Admittedly, the hand I use to open my own garage door could be considered a digital device, but I thought that living organisms could only be patented, not copyrighted.
-- "Observation collapsed the wave function of the experimental subject to a deceased state" - Schroedinger
First, a bit of history. SMS is something of a bolt-on to the basic mobile phone mechanism: my understanding is that the data is carried in a part of the signalling scheme that also handles call setup and other control functions. The telcos may have thought of it as a next-generation pager service with the benefit of answerback, of interest mostly to large organisations that need to contact staff who are on the move. It's clear that the telcos never expected that such a limited medium would take off in the way it has, especially in the youth market in Europe. And this growth has presented a problem to the telcos: the SMS mechanism had no built-in support for cross-charging between carriers for forwarding each other's messages. Presumably the original thought was that the message traffic would be mostly confined within individual networks, and that what little inter-network traffic took place would be pretty well-balanced between different providers in any case, so there was no need to complicate the design to handle charging issues. Now, volumes and imbalances are large enough that providers are reluctant to carry traffic from others unless they can recover the costs of the additional infrastructure needed to forward it to their own subscribers (remember, the model in much of the world is that the sender of the message pays, the receiver does not - similar to snailmail). As a result, carriers can, and do, block traffic unless they have a specific contract with the originating provider to deal with the cross-charging issue.
Outside the US, SMS connectivity is mostly seamless within individual countries, but sending messages to a customer on a provider in another country is still something of a gamble. It will most often work, but if the receiving provider has a block on your provider, the message goes into the big bit-bucket in the sky, and it does not result in a non-delivery message. The situation is improving, but it's still very frustrating to businesses which operate internationally and who would like to be able to use text messaging to reach their own customers - which is how I come to have this background information.
Note that one reason that text messaging is now mostly seamless within national borders is that where, in the early days of SMS deployment in Europe, there was significant resistance by the providers - especially the large ex-monopolies - to interoperating with their competitors, the telecoms regulators stepped in and insisted that this nonsensical situation was corrected. With the amount of revenue the providers are now getting from the service, they're certainly no longer complaining that this was done;)
Maybe there are additional issues of technical incompatibilities between different US providers that make message interoperability more complex and expensive, maybe the US providers are reckoning on skipping SMS and concentrating on getting mobile email deployed widely. But I can't help thinking they're missing out on a potentially very lucrative service.
Blockquoth the submitter:...and currently the RFID industry
seems to be giving 'mixed' signals about whether the
tags will be disabled or left enabled by default."
Permit me to unmix them: if it will cost the tag-users more to disable the tags than to leave then enabled, and they can be left enabled without reducing their utility to the tag-users, then they will be left enabled.
For this statement of the obvious, there is no charge.
A few years ago, when the feature was still quite uncommon, Ericsson ran a billboard campaign in Switzerland promoting a new handset range that had vibro alarms as standard. Maybe they just didn't think, and used a campaign that had run in their home market, but for whatever reason, the ads pictured the new handsets alongside some examples of another product well known for its vibrational characteristics, but rather less for being commonly seen in public places. Switzerland is fairly laid-back in this area, but not, it seems, as much as Sweden. The ads got pulled or papered over very quickly.
(Amusingly, Nokia is currently running a billboard campaign for its latest phones with the selling point that you can put cartoonish hot-chix pix onto their color displays. Seems a good way to me to give their brand a cheap'n'sleazy downmarket image, but what do I know about marketing?)
It's not that surprising a development. In much of western Europe just about everyone who has a use for mobile phone calls text messaging already has a handset. Improvements in weight, battery life, and text displays will help increase the rate of replacement of existing phones somewhat, but to really push sales the networks and the handset makers are going to have to push new features at a market that's learnt to be wary of hype after the disappointment with WAP. General consumer services that could take advantage of 3G capabilities - "eg, give me a map showing nearby chinese restaurants" - are going to need a lot of investment upfront, which just isn't available. But even in economic hard times, adult (what a misnomer!) content still seems able to sell.
I can't say I'm exactly overjoyed at the prospect of punters drooling along sidewalks with eyes fixated on whatever the tiny screen is showing. Expect a rise in the number of jaywalkers run over by autos and buses, if this development proceeds. Ah well, "think of it as evolution in action".
I would guess there's already a fairly substantial body of law and precendent that can be used as a basis to deal with the activities of 'crackers': as a general rule of thumb, don't invent whole new catagories of offense if you can adapt existing ones to a new setting. IOW:
What did the crackers do - action and effects? Bring charges appropriately. Note that you might need to legislate to clarify the scale of the offense in the new setting. As others have already pointed out, defacing a web site in a way that stops it being usable is not just graffiti, it's (probably) nearer breaking and entering followed by deliberate (albeit relatively easily repaired) vandalism.
Were the effects of the crackers activities intentional, or could they be reasonably anticipated, or were they accidental side-effects? This can affect charges and sentencing.
Did carelessness and negligence on the side of those responsible for the things the crackers 'broke' or 'broke into' facilitate the crackers' activities? If yes, charge those people, too.
This isn't a trend that is limited to the US. I can't recall a time when the UK scientific and engineering community hasn't been expressing concern at decreasing numbers of young people studying for and making careers in technical fields. And the reasons, in the case of the UK, are straightforward and obvious: low status (especially of engineering), pay no better than moderate, and limited prospects for reaching influencial positions in commercial organisations.
It's a vicious circle, with falling numbers of university graduates in the so-called 'hard sciences' (pun intended) resulting in a lowering of the standards of teaching in the subjects at (high-)school level, which further discourages kids from carrying on studying them for any longer than curriculum rules mandate. And by the upper end of school and at university, anyone smart enough to deal with such subjects who is also well-rounded enough to take interest in things happening outside their chosen field of study will be well aware of how poorly science and engineering are regarded and rewarded by the society in which they live.
For some people, their curiosity and the satisfaction they get in understanding and doing good work in their field are sufficient incentives, but I'd guess that they're in a minority. What I do remember very well is that as graduation approached - and this was about 30 years ago, now:(, and at one of the country's top institutions - most of my technical-studying friends and acquaintances decided, like myself, that they were unenthralled with the idea of making a career directly related to their studies, and about two thirds of us moved into IT, having found we had an aptitude for programming as part of the coursework and reckoning that it would continue to be a strong growth area for quite a time into the future. We've not been disappointed, but out of the half-dozen friends and acquaintances I'm still in touch with who took this path, I'm the only one who's still working in a predominantly technical role. I'm not complaining - I've had the good luck to find interesting and well-paid work in a sequence of different areas and locations (albeit mostly outside the UK, which itself speaks volumes). The rest of us moved long ago into planning and project management activities: better paid, more opportunities for your work to have tangible practical results, and, yes, with higher prestige. None of us considered teaching as a career, and so the vicious circle continues.
Ah, well. At least none of us is faced with blank-faced incomprehension after answering the traditional "... and what do you do for a living?" question at social occasions.
Why would anybody be worried over this if they are not involved in anything fishy?...
I can think of two reasons:
Although CCTVs and webcams are quite widespread in public places, and digital camaras likewise in tourist spots and on special occasions, adding picture-taking ability to mobile phones makes coverage much more ubiquitous: essentially, you have to assume that you might get imaged anywhere where there are other people present.
There are lots of things that may not actually be "fishy", but which might at first sight appear that way, or which can cause considerable embarassment or worst if taken out of context - intentionally or otherwise.
I'm not so concerned about misuse as such, as that fear of misuse will make people even less willing than they are now to risk getting involved in day-to-day minor emergencies.
Should payphones be thought of as something essential like public
transportation, and possibly subsidized by the govt?
... It's only in the US that payphones depend on the corporate whim of a for-profit
company.
I wouldn't call it a whim, and the issue exists outside the US, too, and for the same reasons.
Concerning the 'essential service' aspect, in many countries we're probably approaching the stage where it will be cheaper to subsidise individual phone installations where they are genuinely essential to people who cannot readily afford them (I'm thinking mainly of the elderly and the isolated) rather than a smaller number of public payphones, given that these have to be more toughly constructed and regularly visited for checking and emptying of their coin safes.
<editorial>Why aren't the text message preferences deleted when
the cancellation notices comes thru?</editorial>
Because this wasn't in the original specification, or
Because things have changed since the original deployment and the cancellation mechanism is now broken.
Either way, because the perpetrators don't consider the cancellation mechanism to be important. After all, the effect would be to reduce the numbers of messages the 'service' is handling - which is in the interests of no-one involved with it.
Human nature, I'm afraid. And there's a lot of it about.
He is most likely set some shit up behind a company firewall and
is having a hard time getting his way around security set to to keep him from doing
crap like this.
Perhaps a mite harsh, but I tend to agree that I'd like to know the ISP's side of this story. I can understand an ISP insisting that the servers it hosts use in-house NTP sources that they run themselves and sync to public servers - it means they don't have to amend the firewall rules for NTP each time a server is added or removed. I can also - just about - understand that an ISP might have a bargain basement hosting contract that's as restrictive as this one. And if the ISP/ whatever does have what they regard as good reasons for this policy, trying to tunnel around it might not be looked on favorably. Just a thought.
The Bloomberg story mentioned in the article quotes Agence France-Presse as citing an article in New Scientist. Searching on 'influenza' at the magazine's web site doesn't find any reference to this topic. Can anyone who subscribes to the dead-tree edition elucidate?
... Their biggest ally will be the United
Kingdom - a country with a Socialist Prime-Minister, a Socialist Cabinet, and a
Socialist Government....
Doesn't sound like the country of that name on the planet where I live. Blair? Somewhere between old-school conservative and Thatcherism-lite, tempered by whatever the Daily Mail editorial line is this week. Cabinet and Government? No consistent philosophy at all, with the result that policy is being driven by the PR needs of the day.
Don't let the term 'New Labour' fool you - with a few exceptions (Brown at the treasury is the most significant, and unfortunately is showing signs both of reverting to the traditional 'throw tax revenues at state-provided services' mindset of earlier Labour governments, and of preparing a bid to supercede Blair) few of the current bunch would recognise socialism even if it came up to them and bit them on the knee.
Apart from personal preferences and whatever else may be going on alongside the roasting, I suspect the degree of nuisance is going to vary pretty strongly with the concentration in the air. There's a small coffee-merchant's plant about a mile across a valley from where I live - they supply many of the local restaurants - and at that distance, on that scale, the smell isn't particularly objectionable. However, I still wouldn't want to live right next door to their works, or anywhere in the neighborhood of one of the industrial-scale manufacturers.
Hardly hidden: they think that it's wrong for people in authority to mistreat other people, and that publicising situations where this is occuring can in some cases help to ameliorate it. Or have you something else in mind, which you can support with credible information?
...And why is it that if non-western countries chooses to implement democracy in their
own way, Amnesty will almost surely have to criticize them for not being more
democratic....
And in such cases, Amnesty will almost surely have the moral high ground, especially compared with various western governments - USA included - which have a long track record of finding it politically advisable to refrain from such criticism when a regime in question happens to be one they're currently friendly with.
It's the clowns who are aiming the gun. "Foot, meet Bullet. Bullet, meet Foot."
In about 30 years earning my daily bread in the IT business there have been improvements. Lot of snake oil as well, of course. One thing that's stayed constant is that requirements get changed partway through development, which you can cope with in a small project with smart people and good tools. But in a large project it's a guarantee of cost overuns, late delivery, and angry recriminations.
Unfortunately, over the last few decades the environment in which applications work has become significantly more complex. 30 years ago much of IT was just a matter of shuffling data from one set of files to another: if you were a big organisation, you might even have a genuine database or three rather than just using files. Or you might be doing leading edge online stuff, which had it's own well-understood ways of doing things, one of which at the time was keeping the execution path lengths under control (yeah, we used to care about efficiency in those days).
These days, to serve up some information to a customer at home, an application might be running in a specialised enterprise-level java environment, communicating to some legacy big iron which holds much of the data and to other machines for specialist functions like authentication. All these interfaces have to be specified and implemented accurately for the whole system to work correctly and reliably, and it's still far too easy to miss the point at which a relatively well-understood project has slipped out of control.
In short, over 30 years, the proportion of projects that are large and complex and hard to coordinate has been increasing. In the circumstances, it's surprising that things work as well as they do.
Both in wireless and desktop software,
there is a US-based monolopoly (Microsoft, Qualcomm) versus fairly open standards
(Linux, GSM) worldwide. In the US, these monopolies are coddled and protected
whereas elsewhere the free market reigns.
I hate to rain on your parade, but bracketing Microsoft (products sold and de-facto standard worldwide) with Qualcomm (specific to N. America) just doesn't compute. I suspect, too, that there is not a large difference between the US and other 1st-world markets with respect to MS's attempts to use its desktop monopoly as a lever to move into other IT areas. So far, at least, traditional big iron is still handling the repetitive high-volume grunt work that must get done no matter what (your paychecks, for example), much of the commercial web infrastructure is still on traditional (Solaris, etc) or nontraditional (OSS) Un*ces. But, MS-Exchange is rolling over the email competition in the corporate space because it's got the single-stop shopping advantage when it comes to handling the MS-Outlook functions needed to support management activities. (Whether geeks regard shared calendars and so on as essential or not is irrelevant - the suits reckon they're needed, they prefer one tool on their desktop to handle admin communications rather than several, and they have the final say on the matter - live with it.)
Slashdot Mirror
--
"Observation collapsed the wave function of the experimental subject to a deceased state" - Schroedinger
Oh, it's not that kind of sequencing? Sorry, my bad.
Outside the US, SMS connectivity is mostly seamless within individual countries, but sending messages to a customer on a provider in another country is still something of a gamble. It will most often work, but if the receiving provider has a block on your provider, the message goes into the big bit-bucket in the sky, and it does not result in a non-delivery message. The situation is improving, but it's still very frustrating to businesses which operate internationally and who would like to be able to use text messaging to reach their own customers - which is how I come to have this background information.
Note that one reason that text messaging is now mostly seamless within national borders is that where, in the early days of SMS deployment in Europe, there was significant resistance by the providers - especially the large ex-monopolies - to interoperating with their competitors, the telecoms regulators stepped in and insisted that this nonsensical situation was corrected. With the amount of revenue the providers are now getting from the service, they're certainly no longer complaining that this was done ;)
Maybe there are additional issues of technical incompatibilities between different US providers that make message interoperability more complex and expensive, maybe the US providers are reckoning on skipping SMS and concentrating on getting mobile email deployed widely. But I can't help thinking they're missing out on a potentially very lucrative service.
For this statement of the obvious, there is no charge.
A few years ago, when the feature was still quite uncommon, Ericsson ran a billboard campaign in Switzerland promoting a new handset range that had vibro alarms as standard. Maybe they just didn't think, and used a campaign that had run in their home market, but for whatever reason, the ads pictured the new handsets alongside some examples of another product well known for its vibrational characteristics, but rather less for being commonly seen in public places. Switzerland is fairly laid-back in this area, but not, it seems, as much as Sweden. The ads got pulled or papered over very quickly.
(Amusingly, Nokia is currently running a billboard campaign for its latest phones with the selling point that you can put cartoonish hot-chix pix onto their color displays. Seems a good way to me to give their brand a cheap'n'sleazy downmarket image, but what do I know about marketing?)
I can't say I'm exactly overjoyed at the prospect of punters drooling along sidewalks with eyes fixated on whatever the tiny screen is showing. Expect a rise in the number of jaywalkers run over by autos and buses, if this development proceeds. Ah well, "think of it as evolution in action".
Bring charges appropriately. Note that you might need to legislate to clarify the scale of the offense in the new setting. As others have already pointed out, defacing a web site in a way that stops it being usable is not just graffiti, it's (probably) nearer breaking and entering followed by deliberate (albeit relatively easily repaired) vandalism.
This can affect charges and sentencing.
If yes, charge those people, too.
It's a vicious circle, with falling numbers of university graduates in the so-called 'hard sciences' (pun intended) resulting in a lowering of the standards of teaching in the subjects at (high-)school level, which further discourages kids from carrying on studying them for any longer than curriculum rules mandate. And by the upper end of school and at university, anyone smart enough to deal with such subjects who is also well-rounded enough to take interest in things happening outside their chosen field of study will be well aware of how poorly science and engineering are regarded and rewarded by the society in which they live.
For some people, their curiosity and the satisfaction they get in understanding and doing good work in their field are sufficient incentives, but I'd guess that they're in a minority. What I do remember very well is that as graduation approached - and this was about 30 years ago, now :(, and at one of the country's top institutions - most of my technical-studying friends and acquaintances decided, like myself, that they were unenthralled with the idea of making a career directly related to their studies, and about two thirds of us moved into IT, having found we had an aptitude for programming as part of the coursework and reckoning that it would continue to be a strong growth area for quite a time into the future. We've not been disappointed, but out of the half-dozen friends and acquaintances I'm still in touch with who took this path, I'm the only one who's still working in a predominantly technical role. I'm not complaining - I've had the good luck to find interesting and well-paid work in a sequence of different areas and locations (albeit mostly outside the UK, which itself speaks volumes). The rest of us moved long ago into planning and project management activities: better paid, more opportunities for your work to have tangible practical results, and, yes, with higher prestige. None of us considered teaching as a career, and so the vicious circle continues.
Ah, well. At least none of us is faced with blank-faced incomprehension after answering the traditional "... and what do you do for a living?" question at social occasions.
(There's probably scope for a list ending with Profit! here as well, but let that pass.)
- Although CCTVs and webcams are quite widespread in public places, and digital camaras likewise in tourist spots and on special occasions, adding picture-taking ability to mobile phones makes coverage much more ubiquitous: essentially, you have to assume that you might get imaged anywhere where there are other people present.
- There are lots of things that may not actually be "fishy", but which might at first sight appear that way, or which can cause considerable embarassment or worst if taken out of context - intentionally or otherwise.
I'm not so concerned about misuse as such, as that fear of misuse will make people even less willing than they are now to risk getting involved in day-to-day minor emergencies.I beg leave to differ.Concerning the 'essential service' aspect, in many countries we're probably approaching the stage where it will be cheaper to subsidise individual phone installations where they are genuinely essential to people who cannot readily afford them (I'm thinking mainly of the elderly and the isolated) rather than a smaller number of public payphones, given that these have to be more toughly constructed and regularly visited for checking and emptying of their coin safes.
Watch this space? No thanks.
-- /. for the second time.
Experience: the name given to the sensation you experience when you have just been trolled on
- Because this wasn't in the original specification, or
- Because things have changed since the original deployment and the cancellation mechanism is now broken.
Either way, because the perpetrators don't consider the cancellation mechanism to be important. After all, the effect would be to reduce the numbers of messages the 'service' is handling - which is in the interests of no-one involved with it.Human nature, I'm afraid. And there's a lot of it about.
The Bloomberg story mentioned in the article quotes Agence France-Presse as citing an article in New Scientist. Searching on 'influenza' at the magazine's web site doesn't find any reference to this topic. Can anyone who subscribes to the dead-tree edition elucidate?
Don't let the term 'New Labour' fool you - with a few exceptions (Brown at the treasury is the most significant, and unfortunately is showing signs both of reverting to the traditional 'throw tax revenues at state-provided services' mindset of earlier Labour governments, and of preparing a bid to supercede Blair) few of the current bunch would recognise socialism even if it came up to them and bit them on the knee.
Apart from personal preferences and whatever else may be going on alongside the roasting, I suspect the degree of nuisance is going to vary pretty strongly with the concentration in the air. There's a small coffee-merchant's plant about a mile across a valley from where I live - they supply many of the local restaurants - and at that distance, on that scale, the smell isn't particularly objectionable. However, I still wouldn't want to live right next door to their works, or anywhere in the neighborhood of one of the industrial-scale manufacturers.
OK.
/. any longer.
Helllloooooo, Security Services, do you deny this?
Hm. No reply. I guess they're not monitoring
It's the clowns who are aiming the gun. "Foot, meet Bullet. Bullet, meet Foot."
In about 30 years earning my daily bread in the IT business there have been improvements. Lot of snake oil as well, of course. One thing that's stayed constant is that requirements get changed partway through development, which you can cope with in a small project with smart people and good tools. But in a large project it's a guarantee of cost overuns, late delivery, and angry recriminations.
Unfortunately, over the last few decades the environment in which applications work has become significantly more complex. 30 years ago much of IT was just a matter of shuffling data from one set of files to another: if you were a big organisation, you might even have a genuine database or three rather than just using files. Or you might be doing leading edge online stuff, which had it's own well-understood ways of doing things, one of which at the time was keeping the execution path lengths under control (yeah, we used to care about efficiency in those days).
These days, to serve up some information to a customer at home, an application might be running in a specialised enterprise-level java environment, communicating to some legacy big iron which holds much of the data and to other machines for specialist functions like authentication. All these interfaces have to be specified and implemented accurately for the whole system to work correctly and reliably, and it's still far too easy to miss the point at which a relatively well-understood project has slipped out of control.
In short, over 30 years, the proportion of projects that are large and complex and hard to coordinate has been increasing. In the circumstances, it's surprising that things work as well as they do.