Until now I had suspected the music industry was just run by stupid people. This just makes it look like those running it are deliberately trying to destroy the "music industry". Guy Hands (EMI boss) admitted today that artists don't need the labels for distribution so what are they good for then...
I can only hope that the defense representatives in this case take the court out for a walk around the block to count the number of radios that can be overheard. Someone mentioned suing speaker manufacturers and others mentioned overhearing the radio playing in someone else's car. Anyone with a 200W sub-woofer in their car has a primary goal of "public performance". Someone repairing a car has a radio on to help pass the time and they have it loud because some of the equipment used is loud. So, god help someone that is hard of hearing and turns their radio up to be able to hear it.
Don't you just wish you could go kick these guys in the nuts and tell them to get a life... In the interests of full disclosure I wouldn't be here if I had a life or knew what one was like.
So Ray, how do all those readers that believe themselves competent to be used as an expert witness in such cases file an Amicus Brief offering their expert opinion on the methods and data used by the plaintiffs? Given that everyone here "knows" themselves to be such an expert I suppose I should have started with: would it even help? If Amicus Briefs would help, couldn't someone with the appropriate legal competence act as a broker of sorts. Those wishing to file such a brief could contact that broker and offer their credentials and an outline of their expert opinion. The broker could select a reasonable number with the best credentials and assist them in filing a brief. In the interests of full disclosure, my entire understanding of Amicus Briefs comes from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amicus_brief
I agree. I think that Ray Beckerman has said before that the RIAA is particularly interested in settling these cases for a few thousand dollars a case. Ray says that there are, I believe, thirty thousand targets in the RIAA sights. Is it stretching belief to wonder if, to the RIAA, the MS issue actually is an important reason to pursue someone. It's easier to force the hand of someone in a weak position than someone in a strong position. Imagine you have MS and are facing this knowing that the act of facing it might significantly worsen your health. Imagine facing it knowing that the act of defending yourself might restrict your ability to pay for the services maintaining your health. You might just cave for a few thousand dollars to avoid the possible effects on your health. Now imagine you are the RIAA deciding which cases to pursue first...the ones most likely to be settled in your favor. The fact that the RIAA is pursuing this case among the 30,000 others raises a very fair question about whether the RIAA is pursuing this case now simply because the defendant has MS and they think it is an easy win. It's fair to ask if the RIAA is pursuing weaker defendants first so I think it's fair for the defense to make reference to the weakness of the defendant the RIAA is pursuing.
"I need to know the address of your NAT router and your NAT router has to be configured to forward incoming connections to internal address 192.168.1.1."
While this is a legitimate configuration it is not required for any P2P technologies I am familiar with and it is not common for anyone to configure their NAT router to do port forwarding in order to use a P2P client. For example, I occasionally use BitTorrent to download Linux ISOs. I use a NAT router but I have no port forwarding rules related to BitTorrent because none are required. In NetFilter/iptables nomenclature, DNAT is not required for P2P clients, only SNAT. Besides, even if I needed and had DNAT rules you still wouldn't have any knowledge from the outside that my actual IP address is 192.168.1.1 so you still couldn't identify my address as the source of the traffic (see my response to your other point below). I suppose I should pre-empt any complaint that SNAT is nothing more than dynamically created DNAT rules. That's true but the fact that they are dynamic is core to the fallacy that a public IP address that can be known to MediaSentry can be used as a proxy for a specific user's identity. No part of an IP header on the public side of a NAT router conclusively indicates to anything other than the NAT router itself what the actual private end-point is for the traffic.
"I then open a connection to your router and bingo! We're connected."
Well, since I didn't have to configure DNAT (port forwarding) on my router to use the P2P clients the RIAA is interested in my use of then that is moot. In a basic NAT router configuration suitable for P2P client usage you cannot connect to my router and be connected to me. Few users will go beyond a basic configuration.
"This is only your identity on your internal subnet. The RIAA will see the address of your NAT router"
No, my internal node address is the closest possible thing to my whole and sole identity and, yes, MediaSentry will see the address of my NAT router. That is the crux of my point. Consider my brother with IP address 192.168.1.2 using the same NAT router as me. What is observed by MediaSentry as his IP address is the same as what is observed as my IP address - the public IP address on the public side of our NAT router. Therefore, the public IP address does not identify him or me specifically and our actual IP addresses are invisible to the outside world and can be non-unique across the entire Internet. Perhaps you are too concerned about my assertion that you and I might have the same IP address behind different NAT routers. That was incidental to my point, it only shows that what is claimed at the start of point 12 of the declaration is untrue. My concern is with many of the comments about NAT routers. It's not enough to argue that point 12 is wholly invalid because it isn't necessary for everyone to have a unique IP address - that was why I posted. To shoot down point 12 you have to show that a specific user cannot be identified by an IP address as known to MediaSentry, whether or not that user has a unique IP address. What the RIAA/MediaSentry are able to see is not useful for the stated purpose, identifying a specific user. NAT routers are the means by which you show that but it isn't the non-uniqueness of end-user IP addresses that proves it - that just proves the declaration demonstrates a lack of understanding of actual IP deployment. A NAT router is a multiplexer/de-multiplexer where the public side doesn't have to participate in the multiplexing so has no knowledge about it. For the kind of multiplexing a NAT router does and for common P2P clients only the multiplexer itself (the NAT router) knows the end-point address and only for the duration of a given session. Therefore, what is seen by MediaSentry cannot and does not identify a specific user.
Late arrival, sorry. I agree with all of the comments about the existence of NAT demonstrating point 12 is not true but none closed the circle for me.
It is a fact that IP addresses do not have to be unique across the entire Internet in order for IP routing to function. Translating routers permit this to be the case and, therefore, the declaration is factually incorrect in its attempt to characterize IP routing in point 12. But I think that you need to say more in order to truly debunk point 12. NAT is a border technology but at some point IP addresses do have to be unique for much of what people use the Internet for and that is why I think you need to say more than just that NAT means IP addresses don't have to be and frequently aren't unique.
Consider a case where my node address is 192.168.1.1 (a RFC 1918 private IP address commonly used on a translated network). Assume I use a NAT router. Assume you also use a NAT router but we are not using the same NAT router. Let your IP address also be 192.168.1.1 then. This configuration will function to your and my satisfaction. But, in this scenario I cannot send IP packets to your computer, there is no IP route to it from my host. Yet, despite this undeniable fact, we can share files with each other using most P2P technologies. Therefore, uniqueness of IP addresses appears irrelevant to the functionality of P2P technologies making much of point 12, as written, irrelevant - in addition to just being wrong. Nevertheless, in order for MediaSentry to even have a list of IP addresses for the RIAA to ask the identity of then they must be observing P2P clients that ultimately have had packets reach the public, routable Internet. Therefore, you still need to say more about point 12 since it is end-user identity that is at issue.
Point 12 is attempting to assert that an IP address is a suitable proxy for end-user identity. Plainly my true identity in the IP arena is 192.168.1.1, as is yours. So, 192.168.1.1 is ambiguous as an identity. There has to be a disambiguation that happens somewhere since we are successfully sharing files even though we have the same ultimate identity. Therefore, even though the existence of NAT demonstrates that much of point 12 simply isn't true and irrelevant, that isn't really the point. Can the IP addresses that you do see on the outside (i.e. the one MediaSentry must see) uniquely identify someone. The IP addresses observed by MediaSentry are undeniably unique IP addresses.
Ironically, point 12 appears to address this by shooting itself in the foot with phone analogy: "in a particular home there may be three or four different telephones, but only one call can be placed at a time to or from that home". Absolutely true, but there may also be three or four people living in that home and knowledge that a call was placed from that number to another number, or vice-versa indicates nothing about which individual placed that call. Further, someone may be visiting and ask to use my phone. I may receive a call for a neighbour and go get them to take the call at my home. There may even be a burglar that makes a call while present in my home. IOW, the number itself is a point where multiplexing takes place and the target of the multiplexing is transparent/invisible to the network. NAT does the same thing for IP networks but can do an additional thing the phone can't. A NAT router can (metaphorically) take multiple calls at the same time (potentially more than sixty thousand) and each one has the same multiplexing potential as the phone example.
The point where multiplexing takes place, the phone number, does not identify a user (it identifies a subscriber). The phone company cannot sell service to a specific user, only to a specific subscriber (for the family, visitors and burglar reasons above). The IP address as seen by MediaSentry does not identify a user, it identifies a subscriber (for the same reasons as for the phone). Therefore, point 12 actually uses the phone analogy to conclusively demonstrate th
Particularly if you consider that surely must apply to every platform UI extension that adds extra decoration and features to the title bar, common dialogs, etc.
A DSP probably is more efficient for that task but you can't go down to your local WalMart and buy one. Besides, even if you could, the IC isn't much use to anyone. Don't forget that you need at least a 60MHz (yes, sixty megahertz) ADC and DSP pair to do what was suggested. The cost of building useful supporting electronics around a DSP capable of implementing a direct sampling receiver at 60MHz would be prohibitive in the range $ridiculous-$ludicrous. Add to that the cost of getting any code written for it and the idea becomes suitable for military application only.
OTOH, the PC has a huge and varied user base so it has the price consistent with being a mere commodity. It is general purpose and can be adapted to a large variety of tasks. It is relatively cheap to write code for and has a huge base of capable special interest programmers. If there is a 60+MHz ADC out there somewhere for a reasonable price then it isn't just a matter of whether a DSP is a better tool, a PC is a trivially cheap tool by comparison. You'd still need a decent UI to use an all-band direct sampling HF receiver. A PC would be good for that too, so keep it all in the same box.
You can buy non-direct sampling receivers with DSPs in them at prices ranging from $1000 to exceeding $10000. The DSP is probably no faster than about 100kHz so the signal has to be passed through one or more analogue IF stages to get the signal you want into the 50kHz that can be decoded. You can probably buy a PC from with greater digital signal processing potential for less than $500. A 30MHz direct sampling receiver will receive and service 30MHz worth of bandwidth simultaneously. Not long after general availability, the graphics card configuration in question will probably cost less than $1000. With the processing capabilities it has you (the human) will probably run out of ability to interpret simultaneously decoded signals before the PC runs out of ability to decode more (it's really hard to listen to two conversations at the same time on an HF radio).
That is something I just don't understand. In simple terms, I believe the universe grew from a point source. If we take your comment at face value (I have no knowledge that permits me not to) then, also in simple terms, 46 billion light years worth of distance are visible (presumably 23 in any direction). If we are looking "back in time" to the time of emission when observing light from a remote source then, if nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, how can the age of the universe be estimated at 13 billion years or so? Surely, no thing in it could be further away from any other thing in it than "age of the universe" light years. To do so would require two objects to have a relative speed exceeding the speed of light I believe. IOW, if the universe is 13 billion years old then how can I see something 23 billion light years away, it's light would have to have been emitted before the universe existed which, in my crude understanding, is meaningless. I suppose I can almost believe the idea that the observable universe cannot exceed the age of the universe light years in any direction. Even that gives me problems but this point has worried me for years, I'd really be interested in an authoritative source.
It would surprise me if that resulted in 250MB of writes to previously unused blocks. FWIW, I can't help thinking the paging file structure would have to be really poorly designed to require 250MB of writes to initialise it and, obviously, it would contribute substantially to extended boot time.
I've spent a lot of time using Windows in virtual machines. For VM platforms that provide on-demand block allocation for virtual disks you can see a typical Windows boot do wild things like write to 250MB worth of blocks that were previously unused (i.e. the virtual disk grows by 250MB). NB: I'm talking about an ordinary boot, not one following installation of anything. It gets harder to see as virtual disk occupancy increases but it's an eye opener.
Intel has had the same thing on its chipsets for many years, i.e. an I/O device rather than a CPU instruction. IIRC, it takes around 5ms per bit.
On the subject of the practical utility of the "invention", does the author now have an excellent source of one time pads for encryption? That knock at the door is the NSA or the CIA, start the fire now.
> many are attempts to deliver the same message
The same message, or the same message? ASSP will detect and permit attempts to deliver the same message, but will reject attempts to deliver the same message. If all that you mean by "same" is the text then they aren't guaranteed to be the same message. You'll have to do full header compares to verify that the messages are the same. With no filtering I get the same message text a few times a day in different messages. Obviously that doesn't change the load you still have to accept and maybe my mailboxes aren't known to the same spammers that affect you.
I suspect that you are not observing retries but, rather, attempts to deliver multiple messages. The technique I'm describing doesn't, as I understand it, rely on source IP address. So, the same IP address could attempt to deliver 50 messages and each one would be an independent candidate for the technique. That could explain both your observations and mine. You probably did the right thing to block the actual traffic given the amount of it anyway. Your observations make me consider adding a log of smtp connects to my firewall rules just so that I can satisfy my curiosity about the traffic.
I use assp as my spam filter: http://assp.sourceforge.net/ It always filtered spam very well for me but the latest version added an interesting technique that has reduced the amount of spam that's even hitting the filters to near zero. Since SMTP is considered "unreliable" a sending server will retry on failure. Apparently, spammers tend not to bother retrying. ASSP builds tables using an identity triplet (I can't remember the three message/source attributes it uses). On first view of a given triplet, ASSP responds with a SMTP error suggesting the source retry later. ASSP tables the triplet and allows that traffic to pass later on a retry. The triplet expires after some period. I'm not aware of any false rejections and the messages hitting the dump mailbox has dropped from around 10 a day to a couple a week.
I suppose one might argue that it increases packet traffic and I assume spammers will workaround it but I suspect the extra packet traffic is far exceeded by the spam that I would otherwise handle and it handles the spammers for now.
Sentience unnecessary perhaps.
I agree, the value of nodes (and even a single node) must be variable.
The carpenters/bricklayers example is good but I think the specific/general purpose computers one is less so. The nodes have moved from the host to the applications themselves but the number of nodes hasn't reduced to one in the case of special purpose computers being replaced by a general purpose computer.
That aside, there is lots of evidence that I find supportive of variable value nodes. The contents of a box that can't be opened (node with no links) can't have value except if it has negative worth, e.g. a box that can't be opened that contains a deadly virus. The contents of the box have negative worth to many nodes in the network so the lack of a link (not being in the network) has positive value to that network. If it connected to a suitable network would that whole network not then have lower value in proportion to the number of nodes that actually linked to the virus. OTOH, the value to the virus would be higher which tends to suggest the value of the network depends on the currency being used, i.e. even a single node can have variable value. An unconnected Wikipedia has no (possibly even negative) value to many but a high value to, say, Britannica but they are all on the same network. Or are they. I'm not qualified to say that they are for the purposes of validating a law. Perhaps my internal definition of network is too broad but it seems reasonable to me.
The Amazon example is similar to the general/special purpose computer. The things Amazon sells might be argued as being nodes in their own right. But Amazon's value is really in the number of nodes (consumers) that connect to it, so not offering links to other retailers (which Amazon kind of does anyway) doesn't mean it has no connections but it does further indicate to me that the value each node in a network is not the same as the value of other nodes (which is the point of the rebuttal I believe). IOW, more of the people that connect to Amazon connect to it than to each other. Interestingly, what I contribute to Amazon benefits you if we share a taste in something or if we spend money that keeps Amazon afloat. It's almost as if I actively linked to you via a symbiotic protocol in the same network even though we never actually connected via the Amazon "protocol". Again, is my definition of network faulty.
Well, the FCC also regulates access to the medium. That doesn't create a First Ammendment conflict I think. I don't think there is a First Amendment issue in taxing the use of the medium. However, I think that the decency enforcement by the FCC is most certainly a First amendment issue. The seven deadly words are an anachronism. South Park, Family Guy and others long ago found ways to make their audiences hear the words without actually saying them (though South Park doesn't actually have to on its first run medium). Even the Simpsons. There was an episode (early prime time on a Sunday here) where groundskeeper Willy (ie?) said "Have you seen the new tractors, they're all shite". Where I grew up that's the same stuff as shit but only shit is on the FCC list of forbidden words.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communism
Particularly: "communism as a political goal generally is a conjectured form of future social organization which has never been implemented"
IOW, don't confuse the states that purport to be communist with communism. The USSR, China, Cuba, et al are not communist states. They are totalitarian dictatorships claiming to be communist (or that we have dubbed communist regardless of what they claimed to be).
A pure communism is moral and not capitalist since there is no self-interest (selfishness) nor any need for it. There's no need to rip anyone off or take advantage of anyone. There is no need for contracts that bind the consumer to the advantage of the vendor.
The truth is that communism is probably not achievable by humans, who would want to clean toilets even if you did have the same lifestyle as the head of state. Life on Star Trek starships is communist. Until matter replicators that will freely feed anyone that wants to eat are broadly available on earth communism is impossible but it is moral in ways that capitalism isn't.
Did ARP disappear for IPv6? You should only have to compare addresses for packets your NIC will take off the wire (i.e. those with MAC headers that target you or multi/broadcast MAC addresses). Most of those frames will be for your IP address anyway. Even if that isn't true, if the addresses are well structured then it ought to be possible to compare regions of the address with most relevant significance before regions with less relevant significance and eliminate packets not for you with minimal compares. I assume that most relevant is the inverse of most significant. I haven't looked at the structure of IPv6 addresses in a very long time but, if you were to use IPv4 as an example. An IPv4 stack on an 8 bit system might be optimised by comparing the fourth octet first. My instinct would be to compare 4th, 3rd, 2nd and 1st in that order (other heuristics may be better). I suspect the same principle can be applied to IPv6 and most cases would require one compare only (machine word sized). I don't belieev it requires four times as many compares as IPv4 on a 32 bit system. It must require between one and 4 (mean) and I suspect the mean is very close to 1.
Most people are aware of many NASA space programs. Hardly anyone appears to be aware of NASA's aeronautics programs. You get the occasional show on the Discovery Channel but that's it. I liked the one about control an aircraft in three axes using thrust only (the project was inspired by the Sioux City DC-10 crash).
Our local county bomb disposal team has a robot and they only use fibre for remote control to avoid having any EM radiation (even from electrical signaling on copper) triggering the device being handled. I can't believe a small county in Utah is bleeding edge with their robot!
I don't see why. If someone steals your car and kills someone with they are guilty and you are a victim of theft. I suppose this has yet to really be tested but a PC has so much automated behaviour that I'm sure it will be become nearly impossible to prove any willful act on the part of the owner of a PC that becomes part of a botnet. Your insurance company might punish you for not locking your car before it was stolen but I don't see the law being able to. There has been recent news (most of it recorded at/.) on the end of usefulness of various security protocols, the ease of factoring huge numbers, the existence of pre-built hashes for whole dictionaries, the near trivial time it takes to get access to a secured wireless network and many others. You don't even have to be remotely negligent to end up with a computer committing crimes on behalf of others. I imagine you could only be judged responsible if you failed to act when you became aware that your computer was being used in criminal activity but these kinds of stories just add to the breadth of useful reasonable doubt defences: "Mr Smith, at any time did you see the accused with a Pringles can?"; "No"; "But you did see his neighbour, Mr. Jones eating pringles with his family on the afternoon the crime took place?"; "Yes"; "Your honour, I submit that my client has no case to answer since his wireless network may have been hacked and his neighbour is clearly a Pringles user"; "So ordered!"
And, of course, the IRA never won their freedom having disbanded before uniting Ireland. They probably stood a better chance without weapons and I imagine the former members will succeed in uniting Ireland without weapons in the coming years.
Isn't US gun control as strict as UK gun control, i.e. bad guys are prohibited from getting them by a series of barriers that seem to be about equal in "strictness". The only real difference appears to be that law-abiding citizens can get them in the US and cannot in the UK (well, they can get some types). Citizen gun posession doesn't seem to be very effective either. In the 12 months to March 2003 there were 10250 gun crimes in the UK, roughly 0.00017 per-capita. In the US there were 357822 in 2002. Approximately 0.0014 per-capita I believe. Of course, if all the UK gun crimes were against an average of more than 12 people and the US ones were against an average of one person then you'd have a point. Let's accept the gun lobby stance that law abiding citizens should should not be punished for the crimes of a few. If we do plan to say that legal gun ownership reduces [gun] crime against the law abiding, then we really ought not to be using an anecdotal, single example like the murder of a police officer to "prove the point" when since actual data could be used to show that the UK is safer per-capita from gun crime.
All governments are oppressive, it's their job. Your job is to get wealthy enough to own a piece of government large enough to ensure that they oppress someone else instead of you.
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Until now I had suspected the music industry was just run by stupid people. This just makes it look like those running it are deliberately trying to destroy the "music industry". Guy Hands (EMI boss) admitted today that artists don't need the labels for distribution so what are they good for then...
I can only hope that the defense representatives in this case take the court out for a walk around the block to count the number of radios that can be overheard. Someone mentioned suing speaker manufacturers and others mentioned overhearing the radio playing in someone else's car. Anyone with a 200W sub-woofer in their car has a primary goal of "public performance". Someone repairing a car has a radio on to help pass the time and they have it loud because some of the equipment used is loud. So, god help someone that is hard of hearing and turns their radio up to be able to hear it.
Don't you just wish you could go kick these guys in the nuts and tell them to get a life... In the interests of full disclosure I wouldn't be here if I had a life or knew what one was like.
So Ray, how do all those readers that believe themselves competent to be used as an expert witness in such cases file an Amicus Brief offering their expert opinion on the methods and data used by the plaintiffs? Given that everyone here "knows" themselves to be such an expert I suppose I should have started with: would it even help? If Amicus Briefs would help, couldn't someone with the appropriate legal competence act as a broker of sorts. Those wishing to file such a brief could contact that broker and offer their credentials and an outline of their expert opinion. The broker could select a reasonable number with the best credentials and assist them in filing a brief. In the interests of full disclosure, my entire understanding of Amicus Briefs comes from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amicus_brief
I agree. I think that Ray Beckerman has said before that the RIAA is particularly interested in settling these cases for a few thousand dollars a case. Ray says that there are, I believe, thirty thousand targets in the RIAA sights. Is it stretching belief to wonder if, to the RIAA, the MS issue actually is an important reason to pursue someone. It's easier to force the hand of someone in a weak position than someone in a strong position. Imagine you have MS and are facing this knowing that the act of facing it might significantly worsen your health. Imagine facing it knowing that the act of defending yourself might restrict your ability to pay for the services maintaining your health. You might just cave for a few thousand dollars to avoid the possible effects on your health. Now imagine you are the RIAA deciding which cases to pursue first...the ones most likely to be settled in your favor. The fact that the RIAA is pursuing this case among the 30,000 others raises a very fair question about whether the RIAA is pursuing this case now simply because the defendant has MS and they think it is an easy win. It's fair to ask if the RIAA is pursuing weaker defendants first so I think it's fair for the defense to make reference to the weakness of the defendant the RIAA is pursuing.
"I need to know the address of your NAT router and your NAT router has to be configured to forward incoming connections to internal address 192.168.1.1."
While this is a legitimate configuration it is not required for any P2P technologies I am familiar with and it is not common for anyone to configure their NAT router to do port forwarding in order to use a P2P client. For example, I occasionally use BitTorrent to download Linux ISOs. I use a NAT router but I have no port forwarding rules related to BitTorrent because none are required. In NetFilter/iptables nomenclature, DNAT is not required for P2P clients, only SNAT. Besides, even if I needed and had DNAT rules you still wouldn't have any knowledge from the outside that my actual IP address is 192.168.1.1 so you still couldn't identify my address as the source of the traffic (see my response to your other point below). I suppose I should pre-empt any complaint that SNAT is nothing more than dynamically created DNAT rules. That's true but the fact that they are dynamic is core to the fallacy that a public IP address that can be known to MediaSentry can be used as a proxy for a specific user's identity. No part of an IP header on the public side of a NAT router conclusively indicates to anything other than the NAT router itself what the actual private end-point is for the traffic.
"I then open a connection to your router and bingo! We're connected."
Well, since I didn't have to configure DNAT (port forwarding) on my router to use the P2P clients the RIAA is interested in my use of then that is moot. In a basic NAT router configuration suitable for P2P client usage you cannot connect to my router and be connected to me. Few users will go beyond a basic configuration.
"This is only your identity on your internal subnet. The RIAA will see the address of your NAT router"
No, my internal node address is the closest possible thing to my whole and sole identity and, yes, MediaSentry will see the address of my NAT router. That is the crux of my point. Consider my brother with IP address 192.168.1.2 using the same NAT router as me. What is observed by MediaSentry as his IP address is the same as what is observed as my IP address - the public IP address on the public side of our NAT router. Therefore, the public IP address does not identify him or me specifically and our actual IP addresses are invisible to the outside world and can be non-unique across the entire Internet. Perhaps you are too concerned about my assertion that you and I might have the same IP address behind different NAT routers. That was incidental to my point, it only shows that what is claimed at the start of point 12 of the declaration is untrue. My concern is with many of the comments about NAT routers. It's not enough to argue that point 12 is wholly invalid because it isn't necessary for everyone to have a unique IP address - that was why I posted. To shoot down point 12 you have to show that a specific user cannot be identified by an IP address as known to MediaSentry, whether or not that user has a unique IP address. What the RIAA/MediaSentry are able to see is not useful for the stated purpose, identifying a specific user. NAT routers are the means by which you show that but it isn't the non-uniqueness of end-user IP addresses that proves it - that just proves the declaration demonstrates a lack of understanding of actual IP deployment. A NAT router is a multiplexer/de-multiplexer where the public side doesn't have to participate in the multiplexing so has no knowledge about it. For the kind of multiplexing a NAT router does and for common P2P clients only the multiplexer itself (the NAT router) knows the end-point address and only for the duration of a given session. Therefore, what is seen by MediaSentry cannot and does not identify a specific user.
Late arrival, sorry. I agree with all of the comments about the existence of NAT demonstrating point 12 is not true but none closed the circle for me.
It is a fact that IP addresses do not have to be unique across the entire Internet in order for IP routing to function. Translating routers permit this to be the case and, therefore, the declaration is factually incorrect in its attempt to characterize IP routing in point 12. But I think that you need to say more in order to truly debunk point 12. NAT is a border technology but at some point IP addresses do have to be unique for much of what people use the Internet for and that is why I think you need to say more than just that NAT means IP addresses don't have to be and frequently aren't unique.
Consider a case where my node address is 192.168.1.1 (a RFC 1918 private IP address commonly used on a translated network). Assume I use a NAT router. Assume you also use a NAT router but we are not using the same NAT router. Let your IP address also be 192.168.1.1 then. This configuration will function to your and my satisfaction. But, in this scenario I cannot send IP packets to your computer, there is no IP route to it from my host. Yet, despite this undeniable fact, we can share files with each other using most P2P technologies. Therefore, uniqueness of IP addresses appears irrelevant to the functionality of P2P technologies making much of point 12, as written, irrelevant - in addition to just being wrong. Nevertheless, in order for MediaSentry to even have a list of IP addresses for the RIAA to ask the identity of then they must be observing P2P clients that ultimately have had packets reach the public, routable Internet. Therefore, you still need to say more about point 12 since it is end-user identity that is at issue.
Point 12 is attempting to assert that an IP address is a suitable proxy for end-user identity. Plainly my true identity in the IP arena is 192.168.1.1, as is yours. So, 192.168.1.1 is ambiguous as an identity. There has to be a disambiguation that happens somewhere since we are successfully sharing files even though we have the same ultimate identity. Therefore, even though the existence of NAT demonstrates that much of point 12 simply isn't true and irrelevant, that isn't really the point. Can the IP addresses that you do see on the outside (i.e. the one MediaSentry must see) uniquely identify someone. The IP addresses observed by MediaSentry are undeniably unique IP addresses.
Ironically, point 12 appears to address this by shooting itself in the foot with phone analogy: "in a particular home there may be three or four different telephones, but only one call can be placed at a time to or from that home". Absolutely true, but there may also be three or four people living in that home and knowledge that a call was placed from that number to another number, or vice-versa indicates nothing about which individual placed that call. Further, someone may be visiting and ask to use my phone. I may receive a call for a neighbour and go get them to take the call at my home. There may even be a burglar that makes a call while present in my home. IOW, the number itself is a point where multiplexing takes place and the target of the multiplexing is transparent/invisible to the network. NAT does the same thing for IP networks but can do an additional thing the phone can't. A NAT router can (metaphorically) take multiple calls at the same time (potentially more than sixty thousand) and each one has the same multiplexing potential as the phone example.
The point where multiplexing takes place, the phone number, does not identify a user (it identifies a subscriber). The phone company cannot sell service to a specific user, only to a specific subscriber (for the family, visitors and burglar reasons above). The IP address as seen by MediaSentry does not identify a user, it identifies a subscriber (for the same reasons as for the phone). Therefore, point 12 actually uses the phone analogy to conclusively demonstrate th
Particularly if you consider that surely must apply to every platform UI extension that adds extra decoration and features to the title bar, common dialogs, etc.
A DSP probably is more efficient for that task but you can't go down to your local WalMart and buy one. Besides, even if you could, the IC isn't much use to anyone. Don't forget that you need at least a 60MHz (yes, sixty megahertz) ADC and DSP pair to do what was suggested. The cost of building useful supporting electronics around a DSP capable of implementing a direct sampling receiver at 60MHz would be prohibitive in the range $ridiculous-$ludicrous. Add to that the cost of getting any code written for it and the idea becomes suitable for military application only. OTOH, the PC has a huge and varied user base so it has the price consistent with being a mere commodity. It is general purpose and can be adapted to a large variety of tasks. It is relatively cheap to write code for and has a huge base of capable special interest programmers. If there is a 60+MHz ADC out there somewhere for a reasonable price then it isn't just a matter of whether a DSP is a better tool, a PC is a trivially cheap tool by comparison. You'd still need a decent UI to use an all-band direct sampling HF receiver. A PC would be good for that too, so keep it all in the same box. You can buy non-direct sampling receivers with DSPs in them at prices ranging from $1000 to exceeding $10000. The DSP is probably no faster than about 100kHz so the signal has to be passed through one or more analogue IF stages to get the signal you want into the 50kHz that can be decoded. You can probably buy a PC from with greater digital signal processing potential for less than $500. A 30MHz direct sampling receiver will receive and service 30MHz worth of bandwidth simultaneously. Not long after general availability, the graphics card configuration in question will probably cost less than $1000. With the processing capabilities it has you (the human) will probably run out of ability to interpret simultaneously decoded signals before the PC runs out of ability to decode more (it's really hard to listen to two conversations at the same time on an HF radio).
I never knew what question to ask before reading this branch of the discussion. Whether or not it is accurate is beyond me but, I think I can feel good about this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expansion_of_the_univ erse
That is something I just don't understand. In simple terms, I believe the universe grew from a point source. If we take your comment at face value (I have no knowledge that permits me not to) then, also in simple terms, 46 billion light years worth of distance are visible (presumably 23 in any direction). If we are looking "back in time" to the time of emission when observing light from a remote source then, if nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, how can the age of the universe be estimated at 13 billion years or so? Surely, no thing in it could be further away from any other thing in it than "age of the universe" light years. To do so would require two objects to have a relative speed exceeding the speed of light I believe. IOW, if the universe is 13 billion years old then how can I see something 23 billion light years away, it's light would have to have been emitted before the universe existed which, in my crude understanding, is meaningless. I suppose I can almost believe the idea that the observable universe cannot exceed the age of the universe light years in any direction. Even that gives me problems but this point has worried me for years, I'd really be interested in an authoritative source.
It would surprise me if that resulted in 250MB of writes to previously unused blocks. FWIW, I can't help thinking the paging file structure would have to be really poorly designed to require 250MB of writes to initialise it and, obviously, it would contribute substantially to extended boot time.
I've spent a lot of time using Windows in virtual machines. For VM platforms that provide on-demand block allocation for virtual disks you can see a typical Windows boot do wild things like write to 250MB worth of blocks that were previously unused (i.e. the virtual disk grows by 250MB). NB: I'm talking about an ordinary boot, not one following installation of anything. It gets harder to see as virtual disk occupancy increases but it's an eye opener.
Intel has had the same thing on its chipsets for many years, i.e. an I/O device rather than a CPU instruction. IIRC, it takes around 5ms per bit. On the subject of the practical utility of the "invention", does the author now have an excellent source of one time pads for encryption? That knock at the door is the NSA or the CIA, start the fire now.
> many are attempts to deliver the same message The same message, or the same message? ASSP will detect and permit attempts to deliver the same message, but will reject attempts to deliver the same message. If all that you mean by "same" is the text then they aren't guaranteed to be the same message. You'll have to do full header compares to verify that the messages are the same. With no filtering I get the same message text a few times a day in different messages. Obviously that doesn't change the load you still have to accept and maybe my mailboxes aren't known to the same spammers that affect you.
I suspect that you are not observing retries but, rather, attempts to deliver multiple messages. The technique I'm describing doesn't, as I understand it, rely on source IP address. So, the same IP address could attempt to deliver 50 messages and each one would be an independent candidate for the technique. That could explain both your observations and mine. You probably did the right thing to block the actual traffic given the amount of it anyway. Your observations make me consider adding a log of smtp connects to my firewall rules just so that I can satisfy my curiosity about the traffic.
I use assp as my spam filter: http://assp.sourceforge.net/ It always filtered spam very well for me but the latest version added an interesting technique that has reduced the amount of spam that's even hitting the filters to near zero. Since SMTP is considered "unreliable" a sending server will retry on failure. Apparently, spammers tend not to bother retrying. ASSP builds tables using an identity triplet (I can't remember the three message/source attributes it uses). On first view of a given triplet, ASSP responds with a SMTP error suggesting the source retry later. ASSP tables the triplet and allows that traffic to pass later on a retry. The triplet expires after some period. I'm not aware of any false rejections and the messages hitting the dump mailbox has dropped from around 10 a day to a couple a week. I suppose one might argue that it increases packet traffic and I assume spammers will workaround it but I suspect the extra packet traffic is far exceeded by the spam that I would otherwise handle and it handles the spammers for now. Sentience unnecessary perhaps.
I agree, the value of nodes (and even a single node) must be variable. The carpenters/bricklayers example is good but I think the specific/general purpose computers one is less so. The nodes have moved from the host to the applications themselves but the number of nodes hasn't reduced to one in the case of special purpose computers being replaced by a general purpose computer. That aside, there is lots of evidence that I find supportive of variable value nodes. The contents of a box that can't be opened (node with no links) can't have value except if it has negative worth, e.g. a box that can't be opened that contains a deadly virus. The contents of the box have negative worth to many nodes in the network so the lack of a link (not being in the network) has positive value to that network. If it connected to a suitable network would that whole network not then have lower value in proportion to the number of nodes that actually linked to the virus. OTOH, the value to the virus would be higher which tends to suggest the value of the network depends on the currency being used, i.e. even a single node can have variable value. An unconnected Wikipedia has no (possibly even negative) value to many but a high value to, say, Britannica but they are all on the same network. Or are they. I'm not qualified to say that they are for the purposes of validating a law. Perhaps my internal definition of network is too broad but it seems reasonable to me. The Amazon example is similar to the general/special purpose computer. The things Amazon sells might be argued as being nodes in their own right. But Amazon's value is really in the number of nodes (consumers) that connect to it, so not offering links to other retailers (which Amazon kind of does anyway) doesn't mean it has no connections but it does further indicate to me that the value each node in a network is not the same as the value of other nodes (which is the point of the rebuttal I believe). IOW, more of the people that connect to Amazon connect to it than to each other. Interestingly, what I contribute to Amazon benefits you if we share a taste in something or if we spend money that keeps Amazon afloat. It's almost as if I actively linked to you via a symbiotic protocol in the same network even though we never actually connected via the Amazon "protocol". Again, is my definition of network faulty.
Well, the FCC also regulates access to the medium. That doesn't create a First Ammendment conflict I think. I don't think there is a First Amendment issue in taxing the use of the medium. However, I think that the decency enforcement by the FCC is most certainly a First amendment issue. The seven deadly words are an anachronism. South Park, Family Guy and others long ago found ways to make their audiences hear the words without actually saying them (though South Park doesn't actually have to on its first run medium). Even the Simpsons. There was an episode (early prime time on a Sunday here) where groundskeeper Willy (ie?) said "Have you seen the new tractors, they're all shite". Where I grew up that's the same stuff as shit but only shit is on the FCC list of forbidden words.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communism Particularly: "communism as a political goal generally is a conjectured form of future social organization which has never been implemented" IOW, don't confuse the states that purport to be communist with communism. The USSR, China, Cuba, et al are not communist states. They are totalitarian dictatorships claiming to be communist (or that we have dubbed communist regardless of what they claimed to be). A pure communism is moral and not capitalist since there is no self-interest (selfishness) nor any need for it. There's no need to rip anyone off or take advantage of anyone. There is no need for contracts that bind the consumer to the advantage of the vendor. The truth is that communism is probably not achievable by humans, who would want to clean toilets even if you did have the same lifestyle as the head of state. Life on Star Trek starships is communist. Until matter replicators that will freely feed anyone that wants to eat are broadly available on earth communism is impossible but it is moral in ways that capitalism isn't.
Did ARP disappear for IPv6? You should only have to compare addresses for packets your NIC will take off the wire (i.e. those with MAC headers that target you or multi/broadcast MAC addresses). Most of those frames will be for your IP address anyway. Even if that isn't true, if the addresses are well structured then it ought to be possible to compare regions of the address with most relevant significance before regions with less relevant significance and eliminate packets not for you with minimal compares. I assume that most relevant is the inverse of most significant. I haven't looked at the structure of IPv6 addresses in a very long time but, if you were to use IPv4 as an example. An IPv4 stack on an 8 bit system might be optimised by comparing the fourth octet first. My instinct would be to compare 4th, 3rd, 2nd and 1st in that order (other heuristics may be better). I suspect the same principle can be applied to IPv6 and most cases would require one compare only (machine word sized). I don't belieev it requires four times as many compares as IPv4 on a 32 bit system. It must require between one and 4 (mean) and I suspect the mean is very close to 1.
...sing his song. I think Microsoft has sung nearly everybody's song.
Most people are aware of many NASA space programs. Hardly anyone appears to be aware of NASA's aeronautics programs. You get the occasional show on the Discovery Channel but that's it. I liked the one about control an aircraft in three axes using thrust only (the project was inspired by the Sioux City DC-10 crash).
I think athletics even has a name for that effect: ski-foot.
Our local county bomb disposal team has a robot and they only use fibre for remote control to avoid having any EM radiation (even from electrical signaling on copper) triggering the device being handled. I can't believe a small county in Utah is bleeding edge with their robot!
I don't see why. If someone steals your car and kills someone with they are guilty and you are a victim of theft. I suppose this has yet to really be tested but a PC has so much automated behaviour that I'm sure it will be become nearly impossible to prove any willful act on the part of the owner of a PC that becomes part of a botnet. Your insurance company might punish you for not locking your car before it was stolen but I don't see the law being able to. There has been recent news (most of it recorded at /.) on the end of usefulness of various security protocols, the ease of factoring huge numbers, the existence of pre-built hashes for whole dictionaries, the near trivial time it takes to get access to a secured wireless network and many others. You don't even have to be remotely negligent to end up with a computer committing crimes on behalf of others. I imagine you could only be judged responsible if you failed to act when you became aware that your computer was being used in criminal activity but these kinds of stories just add to the breadth of useful reasonable doubt defences: "Mr Smith, at any time did you see the accused with a Pringles can?"; "No"; "But you did see his neighbour, Mr. Jones eating pringles with his family on the afternoon the crime took place?"; "Yes"; "Your honour, I submit that my client has no case to answer since his wireless network may have been hacked and his neighbour is clearly a Pringles user"; "So ordered!"
And, of course, the IRA never won their freedom having disbanded before uniting Ireland. They probably stood a better chance without weapons and I imagine the former members will succeed in uniting Ireland without weapons in the coming years.
Isn't US gun control as strict as UK gun control, i.e. bad guys are prohibited from getting them by a series of barriers that seem to be about equal in "strictness". The only real difference appears to be that law-abiding citizens can get them in the US and cannot in the UK (well, they can get some types). Citizen gun posession doesn't seem to be very effective either. In the 12 months to March 2003 there were 10250 gun crimes in the UK, roughly 0.00017 per-capita. In the US there were 357822 in 2002. Approximately 0.0014 per-capita I believe. Of course, if all the UK gun crimes were against an average of more than 12 people and the US ones were against an average of one person then you'd have a point. Let's accept the gun lobby stance that law abiding citizens should should not be punished for the crimes of a few. If we do plan to say that legal gun ownership reduces [gun] crime against the law abiding, then we really ought not to be using an anecdotal, single example like the murder of a police officer to "prove the point" when since actual data could be used to show that the UK is safer per-capita from gun crime.
All governments are oppressive, it's their job. Your job is to get wealthy enough to own a piece of government large enough to ensure that they oppress someone else instead of you.