> ISP's ToS is that whatever they actually publish is bullshit, and far different from what they enforce.
IANAL, but I am sure there are laws that ensure that if they violate their ToS then they are somehow accountable.
> Laws need to be passed to provide internet users' a "Bill of Rights"
Perhaps so. Would you support a law that allows... Microsoft to do whatever they wish with the hardware you own? I wouldn't. In the same vein, I would not support a law that allows... the customer to (ab)use the network hardware an ISP owns.
> If and when boxen start spitting out stuff, then you're entitled to cut them off.
It would certainly be nice to be able to do that. But it is not always possible to detect attack packets. However, knowing that the box is running the software sasser.exe, the ISP can suspect something fishy is up. Nevertheless, the ISP policy could simply be -- we won't allow you to connect to the network unless you have a certified anti-virus software installed (many corporations already implement such policies). This wouldn't be a 'preemptive' strike as you put it, but rather a preventive measure.
You can then ask who certifies the anti-virus software, does SELinux count etc., and that is up to the ISP. If they don't consider SELinux secure enough, they'll lose customers and that'll hit their bottom line; so it is in their best interest to not shut out customers, but rather just ensure that they are taking enough precautions.
While I sympathise with your situation, Internet connectivity is not a fundamental right (yet?). If it ever were to become one, you could argue that the government would be required to provide an ISP service without any restrictions (much like State run TV channels).
But as long as Internet access generates revenue, and is a commercial service, consumers will be at the mercy of capitalistic competition. ISP's will compete on laxer ToS, lower price, better service, less spam and guaranteed bandwidth etc., which will ultimately benefit the consumer in some sense, and inconvinience them in another. Ofcourse, this argument breaks down where there is a monopoly (as seems to be the case with your ISP); at that point you are pretty much hostage to their whims. And until network connectivity is a fundamental right, they are quite free to give you the take-it-or-leave-it spiel.
> Laptop and home users also have the right to run an insecure PC
Absolutely. But do they have the right to abuse the ISP's network by sending spam/DDoS attacks etc?
Run what you may on your PC, but if you are using the network infrastructure owned and maintained by your ISP, you have to adhere to their Terms of Service, and they should have the right to enforce those terms of service.
If you don't like your ISP's TOS, find a different one. But don't confuse you right to run an insure PC with your right to abuse your ISP's network -- you do not have the latter.
In my mind, its is less an issue of "proving" global warming, but rather asking -- Does it matter?
Yes, the average temperature seems to have gone up a couple of digrees over the last fifty years. It did the same at the end of the last ice age. Temperatures went down before the last ice age, they can go down again. If there any evidence to show that global warming is irreversible?
Sure, the effects may be catastrophic; cities may get washed away, millions in coastal areas may die. There have been catastrophic events in the past; dinosaurs got wiped out. Is there any evindence to show that global warming will wipe all life as we know it?
Basically, yes, there has been evidence that shows temperatures have risen -- but is there evidence to show it won't come back down?
The article in the story doesn't seem to mention existing work in the same area. This approach has already be proposed, evaluated and peer-reviewed in the top networking conference (SIGCOMM'04) [1] and the top Operating System's conference (SOSP'05) [2]. The existing approach was proposed by Microsoft Research and is called Vigilante.
They find that it is possible to quickly detect worms automatically, construct automatic filters for just the worm and not benign traffic, and distribute it quickly to vulnerable hosts in a secure, non-forgeable way.
Oddly enough, DNS does use a fair bit of bandwidth (~13Gbps at the root servers based on numbers in [1]). Adding a new TLD involves adding an entry to these root servers. The root servers already have a hard time answering queries for ~300 TLD's that are quite cachable (60-85% are queries that should have been cached but are not [1]). Adding thousands of additional TLD's which are harder to cache only exuberates this problem. Add to the fact that the root servers are a central point of failure, and represent a big target for DDoS; they require a lot of extra provisioning and security. Medling with the DNS root is no laughing matter.
Now I don't know how these guys came up with their cost numbers, and whether or not they are justifiable, but I am pretty sure that adding a DNS TLD will cost them a fair bit.
> That alone is reason enough to not use it for a server.
Ah, but life-cycle is different from lifetime. Short life-cycle means you get new versions of the OS quickly, new technology etc. You don't have to update, and indeed you shouldn't if you are running a server. You can run the server on the stable ageing FC install for years if you want because the lifetime can be pretty long. RH addresses security issues and critical bugs even after a newer FC is released (for about a year I think), after which point it transfers the maintainance to the FedoraLegacy project which extends the life by a couple more years. Ofcourse if you want more than 3-4 years lifetime for a legacy system, RH will make you fork cash for RHEL; but upgrading every 2-3 years to a new FC ain't bad either.
> At the very least I expected the CD images to contain usable packages.
Suffices to say that if the CD images of a major Linux distro were b0rked, you'd hear a lot more about it; and only a select few would be able to install it. There are many reasons why your particular set of packages may have been corrupt -- maybe the CD reader on the system you were installing on had transient issues, who knows? But if you indeed failed at installing FC, and it was a software issue, I certainly hope you submitted a bug report that would help devs address the issue.
I admit it is quite easy to break FC and make it unstable (even inadvertantly). In my experience, unstability has been primarily a result of installing software not packaged properly for FC. For instance, DRI nightlies are tarballs and not well built RPMs, Sun's Java RPMs don't use the/etc/alternatives convention, NVIDIA's drivers are not RPMs etc. There is an absolutely a need for properly packaging these softwares (and there are efforts underway -- JPackage for Java, ATRpms for Nvidia etc).
I completely agree with you that FC is not perfect, and has fewer software packages than Debian -- thus tempting FC users to install 3rd party packages that haven't received as much attention or testing. But that is quite different from saying that FC itself is unstable. Ofcourse, it would be much nicer if FC included that software in the core system in the first place. Perhaps someday.
The article and the summary have a typo: "The next version of Raleigh, North Carolina-based Red Hat's enterprise Linux distribution is not scheduled for release until the second half of 2006" (emphasis mine)
MYTH - Fedora is unstable and unreliable, just a testbed for bleeding-edge software
FACT - This misconception comes from two things:
From http://fedora.redhat.com/: "It is also a proving ground for new technology that may eventually make its way into Red Hat products."
Fedora has rapid releases, a short life-cycle, and a lot of new code.
As for the first item, this means that Red Hat uses Fedora as a platform to promote the development of new technology, some of which might end up in Red Hat Enterprise Linux. This does not mean that Fedora is a dumping ground for untested code, it simply means that Fedora is a rapidly progressing platform.
For the second item, this does mean that Fedora is often running in uncharted innovative territory, but not that it is using too-new code. The programs in Fedora are generally stable releases or well-tested pre-release versions. There are guidelines behind the inclusion of pre-release software, and thorough testing is always done prior to Fedora Core releases.
Each version of Fedora Core receives updates from the Fedora development community that includes Red Hat for up to a year. Continuing updates from the Fedora Legacy Project may extend the life of a release to two years or more, depending on the release schedule. Refer to http://fedoralegacy.org/about/faq.php for more details.
We do everything we can to make sure that the final products released to the general public are stable and reliable. Fedora Core has proven that it can be a stable, reliable, and secure platform. Many businesses and organizations rely upon Fedora Core for both day-to-day tasks and, in some cases, critical infrastructure. Additionally, our well-managed packaging and review process adds an extra layer of safety not found in some other distributions. You can count on Fedora Core.
As someone who has used FC in production, I can attest to the its stability.
> Hinduism is a body of religious and philosophical beliefs, as well as a family of cultural practices, but that is not the same as a society.
From the definition of society [1]: n. A group of humans broadly distinguished from other groups by mutual interests, participation in characteristic relationships, shared institutions, and a common culture.
As you admit, Hinduism, is a family of cultural practices, beliefs etc. By the definition of society, a group of people who observe this would be considered one. Such a group has existed continuously since 2500 BC. If you consider Vedic incluences, you can trace it back to 5000 BC [2].
Ofcourse, if you define society as something that gets wiped out every time an aggressor force conquers it, then nothing survives long; but even so one would argue that even if a "society" is conquered, there is a lot of cross pollination and the aggressor is incorporated into the old society and eventually subsumes it. Indian society, to this day, is a mixture of vedic teachings, muslim influences, British practises -- but the important thing to note is that the influence of the Vedas has been non-trivial, and contiguous for 5000 years even after numerous invasions.
> I think it's silly to say that it's the same society as existed in the ancient Indus Valley
Indeed. It is not the same society in that it is not the same "group of people" due to human mortality. But it is the same society in that it has been groups of people who (largely) share the same beliefs, culture, mutual interest etc over 5 millenia; and while people get killed off, there has been a contiguous overlap of people who believe in this culture.
> After all, with the preponderance of sects, cults, philosophical schools, etc, it would be hard to define by anything other than 'family resemblance'.
If 'family resemblance' is what is used to define a society, then nothing lasts longer than 3-4 generations. But the moment you boraden the definition to anything that evolves (culture, beliefs), the longevity increases to 5000 years and more.
Thats not to say that all society's last 5000 years under this lax definition. Mayans disappeared. The period of contiguous sharing of their beliefs is bounded by 2000 years or so. The group of people believing in Christianity started about 2000 years ago, and are still around. Pharoes and the whole bunch disappeared, and few, if any, believe in that school of thought these days. So including 'beliefs that evolve' in defining society does not trivialize the concept of longevitiy of a society.
Society, by the definition in [1], and by most non-mortality based definitions can last for several millenia, and the Hindu/Vedic civillization that started back in the Indus Valley is a testament to that.
Some of the points they make are justifiable; some not.
> - Skype is not standards-compliant, allowing it and any vulnerability to > pass through corporate firewalls.
It is true Skype is not standards-compliant. But that doesn't make it any more or less vulnerable to attacks. Following that logic, they would argue banning Internet Explorer.
> - Skype's encryption is closed source and prone to man-in-the-middle > attacks. There are also some unanswered questions about how well the > keys are managed.
This is quite valid (almost). Skype's security has not been throughly validated. Unless they know inner workings, it is premature to conclude Skype is prone to man-in-the-middle. It is possible for Skype to use strong symmetric key crypto (AES), but protect the symmetric key exchange with public key crypto (RSA etc); we do not know how it manages keys so it can potentially be insecure. Then again most IM networks don't use any crypto, so its not a complaint against Skype specifically. Perhaps Skype's (unverified) use of crypto could lure a user into a false sense of security and make them drop their guard and reveal secrets more freely; one possble complaint.
> - Enterprises using Skype risk a communication barrier with countries > and institutions that have already banned the service.
This one is dumb. Stop using X because you cannot use X with other users who are not using X; therefore you shouldn't use X either. WTF!
> - Skype is undetectable, untraceable, and unauditable, putting > organizations that are subject to compliance laws at risk.
While incorrect, there is some truth in this. Skype can be detected (i.e. who is running Skype), Skype call endpoints can be verified (article in NY Times earlier in August), Skype can be traced (at the network level)... but it is hard to do all this. Saying it is not possible is incorrect; but these are likely out of reach of enterprises that do need to audit communication.
> - The question of whether VoIP calls constitute a business record is a > legal quagmire. Throwing Skype into the communications mix further > clouds the issue.
Skype doesn't cloud the issue any more than throwing phones into the mix. Skype is half-way between phone calls on one end, and emails on another. Emails constitute a record, so do phone calls. Skype does constitute a record imho. Whether this record can be easily achieved is another question (see above).
Applications have started coping with the fact that you don't need a permanent static IP addresses for everything anymore. IP addresses change underneath you today (DHCP) and you don't even notice because of DNS.
As fewer IPv4 addresses remain, apps will learn to cope better, and these coping mechanisms will become more efficient and more transparent as developers find the pressing need to deal with it. IPv4 scarcity isn't half the problem it is made out to be, the scarcity is something that encourages evolution. Applications like Skype that can evolve will survive, others will wither away until they learn to cope with it. Scarcity won't drive IPv6 adoption, oddly enough.
Talking about NATs is like sex-education. Abstinence only goes so far. Rather that telling everyone to outright stop, telling application developers and vendors how to do it right stops serious problems down the road.
There are ways to write code that works through NATs (think Skype), and ways to make NATs so that working with them isn't hard (UPnP etc). Instead of wasting energy arguing about NATs and IPv6, we should be spending our energy finding a solution that acknowledges that NATs are here today and are not going away.
Given a choice between multiple-static IP addresses form your ISP, and a firewall box that can deal with them, or an off-the-shelf $35 Linksys router at BestBuy, which one do you think the average consumer would rather buy?
For the average consumer, things 'just work' NAT or no NAT; so the cheaper the option, the easier it is to install, the better. Sadly, NATs make most sense for both companies and the average consumer.
Actually, NAT is better because it provides address space isolation. If your organisation has 500 computers that all have a public IP address, it is harder for you to switch providers (500 IPs is too small to get your own address space for). When you switch your provider, you have to renumber all hosts, fix config files, fix DNS servers etc -- a royal pain in the ass. A NAT allows your to keep your internal structure exactly the same while you switch providers. That address isolation is very important for small-mid sized companies.
Second, NAT helps multihomed corporations. For large companies, your 10k hosts are going to be distributed over many states/countries/ISPs... and each site advertising its own address space is expensive for the ISP's because they cannot perform route aggregation (since your address space may not line up with the address space of each ISP). NAT solves this by having each site be NAT'ed behind that ISP's IP address (convinient for the ISP, cheaper for the company). The internal company network runs in the private space and when traffic crosses to the public internet, it gets an IP from the ISP it came out of... consequently replies come back in through the ISP. Read: If you send a packet out of India, the response won't come back inthrough America... which would otherwise require you to then forward it to India through your company's routers.
It is this address isolation and multihoming support that drives NAT use in small and large companies. Address space depletion has nothing to do with it. IPv6 does not fix these problems; companies will continue using NATs because NATs do.
TGIF is a very nice vector drawing program. It is a very highly evolved version of xfig (but with better UI than xfig -- not gtk or qt though). It exports to a whole slew of vector formats -- my favourite being LaTeX and EPS. I don't leave home without it.... Then again, I don't leave home much.:-p
Consider the value of quickly deploying a glycerine shield in space to slow down stray space debris from hitting the space station or shuttle.
Your glycerine (or even more viscous liquid) baloon is all filled and easily moved into place... without spilling the liquid. And then boom! Instant shield.
> Camping is not about wi-fi. It's about burning things. And reading fiction.
Right! Plus putting the SCO press releases onto CD's is a great gift for future generations.
Context is definitely god-sent for ambiguous queries. Though searching for Java doesn't yield a single category to do with either coffee or Java the island in the first 2 screens. Think of that what you may. Though it is probably the underlying engines (MSN, Overture etc) that are ranking those pages way further down that Vivisimo doesn't even see them to categorise them.
While I cant seem to find any page that describes their technology throughly (only glossy uses of the word 'clustering'), my guess would be they use the well known K-Nearest Neighbour algorithm to cluster results -- which clusters based on the presence of certain words. They do say that they use the words in the search result returned by the underlying search engines for clustering (MSN et al.)
So unlike google that brings the most linked (in some sense) result to the top reusing the research of the webmaster, Vivisimo takes the quasi-ranked results from other engines and divides them into smaller bins so that people who browse the results can skip uninteresting bins quickly and just look into the bin of interest.
That is clearly a step up from the results (read sponsored results) these underlying search engines offer, but if you ask me the power of google comes from harnessing the research and conscious linkage performed by website authors as opposed to allowing people to skip irrelevant results with ease.
Slashdot Mirror
> ISP's ToS is that whatever they actually publish is bullshit, and far different from what they enforce.
... Microsoft to do whatever they wish with the hardware you own? I wouldn't. In the same vein, I would not support a law that allows ... the customer to (ab)use the network hardware an ISP owns.
IANAL, but I am sure there are laws that ensure that if they violate their ToS then they are somehow accountable.
> Laws need to be passed to provide internet users' a "Bill of Rights"
Perhaps so. Would you support a law that allows
> If and when boxen start spitting out stuff, then you're entitled to cut them off.
It would certainly be nice to be able to do that. But it is not always possible to detect attack packets. However, knowing that the box is running the software sasser.exe, the ISP can suspect something fishy is up. Nevertheless, the ISP policy could simply be -- we won't allow you to connect to the network unless you have a certified anti-virus software installed (many corporations already implement such policies). This wouldn't be a 'preemptive' strike as you put it, but rather a preventive measure.
You can then ask who certifies the anti-virus software, does SELinux count etc., and that is up to the ISP. If they don't consider SELinux secure enough, they'll lose customers and that'll hit their bottom line; so it is in their best interest to not shut out customers, but rather just ensure that they are taking enough precautions.
While I sympathise with your situation, Internet connectivity is not a fundamental right (yet?). If it ever were to become one, you could argue that the government would be required to provide an ISP service without any restrictions (much like State run TV channels).
But as long as Internet access generates revenue, and is a commercial service, consumers will be at the mercy of capitalistic competition. ISP's will compete on laxer ToS, lower price, better service, less spam and guaranteed bandwidth etc., which will ultimately benefit the consumer in some sense, and inconvinience them in another. Ofcourse, this argument breaks down where there is a monopoly (as seems to be the case with your ISP); at that point you are pretty much hostage to their whims. And until network connectivity is a fundamental right, they are quite free to give you the take-it-or-leave-it spiel.
> Laptop and home users also have the right to run an insecure PC
Absolutely. But do they have the right to abuse the ISP's network by sending spam/DDoS attacks etc?
Run what you may on your PC, but if you are using the network infrastructure owned and maintained by your ISP, you have to adhere to their Terms of Service, and they should have the right to enforce those terms of service.
If you don't like your ISP's TOS, find a different one. But don't confuse you right to run an insure PC with your right to abuse your ISP's network -- you do not have the latter.
In my mind, its is less an issue of "proving" global warming, but rather asking -- Does it matter?
Yes, the average temperature seems to have gone up a couple of digrees over the last fifty years. It did the same at the end of the last ice age. Temperatures went down before the last ice age, they can go down again. If there any evidence to show that global warming is irreversible?
Sure, the effects may be catastrophic; cities may get washed away, millions in coastal areas may die. There have been catastrophic events in the past; dinosaurs got wiped out. Is there any evindence to show that global warming will wipe all life as we know it?
Basically, yes, there has been evidence that shows temperatures have risen -- but is there evidence to show it won't come back down?
The article in the story doesn't seem to mention existing work in the same area. This approach has already be proposed, evaluated and peer-reviewed in the top networking conference (SIGCOMM'04) [1] and the top Operating System's conference (SOSP'05) [2]. The existing approach was proposed by Microsoft Research and is called Vigilante.
5 824a spx?type=Publication&id=1483
They find that it is possible to quickly detect worms automatically, construct automatic filters for just the worm and not benign traffic, and distribute it quickly to vulnerable hosts in a secure, non-forgeable way.
[1] http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1095809.109
[2] http://research.microsoft.com/research/pubs/view.
Oddly enough, DNS does use a fair bit of bandwidth (~13Gbps at the root servers based on numbers in [1]). Adding a new TLD involves adding an entry to these root servers. The root servers already have a hard time answering queries for ~300 TLD's that are quite cachable (60-85% are queries that should have been cached but are not [1]). Adding thousands of additional TLD's which are harder to cache only exuberates this problem. Add to the fact that the root servers are a central point of failure, and represent a big target for DDoS; they require a lot of extra provisioning and security. Medling with the DNS root is no laughing matter.
R oot/dmr.pdf
Now I don't know how these guys came up with their cost numbers, and whether or not they are justifiable, but I am pretty sure that adding a DNS TLD will cost them a fair bit.
[1] http://www.caida.org/outreach/papers/2001/DNSMeas
> That alone is reason enough to not use it for a server.
Ah, but life-cycle is different from lifetime. Short life-cycle means you get new versions of the OS quickly, new technology etc. You don't have to update, and indeed you shouldn't if you are running a server. You can run the server on the stable ageing FC install for years if you want because the lifetime can be pretty long. RH addresses security issues and critical bugs even after a newer FC is released (for about a year I think), after which point it transfers the maintainance to the FedoraLegacy project which extends the life by a couple more years. Ofcourse if you want more than 3-4 years lifetime for a legacy system, RH will make you fork cash for RHEL; but upgrading every 2-3 years to a new FC ain't bad either.
> At the very least I expected the CD images to contain usable packages.
Suffices to say that if the CD images of a major Linux distro were b0rked, you'd hear a lot more about it; and only a select few would be able to install it. There are many reasons why your particular set of packages may have been corrupt -- maybe the CD reader on the system you were installing on had transient issues, who knows? But if you indeed failed at installing FC, and it was a software issue, I certainly hope you submitted a bug report that would help devs address the issue.
> upgrading from an already unstable FC2 to FC3
/etc/alternatives convention, NVIDIA's drivers are not RPMs etc. There is an absolutely a need for properly packaging these softwares (and there are efforts underway -- JPackage for Java, ATRpms for Nvidia etc).
I admit it is quite easy to break FC and make it unstable (even inadvertantly). In my experience, unstability has been primarily a result of installing software not packaged properly for FC. For instance, DRI nightlies are tarballs and not well built RPMs, Sun's Java RPMs don't use the
I completely agree with you that FC is not perfect, and has fewer software packages than Debian -- thus tempting FC users to install 3rd party packages that haven't received as much attention or testing. But that is quite different from saying that FC itself is unstable. Ofcourse, it would be much nicer if FC included that software in the core system in the first place. Perhaps someday.
According to the FC release schedule http://fedora.redhat.com/participate/schedule/:
The original article likely meant second month instead.
As someone who has used FC in production, I can attest to the its stability.
> Hinduism is a body of religious and philosophical beliefs, as well as a family of cultural practices, but that is not the same as a society.
From the definition of society [1]:
n. A group of humans broadly distinguished from other groups by mutual interests, participation in characteristic relationships, shared institutions, and a common culture.
As you admit, Hinduism, is a family of cultural practices, beliefs etc. By the definition of society, a group of people who observe this would be considered one. Such a group has existed continuously since 2500 BC. If you consider Vedic incluences, you can trace it back to 5000 BC [2].
Ofcourse, if you define society as something that gets wiped out every time an aggressor force conquers it, then nothing survives long; but even so one would argue that even if a "society" is conquered, there is a lot of cross pollination and the aggressor is incorporated into the old society and eventually subsumes it. Indian society, to this day, is a mixture of vedic teachings, muslim influences, British practises -- but the important thing to note is that the influence of the Vedas has been non-trivial, and contiguous for 5000 years even after numerous invasions.
> I think it's silly to say that it's the same society as existed in the ancient Indus Valley
Indeed. It is not the same society in that it is not the same "group of people" due to human mortality. But it is the same society in that it has been groups of people who (largely) share the same beliefs, culture, mutual interest etc over 5 millenia; and while people get killed off, there has been a contiguous overlap of people who believe in this culture.
> After all, with the preponderance of sects, cults, philosophical schools, etc, it would be hard to define by anything other than 'family resemblance'.
If 'family resemblance' is what is used to define a society, then nothing lasts longer than 3-4 generations. But the moment you boraden the definition to anything that evolves (culture, beliefs), the longevity increases to 5000 years and more.
Thats not to say that all society's last 5000 years under this lax definition. Mayans disappeared. The period of contiguous sharing of their beliefs is bounded by 2000 years or so. The group of people believing in Christianity started about 2000 years ago, and are still around. Pharoes and the whole bunch disappeared, and few, if any, believe in that school of thought these days. So including 'beliefs that evolve' in defining society does not trivialize the concept of longevitiy of a society.
Society, by the definition in [1], and by most non-mortality based definitions can last for several millenia, and the Hindu/Vedic civillization that started back in the Indus Valley is a testament to that.
[1] http://www.answers.com/society&r=67
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vedic_civilization
> Name any society that has survived more than 4000 years ever.
7 -98/religion/hinduism/origins.htm
Hinduism. 4000-5000 years and counting.
http://165.29.91.7/classes/humanities/worldstud/9
Some of the points they make are justifiable; some not.
... but it is hard to do all this. Saying it is not possible is incorrect; but these are likely out of reach of enterprises that do need to audit
> - Skype is not standards-compliant, allowing it and any vulnerability to
> pass through corporate firewalls.
It is true Skype is not standards-compliant. But that doesn't make it any more or less vulnerable to attacks. Following that logic, they would argue banning Internet Explorer.
> - Skype's encryption is closed source and prone to man-in-the-middle
> attacks. There are also some unanswered questions about how well the
> keys are managed.
This is quite valid (almost). Skype's security has not been throughly validated. Unless they know inner workings, it is premature to conclude Skype is prone to man-in-the-middle. It is possible for Skype to use strong symmetric key crypto (AES), but protect the symmetric key exchange with public key crypto (RSA etc); we do not know how it manages keys so it can potentially be insecure. Then again most IM networks don't use any crypto, so its not a complaint against Skype specifically. Perhaps Skype's (unverified) use of crypto could lure a user into a false sense of security and make them drop their guard and reveal secrets more freely; one possble complaint.
> - Enterprises using Skype risk a communication barrier with countries
> and institutions that have already banned the service.
This one is dumb. Stop using X because you cannot use X with other users who are not using X; therefore you shouldn't use X either. WTF!
> - Skype is undetectable, untraceable, and unauditable, putting
> organizations that are subject to compliance laws at risk.
While incorrect, there is some truth in this. Skype can be detected (i.e. who is running Skype), Skype call endpoints can be verified (article in NY Times earlier in August), Skype can be traced (at the network level)
communication.
> - The question of whether VoIP calls constitute a business record is a
> legal quagmire. Throwing Skype into the communications mix further
> clouds the issue.
Skype doesn't cloud the issue any more than throwing phones into the mix. Skype is half-way between phone calls on one end, and emails on another. Emails constitute a record, so do phone calls. Skype does constitute a record imho. Whether this record can be easily achieved is another question (see above).
> Permanent static IP addresses for everything
Applications have started coping with the fact that you don't need a permanent static IP addresses for everything anymore. IP addresses change underneath you today (DHCP) and you don't even notice because of DNS.
As fewer IPv4 addresses remain, apps will learn to cope better, and these coping mechanisms will become more efficient and more transparent as developers find the pressing need to deal with it. IPv4 scarcity isn't half the problem it is made out to be, the scarcity is something that encourages evolution. Applications like Skype that can evolve will survive, others will wither away until they learn to cope with it. Scarcity won't drive IPv6 adoption, oddly enough.
> why not do it right?
Talking about NATs is like sex-education. Abstinence only goes so far. Rather that telling everyone to outright stop, telling application developers and vendors how to do it right stops serious problems down the road.
There are ways to write code that works through NATs (think Skype), and ways to make NATs so that working with them isn't hard (UPnP etc). Instead of wasting energy arguing about NATs and IPv6, we should be spending our energy finding a solution that acknowledges that NATs are here today and are not going away.
Given a choice between multiple-static IP addresses form your ISP, and a firewall box that can deal with them, or an off-the-shelf $35 Linksys router at BestBuy, which one do you think the average consumer would rather buy?
For the average consumer, things 'just work' NAT or no NAT; so the cheaper the option, the easier it is to install, the better. Sadly, NATs make most sense for both companies and the average consumer.
Actually, NAT is better because it provides address space isolation. If your organisation has 500 computers that all have a public IP address, it is harder for you to switch providers (500 IPs is too small to get your own address space for). When you switch your provider, you have to renumber all hosts, fix config files, fix DNS servers etc -- a royal pain in the ass. A NAT allows your to keep your internal structure exactly the same while you switch providers. That address isolation is very important for small-mid sized companies.
... and each site advertising its own address space is expensive for the ISP's because they cannot perform route aggregation (since your address space may not line up with the address space of each ISP). NAT solves this by having each site be NAT'ed behind that ISP's IP address (convinient for the ISP, cheaper for the company). The internal company network runs in the private space and when traffic crosses to the public internet, it gets an IP from the ISP it came out of ... consequently replies come back in through the ISP. Read: If you send a packet out of India, the response won't come back inthrough America ... which would otherwise require you to then forward it to India through your company's routers.
Second, NAT helps multihomed corporations. For large companies, your 10k hosts are going to be distributed over many states/countries/ISPs
It is this address isolation and multihoming support that drives NAT use in small and large companies. Address space depletion has nothing to do with it. IPv6 does not fix these problems; companies will continue using NATs because NATs do.
TGIF is a very nice vector drawing program. It is a very highly evolved version of xfig (but with better UI than xfig -- not gtk or qt though). It exports to a whole slew of vector formats -- my favourite being LaTeX and EPS. I don't leave home without it. ... Then again, I don't leave home much. :-p
Consider the value of quickly deploying a glycerine shield in space to slow down stray space debris from hitting the space station or shuttle.
... without spilling the liquid. And then boom! Instant shield.
Your glycerine (or even more viscous liquid) baloon is all filled and easily moved into place
When someone insults me like this, I will gladly piss all over his intellectual property.
You'd be shocked if you piss on your TV when the cable channel you paid for airs an advertisement.
> Camping is not about wi-fi. It's about burning things. And reading fiction. Right! Plus putting the SCO press releases onto CD's is a great gift for future generations.
Context is definitely god-sent for ambiguous queries. Though searching for Java doesn't yield a single category to do with either coffee or Java the island in the first 2 screens. Think of that what you may. Though it is probably the underlying engines (MSN, Overture etc) that are ranking those pages way further down that Vivisimo doesn't even see them to categorise them.
While I cant seem to find any page that describes their technology throughly (only glossy uses of the word 'clustering'), my guess would be they use the well known K-Nearest Neighbour algorithm to cluster results -- which clusters based on the presence of certain words. They do say that they use the words in the search result returned by the underlying search engines for clustering (MSN et al.)
So unlike google that brings the most linked (in some sense) result to the top reusing the research of the webmaster, Vivisimo takes the quasi-ranked results from other engines and divides them into smaller bins so that people who browse the results can skip uninteresting bins quickly and just look into the bin of interest.
That is clearly a step up from the results (read sponsored results) these underlying search engines offer, but if you ask me the power of google comes from harnessing the research and conscious linkage performed by website authors as opposed to allowing people to skip irrelevant results with ease.
My $0.02