Agreed whole-heartedly. That was one of the first things that popped out at me about the article.
I also pulled a couple twenties out of my wallet. Two of the 1996 series (haloed, off-center Jackson) and one of the new multi-color series.
Also, regarding the "metal strip" many explain this as:
None of these bills has a solid object anywhere near Jackson's face. They all have an embedded strip, but the strip is less than 1 inch from the left side of the bill. (it passes through the '0' in the upper left corner of the bill, not Jackson's eye)
RFID tags, when removed from their packaging, are a small square silicon chip. This chip will NOT transmit light and would be easily visible in the bill if held to light.
Let's face it, "Dave and Denise" are crackpots. The pattern of burning is typical of what would happen if someone "accidentally" set a stack of bills in front of a propane torch. Note that some bills are burned through and some are barely browned? Looks like heat applied from the bottom to me.
They also appear to have started off with the heat off to the wrong side and moved it to center it on Jackson's face. Note the double-spot pattern? I suspect they moved it after they realized that when you look at the back of the bill Jackson's face will be offset to the right instead of the left. Brilliant. The crackpots can't even figure out how to measure correctly.
Memtest is a great tool, however it is specificaly mentioned in the article itself.
If you read the article, RebornData is looking for something more comprehensive than memtest offers. (ie: more than just a memory test. I assume to include disk, bios, video, cpu information, and a variety of other system tests and checks.)
I myself question the need for much more than a disk-surface-scan tool and a copy of memtest, but it's what RebornData is looking for.
There appears to be a typographical error in #5
on
SCOoby Snacks
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
5) SCO UNIX(R) is Legally Unencumbered
Shouldn't this read "SCO UNIX (R) is Unencumbered by adherence to the law"?
Seriously though, looking at what SCO is attempting to do to IBM, how can one call this "unencumbered"? The only company that is unencumbered in SCO's vision of the world is SCO. Any of their partners are legaly encumbered by adhering to SCO's license arangement. Anything you add to SCO appears to become a part of SCO's IP if their claims are correct.
But wait, doesn't that make SCO just as bad as the GPL, even from SCO's own perspective?
Given the way MIT is structured, I can see the conflict between CS and EE's. It's actually quite strange to me that MIT makes EE and CS into a single department.
At Iowa State, CS and EE are even under separate colleges. EE and CPRE degree programs are under the "Electrical and Computer Engineering" department which is a part of the college of Engineering.
The "Computer Science" department is part of the college of Liberal Arts and Science.
Admittedly the two buildings are right next to each other, as EE's and CPRE's both are required to take some Com Sci courses, but they are still a very separate department.
I have a Computer Engineering degree, not a computer science degree. They are separate degrees, with different programs and come from separate colleges within the university..
Computer Engineers study the same circuit design courses as EE's at the 100 and 200 level, then fork into digital-only design. Com Sci programs are software only and do not include any transistor level design work.
As for accredited, if you check on ABET, Iowa State University has a Computer Engineering program that is abet accredited as an engineering program. check for yourself.
Go to accredited engineering programs, select "computer" as a discipline and you will find:
Iowa State University Computer Engineering (BS) [1979] Ames, IA
So, is ABET accreditation enough? You yourself cited abet as a source.
And how have train-engine-operators been able to be called engineers?
Quite frankly, "engineer" without qualifiers such as "P.E." means very little. It's a generic term with no licensed or legally binding meanings.
For another example, I do have a B.S. in Computer Engineering from Iowa State University, but I elected not to take the P.E. exam. (for reference Computer Engineering is an offshoot of Electrical Engineering, specializing in a mixture of digital hardware design and software)
Does this make me an engineer or not? I've certainly taken all the course work and have a degree by that title from an accredited engineering program. I sat through all the same basic "engineering core" coursework as mechanical, civil and all degrees under the college of engineering require.
It's a term with a lot of meanings, and it's certainly not exclusive to the Association of Professional Engineers. (although the term Professional Engineer and the initials P.E. are exclusive to them, engineer is not)
The DNS blacklists hosted at Osirusoft and monkeys.com were both shut down this year by DDoS attacks. Osirusoft was the most widely reported and probably the one you are thinking of.
There may be other shutdowns I'm unaware of. Many other DNSBLs are being subject to attacks, but several are handling them very well.
The class A address space, collectively, represents half the total IP address space, and not all of the class A space is waste.
Even assuming all of the class A space is waste and could be reclaimed and put to good use, doubling the number of available IP addresses would not be sufficient for the future. It would certainly be helpful, but it would not be entirely sufficient.
The fundamental problem is that IP was not intended to be used for a "global public WAN" like it is now.
The wasteful allocations hurt, but to assume that there will always be less than 4 billion devices on a global scale is pretty silly.
In general, I'd agree it's quite questionable to include exploit details... However, in general I don't think he was unreasonable to Apple in releasing his advisory early.
Apple was notified of the intended release 7 days ago on the 19th. There's nowhere in the log showing that apple ever replied requesting more time.
Admittedly it's speculation, because who knows if Carrel would have honored such a request, but the fact that Apple doesn't appear to ever have made one is a very shameful showing indeed.
Sorry, but if the vendor can't even respond to notices, then they can and should be considered unresponsive. Apple's history in this log of releasing incomplete fixes is extrordinarily shameful as well.
RFPolicy requires a 5-day response time between the originator and maintainer.. Carrel was quite reasonable in giving them 7 days to respond before deciding to consider them unresponsive to the issue.
48 days total time without a fix, 7 days with no response to the last notice sent... anyone home?
Correct. I'm a paid POP3 subscriber on my yahoo account (a whopping $19.95/yr).
They have not messed with my marketing preferences so far.. I just checked them today.. all still set to "no" and no notice sent. We'll see if they reset only the preferences of free users or all users..
"We do not have exact details yet but we can tell you now that each Router's firmware that incorporates Parental Control as an option will be changed."
Hmm.. hopefully this doesn't mean they're going to do something even more nefarious, like only hijack sessions going to the websites of parental control software manufacturers...
I look forward to seeing how they wind up handling the fix, and what they have to say about the patch when it's released. Hopefully Belkin has learned that this was an incredibly bad idea and will do the right thing. However, only time will tell this.
Of course, it still won't convince me to buy Belkin products again. Trust lost to abuse takes a long time to regain.
I agree entirely that content-filtering is an interim solution at best.. and quite frankly, so is IP blocking.
As a contributor to SpamAssassin and study of spam, no form of filter tactics are discouraging to spammers. All they seem to do is become more determined to find clever ways of avoiding you.
IP address blocking, bayes, content searches, none of this does much but force spammers to keep changing their tactics.
Take a look at the HTML source for some of your spam.. notice that a lot of them are hiding "high dollar" words in HTML comments, or white-on-off-white text.. These are deliberate attempts to poison bayes type methods.
IP blocking is a bit more difficult for spammers to evade, but quite frankly the only truly effective way to avoid them entirely is to block 0.0.0.0/0 (that's all IP addresses for those not familiar with CIDR). Selective IP blocking just forces spammers to try more aggressively to find new hosts to abuse. They are sending trojan horses to ordinary home users to abuse their machines, they are attacking educational networks, corporate networks, and pretty much anywhere they can get anything installed.
Even a rewrite of SMTP for security won't help much against the current tactics of the more sophisticated spammers.. They're already targeting legitimate windows users with trojan horses. Once a spammer has control of your machine, he can send spam with all the same credentials you have. Unless you've got some kind of authentication that you need to re-enter every time you send mail, they can send mail as some dumb joe who ran their trojan no matter how secure SMTP becomes. Even if every mailserver in the world was 100% secure against relaying, address forgery was impossible, and servers required authentication for delivery of mail, these tactics which are already in use would still allow them to send spam.
And let's face it, the prevalence of mail viruses shows just how easy it is to convince your average end user to run a trojan.
The best we can hope for is to make spamming inconvenient.
Personally, I much prefer IBM's current approach to a buy out.
I believe it was a LWN poster that described it as the legal equivalent of stoning to death. IBM's got lots of patents and plenty of lawyers... They can keep on digging out a few reasonable matches and toss them at SCO in the form of a patent infringement suit for as long as it takes.
And I think such a slow, painful death will suit them well for making such a sensless lawsuit in the first place.
However, based on their filings in the main case, it looks like SCO is attempting to commit suicide before then.
Well, it's the FSF they mentioned, not EFF, but close enough.
Regardless, it shouldn't matter who is doing selective enforcement. If I recall correctly, only trademarks and the like are subject to loss of rights due to lack of enforcement. However copyrights are subject to no such restrictions, and the GPL is a contractual license, offering broader rights than base copyright.
I don't think there's any restrictions on enforcements of contracts either, unless they can prove that said enforcement is only done in violation of some other laws (ie: discriminatory based on race).
But I'm also not a lawyer.. I merely pontificate about the topic on slashdot like all the other unqualified people:)
NerveGas is right, it's not particularly strong encryption. It's single DES, with a shortened 40-bit key, and the key itself is stored on an external USB dongle.
For those wondering about the details what exact encryption is used, it's using one of enova's x-wall chips. The device family (depending on version) can do single or triple DES in hardware and has been used in enova's own NIST certified 3des device.
http://www.enovatech.net/html/ps_usb_ide.htm
The SE family of these chips is summarized here (abit uses an LX device, but I'd assume at least a vague relation between them): http://www.enovatech.net/html/ps_se_system .htm
The exact part used on ABITs board appears to be a enova x-wall LX40 model. Enova's website doesn't list the device, but based on other part numbers, it's a single DES encryption with a shortened 40-bit key as input.. 40-bit keys are as we all know very weak and can be brute forced in a reasonable timeframe even on a desktop PC.
So it is fairly weak, but not entirely useless, I'd not trust company financial data to this kind of security mechanism. It is however a significant step up from the "bios password" feature.. I'd think this kind of thing would be a lot better on say a laptop. You could keep the dongle on your keychain and at least know that if someone steals your laptop they'll have to spend some time cracking the key to get any data off. If it's a casual thief not a corporate spy, they'll likely just reformat it and sell it. Little security is gained against pros and high school students that know about keycracking, but at least some of the less educated thieves aren't a problem.
It's also done in a way that's OS independent, and has little or no performance impact..
Of course, a loopack encrypted filesystem with decent keysize would be substantially more secure.
Agreed, it seems highly unusual, if not hypocritical, to "hope that png succeeds" against the gif format and yet use the.gif graphic format on ones own site.
Taco, Hemos, etc, the PNG format won't succeed if people don't USE it. If it is truly and honestly your intention to support the PNG format over the gif format, then put your graphics where your mouth is. In the interim, your well wishes might be in the right place, but will do little or no good in the absence of action.
You are correct that 100 meters is the maximum cable length for a single segment of 10baseT or 100baseT. (although technically they are are more limited by propagation speed for collision detection than electrical loss.)
Even without distance limits, both standards also require higher grade cable than phone service, so running plain ethernet over spare phone wires is clearly not an option for covering a 150 acre area.
Ethernet is primarily a LAN technology, and that's why it isn't designed to handle super-long cable lengths. It's mostly used for wiring up buildings or a SOHO.
Sure you can make ethernet go far if you run 100baseFX and use a good single-mode fiber-optic (15km or more), but that's pretty expensive to be pulling high-grade fiber all over the place.
This is definitely the realm of DSL-ish and T-1/3ish signaling if you're going to go copper-line. Some of the other posts mention some VDSL based ethernet-over-phoneline at a few megabits.. those products are likely to work best for this.
Probably their best bet is to run wireless links where they can, and run dsl-esqe wired links to get to spots where wireless cannot. If they plan well, they can even launch wireless from the wired spots and limit the number of wired links they need.
Interesting, using putty for windows (on a high end Athlon) I can PSCP a file onto my Pentium MMX 166 computer (running opensshd) at near wire speed for the 10mbit ethernet I just did a 11mbyte file at 948.2 kbytes/sec. Downloading is similarly fast.
I'll admit my speeds are using blowfish and no compression, but if speed is what you want, those are the settings you should use.
Even with compression added on I still get about 490kbytes/sec upload and 406kbytes/sec download.
What kind of configuration are you using that you can only get such horrid speeds? Are you using compression -9 and 3des encryption as your only encryption option?
True enough, I wasn't arguing that it was morally correct. It is still strange for _any_ organization to pay/employ someone that harshly criticizes them in the open press, because all people have feelings and some degree of pride in what they do.
I mean, if you owned your own company, would you hire a contractor to install new network cables that stated to a newspaper reporter "subzerohen products are worthless junk" when you feel you make a good quality product? I mean, sure his statement has nothing to do with how well he pulls network cable. On the other hand, even if he is a damn good cable installer, do you really want to put money in the pocket of the guy that said that about your products, knowing that his statement likely cost you business? (note: This is an opinion based issue, so wether or not your product is junk or not is a side issue)
I know I wouldn't hire him. I respect people's right to freely express their opinions, but I certainly also exercise my right to not do business with people I dislike.
In this case it's a government organization, but really the behavior of a government is still based on the opinions of people. Lots of people within the DOD would be calling up "why are we funding this guy who's insulting us?" This is because each one of those individual people working for the DOD would have the same reactions that I would if someone insulted my business. They (or at least _some_ of them) take pride in their work.
Although it's somewhat off-topic, despite the lobbying SELinux is still going. They just made an updated release April 7th, a mere 10 days ago.
http://www.nsa.gov/selinux/news.html
Thus, I don't think DARPA has any issue with the open/closed sourced-ness of it.
It does however seem reasonable for a branch of the US DOD to not be wanting to fund someone that is critical of the US military. Wether his statements are true or not is another matter, but it would seem odd to for the DOD provide funding to a non-us citizen that criticizes the DOD. I'd expect them to have been taking a lot of political flack about that.
Slashdot Mirror
Agreed whole-heartedly. That was one of the first things that popped out at me about the article.
I also pulled a couple twenties out of my wallet. Two of the 1996 series (haloed, off-center Jackson) and one of the new multi-color series.
Also, regarding the "metal strip" many explain this as:
None of these bills has a solid object anywhere near Jackson's face. They all have an embedded strip, but the strip is less than 1 inch from the left side of the bill. (it passes through the '0' in the upper left corner of the bill, not Jackson's eye)
RFID tags, when removed from their packaging, are a small square silicon chip. This chip will NOT transmit light and would be easily visible in the bill if held to light.
Let's face it, "Dave and Denise" are crackpots. The pattern of burning is typical of what would happen if someone "accidentally" set a stack of bills in front of a propane torch. Note that some bills are burned through and some are barely browned? Looks like heat applied from the bottom to me.
They also appear to have started off with the heat off to the wrong side and moved it to center it on Jackson's face. Note the double-spot pattern? I suspect they moved it after they realized that when you look at the back of the bill Jackson's face will be offset to the right instead of the left. Brilliant. The crackpots can't even figure out how to measure correctly.
Memtest is a great tool, however it is specificaly mentioned in the article itself.
If you read the article, RebornData is looking for something more comprehensive than memtest offers. (ie: more than just a memory test. I assume to include disk, bios, video, cpu information, and a variety of other system tests and checks.)
I myself question the need for much more than a disk-surface-scan tool and a copy of memtest, but it's what RebornData is looking for.
5) SCO UNIX(R) is Legally Unencumbered
Shouldn't this read "SCO UNIX (R) is Unencumbered by adherence to the law"?
Seriously though, looking at what SCO is attempting to do to IBM, how can one call this "unencumbered"? The only company that is unencumbered in SCO's vision of the world is SCO. Any of their partners are legaly encumbered by adhering to SCO's license arangement. Anything you add to SCO appears to become a part of SCO's IP if their claims are correct.
But wait, doesn't that make SCO just as bad as the GPL, even from SCO's own perspective?
Given the way MIT is structured, I can see the conflict between CS and EE's. It's actually quite strange to me that MIT makes EE and CS into a single department.
At Iowa State, CS and EE are even under separate colleges. EE and CPRE degree programs are under the "Electrical and Computer Engineering" department which is a part of the college of Engineering.
The "Computer Science" department is part of the college of Liberal Arts and Science.
Admittedly the two buildings are right next to each other, as EE's and CPRE's both are required to take some Com Sci courses, but they are still a very separate department.
I have a Computer Engineering degree, not a computer science degree. They are separate degrees, with different programs and come from separate colleges within the university..
Computer Engineers study the same circuit design courses as EE's at the 100 and 200 level, then fork into digital-only design. Com Sci programs are software only and do not include any transistor level design work.
As for accredited, if you check on ABET, Iowa State University has a Computer Engineering program that is abet accredited as an engineering program. check for yourself.
Go to accredited engineering programs, select "computer" as a discipline and you will find:
Iowa State University Computer Engineering (BS) [1979] Ames, IA
So, is ABET accreditation enough? You yourself cited abet as a source.
And how have train-engine-operators been able to be called engineers?
Quite frankly, "engineer" without qualifiers such as "P.E." means very little. It's a generic term with no licensed or legally binding meanings.
For another example, I do have a B.S. in Computer Engineering from Iowa State University, but I elected not to take the P.E. exam. (for reference Computer Engineering is an offshoot of Electrical Engineering, specializing in a mixture of digital hardware design and software)
Does this make me an engineer or not? I've certainly taken all the course work and have a degree by that title from an accredited engineering program. I sat through all the same basic "engineering core" coursework as mechanical, civil and all degrees under the college of engineering require.
It's a term with a lot of meanings, and it's certainly not exclusive to the Association of Professional Engineers. (although the term Professional Engineer and the initials P.E. are exclusive to them, engineer is not)
The DNS blacklists hosted at Osirusoft and monkeys.com were both shut down this year by DDoS attacks. Osirusoft was the most widely reported and probably the one you are thinking of.
There may be other shutdowns I'm unaware of. Many other DNSBLs are being subject to attacks, but several are handling them very well.
The class A address space, collectively, represents half the total IP address space, and not all of the class A space is waste.
Even assuming all of the class A space is waste and could be reclaimed and put to good use, doubling the number of available IP addresses would not be sufficient for the future. It would certainly be helpful, but it would not be entirely sufficient.
The fundamental problem is that IP was not intended to be used for a "global public WAN" like it is now.
The wasteful allocations hurt, but to assume that there will always be less than 4 billion devices on a global scale is pretty silly.
hehehe, that's great..
:)
Yes, the great OSI 7-layer burrito definitely took a massive foothold and tcp/ip went nowhere
Reminds me of the movie "demolition man"... "all protocols are taco bell now".
RFC 704 (circa Sept 1975) states:
"2. Expanded Address field. The address field will be expanded to 32 bits..." "This expansion is adequate for any forseeable ARPA Network growth"
http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc704.html
In general, I'd agree it's quite questionable to include exploit details... However, in general I don't think he was unreasonable to Apple in releasing his advisory early.
Apple was notified of the intended release 7 days ago on the 19th. There's nowhere in the log showing that apple ever replied requesting more time.
Admittedly it's speculation, because who knows if Carrel would have honored such a request, but the fact that Apple doesn't appear to ever have made one is a very shameful showing indeed.
Sorry, but if the vendor can't even respond to notices, then they can and should be considered unresponsive. Apple's history in this log of releasing incomplete fixes is extrordinarily shameful as well.
RFPolicy requires a 5-day response time between the originator and maintainer.. Carrel was quite reasonable in giving them 7 days to respond before deciding to consider them unresponsive to the issue.
48 days total time without a fix, 7 days with no response to the last notice sent... anyone home?
Correct. I'm a paid POP3 subscriber on my yahoo account (a whopping $19.95/yr).
They have not messed with my marketing preferences so far.. I just checked them today.. all still set to "no" and no notice sent. We'll see if they reset only the preferences of free users or all users..
"We do not have exact details yet but we can tell you now that each Router's firmware that incorporates Parental Control as an option will be changed."
Hmm.. hopefully this doesn't mean they're going to do something even more nefarious, like only hijack sessions going to the websites of parental control software manufacturers...
I look forward to seeing how they wind up handling the fix, and what they have to say about the patch when it's released. Hopefully Belkin has learned that this was an incredibly bad idea and will do the right thing. However, only time will tell this.
Of course, it still won't convince me to buy Belkin products again. Trust lost to abuse takes a long time to regain.
I agree entirely that content-filtering is an interim solution at best.. and quite frankly, so is IP blocking.
As a contributor to SpamAssassin and study of spam, no form of filter tactics are discouraging to spammers. All they seem to do is become more determined to find clever ways of avoiding you.
IP address blocking, bayes, content searches, none of this does much but force spammers to keep changing their tactics.
Take a look at the HTML source for some of your spam.. notice that a lot of them are hiding "high dollar" words in HTML comments, or white-on-off-white text.. These are deliberate attempts to poison bayes type methods.
IP blocking is a bit more difficult for spammers to evade, but quite frankly the only truly effective way to avoid them entirely is to block 0.0.0.0/0 (that's all IP addresses for those not familiar with CIDR). Selective IP blocking just forces spammers to try more aggressively to find new hosts to abuse. They are sending trojan horses to ordinary home users to abuse their machines, they are attacking educational networks, corporate networks, and pretty much anywhere they can get anything installed.
Even a rewrite of SMTP for security won't help much against the current tactics of the more sophisticated spammers.. They're already targeting legitimate windows users with trojan horses. Once a spammer has control of your machine, he can send spam with all the same credentials you have. Unless you've got some kind of authentication that you need to re-enter every time you send mail, they can send mail as some dumb joe who ran their trojan no matter how secure SMTP becomes. Even if every mailserver in the world was 100% secure against relaying, address forgery was impossible, and servers required authentication for delivery of mail, these tactics which are already in use would still allow them to send spam.
And let's face it, the prevalence of mail viruses shows just how easy it is to convince your average end user to run a trojan.
The best we can hope for is to make spamming inconvenient.
Personally, I much prefer IBM's current approach to a buy out.
I believe it was a LWN poster that described it as the legal equivalent of stoning to death. IBM's got lots of patents and plenty of lawyers... They can keep on digging out a few reasonable matches and toss them at SCO in the form of a patent infringement suit for as long as it takes.
And I think such a slow, painful death will suit them well for making such a sensless lawsuit in the first place.
However, based on their filings in the main case, it looks like SCO is attempting to commit suicide before then.
Well, it's the FSF they mentioned, not EFF, but close enough.
:)
Regardless, it shouldn't matter who is doing selective enforcement. If I recall correctly, only trademarks and the like are subject to loss of rights due to lack of enforcement. However copyrights are subject to no such restrictions, and the GPL is a contractual license, offering broader rights than base copyright.
I don't think there's any restrictions on enforcements of contracts either, unless they can prove that said enforcement is only done in violation of some other laws (ie: discriminatory based on race).
But I'm also not a lawyer.. I merely pontificate about the topic on slashdot like all the other unqualified people
NerveGas is right, it's not particularly strong encryption. It's single DES, with a shortened 40-bit key, and the key itself is stored on an external USB dongle.
m .htm
7 25 #93796
For those wondering about the details what exact encryption is used, it's using one of enova's x-wall chips. The device family (depending on version) can do single or triple DES in hardware and has been used in enova's own NIST certified 3des device.
http://www.enovatech.net/html/ps_usb_ide.htm
The SE family of these chips is summarized here (abit uses an LX device, but I'd assume at least a vague relation between them):
http://www.enovatech.net/html/ps_se_syste
The exact part used on ABITs board appears to be a enova x-wall LX40 model. Enova's website doesn't list the device, but based on other part numbers, it's a single DES encryption with a shortened 40-bit key as input.. 40-bit keys are as we all know very weak and can be brute forced in a reasonable timeframe even on a desktop PC.
http://www.digit-life.com/archive.shtml?dl20030
So it is fairly weak, but not entirely useless, I'd not trust company financial data to this kind of security mechanism. It is however a significant step up from the "bios password" feature.. I'd think this kind of thing would be a lot better on say a laptop. You could keep the dongle on your keychain and at least know that if someone steals your laptop they'll have to spend some time cracking the key to get any data off. If it's a casual thief not a corporate spy, they'll likely just reformat it and sell it. Little security is gained against pros and high school students that know about keycracking, but at least some of the less educated thieves aren't a problem.
It's also done in a way that's OS independent, and has little or no performance impact..
Of course, a loopack encrypted filesystem with decent keysize would be substantially more secure.
And why not simply do:
matrix3 = matrix1;
matrix3 += matrix2;
This should achieve the stated goal of avoiding copy to a temporary and allows use of overloaded operators.
Seems simple and straightforward to me.
Just FYI, In English (at least in the US) they are typically called "non-compete" agreements.
The meaning of your message was clear enough anyway, but since you weren't sure what they were called, I figured I'd add a note.
Agreed, it seems highly unusual, if not hypocritical, to "hope that png succeeds" against the gif format and yet use the .gif graphic format on ones own site.
Taco, Hemos, etc, the PNG format won't succeed if people don't USE it. If it is truly and honestly your intention to support the PNG format over the gif format, then put your graphics where your mouth is. In the interim, your well wishes might be in the right place, but will do little or no good in the absence of action.
You are correct that 100 meters is the maximum cable length for a single segment of 10baseT or 100baseT. (although technically they are are more limited by propagation speed for collision detection than electrical loss.)
Even without distance limits, both standards also require higher grade cable than phone service, so running plain ethernet over spare phone wires is clearly not an option for covering a 150 acre area.
Ethernet is primarily a LAN technology, and that's why it isn't designed to handle super-long cable lengths. It's mostly used for wiring up buildings or a SOHO.
Sure you can make ethernet go far if you run 100baseFX and use a good single-mode fiber-optic (15km or more), but that's pretty expensive to be pulling high-grade fiber all over the place.
This is definitely the realm of DSL-ish and T-1/3ish signaling if you're going to go copper-line. Some of the other posts mention some VDSL based ethernet-over-phoneline at a few megabits.. those products are likely to work best for this.
Probably their best bet is to run wireless links where they can, and run dsl-esqe wired links to get to spots where wireless cannot. If they plan well, they can even launch wireless from the wired spots and limit the number of wired links they need.
Regarding "why not by a $200 1gig machine":
The example is actualy a laptop system, not a desktop, which are generaly considerably more expensive, even in the "low end category."
A scratch-and-dent old model pIII-500 laptop will still cost you about $450, even at a surplus shop like www.compgeeks.com.
Hence why one would bother with a low-end CPU on a laptop..
Interesting, using putty for windows (on a high end Athlon) I can PSCP a file onto my Pentium MMX 166 computer (running opensshd) at near wire speed for the 10mbit ethernet I just did a 11mbyte file at 948.2 kbytes/sec. Downloading is similarly fast.
I'll admit my speeds are using blowfish and no compression, but if speed is what you want, those are the settings you should use.
Even with compression added on I still get about 490kbytes/sec upload and 406kbytes/sec download.
What kind of configuration are you using that you can only get such horrid speeds? Are you using compression -9 and 3des encryption as your only encryption option?
True enough, I wasn't arguing that it was morally correct. It is still strange for _any_ organization to pay/employ someone that harshly criticizes them in the open press, because all people have feelings and some degree of pride in what they do.
I mean, if you owned your own company, would you hire a contractor to install new network cables that stated to a newspaper reporter "subzerohen products are worthless junk" when you feel you make a good quality product? I mean, sure his statement has nothing to do with how well he pulls network cable. On the other hand, even if he is a damn good cable installer, do you really want to put money in the pocket of the guy that said that about your products, knowing that his statement likely cost you business? (note: This is an opinion based issue, so wether or not your product is junk or not is a side issue)
I know I wouldn't hire him. I respect people's right to freely express their opinions, but I certainly also exercise my right to not do business with people I dislike.
In this case it's a government organization, but really the behavior of a government is still based on the opinions of people. Lots of people within the DOD would be calling up "why are we funding this guy who's insulting us?" This is because each one of those individual people working for the DOD would have the same reactions that I would if someone insulted my business. They (or at least _some_ of them) take pride in their work.
Although it's somewhat off-topic, despite the lobbying SELinux is still going. They just made an updated release April 7th, a mere 10 days ago.
http://www.nsa.gov/selinux/news.html
Thus, I don't think DARPA has any issue with the open/closed sourced-ness of it.
It does however seem reasonable for a branch of the US DOD to not be wanting to fund someone that is critical of the US military. Wether his statements are true or not is another matter, but it would seem odd to for the DOD provide funding to a non-us citizen that criticizes the DOD. I'd expect them to have been taking a lot of political flack about that.