Slashdot Mirror


User: Obfuscant

Obfuscant's activity in the archive.

Stories
0
Comments
10,402
First seen
Last seen
Profile
(view on slashdot.org)

Comments · 10,402

  1. Re:Monopolies on Netflix Pushes FCC To Crack Down On Data Caps (dslreports.com) · · Score: 1

    Given that Comcast enjoys government granted monopolies in its markets,

    Citation required. Where is there an exclusive franchise? They're illegal in the US, so you must be talking about outside the US -- where Comcast isn't.

    but we're going to open all of your markets to competition.

    That's already happened. It's not a valid threat. There are no franchises for ISPs.

  2. Re:If people only knew... on Netflix Pushes FCC To Crack Down On Data Caps (dslreports.com) · · Score: 1

    I would also like to see the FCC mandate that as long as costumers are paying for their cable TV service, it should be commercial free, as we were promised at the very beginning of cable TV roll-outs!

    I wish I knew where that completely nonsensical claim keeps coming from. Cable TV was NEVER promised to be commercial free, since cable TV STARTED as a means of distributing COMMERCIAL BROADCAST (i.e. advertising supported) channels without everyone needing to install their own antennas. It was later that the satellite networks came about, and many of them were also advertising supported -- from the very beginning of their existence.

    Cable TV, with the exception of PEG and local origination channels, carries OTHER PEOPLE'S CONTENT, which may or may not contain commercials depending on what those OTHER PEOPLE send through the pipeline. The cable company cannot simply strip out the commercials from the CBS or ABC or PBS channels it carries. Or from ESPN or TBS or WGN, or from any other service. To mandate that cable channels be commercial free would mean mandating that every source of programming the cable service carries be commercial free -- and that isn't going to happen EVER. (You can argue that Comcast/NBC or Time Warner/ABC are examples of cable companies carrying their own content, but that happened long after cable TV began, and a lot of the content on those two cable companies is still other people's content that contains ads that cannot be stripped out at the cable company's whim.)

    You need to get over the idea that your cable fees go to pay for all the programming that you have available and so they should never have advertising support. Your cable fees go to pay for the delivery, with some small fraction paying for part of the content, just as your newspaper or magazine subscription fees pay for delivery and some small part of the content, with the remainder paid for by advertising.

  3. Re:Using government to advance one's business on Netflix Pushes FCC To Crack Down On Data Caps (dslreports.com) · · Score: 1

    They can abuse their customers because... gasp... they have a virtual monopoly granted by the government.

    No. Exclusive franchise laws have been illegal for a very long time. They have a defacto monopoly granted by the economics of competition, not by the government.

    Kill all the regs including last mile regs and the free market would kick the shit out of ATT and the other asshats.

    It wouldn't be a free market. One of the competitors is bound by a franchise agreement, the others would be free to cherry pick customers and services and avoid a lot of the costs.

  4. Re:Channel saturation on Netflix Pushes FCC To Crack Down On Data Caps (dslreports.com) · · Score: 1

    Bullshit. They don't even want to OFFER it.

    They know it would cost more than most people would want to pay, especially in the residential service market.

    Instead they rather play word games and sell idiots on the idea of 'unlimited'.

    Only an idiot thinks that any internet service is completely unlimited. When the context is such that a word cannot possibly have one common language meaning, it must mean something else. I mean, when you get a service that has LIMITS (e.g. 30Mbps down/5Mbps up), how can "unlimited" mean unlimited? Such a service has an implicit cap of 10Tb/month -- a limit that you will be hard pressed to exceed even for a service that is "unlimited".

    "You promised me something that is impossible and I want to collect!"

  5. Re:Channel saturation on Netflix Pushes FCC To Crack Down On Data Caps (dslreports.com) · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Personally, if I'm sold a 30Mbps/5Mbps cable/dsl connection, I expect to be able to saturate that channel 24/7 if I want to. ISPs should provision accordingly.

    You wouldn't be able to afford it if they did. A dedicated full-time 30/5 line to the border gateway would cost more than you want to pay. A line that you share with 100 other people is much cheaper.

    The caps are not put in place by ISPs to make people pay for TV as the summary claims. (Why would an ISP that has no video services at all have caps if that were truly the reason? What is T-Mobile's TV service?) They're put in place to keep people who think they ought to have 100% fulltime use of a shared resource from keeping other users from getting what they are paying for.

  6. Re:Had a similar idea years ago on The USB Kill Stick, Priced at $56, Is Designed To Destroy Laptops, PCs, TVs (zdnet.com) · · Score: 1
    You use a lot of technical terms, but I don't believe you are thinking about the problem.

    A many walled setup, with one SF6 filled tube containing the cap, the discharge coil, and a third tank circuit to measure when the discharge coil is full

    Full of what? Pixie dust? Voltage? Do you not realize that as soon as your "discharge coil" is "full" of voltage the ends of that coil will have "many megavolts" difference in potential? Did you look at the document I referenced for you that shows a 2" gap in an SF6 environment breaks down at just over 200kV? That means your "many megavolts" coil will have to have ends that are more than 10" apart. And that's to keep what is IN the "glass tube" from arcing. Those wires have to come outside the tube so they can feed their many megavolts into the wall -- and that's going to be MUCH less than a 2" gap and it will not be surrounded by SF6.

    to bridge it to the mains

    And just what magical switch will you use that fits inside a wallwart package that will handle many megavolts across its terminals to create this "bridge"?

    It can only self discharge when there is a bridge between the driver and discharge coils.

    You know, every Jacob's Ladder I've ever built did not have a "bridge" between the input and output coils of the neon sign transformer and yet it created dandy sparks across the output -- and that was at just a paltry 10kV. Imagine many megavolts packed into a tiny wallwart. That you cannot imagine that this will arc and spark and spitz and self-destruct is amazing.

    I've already spent too much time trying to educate you on this, so please, prove me wrong and build a multi-megavolt wallwart and show me how it doesn't go up in a flash of plasma as it self destructs.

  7. Re:More "research" on Smartphones Can Steal 3D Printing Plans By Listening To The Printer (fedscoop.com) · · Score: 1

    People in industrial and military espionage can now take heart in the knowledge that all sorts of top-secret plans can be stolen with 90+% accuracy by simply "accidentally" leaving a phone on a workbench.

    If a 3D printer is printing a top secret thing, don't you imagine that the people running the printer might know that any phone "accidentally" left on a workbench is a problem? Like, "we're in a top secret facility working with top secret material -- how did ANY smartphone get in here?"

    and even not-so-obviously sensitive ones like open production floors.

    Top secret parts are not going to be printed on an "open production floor".

    On the other hand, maybe the next Secretary of State will have a flunky email the top secret CAD files to her home server so they can be printed on the home 3D printer. Wait, no, that's not a problem. If the printed part doesn't have a coversheet declaring it Top Secret it obviously cannot be. Nevermind.

  8. Re:Had a similar idea years ago on The USB Kill Stick, Priced at $56, Is Designed To Destroy Laptops, PCs, TVs (zdnet.com) · · Score: 1
    The point is that there is not likely to be ANY smoke. ESD tends to create open circuits, not shorts, and a short on a USB data output is not going to create a huge amount of smoke anyway.

    Like I said, you're more likely to get a response by carrying on a bottle of liquid smoke. Why destroy someone's property when you can do the same thing with a few drops of an odorant?

  9. Re:I can't wait for the future! on Smartphones Can Steal 3D Printing Plans By Listening To The Printer (fedscoop.com) · · Score: 2

    Actually, some of the parts of that plane you use are, in fact, built on a 3D printer.

    "Some parts" is hardly what was meant by either the OP or me. But I think you knew that.

    Or, to the point, you're flying in a plane built partially with 3D printed parts.

    Having a bezel on the seatback display printed in a 3D printer is a lot different than having a 3D printed fuselage. But I think you knew that. You're not "to the point", you are ignoring the point.

  10. Re:Had a similar idea years ago on The USB Kill Stick, Priced at $56, Is Designed To Destroy Laptops, PCs, TVs (zdnet.com) · · Score: 1

    Blow power to check in, no-one boards that flight for a few hours.

    First of all, every airport check-in area I've seen in the last decade is operating at about half capacity. Blow out one computer, they simply switch to a different station and carry on. Trip a breaker and they simply reset it and carry on.

    And second, check-in and boarding are done in two very different parts of the airport. It's not very likely that the gate computers are on the same breaker that the check-in computers are. A five minute delay while they find and reset a breaker at check-in will have zero impact on boarding.

    Blow power to security screening and the TSA will cancel all departures until they can get it back.

    You're going to sneak up to a TSA security checkpoint and start plugging things into their outlets? Really? Have you been to an airport recently?

    And my comment about "half capacity operations" regarding check-in goes double for TSA security checkpoints. "Oh my, one of the body scanners stopped working. Call maintenance and use that one over there." I've been in line when that has happened. Or if there isn't one over there, simply close that line and delay everyone. Or if you blow out one of the metal detectors, then EVERYONE gets to go through the body scanners.

  11. Re:I can't wait for the future! on Smartphones Can Steal 3D Printing Plans By Listening To The Printer (fedscoop.com) · · Score: 1

    Anyone else want to fly on a cheap knockoff plane who's fuselage is 94% correct?

    Anyone want to fly in a plane that is built on a 3D printer, even 100% correct?

    Really, if you can get your phone next to the printer to measure the electromagnetic energy it emits, why not just have the phone measure the electromagnetic energy that reflects off the printer using the ubiquitous spy software called "camera"?

  12. Re:Had a similar idea years ago on The USB Kill Stick, Priced at $56, Is Designed To Destroy Laptops, PCs, TVs (zdnet.com) · · Score: 1

    imagine something the size of a laptop power brick, if that makes you feel better.

    This isn't an issue you can wave away by making other people "feel better". "Feel better" isn't the same as "makes it technologically possible." You've now just added a foot or two of power cable between your impossible device and the wall, which will have to refrain from arcing over and creating quite a display when it carries many megavolts from the now not-a-wallwart into the wall. That's if the not-a-wallwart thing can manage to create many megavolts without itself starting to arc and being an amazing display all by itself.

    Remember, the goal is to be stealthy and not light up the place like the Fourth of July fireworks with sparks and flame. Even were you able to create many megavolts in a "laptop power brick", you're not going to be stealthy when it arcs like a Jacob's ladder. And also remember, Jacob's ladders can be produced with as little as 10kV -- a whole lot less than a megavolt.

  13. Re:Had a similar idea years ago on The USB Kill Stick, Priced at $56, Is Designed To Destroy Laptops, PCs, TVs (zdnet.com) · · Score: 1

    you only want to down the little kiosk the lady taking your boarding passes is using.

    You don't get to plug anything into that outlet. If you manage to do that and something stops working, they'll see you and security will haul your ass off to the hoosegow.

    And if you did manage to sneak your impossible device into that outlet and blow out the power supply on the pass reader, they'll just move one from another gate over, or use the other one already at the gate. Or, at the very worst, take passes by hand and enter them manually.

    i very much doubt that it is on its own breaker.

    Yes, dear, for liability issues, publicly accessible charging stations and outlets have their own breakers. Just to stop morons like you from trying to shut down the terminal by plugging something destructive into them.

  14. Re:Had a similar idea years ago on The USB Kill Stick, Priced at $56, Is Designed To Destroy Laptops, PCs, TVs (zdnet.com) · · Score: 1

    apowercap just came to mind. if you want small, high voltage caps, try tdk.

    50kV is closer, but still at least 1/400th the "many megavolts" you want to create. And they're 10,000pF or below.

    also, again, glass vial enclosure full of sulfur hexafluride.

    I refer you to this report from the Air Force Materials Laboratory, specifically page 12, which shows a DC breakdown voltage of just over 200kV for a 2" gap in SF6. It's hard to have a 2" gap in a wallwart that isn't much bigger than that. That's one fifth of a megavolt; much less than your "many megavolts". And, as someone else pointed out, you have to get these megavolts out of the wallwart, so you can't enclose the entire system in SF6.

    The fact remains, creating a "many megavolts" output from a wallwart sized device will be a technological feat that you can profit from. Your desire to destroy other people's stuff because they dare leave an outlet open for you to plug into is hardly necessary, or even a positive attribute.

  15. Re:Had a similar idea years ago on The USB Kill Stick, Priced at $56, Is Designed To Destroy Laptops, PCs, TVs (zdnet.com) · · Score: 1

    Smoke in the cabin.

    From what, a "smoked" seatback display? The term "smoked" doesn't mean "emits vast quantities of smoke", it means "broken". I've "smoked" lots of electrical bits, and except for a few cases none of them have emitted smoke. That's especially true when I've "smoked" a cute little IC by putting too much voltage on it. The last one was a precious little Nano that started drawing about 200 times the current it should have. Had it been properly fused, the fuse would have blown and I'd be wondering why it wasn't working. As it was, I didn't really detect the problem until I burned my finger on the Atmel processor. That's when I noticed the current draw. But not a single bit of smoke.

    You'd have much better luck smuggling a bottle of liquid smoke on board and pouring it out at the opportune time. Less than 3oz is a LOT of liquid smoke. But they might catch you? Well, what do you think is going to happen when the seatback display IN FRONT OF YOU starts smoking? You don't think they will notice you? But it won't, so you don't have to be scared.

    What do you think the airline is going to do?

    Tell you that the display is broken and sorry. They'll tell the next pax that the display is broken and sorry. They will probably write it up for maintenance, but since it's not on the minimum operating equipment list it won't ground the airplane.

  16. Re:Had a similar idea years ago on The USB Kill Stick, Priced at $56, Is Designed To Destroy Laptops, PCs, TVs (zdnet.com) · · Score: 1

    you dont plug a wallwart into a usb port, idiot. troll elsewhere.

    And plugging your "many megavolt" wallwart into a complimentary charging outlet isn't going to shut down an airport terminal, either, moron. It will blow the breaker in the charging station at worst, destroy stuff other people have plugged into the same charging station maybe. But shut down the terminal? You're on drugs. Or you are a troll.

  17. Re:Had a similar idea years ago on The USB Kill Stick, Priced at $56, Is Designed To Destroy Laptops, PCs, TVs (zdnet.com) · · Score: 1

    having many rooms on a single power drop from the breaker, jackass.

    Speak in complete sentences so you might have a chance of making some kind of sense, please. So what about having multiple outlets on one breaker?

    you can cripple many systems by exploiting cheap assedness in planning of the power infrastructure.

    So your idea of "proper building wiring" is a home run for every outlet to individual breakers? But even that's not enough, since breakers are connected to the same circuit on the back end. Putting "many megavolts" into one breaker on one circuit will feed that voltage out the others on the same circuit. So you must think that a single phase for each breaker and one outlet each is "proper". A house with five outlets in one room would need two three-phase feeds to the house to be properly wired, then, for just that one room.

    But if you have just one home-run for each breaker, then what are you plugging your wallwart into again? There will be no outlet available for you.

    megavolt voltages are easily obtained with 19th century wiring designs.

    Yes, they are, but INSULATING the wiring so that megavolts doesn't leap wildly about is still an issue. You want megavolts in a wallwart. If you can invent the insulation that would allow that, you'll make a fortune and you won't need to demonstrate your technical wizardry by destroying other people's property for fun.

    we have much better conductors and material now.

    The issue is not conductors.

    they make supercaps that can handle that kind of load,

    Thanks for the name. I looked them up. Did you? It's hard to find any specifics about their products other than a couple of pictures on their website. The largest cap they have shown there is 550F. But it's rated at only 2.7V. That's a million times less than the "multimegavolts" you want to generate.

    How long will it take to charge your multimegavolt supercap? Let's see, "C equals ice cream cone". C=Q/V. C=550F. V=2.7V. Q is CxV, or 1485 coulombs. You're plugging this into a USB port. A 2.1A USB charging port will take 707 seconds to charge this cap, or more than 11 minutes. (One Ampere is one Coulomb per second.) And you'll wind up with a whopping 2.7 volts when you're done.

    But, if you figure out some way to switch 1,000,000 of these caps from parallel to serial (a common way of voltage doubling or tripling, usually done with diodes) you'll get your "many megavolts" (2.7MV, to be exact). But it will take 707 million seconds to charge this capacitor bank up, and it won't be wallwart sized anymore.

    But do this with a coil? Ok, now insulate the coil so it isn't busy arcing internally and the current is going out the wallwart plug.

  18. Re:Had a similar idea years ago on The USB Kill Stick, Priced at $56, Is Designed To Destroy Laptops, PCs, TVs (zdnet.com) · · Score: 1

    you want to keep edward snowden from boarding his flight. you plug in on the complimentary power recepticle, 30 secs later, the airport terminal is down,

    You think smoking a complimentary USB charging port is going to shut down an airport terminal? You're on drugs.

    Oh, but if you put it into the charging port on the airplane and smoke the seatback display! That will surely disable the aircraft, right? Sorry, that aircraft will be fine, it will just have another non-working seatback display that will eventually get replaced.

    There is no justification for this device. None at all. It is intended only to destroy other people's property.

  19. Re:Talk about the Evil Maid... on The USB Kill Stick, Priced at $56, Is Designed To Destroy Laptops, PCs, TVs (zdnet.com) · · Score: 1

    Any answer to the question "is there a legit reason" that starts with "let's say you are an international terrorist" can be ignored as patently absurd.

  20. Re:Had a similar idea years ago on The USB Kill Stick, Priced at $56, Is Designed To Destroy Laptops, PCs, TVs (zdnet.com) · · Score: 1

    wallwart sized device charges up many megavolts in a resonant coil, then discharges it back into the mains.

    If you could design insulation that would allow a wallwart sized device to develop many megavolts internally without frying itself, you could make a fortune and wouldn't need to destroy other people's property.

    the breaker will blow from the backfed voltage,

    Breakers blow from current, not voltage. You can't generate a million volts with sufficient current to feed back into a wiring panel from the same line you take the current, at least not without a huge storage capacity and a long time to fill it. Wallwart sized? Hardly. What you might be able to do is get the breaker to blow when you fry a switching power supply plugged into it, but that's not a "backfed voltage", its a resulting short circuit in a connected device.

    given how often proper building wiring is real consideraton over cost (sarcasm),

    I'm sorry, but feeding a huge voltage back into the wiring is not proving that the building wiring is at fault. It's showing a destructive tendency and ignorance of what constitutes "proper building wiring".

  21. Re:How is this different from any other form of... on The USB Kill Stick, Priced at $56, Is Designed To Destroy Laptops, PCs, TVs (zdnet.com) · · Score: 3, Insightful

    How is this different from any other form of vandalism?

    It's not. It's not "security testing", it's not something an honest "security tester" will have in his "toolbox". It's vandalism and destructive behaviour pretending to be respectable activity.

    How DARE anyone expose a USB port where something can be plugged in for some legitimate purpose? Those money grubbing airlines who are putting USB charging ports on their seat-back systems so you can power your mobile device while on a four hour flight -- how DARE they! And those charging ports that are starting to show up in the waiting areas for those flights? They deserve to be taught a lesson. Kill anything with a USB port on it. It's "security testing" to see if they can survive. Who cares if the service they were providing goes away?

    "Because I can" is not an excuse for destroying other people's property. "TV-B-Gone" is an annoyance; destroying someone's $1000 laptop because they fell asleep next to you on the airplane while it was running and it happened to have an open USB port is pathetic. There is no legitimate purpose for this thing. If you need ESD testing for your own hardware designs, use the appropriate tool. ESD testing other people's stuff is, and should be, criminal.

  22. Re:Quality control on Samsung Delays Shipments of Galaxy Note 7 For Quality Control Testing (theguardian.com) · · Score: 3, Funny

    "local reports of users claiming that the battery of the Galaxy Note 7 battery exploded"

    Well, if they didn't design in a battery to power the battery maybe they wouldn't need additional quality control testing to conduct additional quality control testing?

  23. Re:One must wonder... on Hackers Stole Account Details for Over 60 Million Dropbox Users · · Score: 1

    ... I've got the same combination on my luggage!

    I don't bother with locks on my luggage anymore. TSA just cuts them off -- even the "TSA approved" locks they have a key for -- as would anyone who wants to break in.

  24. Re:QoS and net neutrality are the same issue... on Europe's Net Neutrality Doesn't Ban BitTorrent Throttling (torrentfreak.com) · · Score: 1

    What you have just described gives an artificial advantage (or disadvantage in the case of bittorrent) to managed protocols, discouraging innovation.

    You have it backwards, if anything.

    A neutral network should not discriminate based on packet contents whatsoever.

    That's the issue being debated, not just a conclusion to be stated as final. The Internet was designed with such "discrimination" because the people who designed it understood that it is a useful function.

    If you return to the reason for net neutrality in the first place, it is based on the desire to prevent ISPs from gaining an advantage as both the service and content provider by artificially slowing competitor's content. That doesn't argue for "no discrimination whatsoever", it argues for "no discrimination for the same kinds of content".

    There are very good reasons to prioritize content that needs low latency and guaranteed delivery, like VoIP or streaming video. VoIP starts to fail if the packets show up late or out of order. Your bittorrent of an ISO or video file does not.

    Beyond that, an ISP has no business discriminating based on address or packet contents.

    Address I agree. Completely. That's net neutrality. But contents? Of course they do, and your proof by repeated assertion is still proof by assertion.

    The moment that is allowed, ISPs game the system.

    How so?

    As seen, they invest in smart hardware capable of culling unwanted traffic rather than adding capacity,

    Where have I said anything about culling traffic? Nowhere. That's hyperbole on your part. Prioritizing time sensitive content is not the same as culling everything or anything else. Culling traffic is wrong not because it fails net neutrality tests, it is wrong because it fails to fulfill contractual service provision agreements.

    There is exactly one good solution: add more capacity when necessary.

    Yes, in a perfect world with unlimited money and resources, that is the "exactly one good solution". When you find such a planet where this exists, please let us know.

    This is the simplest, least expensive

    That is not necessarily true. It may be simpler but will hardly be less expensive. If my ISP has to come to my house to install hardware with higher capacity then it will cost someone -- most likely me. If they have to install that hardware for the entire block because one person thinks his ISO download should never every be slowed by even a fraction of a second (not that he's even likely to notice) for any reason at all, then I'm getting charged for his wants and get nothing out of it. That's fair?

    and perfectly fair.

    No. Everyone who has to pay higher rates because some people think it is unfair that their file downloads or email traffic may be slowed temporarily while someone else's VoIP call gets priority is not being treated fairly.

    While it would be the "exactly good solution" for everyone to get infinite bandwidth and never have to share anything with anyone else, that's much more expensive that the current system, and does not exist.

    It also ensures that there will be an excess of capacity available for innovative new protocols and uses.

    So you want not only enough to cover the current need, you want an excess so that someone might be able to invent something new sometime in the future. That's not an argument based on net neutrality, that a blue-sky wonderful utopian view.

  25. Re:What's the complaint? on Europe's Net Neutrality Doesn't Ban BitTorrent Throttling (torrentfreak.com) · · Score: 2

    Net neutrality applies to all throttling of all kinds for all reasons.

    No, it does not. Net "neutrality" means you treat the sources of data the same way, not that you treat all data the same way. It is neutral if an ISP doesn't prioritize its own VoIP services over other providers, for example. The question to ask is if the traffic shaping is creating an advantage for the ISP. That's what "neutral" means in this context. If it's for traffic management for all of the same kinds of traffic, it's part of the system design from the very beginning.

    It is none of my ISP's business what kind of packets I'm sending

    That's a different issue than net neutrality. That's privacy.

    and not their perogative to decide which bits of my traffic are more important than other bits

    The issue is not "important" (a very subjective measure), but what traffic does not need low latency. VoIP only works reasonably well if all the packets get there fast enough; file downloads or email or many other things work just as well if the packets are a little bit "late" or even out of order. If you're trying to say that your FTP download of a distribution ISO (or torrent of the same) is as important as someone else's VoIP session, that's just selfish. Net neutrality has nothing to do with selfish, it has to do with not creating an artificial advantage for services sold by the ISP over services sold by others.