If you are anti FBI getting customers info it could take days. If they didn't loose it permanently first. I can see it now...an admin saying, "OOPS, I slipped and hit the delete key. Sorry the information was just permanently deleted"
Agent: So which server did you delete the data from? You know we have ways of reading recently-deleted data from hard drives these days so long as it's not overwritten by something else. I'll just take that server and we can read the data back at the labs. Admin: Well, it could be any of our servers. I've designed my network so even I don't know which one I'm working so you can't just snatch the server I was working on like that. Agent: Okay, boys, you heard the man. It could be any server here, so we have to take them all. Let's get to work...
The poor hosting company probably has ToS to live up to. This will ruin them.
Law always beats a ToS. If the FBI comes with a warrant for a piece of customer data, you've got to turn it over even if your ToS/Privacy Policy says you won't. To avoid getting caught in this jam, include a statement saying you'll turn over anything to any authority who presents a proper warrant.
If their business was based on not turning anything over to the spooks, well, so much for that idea.
The article didn't even reveal what the warrant was looking for, so it's impossible for us to say if it was a reasonable request. If the company was refusing to look for infomation the FBI was sure it had, then this kind of action would be fully justified.
Something you have: Like the card. You've got to be in possession of a physical object that has the right 16 digits encoded on it to get the machine to work.
Something you know: That's the PIN. Only somebody who knows the right secret handshake of buttons is admitted in.
Something you are: That's where biometrics would be. You've got to look/feel like you in order to get in.
So, The biometrics shouldn't be used in place of a PIN, it should be used in tandem with a PIN. If your biometrics test gets compromised, you're no less secure than the ATMs of today since they'd still have to get to your new card and new PIN number for the biometric reading to be worth anything.
Another tactic is to completely shield the keypad from view while typing the numbers by feel with your other hand. That'll at least annoy all visual attempts to steal the pin.
Sounds cool... but just out of curiosity, is it legal to make your own ATM card?
To make? Sure. Afterall, an ATM card or credit card is nothing more than a piece of plastic with a standardized magnetic stripe that repeats the same 16 numbers that are on the front of the card over and over.
To use? Uh... well, that's up to your bank. I kinda doubt they'd be to happy with it.
I think the knocks at that are that a web form claiming your location is not good enough to verify you are where you say you are, and no good at all if you relocate the phone even on a part-time basis.
BTW, the fee Vonage is charging for 911 is a value that they set, not the regulators. So, if they're going to collect money in the name of regulation, the FCC might as well make them spend it!
Therefore, all Vonage needs to do is implement some technology that locates their phones. It can be GPS, asking the clients and then sending a postcard, some IP-to-location tech, or something else they dream up. They just have to come up with one.
A typical business reply to a threat of government regulation is to create a watered-down version of what the regulation would do but is much easier on the business. That's exactly what Vonage did. The FCC is saying that program isn't good enough and they need to come up with real e911.
Basically, there are people like Vonage who are using VoIP to connect to the PTSN, and then acting all shocked when the "So, you've decided you want to be a PTSN provider" regulation book gets thown at them.
Don't worry. This isn't unfair. If anybody thinks they have a way to connect a tin can and string to the PTSN, they'll get the same book too.
Wouldn't be bad, because that'd create a worm that causes those who contract it to get fined by the government for false calls to 911. Doesn't matter that you lost control of your machine, it was your machine that called 911 on your line.
Then why can't the POTS phone company make 911 a matter of consumer choice?
As much as we love capitalism in this country, at some points our government goes downright socialist on some issues. 911 is one of them. If you're going to provide phone service, you also have to provide e911 connectivity whether you like it or not. Any technology that comes up to compete with the POTS service is going to have to duplicate that or it won't be allowed to get out of the testing stages...
And that's exactly why cell phone networks are being forced to implement a location-spying technology of some kind so that the 911 centers get at least some clue where you're calling from if you call 911 on a cell phone. Because complying with e911 is not an elective, it's a requirement.
It's not like 911 is the only way to get in touch with the police.
You have 15 seconds. Tell me the non-911 way to report an emergency to the fire department where you are presently located.
See, the point of 911 is to have a dedicated emergency number that connects you to a trained dispatcher with the power to dispatch police, fire, and emergency medical services that is the same from coast to coast. As a result, most police and fire departments have ended their efforts to promote their local-access numbers because schoolchildren just need to learn what 911 is. The emergency numbers are no longer on a sticker on your phone, no longer on a magnet on your fridge, and no longer on the inside cover of your phone book. The inside cover now just tells you to call 911.
If consumers want it, they can pay for it- if not, they shouldn't have to. Sorry, that's not how we do emergency services in this country. You don't get to opt out of emergency services to save a few pennies because you never know when you or somebody around you will need it. Any phone that's connected to the network, even one that has no paid-for service, has the ability to reach 911 at all times.
Isn't this going to just push VoIP companies overseas where there won't be as tight regulation? It doesn't matter to the end user in the long run where the physical servers are located afterall.
The end user might not care, but that end user will seriously cause problems for their friends and family. It means to call a VoIP-to-phone user from a normal PTSN phone would be an international call to wherever the PTSN-to-VoIP transfer happens. If that transfer happens in the USA, then the VoIP company is a phone service provider and they'll have to comply with FCC rules.
Vonage has a poor fill-in for 911 service already, the ability to map "911" to the local police department.
Sorry. That's not 911, and it's far away from e911. Phone companies is required to provide the true e911. That means when you hit 911, you get connected immediately to the right call center servicing your area that has the capability to dispatch police, fire, and medical resources and your location data is automatically sent to that center as well.
911 call centers cannot be reached by mapping to any 10-digit number. There is no 10-digit number for them, they are simply known as 911 on the network within the region they serve. Vonage's immitation 911 depends on mapping 911 to a 10-digit number, so it can't find the call center and has to hope the police can help them. If you call a police department to report a fire, you will lose when-seconds-count time being bounced around while things burn.
If Vonage wants to compete with the phone companies, they have to have the same regulatory burdens that the FCC slaps on phone companies. It's only fair. If it means Vonage has to limit portability and/or raise prices to
Google's translation service is nothing more than their own implementation of Babelfish, which hasn't improved at all since AltaVista was using it in the 1990s. It's nothing to write home about, and still makes the same bad mistakes it has always made.
The problem with regexps is that they can be used to create very database-expensive queries. No search engine is ever going to allow a query that returns the entire database as the result set either.
There are three very distinct elements involved in creating a powerhouse search engine:
- A large crawl: A search engine with nothing in its database isn't going to work very well. A search engine needs as big of a crawl as possible in order to have any results at all. This takes huge resources in terms of bandwidth and computing power. Some of the early search engines met their demise when they couldn't afford to keep their crawlers growing as fast as new web content comes out.
- The Sorter: Once the long list of results that match the keywords are pulled out of the crawl, a sort needs to be applied in order to locate the best results and present them first. Google got vaulted to the top because PageRank was better than anybody else has ever put out. However, PageRank isn't perfect, so there is still room for somebody to make something better than PageRank.
-Promotion: A web site just sits there unused if it isn't promoted. Google never spent much on advertising and it just relied on word of mouth since it was so strong in the other two areas. And now that everyone turns to them first without even checking other engines, that has given them the strong advantage of a strong brand image. However, we've seen plenty of cases where inferior technology has been beaten out by better marketing. If somebody's tech passes Google, without marketing it nobody will know about it. Therefore, look for the challengers to be launching major ad campaigns inviting people to at least try them before they assume Google is better.
Can anybody put it all together? We're about to find out...
Some might claim that Teoma actually has the best find-what-you-want technology right now, but is suffering from a lack of crawling resources and promotion since Ask Jeeves, Inc. hasn't been bought up by any of the major resources. They seem like a project only being held back by lack of funding...
Re:Google can't rest on its successes
on
Search Beyond Google
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
The problem with Yahoo is that it tries to do far too much. When I want go search for something, I just want a little box asking me what I want to search for - not a huge page with a million links on it and a few flash ads.
And I doubt Yahoo.com is going to change at all. However, look at the other two search portals they operate. It's quite likely that the offering Yahoo puts forward to fight Google won't be called Yahoo, but be flown under the AltaVista or AllTheWeb brand name.
So, if you just want to search, they'll have a nice clean entry point to their network for you. If you want the full busy-screen portal, there will be another entry point for that. Nothing limits Yahoo to having only one major brand...
But look how that game has changed. Google's the one now bragging that they can search "6 billion items", while the others have worked at tweaking their sort routines to be more resistant to link spam... and there's the event.
Google's starting to be the one wishing this was a non-event.
It seems like Google is starting to admit that they've hit a wall at improving their search technology, so they're starting to expand into other portal areas to anchor themselves down the same way Yahoo did when their directory-search model hit the wall.
But Yahoo seems to be investing in several of the surviving web crawlers from the early days. Clearly, they see Google's hold on the title as the #1 search engine as something they might be able to take back.
Slashdot Mirror
If you are anti FBI getting customers info it could take days. If they didn't loose it permanently first. I can see it now...an admin saying, "OOPS, I slipped and hit the delete key. Sorry the information was just permanently deleted"
Agent: So which server did you delete the data from? You know we have ways of reading recently-deleted data from hard drives these days so long as it's not overwritten by something else. I'll just take that server and we can read the data back at the labs.
Admin: Well, it could be any of our servers. I've designed my network so even I don't know which one I'm working so you can't just snatch the server I was working on like that.
Agent: Okay, boys, you heard the man. It could be any server here, so we have to take them all. Let's get to work...
Outsmarting the FBI doesn't usually work.
The poor hosting company probably has ToS to live up to. This will ruin them.
Law always beats a ToS. If the FBI comes with a warrant for a piece of customer data, you've got to turn it over even if your ToS/Privacy Policy says you won't. To avoid getting caught in this jam, include a statement saying you'll turn over anything to any authority who presents a proper warrant.
If their business was based on not turning anything over to the spooks, well, so much for that idea.
The article didn't even reveal what the warrant was looking for, so it's impossible for us to say if it was a reasonable request. If the company was refusing to look for infomation the FBI was sure it had, then this kind of action would be fully justified.
There are three ways to secure something
Something you have: Like the card. You've got to be in possession of a physical object that has the right 16 digits encoded on it to get the machine to work.
Something you know: That's the PIN. Only somebody who knows the right secret handshake of buttons is admitted in.
Something you are: That's where biometrics would be. You've got to look/feel like you in order to get in.
So, The biometrics shouldn't be used in place of a PIN, it should be used in tandem with a PIN. If your biometrics test gets compromised, you're no less secure than the ATMs of today since they'd still have to get to your new card and new PIN number for the biometric reading to be worth anything.
Another tactic is to completely shield the keypad from view while typing the numbers by feel with your other hand. That'll at least annoy all visual attempts to steal the pin.
Sounds cool... but just out of curiosity, is it legal to make your own ATM card?
To make? Sure. Afterall, an ATM card or credit card is nothing more than a piece of plastic with a standardized magnetic stripe that repeats the same 16 numbers that are on the front of the card over and over.
To use? Uh... well, that's up to your bank. I kinda doubt they'd be to happy with it.
So Amtrak has to comply with airline regulations, and vice versa?
They all of the laws that apply to things public transportation services must do apply to both...
I think the knocks at that are that a web form claiming your location is not good enough to verify you are where you say you are, and no good at all if you relocate the phone even on a part-time basis.
BTW, the fee Vonage is charging for 911 is a value that they set, not the regulators. So, if they're going to collect money in the name of regulation, the FCC might as well make them spend it!
Therefore, all Vonage needs to do is implement some technology that locates their phones. It can be GPS, asking the clients and then sending a postcard, some IP-to-location tech, or something else they dream up. They just have to come up with one.
A typical business reply to a threat of government regulation is to create a watered-down version of what the regulation would do but is much easier on the business. That's exactly what Vonage did. The FCC is saying that program isn't good enough and they need to come up with real e911.
Basically, there are people like Vonage who are using VoIP to connect to the PTSN, and then acting all shocked when the "So, you've decided you want to be a PTSN provider" regulation book gets thown at them.
Don't worry. This isn't unfair. If anybody thinks they have a way to connect a tin can and string to the PTSN, they'll get the same book too.
Wouldn't be bad, because that'd create a worm that causes those who contract it to get fined by the government for false calls to 911. Doesn't matter that you lost control of your machine, it was your machine that called 911 on your line.
but fire wants to be Free! :)
Then why can't the POTS phone company make 911 a matter of consumer choice?
As much as we love capitalism in this country, at some points our government goes downright socialist on some issues. 911 is one of them. If you're going to provide phone service, you also have to provide e911 connectivity whether you like it or not. Any technology that comes up to compete with the POTS service is going to have to duplicate that or it won't be allowed to get out of the testing stages...
And that's exactly why cell phone networks are being forced to implement a location-spying technology of some kind so that the 911 centers get at least some clue where you're calling from if you call 911 on a cell phone. Because complying with e911 is not an elective, it's a requirement.
It's not like 911 is the only way to get in touch with the police.
You have 15 seconds. Tell me the non-911 way to report an emergency to the fire department where you are presently located.
See, the point of 911 is to have a dedicated emergency number that connects you to a trained dispatcher with the power to dispatch police, fire, and emergency medical services that is the same from coast to coast. As a result, most police and fire departments have ended their efforts to promote their local-access numbers because schoolchildren just need to learn what 911 is. The emergency numbers are no longer on a sticker on your phone, no longer on a magnet on your fridge, and no longer on the inside cover of your phone book. The inside cover now just tells you to call 911.
If consumers want it, they can pay for it- if not, they shouldn't have to.
Sorry, that's not how we do emergency services in this country. You don't get to opt out of emergency services to save a few pennies because you never know when you or somebody around you will need it. Any phone that's connected to the network, even one that has no paid-for service, has the ability to reach 911 at all times.
Isn't this going to just push VoIP companies overseas where there won't be as tight regulation? It doesn't matter to the end user in the long run where the physical servers are located afterall.
The end user might not care, but that end user will seriously cause problems for their friends and family. It means to call a VoIP-to-phone user from a normal PTSN phone would be an international call to wherever the PTSN-to-VoIP transfer happens. If that transfer happens in the USA, then the VoIP company is a phone service provider and they'll have to comply with FCC rules.
Vonage has a poor fill-in for 911 service already, the ability to map "911" to the local police department.
Sorry. That's not 911, and it's far away from e911. Phone companies is required to provide the true e911. That means when you hit 911, you get connected immediately to the right call center servicing your area that has the capability to dispatch police, fire, and medical resources and your location data is automatically sent to that center as well.
911 call centers cannot be reached by mapping to any 10-digit number. There is no 10-digit number for them, they are simply known as 911 on the network within the region they serve. Vonage's immitation 911 depends on mapping 911 to a 10-digit number, so it can't find the call center and has to hope the police can help them. If you call a police department to report a fire, you will lose when-seconds-count time being bounced around while things burn.
If Vonage wants to compete with the phone companies, they have to have the same regulatory burdens that the FCC slaps on phone companies. It's only fair. If it means Vonage has to limit portability and/or raise prices to
Google's translation service is nothing more than their own implementation of Babelfish, which hasn't improved at all since AltaVista was using it in the 1990s. It's nothing to write home about, and still makes the same bad mistakes it has always made.
The problem with regexps is that they can be used to create very database-expensive queries. No search engine is ever going to allow a query that returns the entire database as the result set either.
There are three very distinct elements involved in creating a powerhouse search engine:
- A large crawl: A search engine with nothing in its database isn't going to work very well. A search engine needs as big of a crawl as possible in order to have any results at all. This takes huge resources in terms of bandwidth and computing power. Some of the early search engines met their demise when they couldn't afford to keep their crawlers growing as fast as new web content comes out.
- The Sorter: Once the long list of results that match the keywords are pulled out of the crawl, a sort needs to be applied in order to locate the best results and present them first. Google got vaulted to the top because PageRank was better than anybody else has ever put out. However, PageRank isn't perfect, so there is still room for somebody to make something better than PageRank.
-Promotion: A web site just sits there unused if it isn't promoted. Google never spent much on advertising and it just relied on word of mouth since it was so strong in the other two areas. And now that everyone turns to them first without even checking other engines, that has given them the strong advantage of a strong brand image. However, we've seen plenty of cases where inferior technology has been beaten out by better marketing. If somebody's tech passes Google, without marketing it nobody will know about it. Therefore, look for the challengers to be launching major ad campaigns inviting people to at least try them before they assume Google is better.
Can anybody put it all together? We're about to find out...
Some might claim that Teoma actually has the best find-what-you-want technology right now, but is suffering from a lack of crawling resources and promotion since Ask Jeeves, Inc. hasn't been bought up by any of the major resources. They seem like a project only being held back by lack of funding...
The problem with Yahoo is that it tries to do far too much. When I want go search for something, I just want a little box asking me what I want to search for - not a huge page with a million links on it and a few flash ads.
And I doubt Yahoo.com is going to change at all. However, look at the other two search portals they operate. It's quite likely that the offering Yahoo puts forward to fight Google won't be called Yahoo, but be flown under the AltaVista or AllTheWeb brand name.
So, if you just want to search, they'll have a nice clean entry point to their network for you. If you want the full busy-screen portal, there will be another entry point for that. Nothing limits Yahoo to having only one major brand...
But look how that game has changed. Google's the one now bragging that they can search "6 billion items", while the others have worked at tweaking their sort routines to be more resistant to link spam... and there's the event.
Google's starting to be the one wishing this was a non-event.
It seems like Google is starting to admit that they've hit a wall at improving their search technology, so they're starting to expand into other portal areas to anchor themselves down the same way Yahoo did when their directory-search model hit the wall.
But Yahoo seems to be investing in several of the surviving web crawlers from the early days. Clearly, they see Google's hold on the title as the #1 search engine as something they might be able to take back.