Doesn't really help. All that does is guarantees that my server is really talking to google's server and not some third party. If I don't trust Google (i.e. maybe they are logging all the IMs I send through them) or their server has been cracked (it's still presenting me the valid certs, but some malware is grabbing the IMs and sending them to a third party site) then I'm just as screwed.
So if alice@example.com wants to IM bob@gmail.com, Alice might trust Bob but might not trust Eve, who is Gmail's administrator. Eve still gets to see all the data in the clear because she has root access to the server. What is needed is end to end encryption so that the stream is encrypted for the whole time it is in transit between Alice and Bob rather than getting decrypted at every server along the way.
I tend to ignore bullshit such as, "Even though you've paid for this, you're not allowed to use it."
Seems like an expensive way of breaking the law to me - buy a product, agree to the licence and then break it. If you're going to break the law you may as well just download the damned thing illegally in the first place. Of course, if you didn't like the licence you were agreeing to you could've rejected it instead of carrying on regardless with the intention of breaking your agreement.
I rip my CD's and listen to them on my mp3 player. Heck, I even think I'm allowed to to rip my DVD's and watch them on my portable media player.
I don't recall ever having agreed to a licence when I purchased CDs or DVDs.
Of course, you can certainly feel free to follow any unjust laws that the various intellectual property companies have bought and paid for.
These aren't "unjust laws" - if you accepted a contract (the EULA) then you are breaking your contract with the vendor. If you didn't like it you shouldn't have agreed. (Note that as far as I'm concerned it is completely legal to _remove_ the EULA from the software before agreeing so that you don't have to agree in the first place, but that isn't what it sounds like you are doing. From the sounds of it you are just agreeing to a contract with the intention of breaking it which is something that has been illegal for centuries).
If they cared about the network, they would do what many non-US ISPs do... throttle your connection.
That isn't what some of the customers want though. Some customers only want to make light use of the network whilst others want to make very heavy use - it seems that by introducing a tiered pricing system they are allowing both customers to use the network as they want (and pay for their respective uses). If they just throttled everyone down then they would only be catering for the light users.
[Conjecture again:] at the moment the heavy users may be costing TW more than they are paying. If this is the case, TW can choose between just cutting those unprofitable users off, or raising the amount they are charging those users. IMHO the latter method is better because at least then the heavy users get a choice rather than just losing the service.
Instead, they gladly let people continue to "abuse the network".
It's not abuse if you are using the service you were sold in the way the ISP intended. If you were sold a network connection with a 200GB/month cap and you happen to transfer 200GB/month then you are using it for its intended purpose, not abusing it.
The network will still "suffer"
Well not really, for 2 reasons:
1. If people have to pay more to leave their torrents running 24/7 less people will do it, so the overall amount of bandwidth used on the network will drop. 2. If you are charging the heavy users more you can afford to invest more in your infrastructure to support them.
it's still unproven that there really is as much of bandwidth crunch as they want us to beleive; and while it's hard to say on the grand scale, I've not noticed "slow internet" anywhere I've been.
Yes, and I'd rather not buy into the "TW are evil" mindset when there is absolutely no evidence one way or the other. As far as I'm concerned they _may_ be just trying to increase profits, or they _may_ be trying to align the cost per user with the real cost of the infrastructure required to support that user, thereby allowing them to improve the infrastructure. Only time will tell.
I've never used TW so I can't comment on the state of their network, but I do know that my 8Mbps DSL line very rarely delivers anything close to 8Mbps for the majority of sites. Now, IMHO if you are going to sell 8Mbps connections, your network infrastructure should be good enough that statistically I should be able to get 8Mbps almost any time I choose to use the connection. That doesn't mean I should be able to saturate the thing at 8Mbps *all the time*, it means that on the occasion I do want to make heavy use of the connection (lets say I decide I need to download a CD image - i.e. a fairly short-term heavy usage pattern) I should be fairly confident of getting close to 8Mbps.
Bandwidth monitoring per user is much more involved than you think it is. But by all means, keep your head in the sand until they incorrectly bill you.
The ISP I use have been doing per-user bandwidth monitoring for quite some time and I've never seen a problem with it. Whilst I personally don't run an ISP, I do run several servers with a number of virtual machines which have per-VM monitoring - it's a very similar problem, but on a smaller scale, and it isn't exactly rocket science.
There's no way the entire network can support even a fraction of it's users using their full connection.
That's exactly my point - the ISPs cannot accommodate the heavy users at the current price point. Their options are simply:
1. Kick heavy users off the network entirely. This generates a lot of bad will and prevents people who really do actually need a lot of bandwidth from being customers. 2. Throttle down the heavy users. This gives users the impression of a poor quality network and again, prevents some people from being customers. 3. Raise the prices across the board. This ends up charging light users way over the odds and you'll lose them as
(Oddly, I can see on-line status with the Jabber side of iChat AV for one gtalk guy, but not at all for another guy. I'd either blame Google or iChat for that before XMPP.)
Sounds like you aren't subscribed to that buddy. When you add a buddy to your roster it will send a subscription request to them. They can either accept the request (and you'll then get status updates from them) or they can decline it (they are still on your roster but it won't give you their status).
In Pidgin you can re-send the subscription request by right clicking the buddy, but if they don't want you to see their status they can just decline it again.:)
If you have a Jabber account anywhere, be prepared to start receiving lots of spim all day, every day.
Whilst this is true, XMPP does callback verification which means that the spammers can't spoof their domains. I suspect the lack of spoofability will mean that spam will never get anywhere near as significant as email spam. For one thing, it means you can't have a botnet of machines running XMPP servers because they would each need a DNS record and the ability to accept the callbacks.
XMPP is very similar to SIP in that low bandwidth data (e.g. your IMs) all go via the servers. It is only high bandwidth or latency-sensitive data (file transfers, VoIP (using Jingle), etc.) which set up a peer-to-peer session. In general, technologies which try to traverse NAT are unreliable, so it is avoided unless there is a substantial gain from doing so (and this is a major reason why we need IPv6 so we can ditch the mess that is NAT).
SIP is "Session Initiation Protocol" - it negotiates sessions of other protocols between endpoints. So for example, it is often used to initiate RTP sessions (VoIP). However, it can also be used to pass other data such as instant messages - in fact there is a chopped down version of the SIP protocol that just does IM (known as SIP/SIMPLE), which Microsoft (amoungst others) have used for their corporate IM server products for some time.
except through Jingle, but they're not exactly the same thing
When I read the Jingle specs it very much appeared to me to be almost SIP-over-XMPP. I.e. it does the same job as SIP - setting up RTP sessions between endpoints. ISTR when they came up with Jingle, Google said they would also be providing a SIP gateway eventually (anyone know if this actually happened?)
If the walls of IM fall, Skype will be next.
I won't hold my breath - Skype have a lot to gain by remaining non-interoperable. Not least the fact that it prevents people from shopping around for cheaper VoIP/PSTN gateways (of which there are hundreds in the SIP world).
However, Jabber/XMPP streams can be encrypted with TLS/SSL, so all of your traffic between you and your server (and between servers) can be encrypted.
That's not a lot of help if you don't trust all the servers involved. For example, I trust my server because I administer it, but if I'm chatting to a GoogleTalk user then I have to trust Google's server too... Why should I trust their server? For one thing I don't know how trustworthy Google are themselves, and for another I don't know how competent the server admins are - the server could be spyware infested for all I know.
I'd like to see end-to-end encryption over XMPP become a standard thing, but as you mentioned it is a difficult problem.
I love OS X and it has in the last few months been what Linux (after almost 10 years of trying) never could be for me: a complete and total replacement for Windows.
Out of interest, why do you find that Linux can't replace Windows? I've not had any use for windows for about 7 years now - Linux has done everything I need and most of the time it's done it better.
With that said, I don't like Apple's computer lineup.
I've often found Apple computers to be unsuitable for various reasons. For example (as you mentioned), the old iMac had the monitor and computer integrated together - I don't know about anyone else but I have never upgraded my monitor and computer at the same time and the idea of having to throw away one to upgrade the other erks me (in fact, I _still_ use my 10 year old 15" Sony monitor as a secondary and it's as crystal clear as it was when it I first got it). The laptops have always had a single big flaw for me - the fact that the trackpads only have physical button.
Not to mention the price of the kit - an Apple laptop of a similar spec to my Acer was about twice the price.
I'm really not convinced by the Air either - IMHO once you get under about 25mm the thickness really doesn't matter that much. If you wanted ultra-portable you'd be buying something with a smaller screen since that's what limits the size the most.
Plenty of people have discs of Windows 9x lying around the house or office not being used.
Except most of those discs that are lying around are OEM versions of Win98 which have already been installed on a machine. The Windows EULA you agreed to makes them non-transferable.
Dieu merci! Now the French are safely protected from the limited selection of Amazon.com.
You might notice that the law was passed before the likes of Amazon existed. As with all laws, people with a vested interest will often use them in ways not envisaged at the time the law was passed, which may be contrary to the law's original intent. It doesn't necessarily mean the original idea was a bad one, it just means that the law needs to be adjusted to prevent this kind of abuse.
When did I say that we should continue with the flat-rate for unlimited usage model? I never did, and I wish you people would stop assuming that because I think the "surprise overage charge" solution is a stupid idea, that therefore I think we should just leave things as they are.
Hey, don't raise your blood pressure. All I asked was why the general public can cope with metered pricing for phone, gas, electricity, etc and yet can't cope with metered pricing for bandwidth?
Carrying a very, very broad and deep selection of books means that you'll have a lot of books that will sit on the shelf collecting dust until the right buyer comes along.
This isn't just about expensive shelf space though - if you want a niche book you can ask the bookstore to order it for you, but I bet you'd get nowhere asking a supermarket to do the same (bear in mind this law predates the likes of Amazon).
What possible reason could France have for this law, besides being successfully bought by big business?
I understand that the law was passed to prevent supermarkets from putting book sellers out of business by selling the most popular books at knock-down prices (the theory being that if all books are sold by the supermarkets rather than proper book stores you would only be able to buy the most profitable books).
TW isn't doing this in the name of network health.
How do you know? Do you have some inside knowledge that the rest of us don't, or are you just guessing? Sure, they are going to raise more money, but they might need to do that in order to improve the network's infrastructure.
Without inside knowledge, this is all conjecture.
See, they aren't slowing your network down. They're increasing your bill.
If they increase your bill they can pay for the infrastructure upgrades needed to provide a "not slowed down" network.
Accurate bandwidth monitoring is not as hard as it used to be, but it's still a long way from simple.
Actually, accurate monitoring is _really_ simple so long as you are just looking at overall bandwidth. The bit where it gets complex is if you want to look at the bandwidth associated with specific services (e.g. HTTP, NNTP, BitTorrent, etc).
I know that a lot of people on Slashdot seem to think that bandwidth grows on trees and doesn't cost anything but back in the real world network infrastructure _does_ cost money and it seems unreasonable to have light users foot the bill for supporting the heavy users.
I never said copyright infringment is stealing from a legal perspective. It's stealing from a moral perspective.
It certainly isn't the same as stealing from _my_ moral perspective. As far as I'm concerned, stealing is far worse an act than copyright infringement since when you steal you are preventing someone from using their property. For example, if you steal a car you are preventing someone from using it, and that is inconvenient at the very least. On the other hand if you infringe a copyright it simply means that the copyright owner won't get some money that they _may_ have got if you didn't infringe - i.e. you haven't prevented them from using something they owned.
-If you take something that doesn't belong to you without permission it is stealing. Please consult a dictionary.
-You don't own the song or you could do whatever you want with it.
I'm sorry, the law disagrees with you. You own the song but the law places a restriction on what you are allowed to do with it because you don't own the copyright.
Please bear in mind that many physical every day objects are also copyrighted or patented - even though you are the owner you are not allowed to reproduce them without a licence. A CD is no different.
-It is stealing. If you infringed on a copyright then you stole something.
So you are now admitting that you accused me of copyright infringement?
Then the ISP shouldn't sell it as "unlimited pure and simple.
I agree entirely. So does Time Warner, it seems.
Time Warner basically have said (massively paraphrasing) "We can't offer unlimited bandwidth so we're going to stop selling our connections as "unlimited" and apply a publicised tiered cap". And the response was "How about really giving customers unlimited bandwidth?".
Giving people unlimited bandwidth would be cost prohibitive, so they have chosen the only other sensible option - don't advertise it as "unlimited". I'm not sure what the dispute is here - it sounds like Time Warner are supplying exactly what they are advertising.
And these laws (whether you agree with them or not) aren't influenced by the moral idea of not allowing people to harm others
And yet the laws themselves allow people (the authorities) to harm others. However, you make one of my other points for me - not everyone's morals are the same.
How about the DMCA and EUCD, which make it illegal for someone to bypass the region coding on Bluray discs and certain ink cartridges. Are you telling me it's immoral to import movies and inks from other countries?
Then why have you spent the last 3 days disputing it?
I haven't - I have spent the last 3 days disputing the your idea that copyright infringement is stealing.
When you disputed that copyright infringement was not stealing you were disputing an argument that I never made. It's called a straw man argument. I simply said stealing is taking something you don't own without permission.
-Just the disk not the song. If you owned the song you could do whatever you want with it.
I'm sorry, the law disagrees with you. You own the song but the law places a restriction on what you are allowed to do with it because you don't own the copyright.
Please bear in mind that many physical every day objects are also copyrighted or patented - even though you are the owner you are not allowed to reproduce them without a licence. A CD is no different.
As for clearly making an implication, no, it did not.
How qould you interpret this?
Copyright infringement IS stealing. You can wrap it any way you want, but you know it is stealing because you're not paying for the content.... No, if you had the rights you wouldn't be splitting hairs or making fictional arguments. You're stealing and you're mad at Apple because they haven't made that easy for you.
(Emphasis mine)
You have made the declaration that copyright infringement is stealing, and then have accused me of stealing. By your own definition, you appear to have accused me of either copyright infringement or stealing (or both).
As an easy starting point, how about the laws that allow anyone in the UK to be held without charge on suspicion of terrorism and the laws that allow the US to commit acts of torture. Also the laws that allow British citizens to be extradited to the US despite breaking no British laws and there being no evidence presented against them by the US authorities.
Who said they were?
You were the one who made the quote - presumably you thought it was of importance.
That doesn't change the fact that the concept of stealing is a moral concept and predates the law.
But there is no dispute about that. The dispute is as to whether copyright infringement constitutes stealing. The law says it doesn't, and the concept of copyright does not predate the law.
I don't need the law to understand the concept of stealing therefore it is not necessary to bring the law into the discussion.
It seems that you do need the law to understand the concept of stealing, since the law disagrees with you as to what stealing is.
In this case you own the disk, but you DO NOT OWN THE SONG. If you own the song then start selling it to other people, publish it on your cheesy web site and publicize it so people can download it or buy it. See what happens. If you owned it then you could do that. But you don't own it.
That isn't the legal position on the matter. Legally you own the disc and the song but not the copyright. Legally you can start selling it to other people so long as you are selling your authorised copy rather than a copy which you personally have made. If it were the case that you only own a licence to use the material then you would legally be allowed to acquire a copy to replace a damaged CD since your licence would still be valid. This, however, is illegal, as per copyright law.
-True, but in this case it is made up because it's obviously not true.
Except it is true.
No, I can only be accountable for what I said.
Again, the law disagrees with you. Defamation laws cover both express and implied statements. The context of your statements clearly made an implication.
If it weren't for the moral construct then we'd feel no need to create the law, now would we?
I'm sure I can point to quite a few laws which I would consider to be nothing to do with morals at all.
-Thou Shalt Not STEAL. It's a moral concept.
The teachings of your specific religion are of little importance to many people. I'm also pretty sure that there was no concept of copyright at the time that was originally written.
-I'm not sure you have any so we'll never know.
Of course I have some - just because someone's morals don't completely match with your own doesn't mean they are amoral.
-What question is that?
What purpose does your overly broad definition serve?
You don't own the song. You have purchased the right to listen to it. If you owned it then you'd have the right to sell the song to whoever or give it away for free. You don't have that right because you don't own it.
I strongly suggest you check the law. The law quite clearly states that if you go into a shop, hand over some money and receive an object in return for the cash then you own that object. What you do not own is the copyright (i.e. the right to create a copy of the object beyond that allowed by fair dealing laws).
-You may own the physical media, but you don't own the song. No, it's not a legal position. You made it up.
No, I'm afraid I didn't make it up - information which extend beyond your knowledge is not necessarily "made up".
If I didn't say "you are infringing copyrights" then you can't say that is what I meant.
Sure I can - it was quite clearly implied by the context of the statement. (And yes, defamation laws cover both express and implied untruths).
"You seem to be talking about theft (a legal construct) and copyright (also a legal construct). "
-No, it is YOU who have talked about those, not me. I said STEALING. Idiot.
Theft and stealing are both the same legal construct. Also, if you are not talking about copyright then there is no problem at all, since copyright is the only thing that makes it wrong to copy a work.
-No, it's a MORAL concept. Idiot
Morals define right and wrong - not specific concepts such as stealing. Also, how are morals defined? I'm pretty sure your morals don't match mine.
-I've repeatedly said it's a common sense definition of stealing. Idiot.
You have failed to answer the question I asked.
No, you buy the CD, but you DO NOT OWN THE SONG TO DISTRIBUTE AS YOU WISH.
Correct - you do not have the right to distribute it. You do, however, own the song (yes, this is the legal position).
You have a license to use it, but you do not own it. Idiot.
I'm afraid you are wrong here as well. Unless you were presented with a licence to sign at the time of purchase, you have been sold the CD and contents (but not the copyright thereof), not a licence to use it in a specific way. Again, this is the legal position.
I never talked about copyright infringement (please quote where I accuse you of copyright infringement), nor have I accused you of theft (please quote where I call you a thief).
In the above examples you were quite clearly talking about copyright infringement despite your incorrect use of the word "stealing". However, whether you were accusing me of being a theif of a copyright infringer, the statement was libelous and defamatory.
About a year ago, NTL (in the UK) decided that they were going to abolish speed grades and give everyone a 10Mb/s connection and tier the prices based on usage rather than peak speed. They seem to have dropped this idea now, and still offer three speed grades (2Mb/s, 4Mb/s and 20Mb/s).
I've got to say that I prefer the idea of capping the total bandwidth used over the course of the month to capping the maximum speed.
I'm on PlusNet at the moment and their caps seem to work generally quite well. You get emailed when you exceed about half your quota, then emailed again later, and they progressively throttle certain stuff down as you get perilously close to the cap (once you hit the cap you get severely throttled). The caps and throttling only apply during "peak times" though (ISTR 16:00 - 00:00). Of course, when they initially implemented the caps there was outcry from all the torrenters and quite a lot of them canceled their accounts (needless to say, this was quite good for the service as a whole:)
if they lose a customer permanently because he's outraged that they charged him $300 without (from his perspective) warning, and possibly lose some other customers because this one guy convinces them TW sucks, and engender loads of ill will.
I'm a little unclear on why people who aren't tech-savvy can cope with their gas, electricity, telephone, water, PPV TV, etc. all being metered by the amount they use, but must have bandwidth charged at a flat rate because otherwise they might get a surprise $300 bill.
People understand that if they stay on the phone 24/7 they are going to get a big phone bill - why is it so hard to accept that downloading movies 24/7 will get you a big bandwidth bill?
If that's the case, then they should stop selling their product as though it isn't. Claiming that customers can download as much as they want before cutting them off for downloading too much is false advertising, plain and simple. Don't you have a consumer affairs organisation to deal with this kind of thing?
Isn't that what this story is about? Time Warner are going to start selling connections by their bandwidth cap (e.g. "10 GB per month", "20 GB per month", etc.) rather than telling everyone it's unlimited (and then complaining at customers who actually try and use the "unlimited" bandwidth).
Sounds like a good idea to me. Notably it is something the smaller ISPs in the UK have been doing for a few years now. The bigger ISPs are still saying "unlimited", sadly. Having tiered caps is good for most users since it means that people who use less end up paying less. The only people who lose out are the people who _do_ try to saturate their connection all the time, because their high usage is no longer being subsidised by everyone else - they must either accept that they need to pay for the massive amount of bandwidth they use, or use less.
Given the choice between an ISP that advertises "unlimited" bandwidth and one that advertises a capped service, I'd choose the capped one for the simple reason that I know unlimited bandwidth is not a realistically achievable thing and the "unlimited" ISPs are going to attact a larger number of people wanting to use vast amounts of bandwidth (which will degrade the performance of the network for everyone else).
I suspect the reason the "unlimited" marketing tactic has continued is because the majority of people don't know how much bandwidth they use, and £20 for an "unlimited" 8Mbps connection *sounds* better than £20 for a connection capped at 30MB / month, even though they actually only use maybe 5MB/month anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, the XMPP community is working on this: https://stpeter.im/?p=2136 [stpeter.im]
Doesn't really help. All that does is guarantees that my server is really talking to google's server and not some third party. If I don't trust Google (i.e. maybe they are logging all the IMs I send through them) or their server has been cracked (it's still presenting me the valid certs, but some malware is grabbing the IMs and sending them to a third party site) then I'm just as screwed.
So if alice@example.com wants to IM bob@gmail.com, Alice might trust Bob but might not trust Eve, who is Gmail's administrator. Eve still gets to see all the data in the clear because she has root access to the server. What is needed is end to end encryption so that the stream is encrypted for the whole time it is in transit between Alice and Bob rather than getting decrypted at every server along the way.
I tend to ignore bullshit such as, "Even though you've paid for this, you're not allowed to use it."
Seems like an expensive way of breaking the law to me - buy a product, agree to the licence and then break it. If you're going to break the law you may as well just download the damned thing illegally in the first place. Of course, if you didn't like the licence you were agreeing to you could've rejected it instead of carrying on regardless with the intention of breaking your agreement.
I rip my CD's and listen to them on my mp3 player. Heck, I even think I'm allowed to to rip my DVD's and watch them on my portable media player.
I don't recall ever having agreed to a licence when I purchased CDs or DVDs.
Of course, you can certainly feel free to follow any unjust laws that the various intellectual property companies have bought and paid for.
These aren't "unjust laws" - if you accepted a contract (the EULA) then you are breaking your contract with the vendor. If you didn't like it you shouldn't have agreed. (Note that as far as I'm concerned it is completely legal to _remove_ the EULA from the software before agreeing so that you don't have to agree in the first place, but that isn't what it sounds like you are doing. From the sounds of it you are just agreeing to a contract with the intention of breaking it which is something that has been illegal for centuries).
If they cared about the network, they would do what many non-US ISPs do... throttle your connection.
That isn't what some of the customers want though. Some customers only want to make light use of the network whilst others want to make very heavy use - it seems that by introducing a tiered pricing system they are allowing both customers to use the network as they want (and pay for their respective uses). If they just throttled everyone down then they would only be catering for the light users.
[Conjecture again:] at the moment the heavy users may be costing TW more than they are paying. If this is the case, TW can choose between just cutting those unprofitable users off, or raising the amount they are charging those users. IMHO the latter method is better because at least then the heavy users get a choice rather than just losing the service.
Instead, they gladly let people continue to "abuse the network".
It's not abuse if you are using the service you were sold in the way the ISP intended. If you were sold a network connection with a 200GB/month cap and you happen to transfer 200GB/month then you are using it for its intended purpose, not abusing it.
The network will still "suffer"
Well not really, for 2 reasons:
1. If people have to pay more to leave their torrents running 24/7 less people will do it, so the overall amount of bandwidth used on the network will drop.
2. If you are charging the heavy users more you can afford to invest more in your infrastructure to support them.
it's still unproven that there really is as much of bandwidth crunch as they want us to beleive; and while it's hard to say on the grand scale, I've not noticed "slow internet" anywhere I've been.
Yes, and I'd rather not buy into the "TW are evil" mindset when there is absolutely no evidence one way or the other. As far as I'm concerned they _may_ be just trying to increase profits, or they _may_ be trying to align the cost per user with the real cost of the infrastructure required to support that user, thereby allowing them to improve the infrastructure. Only time will tell.
I've never used TW so I can't comment on the state of their network, but I do know that my 8Mbps DSL line very rarely delivers anything close to 8Mbps for the majority of sites. Now, IMHO if you are going to sell 8Mbps connections, your network infrastructure should be good enough that statistically I should be able to get 8Mbps almost any time I choose to use the connection. That doesn't mean I should be able to saturate the thing at 8Mbps *all the time*, it means that on the occasion I do want to make heavy use of the connection (lets say I decide I need to download a CD image - i.e. a fairly short-term heavy usage pattern) I should be fairly confident of getting close to 8Mbps.
Bandwidth monitoring per user is much more involved than you think it is. But by all means, keep your head in the sand until they incorrectly bill you.
The ISP I use have been doing per-user bandwidth monitoring for quite some time and I've never seen a problem with it. Whilst I personally don't run an ISP, I do run several servers with a number of virtual machines which have per-VM monitoring - it's a very similar problem, but on a smaller scale, and it isn't exactly rocket science.
There's no way the entire network can support even a fraction of it's users using their full connection.
That's exactly my point - the ISPs cannot accommodate the heavy users at the current price point. Their options are simply:
1. Kick heavy users off the network entirely. This generates a lot of bad will and prevents people who really do actually need a lot of bandwidth from being customers.
2. Throttle down the heavy users. This gives users the impression of a poor quality network and again, prevents some people from being customers.
3. Raise the prices across the board. This ends up charging light users way over the odds and you'll lose them as
What is firehouse?
http://slashdot.org/firehose.pl
(Oddly, I can see on-line status with the Jabber side of iChat AV for one gtalk guy, but not at all for another guy. I'd either blame Google or iChat for that before XMPP.)
:)
Sounds like you aren't subscribed to that buddy. When you add a buddy to your roster it will send a subscription request to them. They can either accept the request (and you'll then get status updates from them) or they can decline it (they are still on your roster but it won't give you their status).
In Pidgin you can re-send the subscription request by right clicking the buddy, but if they don't want you to see their status they can just decline it again.
If you have a Jabber account anywhere, be prepared to start receiving lots of spim all day, every day.
Whilst this is true, XMPP does callback verification which means that the spammers can't spoof their domains. I suspect the lack of spoofability will mean that spam will never get anywhere near as significant as email spam. For one thing, it means you can't have a botnet of machines running XMPP servers because they would each need a DNS record and the ability to accept the callbacks.
I thought Jabber traversed NAT...
XMPP is very similar to SIP in that low bandwidth data (e.g. your IMs) all go via the servers. It is only high bandwidth or latency-sensitive data (file transfers, VoIP (using Jingle), etc.) which set up a peer-to-peer session. In general, technologies which try to traverse NAT are unreliable, so it is avoided unless there is a substantial gain from doing so (and this is a major reason why we need IPv6 so we can ditch the mess that is NAT).
SIP is pretty much a VOIP thing
SIP is "Session Initiation Protocol" - it negotiates sessions of other protocols between endpoints. So for example, it is often used to initiate RTP sessions (VoIP). However, it can also be used to pass other data such as instant messages - in fact there is a chopped down version of the SIP protocol that just does IM (known as SIP/SIMPLE), which Microsoft (amoungst others) have used for their corporate IM server products for some time.
except through Jingle, but they're not exactly the same thing
When I read the Jingle specs it very much appeared to me to be almost SIP-over-XMPP. I.e. it does the same job as SIP - setting up RTP sessions between endpoints. ISTR when they came up with Jingle, Google said they would also be providing a SIP gateway eventually (anyone know if this actually happened?)
If the walls of IM fall, Skype will be next.
I won't hold my breath - Skype have a lot to gain by remaining non-interoperable. Not least the fact that it prevents people from shopping around for cheaper VoIP/PSTN gateways (of which there are hundreds in the SIP world).
However, Jabber/XMPP streams can be encrypted with TLS/SSL, so all of your traffic between you and your server (and between servers) can be encrypted.
That's not a lot of help if you don't trust all the servers involved. For example, I trust my server because I administer it, but if I'm chatting to a GoogleTalk user then I have to trust Google's server too... Why should I trust their server? For one thing I don't know how trustworthy Google are themselves, and for another I don't know how competent the server admins are - the server could be spyware infested for all I know.
I'd like to see end-to-end encryption over XMPP become a standard thing, but as you mentioned it is a difficult problem.
I love OS X and it has in the last few months been what Linux (after almost 10 years of trying) never could be for me: a complete and total replacement for Windows.
Out of interest, why do you find that Linux can't replace Windows? I've not had any use for windows for about 7 years now - Linux has done everything I need and most of the time it's done it better.
With that said, I don't like Apple's computer lineup.
I've often found Apple computers to be unsuitable for various reasons. For example (as you mentioned), the old iMac had the monitor and computer integrated together - I don't know about anyone else but I have never upgraded my monitor and computer at the same time and the idea of having to throw away one to upgrade the other erks me (in fact, I _still_ use my 10 year old 15" Sony monitor as a secondary and it's as crystal clear as it was when it I first got it). The laptops have always had a single big flaw for me - the fact that the trackpads only have physical button.
Not to mention the price of the kit - an Apple laptop of a similar spec to my Acer was about twice the price.
I'm really not convinced by the Air either - IMHO once you get under about 25mm the thickness really doesn't matter that much. If you wanted ultra-portable you'd be buying something with a smaller screen since that's what limits the size the most.
Plenty of people have discs of Windows 9x lying around the house or office not being used.
Except most of those discs that are lying around are OEM versions of Win98 which have already been installed on a machine. The Windows EULA you agreed to makes them non-transferable.
Dieu merci! Now the French are safely protected from the limited selection of Amazon.com.
You might notice that the law was passed before the likes of Amazon existed. As with all laws, people with a vested interest will often use them in ways not envisaged at the time the law was passed, which may be contrary to the law's original intent. It doesn't necessarily mean the original idea was a bad one, it just means that the law needs to be adjusted to prevent this kind of abuse.
When did I say that we should continue with the flat-rate for unlimited usage model? I never did, and I wish you people would stop assuming that because I think the "surprise overage charge" solution is a stupid idea, that therefore I think we should just leave things as they are.
Hey, don't raise your blood pressure. All I asked was why the general public can cope with metered pricing for phone, gas, electricity, etc and yet can't cope with metered pricing for bandwidth?
Carrying a very, very broad and deep selection of books means that you'll have a lot of books that will sit on the shelf collecting dust until the right buyer comes along.
This isn't just about expensive shelf space though - if you want a niche book you can ask the bookstore to order it for you, but I bet you'd get nowhere asking a supermarket to do the same (bear in mind this law predates the likes of Amazon).
What possible reason could France have for this law, besides being successfully bought by big business?
I understand that the law was passed to prevent supermarkets from putting book sellers out of business by selling the most popular books at knock-down prices (the theory being that if all books are sold by the supermarkets rather than proper book stores you would only be able to buy the most profitable books).
TW isn't doing this in the name of network health.
How do you know? Do you have some inside knowledge that the rest of us don't, or are you just guessing? Sure, they are going to raise more money, but they might need to do that in order to improve the network's infrastructure.
Without inside knowledge, this is all conjecture.
See, they aren't slowing your network down. They're increasing your bill.
If they increase your bill they can pay for the infrastructure upgrades needed to provide a "not slowed down" network.
Accurate bandwidth monitoring is not as hard as it used to be, but it's still a long way from simple.
Actually, accurate monitoring is _really_ simple so long as you are just looking at overall bandwidth. The bit where it gets complex is if you want to look at the bandwidth associated with specific services (e.g. HTTP, NNTP, BitTorrent, etc).
I know that a lot of people on Slashdot seem to think that bandwidth grows on trees and doesn't cost anything but back in the real world network infrastructure _does_ cost money and it seems unreasonable to have light users foot the bill for supporting the heavy users.
I never said copyright infringment is stealing from a legal perspective. It's stealing from a moral perspective.
It certainly isn't the same as stealing from _my_ moral perspective. As far as I'm concerned, stealing is far worse an act than copyright infringement since when you steal you are preventing someone from using their property. For example, if you steal a car you are preventing someone from using it, and that is inconvenient at the very least. On the other hand if you infringe a copyright it simply means that the copyright owner won't get some money that they _may_ have got if you didn't infringe - i.e. you haven't prevented them from using something they owned.
-If you take something that doesn't belong to you without permission it is stealing. Please consult a dictionary.
Look, you said "Copyright infringement IS stealing.". I then disputed that and after some time you said "When you disputed that copyright infringement was not stealing you were disputing an argument that I never made". Clearly you _did_ make the argument, as referenced by the above comment. How about staying consistent rather than denying you ever made an argument which you clearly did make.
-You don't own the song or you could do whatever you want with it.
I'm sorry, the law disagrees with you. You own the song but the law places a restriction on what you are allowed to do with it because you don't own the copyright.
Please bear in mind that many physical every day objects are also copyrighted or patented - even though you are the owner you are not allowed to reproduce them without a licence. A CD is no different.
-It is stealing. If you infringed on a copyright then you stole something.
So you are now admitting that you accused me of copyright infringement?
Then the ISP shouldn't sell it as "unlimited pure and simple.
I agree entirely. So does Time Warner, it seems.
Time Warner basically have said (massively paraphrasing) "We can't offer unlimited bandwidth so we're going to stop selling our connections as "unlimited" and apply a publicised tiered cap". And the response was "How about really giving customers unlimited bandwidth?".
Giving people unlimited bandwidth would be cost prohibitive, so they have chosen the only other sensible option - don't advertise it as "unlimited". I'm not sure what the dispute is here - it sounds like Time Warner are supplying exactly what they are advertising.
And yet the laws themselves allow people (the authorities) to harm others. However, you make one of my other points for me - not everyone's morals are the same.
How about the DMCA and EUCD, which make it illegal for someone to bypass the region coding on Bluray discs and certain ink cartridges. Are you telling me it's immoral to import movies and inks from other countries?
Then why have you spent the last 3 days disputing it?
I haven't - I have spent the last 3 days disputing the your idea that copyright infringement is stealing.
When you disputed that copyright infringement was not stealing you were disputing an argument that I never made. It's called a straw man argument. I simply said stealing is taking something you don't own without permission.
"Copyright infringement IS stealing."
Looks like you did make that statement after all.
-Just the disk not the song. If you owned the song you could do whatever you want with it.
I'm sorry, the law disagrees with you. You own the song but the law places a restriction on what you are allowed to do with it because you don't own the copyright.
Please bear in mind that many physical every day objects are also copyrighted or patented - even though you are the owner you are not allowed to reproduce them without a licence. A CD is no different.
As for clearly making an implication, no, it did not.
How qould you interpret this?
(Emphasis mine)
You have made the declaration that copyright infringement is stealing, and then have accused me of stealing. By your own definition, you appear to have accused me of either copyright infringement or stealing (or both).
-Such as.
As an easy starting point, how about the laws that allow anyone in the UK to be held without charge on suspicion of terrorism and the laws that allow the US to commit acts of torture. Also the laws that allow British citizens to be extradited to the US despite breaking no British laws and there being no evidence presented against them by the US authorities.
Who said they were?
You were the one who made the quote - presumably you thought it was of importance.
That doesn't change the fact that the concept of stealing is a moral concept and predates the law.
But there is no dispute about that. The dispute is as to whether copyright infringement constitutes stealing. The law says it doesn't, and the concept of copyright does not predate the law.
I don't need the law to understand the concept of stealing therefore it is not necessary to bring the law into the discussion.
It seems that you do need the law to understand the concept of stealing, since the law disagrees with you as to what stealing is.
In this case you own the disk, but you DO NOT OWN THE SONG. If you own the song then start selling it to other people, publish it on your cheesy web site and publicize it so people can download it or buy it. See what happens. If you owned it then you could do that. But you don't own it.
That isn't the legal position on the matter. Legally you own the disc and the song but not the copyright. Legally you can start selling it to other people so long as you are selling your authorised copy rather than a copy which you personally have made. If it were the case that you only own a licence to use the material then you would legally be allowed to acquire a copy to replace a damaged CD since your licence would still be valid. This, however, is illegal, as per copyright law.
-True, but in this case it is made up because it's obviously not true.
Except it is true.
No, I can only be accountable for what I said.
Again, the law disagrees with you. Defamation laws cover both express and implied statements. The context of your statements clearly made an implication.
If it weren't for the moral construct then we'd feel no need to create the law, now would we?
I'm sure I can point to quite a few laws which I would consider to be nothing to do with morals at all.
-Thou Shalt Not STEAL. It's a moral concept.
The teachings of your specific religion are of little importance to many people. I'm also pretty sure that there was no concept of copyright at the time that was originally written.
-I'm not sure you have any so we'll never know.
Of course I have some - just because someone's morals don't completely match with your own doesn't mean they are amoral.
-What question is that?
What purpose does your overly broad definition serve?
You don't own the song. You have purchased the right to listen to it. If you owned it then you'd have the right to sell the song to whoever or give it away for free. You don't have that right because you don't own it.
I strongly suggest you check the law. The law quite clearly states that if you go into a shop, hand over some money and receive an object in return for the cash then you own that object. What you do not own is the copyright (i.e. the right to create a copy of the object beyond that allowed by fair dealing laws).
-You may own the physical media, but you don't own the song. No, it's not a legal position. You made it up.
No, I'm afraid I didn't make it up - information which extend beyond your knowledge is not necessarily "made up".
If I didn't say "you are infringing copyrights" then you can't say that is what I meant.
Sure I can - it was quite clearly implied by the context of the statement. (And yes, defamation laws cover both express and implied untruths).
-No, it is YOU who have talked about those, not me. I said STEALING. Idiot.
Theft and stealing are both the same legal construct. Also, if you are not talking about copyright then there is no problem at all, since copyright is the only thing that makes it wrong to copy a work.
-No, it's a MORAL concept. Idiot
Morals define right and wrong - not specific concepts such as stealing. Also, how are morals defined? I'm pretty sure your morals don't match mine.
-I've repeatedly said it's a common sense definition of stealing. Idiot.
You have failed to answer the question I asked.
No, you buy the CD, but you DO NOT OWN THE SONG TO DISTRIBUTE AS YOU WISH.
Correct - you do not have the right to distribute it. You do, however, own the song (yes, this is the legal position).
You have a license to use it, but you do not own it. Idiot.
I'm afraid you are wrong here as well. Unless you were presented with a licence to sign at the time of purchase, you have been sold the CD and contents (but not the copyright thereof), not a licence to use it in a specific way. Again, this is the legal position.
I never talked about copyright infringement (please quote where I accuse you of copyright infringement), nor have I accused you of theft (please quote where I call you a thief).
In the above examples you were quite clearly talking about copyright infringement despite your incorrect use of the word "stealing". However, whether you were accusing me of being a theif of a copyright infringer, the statement was libelous and defamatory.
About a year ago, NTL (in the UK) decided that they were going to abolish speed grades and give everyone a 10Mb/s connection and tier the prices based on usage rather than peak speed. They seem to have dropped this idea now, and still offer three speed grades (2Mb/s, 4Mb/s and 20Mb/s).
:)
I've got to say that I prefer the idea of capping the total bandwidth used over the course of the month to capping the maximum speed.
I'm on PlusNet at the moment and their caps seem to work generally quite well. You get emailed when you exceed about half your quota, then emailed again later, and they progressively throttle certain stuff down as you get perilously close to the cap (once you hit the cap you get severely throttled). The caps and throttling only apply during "peak times" though (ISTR 16:00 - 00:00). Of course, when they initially implemented the caps there was outcry from all the torrenters and quite a lot of them canceled their accounts (needless to say, this was quite good for the service as a whole
if they lose a customer permanently because he's outraged that they charged him $300 without (from his perspective) warning, and possibly lose some other customers because this one guy convinces them TW sucks, and engender loads of ill will.
I'm a little unclear on why people who aren't tech-savvy can cope with their gas, electricity, telephone, water, PPV TV, etc. all being metered by the amount they use, but must have bandwidth charged at a flat rate because otherwise they might get a surprise $300 bill.
People understand that if they stay on the phone 24/7 they are going to get a big phone bill - why is it so hard to accept that downloading movies 24/7 will get you a big bandwidth bill?
If that's the case, then they should stop selling their product as though it isn't. Claiming that customers can download as much as they want before cutting them off for downloading too much is false advertising, plain and simple. Don't you have a consumer affairs organisation to deal with this kind of thing?
Isn't that what this story is about? Time Warner are going to start selling connections by their bandwidth cap (e.g. "10 GB per month", "20 GB per month", etc.) rather than telling everyone it's unlimited (and then complaining at customers who actually try and use the "unlimited" bandwidth).
Sounds like a good idea to me. Notably it is something the smaller ISPs in the UK have been doing for a few years now. The bigger ISPs are still saying "unlimited", sadly. Having tiered caps is good for most users since it means that people who use less end up paying less. The only people who lose out are the people who _do_ try to saturate their connection all the time, because their high usage is no longer being subsidised by everyone else - they must either accept that they need to pay for the massive amount of bandwidth they use, or use less.
Given the choice between an ISP that advertises "unlimited" bandwidth and one that advertises a capped service, I'd choose the capped one for the simple reason that I know unlimited bandwidth is not a realistically achievable thing and the "unlimited" ISPs are going to attact a larger number of people wanting to use vast amounts of bandwidth (which will degrade the performance of the network for everyone else).
I suspect the reason the "unlimited" marketing tactic has continued is because the majority of people don't know how much bandwidth they use, and £20 for an "unlimited" 8Mbps connection *sounds* better than £20 for a connection capped at 30MB / month, even though they actually only use maybe 5MB/month anyway.