I think the concept of wardriving is interesting, but the practical ethical results of wardriving efforts seem very very few
I think a lot of people are missing the point. These projects have very little to do with security, and a lot to do with providing a telecommunications service that actually works for a change.
The state of braodband in the US is miserable, most of us can't even get a connection, and our elected officials couldn't care less.
In a time of general apathy and dispair over the state of the telecom industy in this country, a people's alternative to broadband is a very refreshing concept. For instance...maybe some guy has a T1 at his home shop, and when he locks up at night he just leaves his AP open because hey...he's not using it why not help some people out? This is how it starts.
Naturally we're just making baby steps with projects like these...but everything great starts small.
I hear you, but I think it might be better the other way around.
I've noticed that some games, which require *constant* attention...like TFC or DoD...where there is really no rest time at all...end up giving me a bad case of neck-strain, eye-strain, and back-strain.
But, when I play games like counter-strike...or even EQ...there are usually regular opportunities to get up for 30secs or so and stretch...get a drink if water, take a bio break, put the pop-tart in the toaster...whatever it is. I find that when I play games this way, I can play them for 10 hours at a stretch...but the "other" kinds of games that require constant attention really bust my body up bad. Probably why I don't play them as much anymore.
I think a lot of people are missing the point. These projects have very little to do with security, and a lot to do with providing a telecommunications service that actually works for a change.
The state of braodband in the US is miserable, most of us can't even get a connection, and our elected officials couldn't care less.
In a time of general apathy and dispair over the state of the telecom industy in this country, a people's alternative to broadband is a very refreshing concept. For instance...maybe some guy has a T1 at his home shop, and when he locks up at night he just leaves his AP open because hey...he's not using it why not help some people out? This is how it starts.
Naturally we're just making baby steps with projects like these...but everything great starts small.
I'd like to see some pretty boy like you try and catch someone like Kevin Mitnick. These guys live on an entirely different plane from people like you.
And they can hack circles around these FBI fruitcakes.
I agree as far as needing to get rid of Israel. The only reason the US is involved is because our Judeo-Christian beliefs obligate us to protect "the holy land." For pete's sake, people, it's a fucking hunk of dirt! There's nothing "holy" about it. It's fucking DIRT! Let the Arabs have it, it was theirs to begin with.
Ya, but where will the israelis go? Here in the US? Do you really want a population that willingly voted a mass murderer into office immigrating to the US? You can be damn sure noone else in Europe wants them.
There's a bigger picture here. What happens when we start wanting to download books, movies, television shows, music, trade journals, etc?
That's an aweful lot of content, and each content producer will want thier cut. Sure most people would be willing to pay $10/month for unlimited downloads of music....but they won't be willing to pay $70/month for unlimited downloads of all content.
And that's what P2P is about, universal content distribution.
I know this is not a radical idea, but I'm going to say it again. I think broadband Internet access should become part of a city's infrastructure, like roads and garbage service. I'd even pay for it like a utility (like water treatment or gas). God knows it'd get rid of silly little disputes over 'stealing' or redistributing bandwidth and cable companies penalizing users for doing what they signed on to do...use lots of bandwidth.
My question to Janis would be to verify or deny the legitimacy of the following idea:
Recording artists make more money doing concerts than anything else.
How can increased public exposure do anything but help the artist?
The RIAA buys/sells the artist' out in the studio, and then makes their money selling CDs. So this is more like us paying the RIAA to market artists to us, so that we can go see them in concert. It's a very clear case of an unwanted middle man.
Ask any artist what the biggest problem they have is, and they will tell you that it's thier recording contract.
If we create a medium where artists can market themselves "for free", they would be able to bypass the recording contract completely, and perform concerts wherever there is public demand.
We win, the artist wins, and the RIAA bothers someone else.
What if each client maintained thier own index of signatures?
If each song/video had it's own unique serial number, the index would be a long list of checksums indexed by serial number. All of this could be encrypted, and accessable only by the client software.(I.e. the user cant see it)
Then a trusted circle of 1337 haxor P2P traders(like the parent poster) could put thier time and effort into compiling a list of checksums. This group would then have 'root' access to the list, and they would be the only ones authorized to make editions or changes.
This way everyone still gets to use the network(client software automatically verifies checksum by the list), the index is always updated and on everyones harddrive(no need to go to a seperate website), and the "underground" maintains the integrity of the list.
I would be very much on favour for kind of a GPL for research papers
The problem here is that software is a concrete representation of an abstract algorithm. It's immediately demonstrable by running it and observing what it does.
Science however is largely communicated in the form of equations, diagrams, and laboratory procedures. The more complicated a theory is, the more difficult it is to verify. Historically science has solved the more simple problems first, and then worked toward the more complex. This has left us with a legacy of very difficult, complicated problems. So the question is, how do we keep up with the increasing complexity of scientific theory?
In science, once an idea has been "confirmed" to be legitimate, it is then "accepted" by a very large community who begin to do work with the new theory as a basis. So naturally it's very important to be certain that the theory is correct.
The Manhattan Project for instance cost taxpayers $2.2 billion. Back then that was a very significant percentage of the entire US defense budget. The military went out on a limb because the best minds in science all concurred that it was a realistic possibility.
The only way that industry will have that same kind of respect/trust in science is if they are assured that they best and brightest have verified the findings. And like most things in this country....everyone has a price....the best journals offer the biggest pay to the best minds, because industry is willing to pay for the information that is produced.
The point is, that the a-bomb represented a very large shift away from science as "discovery" to science as "industry". Today there is very little distinction remaining between advanced engineering and science. They are both funded by the same people, for the same purpose.
60 million users is how many napster claimed at its peak. Most companies would kill for that.
Yep, that's why none of us will let a company own something as important as file-sharing.
And as for a distribution model, a bussiness model, having central index servers and distributed content servers lets the bussiness control the show
See above.
Gnutella is mostly for the sector of slash dot populated by "free love free lunch" imbeciles who think is is "okay" to steal because they can.
Unfortunately 90% of the world population agrees with us. The other 9% agrees to pay someone for a CD/DVD they burned for them. The remaining 1% is you.
my guess is that when something copy protected replaces mp3 that gnutella could become a viable bussiness model
This will never happen, it is a physical impossibility. You cannot protect analog content, the only way to do this is to anti-design every general purpose computer/recorder on the face of the planet. And no that won't happen either.
Lot's of times this happens...I really think the award was giving out of respect for the Sandman series.
Nobody says it of course, but I'm sure that everyone in that panel had thier respect for Gaiman won be reading Sandman.
Lots of people are very gaurded about the chategorization of thier genre fiction...comic books, graphic novel, sci fi, fantasy...like most geniuses Gaiman took one genre and blended it with a few others.
It's hard to characterize(I.E. pigeonhole) work like that....so they sneak him in edgewise by giving him an award about a book he wrote.
They are paying him respect as an artist. Respect he amply deserves.
Yep, this is exactly why the film industry should be canibalized. They produce total crap.
The next generation of filmmakers can't even get into Hollywood because creativity is against the rules. The only way we're going to discover the next Steven Speilburg, or the next James Cameron, is if we find them through a new industy.
Let's all pirate the hell out of Hollywood, and boycot them simultaneosly. Eventually thier industry will come crashing down...then the good guys(I.E. the ones who see film as art instead of a paycheck) can start making movies we all want to see again.
Has it occured to you that none of us have a choice? That maybe the genie is out of the bottle, and this is the next inevitable step in the march of technological progress?
IP protection threatens to turn your computer into a brain dead toaster, so the previous generation of industry/technology can retire well.
What if technology doesn't want to wait for that? What if technology doesn't care about your society at all?
P2P filesharing is the defacto next step for all of us, it's what the internet has always wanted to be. And it's not unlikely that it will bulldoze over any industry it needs to in order to grow and become what it wants to be.
Can you imagine? Those new heat-assist harddrives were quoted to have the capacity to contain the entire library of congress. In ten years time, we may all have HDs on our desk that contain 10% of all recorded content in the history of our species. A P2P network of just a few hundred people with machines like that could contain the entire recorded history of the human race.
Do you have any idea what the implications of that could be? This is not science fiction, it is happening right now!
Do you really think it's your right to prioritize the past over a future like that?
Has anyone else noticed that the moderators are giving 4 and 5 insightfuls to guys like this, who like to play IP cop?
Wanna know why? Because Slashdot is nothing but one big mound of IP...if the internet suddenly shifts to P2P, or some other non-server-centric model....Slashdot is done.
I find it very hard to believe that Slashdot as a moderated forum represents the majority of us with regards to the topic of IP and P2P.
Slashdot Mirror
Just vote Republican in the next Senate elections, then you can lose your job too.
Mod Parent Down.
Slashdot won't mod parent down because thier business model depends on the scarcity of client bandwidth.
I think the concept of wardriving is interesting, but the practical ethical results of wardriving efforts seem very very few
I think a lot of people are missing the point. These projects have very little to do with security, and a lot to do with providing a telecommunications service that actually works for a change.
The state of braodband in the US is miserable, most of us can't even get a connection, and our elected officials couldn't care less.
In a time of general apathy and dispair over the state of the telecom industy in this country, a people's alternative to broadband is a very refreshing concept. For instance...maybe some guy has a T1 at his home shop, and when he locks up at night he just leaves his AP open because hey...he's not using it why not help some people out? This is how it starts.
Naturally we're just making baby steps with projects like these...but everything great starts small.
I hear you, but I think it might be better the other way around.
I've noticed that some games, which require *constant* attention...like TFC or DoD...where there is really no rest time at all...end up giving me a bad case of neck-strain, eye-strain, and back-strain.
But, when I play games like counter-strike...or even EQ...there are usually regular opportunities to get up for 30secs or so and stretch...get a drink if water, take a bio break, put the pop-tart in the toaster...whatever it is. I find that when I play games this way, I can play them for 10 hours at a stretch...but the "other" kinds of games that require constant attention really bust my body up bad. Probably why I don't play them as much anymore.
I think a lot of people are missing the point. These projects have very little to do with security, and a lot to do with providing a telecommunications service that actually works for a change.
The state of braodband in the US is miserable, most of us can't even get a connection, and our elected officials couldn't care less.
In a time of general apathy and dispair over the state of the telecom industy in this country, a people's alternative to broadband is a very refreshing concept. For instance...maybe some guy has a T1 at his home shop, and when he locks up at night he just leaves his AP open because hey...he's not using it why not help some people out? This is how it starts.
Naturally we're just making baby steps with projects like these...but everything great starts small.
This just goes to show that there are far too many people with too much time on there hands
Ya, it's called un-employment.
I'd like to see some pretty boy like you try and catch someone like Kevin Mitnick. These guys live on an entirely different plane from people like you.
And they can hack circles around these FBI fruitcakes.
I agree as far as needing to get rid of Israel. The only reason the US is involved is because our Judeo-Christian beliefs obligate us to protect "the holy land." For pete's sake, people, it's a fucking hunk of dirt! There's nothing "holy" about it. It's fucking DIRT! Let the Arabs have it, it was theirs to begin with.
Ya, but where will the israelis go? Here in the US? Do you really want a population that willingly voted a mass murderer into office immigrating to the US? You can be damn sure noone else in Europe wants them.
There's a bigger picture here. What happens when we start wanting to download books, movies, television shows, music, trade journals, etc?
That's an aweful lot of content, and each content producer will want thier cut. Sure most people would be willing to pay $10/month for unlimited downloads of music....but they won't be willing to pay $70/month for unlimited downloads of all content.
And that's what P2P is about, universal content distribution.
Please, please, please mod parent up to 5.
This is so boring... everyone on slashdot knows how to build a sooped up box.
I thought the article was about a "black box" hack of a multi-functional wireless AP.
Wake me up when someone garage hacks one of those, I wanna know what features are cool.
I know this is not a radical idea, but I'm going to say it again. I think broadband Internet access should become part of a city's infrastructure, like roads and garbage service. I'd even pay for it like a utility (like water treatment or gas). God knows it'd get rid of silly little disputes over 'stealing' or redistributing bandwidth and cable companies penalizing users for doing what they signed on to do...use lots of bandwidth.
Seconded.
My question to Janis would be to verify or deny the legitimacy of the following idea:
Recording artists make more money doing concerts than anything else.
How can increased public exposure do anything but help the artist?
The RIAA buys/sells the artist' out in the studio, and then makes their money selling CDs. So this is more like us paying the RIAA to market artists to us, so that we can go see them in concert. It's a very clear case of an unwanted middle man.
Ask any artist what the biggest problem they have is, and they will tell you that it's thier recording contract.
If we create a medium where artists can market themselves "for free", they would be able to bypass the recording contract completely, and perform concerts wherever there is public demand.
We win, the artist wins, and the RIAA bothers someone else.
What if each client maintained thier own index of signatures?
If each song/video had it's own unique serial number, the index would be a long list of checksums indexed by serial number. All of this could be encrypted, and accessable only by the client software.(I.e. the user cant see it)
Then a trusted circle of 1337 haxor P2P traders(like the parent poster) could put thier time and effort into compiling a list of checksums. This group would then have 'root' access to the list, and they would be the only ones authorized to make editions or changes.
This way everyone still gets to use the network(client software automatically verifies checksum by the list), the index is always updated and on everyones harddrive(no need to go to a seperate website), and the "underground" maintains the integrity of the list.
Taco is a corporate stooge.
Remember, all of this translates into a patent for the company that does the funding.
I would be very much on favour for kind of a GPL for research papers
The problem here is that software is a concrete representation of an abstract algorithm. It's immediately demonstrable by running it and observing what it does.
Science however is largely communicated in the form of equations, diagrams, and laboratory procedures. The more complicated a theory is, the more difficult it is to verify. Historically science has solved the more simple problems first, and then worked toward the more complex. This has left us with a legacy of very difficult, complicated problems. So the question is, how do we keep up with the increasing complexity of scientific theory?
In science, once an idea has been "confirmed" to be legitimate, it is then "accepted" by a very large community who begin to do work with the new theory as a basis. So naturally it's very important to be certain that the theory is correct.
The Manhattan Project for instance cost taxpayers $2.2 billion. Back then that was a very significant percentage of the entire US defense budget. The military went out on a limb because the best minds in science all concurred that it was a realistic possibility.
The only way that industry will have that same kind of respect/trust in science is if they are assured that they best and brightest have verified the findings. And like most things in this country....everyone has a price....the best journals offer the biggest pay to the best minds, because industry is willing to pay for the information that is produced.
The point is, that the a-bomb represented a very large shift away from science as "discovery" to science as "industry". Today there is very little distinction remaining between advanced engineering and science. They are both funded by the same people, for the same purpose.
As bandwidth gets more expensive, and ISP gets smarter, Slashdot may well put itself out of business.
You guys should really be working on a cache-based solution to this....the laughs are over.
The amount of bandwidth used depends on how many hops you are from the access point
Of course, this number drops precipitiously on a P2P network.
If the guy you're sitting next to at the coffeeshop has today's copy of the NYTimes cached on his laptop, why contact NYTimes.com?
60 million users is how many napster claimed at its peak. Most companies would kill for that.
Yep, that's why none of us will let a company own something as important as file-sharing.
And as for a distribution model, a bussiness model, having central index servers and distributed content servers lets the bussiness control the show
See above.
Gnutella is mostly for the sector of slash dot populated by "free love free lunch" imbeciles who think is is "okay" to steal because they can.
Unfortunately 90% of the world population agrees with us. The other 9% agrees to pay someone for a CD/DVD they burned for them. The remaining 1% is you.
my guess is that when something copy protected replaces mp3 that gnutella could become a viable bussiness model
This will never happen, it is a physical impossibility. You cannot protect analog content, the only way to do this is to anti-design every general purpose computer/recorder on the face of the planet. And no that won't happen either.
Lot's of times this happens...I really think the award was giving out of respect for the Sandman series.
Nobody says it of course, but I'm sure that everyone in that panel had thier respect for Gaiman won be reading Sandman.
Lots of people are very gaurded about the chategorization of thier genre fiction...comic books, graphic novel, sci fi, fantasy...like most geniuses Gaiman took one genre and blended it with a few others.
It's hard to characterize(I.E. pigeonhole) work like that....so they sneak him in edgewise by giving him an award about a book he wrote.
They are paying him respect as an artist. Respect he amply deserves.
Yep, this is exactly why the film industry should be canibalized. They produce total crap.
The next generation of filmmakers can't even get into Hollywood because creativity is against the rules. The only way we're going to discover the next Steven Speilburg, or the next James Cameron, is if we find them through a new industy.
Let's all pirate the hell out of Hollywood, and boycot them simultaneosly. Eventually thier industry will come crashing down...then the good guys(I.E. the ones who see film as art instead of a paycheck) can start making movies we all want to see again.
Can you point to one positively-moderated comment here that's "cheered" the theft of the movie?
Well...isn't that his whole point? What's the difference between software and cenima?
Has it occured to you that none of us have a choice? That maybe the genie is out of the bottle, and this is the next inevitable step in the march of technological progress?
IP protection threatens to turn your computer into a brain dead toaster, so the previous generation of industry/technology can retire well.
What if technology doesn't want to wait for that? What if technology doesn't care about your society at all?
P2P filesharing is the defacto next step for all of us, it's what the internet has always wanted to be. And it's not unlikely that it will bulldoze over any industry it needs to in order to grow and become what it wants to be.
Can you imagine? Those new heat-assist harddrives were quoted to have the capacity to contain the entire library of congress. In ten years time, we may all have HDs on our desk that contain 10% of all recorded content in the history of our species. A P2P network of just a few hundred people with machines like that could contain the entire recorded history of the human race.
Do you have any idea what the implications of that could be? This is not science fiction, it is happening right now!
Do you really think it's your right to prioritize the past over a future like that?
Has anyone else noticed that the moderators are giving 4 and 5 insightfuls to guys like this, who like to play IP cop?
Wanna know why? Because Slashdot is nothing but one big mound of IP...if the internet suddenly shifts to P2P, or some other non-server-centric model....Slashdot is done.
I find it very hard to believe that Slashdot as a moderated forum represents the majority of us with regards to the topic of IP and P2P.