This is exactly why bandwith is considered a service instead of a good. It's not the fact that they're selling you a wire, it's that they're offing to accept signals from you over a wire, and then route them to whatever place you've addressed them too.
People think that the Internet is truely peer-to-peer and that it doesn't have a central data center... the problem with that idea is that the Internet actually has many well-distributed data centers.
Consider any point where one data services provider connects with another data services of equal size on a peering basis to be a mini-MAE, and then think about all of the places that we actually call MAEs where a lot of data service provider network meet. Even though UUnet and Sprint are competitors out "in the field", there are many points at which their two networks intentionally shake hands and meet nicely on a nice big fat two-way data pipe. Why do they do this? Because this is exactly what makes the Internet work.
There are many small-town ISPs that do nothing but gather up Internet traffic from a 3-town region into a single data-center, and then put that traffic on a T3 pipe towards the nearest big-city ISP. Big city ISP then gathers the traffic from its own customers and a few other small-town ISPs onto fiber links that go to UUnet, with a couple spare fiber links from Cogent that they maintain just in case UUnet has a major problem for any length of time.
All roads lead to the major backbone providers, and the major backbone providers join with each other all over the place to swap traffic that starts on one backbone that's headed to a tributary of another backbone provider. The Internet depends on these backbone providers so that somebody on Verizon DSL in Boston can connect "directly" to somebody on a Charter Pipeline cable modem in Washington State.
If we didn't have the backbone providers, the Internet just plain would exist. The Internet is a result of networks connected to networks... or if you really want to deconstruct the word it is the network that goes between networks. You're really just connected to (name of ISP here)'s network... it's just the fact that (name of ISP here) has a connection to the Internet as the main attraction on the network that makes you want to connect to them.
Here's another problem with this Utopian networking plan. Imagine MSN a bunch of devices out "into the field" that will gladly pass along most messages, but will intercept any request for a Yahoo-owned site and return the functionally-equal MSN-owned competitor. Yahoo would be powerless to defend against it... there's no way to encrypt the address headers and then expect devices that you're trying to hide the address from to help you your message.
Far too many networking concepts, even ones that ended up actually getting taken into production, falsely assume that everybody will play the game fairly, in the way that the network designers didn't want them to do. Would the founding fathers of the Internet really have implemented SMTP the standard for e-mail transfer if they knew that spam was going to be such a problem?
Might also be useful for a restaurant, where patrons could choose to have "the big event" seen on the wall next to them, or if they don't they'll just have a non-intrusive mirror on the wall rather than a turned-off TV.
You know, for some odd reason shower radios have been around for years, but shower TVs have been technically possible for a good while but nobody bothered to make it. Why? Because most people don't exactly want a TV in their bathroom, the idea of watching a newscast while naked and showering just doesn't seem appealing to most people.
I expect that people who discover the Mirror TV at their hotels (because this is not a feature the participating hotels will bother to advertise) will be given a feedback card to send to Philips as they leave, and a majority will be returned with the box for "I don't know whether it works well because didn't feel like using it." marked.
And at this hour, the parent post is modded 80% Funny and 20% troll, with a bonus point for coming from a high-karma user. Good work mods, I'm glad nobody's mistaking it for insightful or informative.
Sorry, as much as you try to sugar coat it, this advice is too smart for its own good. Being a racist in your hiring practices is illegal, and keeping a gun or two in the server room is more likely to get you blamed for contributing to a death when a workplace fight gets out of hand than ever being shot at a terrorist. There is such a thing as being too secure for your own good.
Some common-sense preperations are needed, but too many become wasteful, and many bring their own daily problems. Remember, when disasters by definition are rare. Balance your risk tolerance with your tolerance for annoyance in your daily operations... far too many people forget to do that.
It's an analogy... the point is that properly designed systems on a network work correctly, but a small handfull systems that trust everything they hear without thinking about it mixed with a few evil-doing people can cause annoyances for everyone...
The "paid in full" situation doesn't give them new consideration, because you're already in debt to them, and your partial payment now is something you're likely already late giving to them. They can take your money and still seek the rest.
Putting a restriction on the check before the product is delivered is a different situation. That check represents an offer of money to them that the writer isn't already required to give them, and that is a new consideration. That's why the "We'll let you cash this $2 check if you agree that by doing so you agree to let us switch your phone number to Brand X Long Distance Service." offer is valid, Brand X Long Distance didn't owe you $2 coming into this deal.
BTW, notice that company-owned Burger King outlets have a small-print sign on the entry door that indicates that all restaurnt staff present at the location do not have authorization to make agreements on behalf of the larger company. They put that there so that any incoming salespeople are on notice that even if the restaurant manager appears to be agreeing on behalf of the company, he's not authorized to do so, and since you walked right next to a sign that told you he's not you can't take actions on the mistaken belief that he is because you should have read the sign and known better. That's another way to take a person who appears to be in a postion to make a binding deal and make sure he's not.
Last I checked, going back as far as our system goes, the way things worked is that investigations were conducted as quietly as possible by the police, who quietly ask the permission of judges for warrants when they have a good reason to violate somebody's privacy. When the police have a suspect that they're sure about, they make an arrest.
At that point, the suspect are quickly told what they are being accused of, shown what evidence has been collected, and given the chance to challenge any evidence that may have been improperly gathered, and if evidence is found to be improper it is ignored. Any witnesses that are brought forward to accuse them are made available to be questioned by those representing the suspect, and those representing the suspect's side also get the same ability to force a witness to testify as the government for use in their defense.
Investigations secret, accusations public... seems to be working well enough so far.
Other than the fact that this isn't going to fully solve the problem. If somebody configures devices (any IP-addressed devices of any kind) with IP addresses that don't belong to them, their routers will broadcast the fact that they're on the path that leads to that IP space to any upstream routers that are willing to listen. Hopefully, the ISP's routers will be smart enough to know that the IP address space doesn't belong there... However if you they trick either the ISP's staff or just the ISP's routers in to thinking the IP space really belongs to them, the ISP is going to carry the false claims through all of their their routers, and if two machines with the same IP address exist on the Internet like this they'll start getting traffic meant for the other and neither of them works very well.
Having an authoritative and hard-to-crack source for who really owns the IP space would be nice, but you've also got to upgrade router specs so that everybody looks at that source in order for it to do anything, that's not so easy.
You really haven't been watching The Screen Savers lately. Kevin Rose has been frequently been making flirty remarks towards cast member Sarah Lane ( for far too many pics of her click here) and she's been returning them. It appears he's doing just fine in that department.
Doesn't work the first time, but after eventually becoming aware of what's going on the employer would get a responsiblity to tell "the minimum wage desk jockey rubber-stamping endorsements" not to put any check with a license agreement into the path that leads to it being cashed.
Once bosses that do have the authority to make such agreements become aware that kids are putting their endorsement stamp next to agreements they don't want them making, it becomes their duty to stop them from doing that... they can try to look the other way, that can only last for so long. They'd have to take on the expense of double-checking the backs of all checks, or simply stop taking checks and insist everybody pay with a credit card.
But this brings us to the reason why there's no such thing as software/data/network insurance...
When a company sells you fire insurance, they promise to pay you quickly your house ever burns down. However, the policy also says that when you make that claim to them, they aquire the right to sue anybody who's responsible for your house buring down... such as the arsonist who sets it ablase or the company that made the battery charger that caught on fire. There are some fires such as those caused by lightning strikes that nobody can control and the insurance company just has to run the risk for, but they also have the assurance that those who do the stupid things that cause preventable fires can be sued for all they're worth, therefore most companies design their products to make sure they're not going to burn houses down if they malfunction.
In order for there to be insurance to protect against losses from insecure software, there first has to be legal liability for putting out insecure software... UCITA is an attempt to put into law what's already in most EULAs, that no such liability will ever exist.
You may relax, the two states who have passed this law aren Maryland and Virginia. However, the problem is that the UCITA would allow a certain Washington State corperation to put a choice-of-law clause into its EULA saying that any lawsuit based contract is to be judged by Maryland or Virginia law using a court in one of those two states, which effectively would give those state laws "longarm" power into other states. "Bomb shelter" laws need to be passed in non-UCITA states in order to prevent this practice.
Follow the hyperlink to http://www.ala.org/Content/NavigationMenu/Our_Asso ciation/Offices/ALA_Washington/Issues2/Copyright1/ UCITA/States.htm that the parent post all the way back there gave to see what has happened in all 50 states. Most of the states that weren't listed here have either had either no legislative activity friend-or-foe towards UCITA, or saw it introduced briefly after it first came out only to let it die unacted upon and never brought up again. Both Illinois and California fall into the latter category.
Fortunately, lobbists haven't yet found a way to overpower our courts... a court who has a plantiff who is bringing in a car that fits all of the definition's of the state's lemon law is not going to let the car-maker claim that since the car has a computer processor that UCITA overrides the lemon law. When the legislators screw up and pass two laws that contradict each other, courts are there to sort out the mess and enforce only the one that makes more sense.
This kind of stupidity is usually the kind of dumbness that lawyers love. Anybody who knows what they're doing in the computer industry knows that 127.0.0.1 is the IP address of "localhost" and isn't a real address of another installation, but apparently this company didn't. In a fair world, that company would owe actual damages for lost productivity due to this mistake, and maybe even punitive damages because what they did was just that stupid.
But, in the tech industry we're establishing the tradition that software is always going to be buggy, and software providers are just always going to be making mistakes and we're just going to have to tolerate them when they happen if we want to have software. Microsoft seems to rely on all of the "you promise not to sue us..." clauses in their EULA on a daily basis, even though their standard EULA hasn't really been tested with the kind of lawsuits that show whether all of their anti-liablity clauses are in fact valid. This is why software publishers want UCITA passed, so that they're sure their anti-liabity clauses are in fact going to hold up.
Their worse nightmare is a law that's the exact inverse of UCITA, one that would give customers the right to hold their software vendors liable whenever they screw up... but wouldn't that be the kind of thing that'd force software vendors to test before they ship?
The goal of the UCITA proponents was to make UCITA part of the Universal Commercial Code... The UCC laws are the basic laws of business that are state laws that are exactly the same in all 50 states, so that a somebody writing a typical business contract written in Texas is certain that it holds water in Maine.
Well, that hasn't gone over well... some states have made it clear that they're never going adopt this law. So the fallback is to try to get this law passed in a handful of states, and then let contract-writers use a "choice of law" clause (You've seen those, they're the part that says that if you're going to sue, you have to sue in the contract-writer's favorite state and not yours...) to force UCITA's terms on consumers that way.
Well, that's not going well eitter.... Some states are adopting "Anti-UCITA Bomb Shelter" laws that affirmatively give the rights to consumers that UCITA tries to deny, and affirmatively gives that state's residents the right to sue in their home-state courts over the issues that UCITA tries to block, and effectively overpowering a choice-of-law contract clause with a state law. UCITA is powerless in any state that has a "bomb shelter law" on the books, which effectively means that UCITA's longarm powers to reach out of the states its passed in become voided.
If you're not a fan of what UCITA represents, it's important that your state not only reject UCITA when the lobbists come calling, but that they also pass a bomb shelter law to prevent Maryland or Virgina's UCTIA laws from being used via a choice-of-law clause in your state.
The only simularity between UCITA and DMCA is that they both are industry-favoring-lobbist-written laws. DMCA is all about "thou shalt not copy!"... UCITA can basically be described as "Thou shall not sue the software vendor if anything goes wrong!"
And just how would the Libertarian party (or any other third party) do any better? They'd slash taxes, but to do so they'd also have to slash spending. Yeah, there are plenty of things in government that need to be cut, but getting a bunch of people to agree on a list of which things those are is outright impossible. (Just try to talk about eliminating NASA around here...)
The "FCC tax" you see on your bill is the cell phone provider trying to pass on the costs of complying with FCC requirements such as E-911 on to you. If you call them and ask them to take it off your bill, it's up to the provider whether they want to give you the price break for being a complainer, or if they'd rather you take your business elsewhere. If you don't fit their model of a high-profit customer, no price break for you...
Slashdot Mirror
This is exactly why bandwith is considered a service instead of a good. It's not the fact that they're selling you a wire, it's that they're offing to accept signals from you over a wire, and then route them to whatever place you've addressed them too.
People think that the Internet is truely peer-to-peer and that it doesn't have a central data center... the problem with that idea is that the Internet actually has many well-distributed data centers.
Consider any point where one data services provider connects with another data services of equal size on a peering basis to be a mini-MAE, and then think about all of the places that we actually call MAEs where a lot of data service provider network meet. Even though UUnet and Sprint are competitors out "in the field", there are many points at which their two networks intentionally shake hands and meet nicely on a nice big fat two-way data pipe. Why do they do this? Because this is exactly what makes the Internet work.
There are many small-town ISPs that do nothing but gather up Internet traffic from a 3-town region into a single data-center, and then put that traffic on a T3 pipe towards the nearest big-city ISP. Big city ISP then gathers the traffic from its own customers and a few other small-town ISPs onto fiber links that go to UUnet, with a couple spare fiber links from Cogent that they maintain just in case UUnet has a major problem for any length of time.
All roads lead to the major backbone providers, and the major backbone providers join with each other all over the place to swap traffic that starts on one backbone that's headed to a tributary of another backbone provider. The Internet depends on these backbone providers so that somebody on Verizon DSL in Boston can connect "directly" to somebody on a Charter Pipeline cable modem in Washington State.
If we didn't have the backbone providers, the Internet just plain would exist. The Internet is a result of networks connected to networks... or if you really want to deconstruct the word it is the network that goes between networks. You're really just connected to (name of ISP here)'s network... it's just the fact that (name of ISP here) has a connection to the Internet as the main attraction on the network that makes you want to connect to them.
Here's another problem with this Utopian networking plan. Imagine MSN a bunch of devices out "into the field" that will gladly pass along most messages, but will intercept any request for a Yahoo-owned site and return the functionally-equal MSN-owned competitor. Yahoo would be powerless to defend against it... there's no way to encrypt the address headers and then expect devices that you're trying to hide the address from to help you your message.
Far too many networking concepts, even ones that ended up actually getting taken into production, falsely assume that everybody will play the game fairly, in the way that the network designers didn't want them to do. Would the founding fathers of the Internet really have implemented SMTP the standard for e-mail transfer if they knew that spam was going to be such a problem?
Might also be useful for a restaurant, where patrons could choose to have "the big event" seen on the wall next to them, or if they don't they'll just have a non-intrusive mirror on the wall rather than a turned-off TV.
You know, for some odd reason shower radios have been around for years, but shower TVs have been technically possible for a good while but nobody bothered to make it. Why? Because most people don't exactly want a TV in their bathroom, the idea of watching a newscast while naked and showering just doesn't seem appealing to most people.
I expect that people who discover the Mirror TV at their hotels (because this is not a feature the participating hotels will bother to advertise) will be given a feedback card to send to Philips as they leave, and a majority will be returned with the box for "I don't know whether it works well because didn't feel like using it." marked.
And at this hour, the parent post is modded 80% Funny and 20% troll, with a bonus point for coming from a high-karma user. Good work mods, I'm glad nobody's mistaking it for insightful or informative.
Sorry, as much as you try to sugar coat it, this advice is too smart for its own good. Being a racist in your hiring practices is illegal, and keeping a gun or two in the server room is more likely to get you blamed for contributing to a death when a workplace fight gets out of hand than ever being shot at a terrorist. There is such a thing as being too secure for your own good.
Some common-sense preperations are needed, but too many become wasteful, and many bring their own daily problems. Remember, when disasters by definition are rare. Balance your risk tolerance with your tolerance for annoyance in your daily operations... far too many people forget to do that.
It's an analogy... the point is that properly designed systems on a network work correctly, but a small handfull systems that trust everything they hear without thinking about it mixed with a few evil-doing people can cause annoyances for everyone...
The "paid in full" situation doesn't give them new consideration, because you're already in debt to them, and your partial payment now is something you're likely already late giving to them. They can take your money and still seek the rest.
Putting a restriction on the check before the product is delivered is a different situation. That check represents an offer of money to them that the writer isn't already required to give them, and that is a new consideration. That's why the "We'll let you cash this $2 check if you agree that by doing so you agree to let us switch your phone number to Brand X Long Distance Service." offer is valid, Brand X Long Distance didn't owe you $2 coming into this deal.
BTW, notice that company-owned Burger King outlets have a small-print sign on the entry door that indicates that all restaurnt staff present at the location do not have authorization to make agreements on behalf of the larger company. They put that there so that any incoming salespeople are on notice that even if the restaurant manager appears to be agreeing on behalf of the company, he's not authorized to do so, and since you walked right next to a sign that told you he's not you can't take actions on the mistaken belief that he is because you should have read the sign and known better. That's another way to take a person who appears to be in a postion to make a binding deal and make sure he's not.
Last I checked, going back as far as our system goes, the way things worked is that investigations were conducted as quietly as possible by the police, who quietly ask the permission of judges for warrants when they have a good reason to violate somebody's privacy. When the police have a suspect that they're sure about, they make an arrest.
At that point, the suspect are quickly told what they are being accused of, shown what evidence has been collected, and given the chance to challenge any evidence that may have been improperly gathered, and if evidence is found to be improper it is ignored. Any witnesses that are brought forward to accuse them are made available to be questioned by those representing the suspect, and those representing the suspect's side also get the same ability to force a witness to testify as the government for use in their defense.
Investigations secret, accusations public... seems to be working well enough so far.
Most of the big bandwidth providers don't just automatically accept any IP blocks you advertise.
Most major e-mail servers are properly secured so that only authorized users may send e-mail through them.
However, a few small-time servers acting as open relays can still make quite the mess of spam...
Other than the fact that this isn't going to fully solve the problem. If somebody configures devices (any IP-addressed devices of any kind) with IP addresses that don't belong to them, their routers will broadcast the fact that they're on the path that leads to that IP space to any upstream routers that are willing to listen. Hopefully, the ISP's routers will be smart enough to know that the IP address space doesn't belong there... However if you they trick either the ISP's staff or just the ISP's routers in to thinking the IP space really belongs to them, the ISP is going to carry the false claims through all of their their routers, and if two machines with the same IP address exist on the Internet like this they'll start getting traffic meant for the other and neither of them works very well. Having an authoritative and hard-to-crack source for who really owns the IP space would be nice, but you've also got to upgrade router specs so that everybody looks at that source in order for it to do anything, that's not so easy.
The current passing through that thing is at MOST 0.02 mA (0.2 J = 0.02 mA x 20 kV). That's weak =)
Nothing like a good dose of physics to make 20,000 Volts suddenly not sound so impressive anymore, huh?
You really haven't been watching The Screen Savers lately. Kevin Rose has been frequently been making flirty remarks towards cast member Sarah Lane ( for far too many pics of her click here) and she's been returning them. It appears he's doing just fine in that department.
Unfortunately, that's Kevin's usual story-credit headshot...
Likely live on the air during The Screen Savers at 7pm ET (replays Thurs at 2am ET, Noon ET) on TechTV.
Doesn't work the first time, but after eventually becoming aware of what's going on the employer would get a responsiblity to tell "the minimum wage desk jockey rubber-stamping endorsements" not to put any check with a license agreement into the path that leads to it being cashed.
Once bosses that do have the authority to make such agreements become aware that kids are putting their endorsement stamp next to agreements they don't want them making, it becomes their duty to stop them from doing that... they can try to look the other way, that can only last for so long. They'd have to take on the expense of double-checking the backs of all checks, or simply stop taking checks and insist everybody pay with a credit card.
But this brings us to the reason why there's no such thing as software/data/network insurance...
When a company sells you fire insurance, they promise to pay you quickly your house ever burns down. However, the policy also says that when you make that claim to them, they aquire the right to sue anybody who's responsible for your house buring down... such as the arsonist who sets it ablase or the company that made the battery charger that caught on fire. There are some fires such as those caused by lightning strikes that nobody can control and the insurance company just has to run the risk for, but they also have the assurance that those who do the stupid things that cause preventable fires can be sued for all they're worth, therefore most companies design their products to make sure they're not going to burn houses down if they malfunction.
In order for there to be insurance to protect against losses from insecure software, there first has to be legal liability for putting out insecure software... UCITA is an attempt to put into law what's already in most EULAs, that no such liability will ever exist.
You may relax, the two states who have passed this law aren Maryland and Virginia. However, the problem is that the UCITA would allow a certain Washington State corperation to put a choice-of-law clause into its EULA saying that any lawsuit based contract is to be judged by Maryland or Virginia law using a court in one of those two states, which effectively would give those state laws "longarm" power into other states. "Bomb shelter" laws need to be passed in non-UCITA states in order to prevent this practice.
Follow the hyperlink to http://www.ala.org/Content/NavigationMenu/Our_Asso ciation/Offices/ALA_Washington/Issues2/Copyright1/ UCITA/States.htm that the parent post all the way back there gave to see what has happened in all 50 states. Most of the states that weren't listed here have either had either no legislative activity friend-or-foe towards UCITA, or saw it introduced briefly after it first came out only to let it die unacted upon and never brought up again. Both Illinois and California fall into the latter category.
Fortunately, lobbists haven't yet found a way to overpower our courts... a court who has a plantiff who is bringing in a car that fits all of the definition's of the state's lemon law is not going to let the car-maker claim that since the car has a computer processor that UCITA overrides the lemon law. When the legislators screw up and pass two laws that contradict each other, courts are there to sort out the mess and enforce only the one that makes more sense.
This kind of stupidity is usually the kind of dumbness that lawyers love. Anybody who knows what they're doing in the computer industry knows that 127.0.0.1 is the IP address of "localhost" and isn't a real address of another installation, but apparently this company didn't. In a fair world, that company would owe actual damages for lost productivity due to this mistake, and maybe even punitive damages because what they did was just that stupid.
But, in the tech industry we're establishing the tradition that software is always going to be buggy, and software providers are just always going to be making mistakes and we're just going to have to tolerate them when they happen if we want to have software. Microsoft seems to rely on all of the "you promise not to sue us..." clauses in their EULA on a daily basis, even though their standard EULA hasn't really been tested with the kind of lawsuits that show whether all of their anti-liablity clauses are in fact valid. This is why software publishers want UCITA passed, so that they're sure their anti-liabity clauses are in fact going to hold up.
Their worse nightmare is a law that's the exact inverse of UCITA, one that would give customers the right to hold their software vendors liable whenever they screw up... but wouldn't that be the kind of thing that'd force software vendors to test before they ship?
The goal of the UCITA proponents was to make UCITA part of the Universal Commercial Code... The UCC laws are the basic laws of business that are state laws that are exactly the same in all 50 states, so that a somebody writing a typical business contract written in Texas is certain that it holds water in Maine.
Well, that hasn't gone over well... some states have made it clear that they're never going adopt this law. So the fallback is to try to get this law passed in a handful of states, and then let contract-writers use a "choice of law" clause (You've seen those, they're the part that says that if you're going to sue, you have to sue in the contract-writer's favorite state and not yours...) to force UCITA's terms on consumers that way.
Well, that's not going well eitter.... Some states are adopting "Anti-UCITA Bomb Shelter" laws that affirmatively give the rights to consumers that UCITA tries to deny, and affirmatively gives that state's residents the right to sue in their home-state courts over the issues that UCITA tries to block, and effectively overpowering a choice-of-law contract clause with a state law. UCITA is powerless in any state that has a "bomb shelter law" on the books, which effectively means that UCITA's longarm powers to reach out of the states its passed in become voided.
If you're not a fan of what UCITA represents, it's important that your state not only reject UCITA when the lobbists come calling, but that they also pass a bomb shelter law to prevent Maryland or Virgina's UCTIA laws from being used via a choice-of-law clause in your state.
The only simularity between UCITA and DMCA is that they both are industry-favoring-lobbist-written laws. DMCA is all about "thou shalt not copy!"... UCITA can basically be described as "Thou shall not sue the software vendor if anything goes wrong!"
And just how would the Libertarian party (or any other third party) do any better? They'd slash taxes, but to do so they'd also have to slash spending. Yeah, there are plenty of things in government that need to be cut, but getting a bunch of people to agree on a list of which things those are is outright impossible. (Just try to talk about eliminating NASA around here...)
Running a government isn't as easy as it looks...
The "FCC tax" you see on your bill is the cell phone provider trying to pass on the costs of complying with FCC requirements such as E-911 on to you. If you call them and ask them to take it off your bill, it's up to the provider whether they want to give you the price break for being a complainer, or if they'd rather you take your business elsewhere. If you don't fit their model of a high-profit customer, no price break for you...