.
Moderate that one up!
I've stopped eating at Burger King since they nabbed the Pokèmon contract.
On a related note:
I'm compiling a list of standard units.. football fields, breadboxes, Niagara Fallses, cow-skeletonization minutes, Encyclopediae Brittanica(sp?), Empire State buildings, and anything else that people frequently use as a basis for comparison.
I'm thinking of adding "y2k" as the standard unit of hype, newsmedia-terrorism, consumer foolishness, and general bogosity.
Scroll bars suck. For such a common task, scrolling should have its own buttons. And leaving one hand on PgUp/PgDn, while I use the mouse for other things, is awkward and stupid.
A wheel is actually pretty natural for scrolling. With PgUp/PgDn, the distance you move is determined by the number of times you hit the key. I find that it's more natural to whiz the wheel a larger or smaller amount. (Altho for continuous scrolling, I wish there was something like key-repeat. Perhaps hold/toggle a button and use the wheel to adjust the velocity?)
Five buttons is just plain silly. I wouldn't mind if they'd move the middle button out from under the wheel (trying to click it, I always move the wheel too), but I'm just fine with 3 buttons.
I agree, the original Logitech square "pack of cigarettes" C-4 and C-7 mice were great. Durable as all hell, easily cleaned, good resolution.. If they'd made it possible for the user to replace the cord without breaking the warranty seal, I'd love 'em even more.
I'm a win-weenie myself, and it always seems that the powerful keyboard mappings are only possible under X.
When you hit one of those nontraditional keys, does it just send back a scancode like any other? Some laptops are now coming with stupid extra buttons too, do those work in the same way?
I'm using an IBM clickmonster myself. I finally ditched my old faithful Logitech C-7 series mouse for a $20 Logitech wheel mouse, which I absolutely adore. I want to replace my PgUp and PgDn keys with a wheel now. Maybe my up/down arrows too, with a different acceleration factor.
There's a thought: Is it possible to attach multiple pointing devices to a PC, and map one of them to keyboard functions (have it behave as arrow keys) while leaving the other one with control over the pointer? Then I'll get a foot-trackball..
I agree with the previously stated thoughts on split keyboards only working for a certain typing style. Is there such a thing as a split Dvorak?
"The Net treats censorship as damage and routes around it." - John Gilmore
See if you can snag a few of their shoeboxes. Place your main server indoors somewhere and leave the outdoor packet-hopping to a proven technology.
Ricochet
I don't know about software and licensing, but it sounds to me like you're reinventing the wheel.
Obviously 69 gets a lot easier in zero-G. Same goes for anything that was formerly constrained to 2 dimensions. Circlejerks, for example, could go spherical.
I want to officially coin the term "Buckyfuck" to refer to a 60-person orgy. It would require a large chamber, but I'm sure a civilian space hotel might include such a facility.
And for normal sex in space: Don't worry about getting the controls sticky, just cover the panel with a tarp! Lots of velcro, some bungees, handles and toe-holds, maybe a motorized turntable... I'd pay to see the video too. SAREX would get a lot more interesting if we could hear some moaning every now and then.
The hilarious part comes when they have to document their findings in scientific form.
Cruising around in my Encore one day, although it was the first one I'd ever owned, I was nearly sideswiped by a large pickup truck. After a quick maneuver to avoid it, I commented to my shaken-up passenger: "Have you ever had to dodge a Dodge?"
He shot right back with "We were nearly rammed by a Ram!"
The rest of our two-hour car ride was filled with..
"Have you ever followed a Ranger with a Tracker?"
"I wonder which has better headlights, a beamer [(sp?)sic] or a Laser."
"Which will go farther before its power runs out, the Explorer, the Voyager, the Probe, or the Pathfinder?"
At one point we passed several Cougars and a Jaguar in a fairly tight group, and observed that such creatures usually don't travel in packs. Impalas, however, do. Hmm. Too bad we weren't driving a Safari.
Then we got lazy and continued with "Have you ever flipped an Eagle the bird?" "No, but I got the driver of a Falcon all ruffled once."
My favorite to this day, more so because a locksmith confirmed the hilarity of the situation:
"Ever locked your keys inside a Jimmy?"
I wondered if anyone else had that problem. Some words more than others, like "luggage"..
I ought to start a list, because about once a week I find one of those words that just sounds weird.
Get this: The ROM Setup program on my laptop has an option for "exchange Caps/Ctrl keys" as well as a "keyclick on/off" which of course just triggers the sound chip every time you hit a key.
Of course the keycaps are identially sized and removable (unusual on a notebook) and the clicking happens at a near-hardware level, so it doesn't even slow things down.
Zenith did a lot of things right in their portables. A DEBUG-like Rom monitor on the early ones, EEPROM-stored bootup/setup passwords on later models, user-swappable screens (with an extension cable(!)) on one line, etc. Too bad their marketing sucked. Even the Fn+Esc "Lock while on" password protection was uniquely useful.
*sniff* Bring back intelligent design, someone, please?
I'm gonna see if I can dig up a copy and play it for new year's. Maybe I can persuade some local radio stations to do the same.
Seriously tho. I believe these fearmongers should be held responsible if chaos breaks out. There's a fine line between the public just being stupid as usual, and the public not knowing much about technology.
If the public is coerced into being stupid, that's one thing, and it serves them right. "Fuck 'em if they can't take a joke." right?
But OTOH, it's realistic to assume that the common person might not understand what makes a system potentially Y2K vulnerable. Therefore I see no difference between the "experts" who predict doom, and the jerks who used to tease the retarded kids in school. In either case, it's taking advantage of the mentally incapable, and it's got to be illegal somehow. I say we rip these doom-sayers some new orifices.
Mostly when my mom asks a stupid question, I quip something like "Didn't your computing instructor show you how to save files before the license test?" and the occasional "I'm gonna revoke the computing license of the next moron who forwards a virus-infected attachment."
Anecdotally I love the idea, I'd get such a kick out of being an internet cop. "No more spam for you! Hand it over, Stanford."
Realistically? It'll never fly.
When the DES-III contest was announced, but no ciphertext was available yet, d.net asked everyone to install a new version of the client. As soon as RSA released the challenge data, clients around the world immediately started working on it.
Whether this was technically a "start message" from the keymaster, or a "start flag" that clients polled and watched for, I'm not sure. Either way, it accomplished the same thing, which was to begin crunching on the new contest as soon as data was available.
The EXFO Live Fiber Detector, along with the 3M Photodyne tool work in a similar way: Momentarily bend an optical fiber and catch some of the photons that wander out. They can distinguish between a dark fiber, one with an "optical tone" (1kHz modulated light), and one with a live signal on it. The question is, are there enough photons there to reconstruct the actual signal, or just enough to distinguish it?
At the office end, ADC makes Optical Splitters which are perfect for monitoring optical traffic, just like the MON jacks built into most copper (T-1 and T-3) cross-connect systems. The only problem here is that the NSA has to make their presence known, and might have to present *gasp* a warrant!
Technically, it's trivial to get at the signal in question. Whether they can do anything with the data at that point, is a much more difficult question to answer.
Aside from the obvious problem of sifting through all the voice and data traffic on these lines, you need to identify the parties involved in an interesting call. This would require monitoring the SS7 link and possibly having access to the SCP(s) involved. Simply hearing a conversation doesn't do a lot of good unless you know who was speaking.
Photons can and do leak out of fibers. And they can leak in. At the moment, crosstalk isn't an issue, but remember when they ran the first AC powerlines it wasn't either. Look what that stuck us with.
Briefly: The longer a path light takes, the longer it takes to reach its destination. So if some photons go right down the middle of the fiber, while others take a bouncy route off the sides, the edges of each pulse get stretched and blurred. Over short distances (under a kilofoot?) or at low speeds (under a gigabit/s) this isn't an issue, but it quickly becomes a problem when you move from the pansy-ass glass campus Ethernet into the serious bit-pumping that today's telcos do.
Each path that photons can take is called a "mode". I don't know why they picked that word. The fibers that a typical datamonkey is familiar with are "multimode", which means a wide core (125 microns?) of glass, which accomodates lots of bouncing. The fibers that your friendly telcos are burying are "singlemode", which is a much narrower core surrounded by more glass of different refractive indices. The idea is to straighten the light out and get it all traveling along the same path, so that pulse stretching is minimized. Still, the quality of your glass has a lot to do with it.
Now think about the construction of a typical optical cable. The stuff has to be somewhat flexible, to allow for installtion. In order to allow for some curving, the fibers/bundles aren't laid straight in the cable, but they spiral a little bit. This relieves stress when the cable is curved.
The problem here is that the photons are being asked to travel down this several mile long helix of glass, while remaining in as tight a group as possible. You can have one or the other, folks. Every time a fiber bends, a few photons wander off and do mischevious things.
Want to see something nifty? Go see EXFO's "live fiber detector" tool. Next time your phone service actually works, thank these folks for making sure the wrong fiber wasn't cut/disconnected by some technician working from outdated paperwork.
Errors happen for all sorts of reasons. Stray photons are actually the least of them. Imagine the sensitivity of the poor receiver that gets to turn all those bursts back into electricity. Can we say "sensitive to interference"? I thought we could. Most SONET systems achieve an in-service bit error rate well under 10E-10, and some are guaranteed better than 10E-13. How's that stack up against the consumer market, eh?
I need to go learn more about the funky laser those Bell folks used, it sounds like it's more of a color generating toy than a data pumping tool, and I bet the actual bitrates it achieves are laughably slow on each individual wavelength. I don't see DWDM disappearing any time soon.
Besides, none of it matters if the world ends next month. Tee-hee! You should see the disaster plans the telcos are putting together. Stock tip: Buy Dunkin Donuts shares, because telco techs are gonna buy 3 days worth of munchies on the 30th, because they can't leave their appointed sites after that.