In addition to filters being individually tuned, the system allows for "whitelists" - Any mail address on the user's whitelist automagically bypasses the filter.
The difference between this and other whitelist approaches is that "new" people who are sending you legit mail (Like Horny Teenager's latest BF/GF) will likely get through, as opposed to having to authenticate in some manner.
To avoid confrontation...
on
LWCE Wrapup
·
· Score: 2
Give out free hardware.
They should've given out some Intellimouse Explorers. The whole conference would've flocked there, happy to receive one of M$'s few decent products.
These boards have too much power. I don't think he EVER supported what they did or could've done anything about it beyond what he did do, which didn't do much except get him fired.
I had cable (Time Warner) up in Ithaca, NY at school.
Now that I'm back home in central Jersey, where my parents refuse to get cable, I'm stuck with broadcast until I get around to installing a Dish receiver (dependent on if/when my current summer internship turns into a permanent job).
Analog cable blows away analog broadcast. Period. And we have a pretty decent antenna pointed towards NYC. Only 1-2 channels could possibly compete with the quality of analog cable, and after 9/11, it became even worse. (Another advantage to cable - If a terrorist blows up a cable junction or distribution center, it's not too expensive to rebuild an equivalent system. When a terrorist attack destroys the WTC, there is NO replacement for one of the tallest antenna towers in the country.)
Now a terrorist zorching one of the geosync TV satellites would be a different story - But the likelihood of that is EXTREMELY low unless it gets cracked. Given the kind of target such a sat presents to crackers, if it hasn't been cracked already, it's VERY unlikely it will ever be cracked.
I'm not counting client-side free TV cracks in the above example. I'm talking about Captain Midnight style takeover/DoS attacks.
Digital TV consumes the same amount as analog TV, OR LESS.
Broadcasters have two options going digital: Higher quality, same channel bandwidth. Or current quality, something like 1/4 channel bandwidth.
Color TV was a better signal in the same bandwidth, and had a lot to offer for the consumer. Full res HDTV is the closest analog to this, but offers less to the consumer.
When FM started there was plenty of spectrum in the broadcast band - In fact, the FCC gave broadcasters excessively wide channel spacings. (Needed for technical reasons at the time, no longer necessary. This is being taken advantage of by current standards proposed for digital radio broadcasting that have both the old analog signal AND the digital signal occupying the same channel.) FM also offered a lot for the consumer.
The problem with standard-res low-bandwidth TV is that it offers very little of visible benefit to the consumer. The beneficiaries are the broadcasters (Theoretically they can broadcast 4 standard-def streams in the bandwidth they are already licensed for), and later the consumers, although indirectly. As someone pointed out in the recent Sprint/2.5G/3G cellular thread, the main thing holding back 3G is spectrum. Care to take a guess where some of that spectrum was supposed to come from??? Yup, bandwidth freed up by moving TV broadcasts to digital.
I have yet to lose digital coverage and features with my phone in ANY area where my roaming light wasn't on, and I've done a lot of traveling up and down the Northeast. My roaming light rarely turns on. Verizon blew away Sprint in Ithaca, and it's marginally better where I'm currently living in Central Jersey.
If you want a better example, try inputting 08836 as your zip code for Sprint.
Compare Sprint's coverage of New Jersey (50% coverage of one of the most densely populated states in the country? You've got to be kidding me!!!) to Verizon's 100% coverage, which has yet to go to analog fallback or lose features for me. (I am now living in central Jersey.)
Basically, Verizon and its predecessors had superior coverage 2-3 years ago to what Sprint has now, and will always remain ahead of the game.
Yet another person spews out regurgitated Sprint PCS "The Clear Alternative to Ourselves" commercials.
Verizon may be a patchwork, but even their digital area is larger than Sprint's puny "nationwide" network.
Look at a coverage map of Verizon's America's Choice plan (These are the digital coverage areas - I don't think the analog towers have the advanced roaming features needed for such a plan). Then look at the coverage for Sprint's plans.
Sprint's "roaming" area is about 75% of the map. Verizon's "covered" area with America's Choice is 60%+ of the map.
I have complete digital coverage with all features over most of upstate New York (the boonies), including where I went to school in Ithaca. Sprint??? Syracuse, Buffalo, and recently Binghamton, that's it. Oh, Ithaca now has service as of a few months ago, but if you leave town with Sprint you're roaming. The entire region was digital for Frontier Cellular (now Verizon) customers over three years ago.
Rabbit can't be compared to Wi-Fi in very many ways at all, if any.
Rabbit had to compete on the high end with cellular phones, giving seamles coverage over large areas.
And it had to compete on the low end with pay phones - A MUCH cheaper alternative that it had few advantages over.
What competes with Wi-Fi? There's no mobile equivalent, while 3G may be "fast", Wi-Fi is 10-100 times faster.
Rabbit used a proprietary phone that became a paperweight if service died - Such unease makes customers hesistant. Wi-Fi uses standard hardware that you can use without any service, in your own home.
The problem wISPs will have is "the network" - Coverage is what makes people switch cellular providers, coverage is what will make people switch/sign up for WiFi providers. The founder of Earthlink has found what I consider a pretty good solution to the problem of building a network - It's the exact same technique he used to build Earthlink into a nationwide dialup ISP - Don't build the network yourself, partner with a multitude of ISPs for maximum coverage, eventually buying them if it makes sense to do so.
There's only one comparison to be made here - Just as Rabbit was a souped-up cordless pay phone, Wi-Fi is a souped-up cordless RJ-45 jack. The only decent competition I can see for Wi-Fi is a provider that puts Ethernet hubs in hot-spots to compete - An easy threat for a wISP to avoid - Simply be the one providing and charging for the Ethernet ports too. Once you've got an AP with a connection to the outside network (the hard/expensive part), adding wired Ethernet drops is easy.
One person already pointed out combining a GPS with an R/C plane - Maybe that would work, although there's the issue of landing - The "finish line" may not have room allow a glide-in landing.
Put a GPS and a computer in a chopper, though... Someone had a link to an open-source helicopter autopilot project a few robotics articles ago.
I worked in competitive analysis at Lucent (now Avaya) 4-5 years ago. Some of our competitors used Dialogic boards in their systems, and part of my job was cost analysis - In small quantities, even basic Dialogic boards were $1500 or so. You could get MAJOR volume discounts, but to drop the price below $500 you needed to buy a LOT of boards. (You could get thr price to below $300-400 if you bought enough IIRC...)
Cool hardware, but WAY too much $$$$$ unles prices have gone down.
Right now, a spammer has no qualms about shotgun-spamming people, on the hopes that 0.01% (One in 10,000) will respond positively to his email.
The 50%+ of people who are pissed off are of no concern to him/her.
The 1-10% that are so pissed off they'd sue if they had the option are of no concern.
If even 0.1% of the recipients of a given spam (1 in 1000) responded with a lawsuit, the spammer would give up VERY quickly.
Less of the spam out there is "masked" than you'd think. Probably 90%+ of my spam originates from semilegit spamops claiming to have "opt-in" marketing, when they're "opt-out" at best. (Most, especially Azoogle, Inc., seem to just shotgun spam without a care, not even bothering to see if a mail bounces or not.) If a law against spam is passed, these guys will all go out of business VERY quickly.
Probably between 10-30% of my spam (varies day-to-day) is from azoogle.com, a supposed "opt-in" spamhaus. They have an "opt-out" system that says to put in your email address - Once I got so desperate to stop THEIR spam only (not caring if they might resell it) that I put in my email address.
It didn't work.
While azoogle's site lists their location as Canada, their domain registration contacts are in NYC.
A 45-minute train ride away.
The minute I find an applicable law (The fact that I have requested that they refrain from contacting me and contact continues means I may have a harassment case) I am taking those bozos to court.
"You just verified your address as valid" - azoogle doesn't CARE if your mail is valid or not - I have procmail configured so that any mail from my spam blocklist gets bounced with a "user not available" message from MAILER-DAEMON. It works with some spammers (I got a message saying, "You have been unsubscribed from list greatsex2@somedomain" due to 4 or more bounced mails. Please correct this and click on the link below to restart your subscription." YEAH RIGHT!), but azoogle has been ignoring the bounces for over a month.
When developing a system, it's always typical to overspec hardware a LOT so you don't have to make many hardware changes during the design process.
At work I'm dealing with a system that has a few FPGAs and DSPs on it, along with some RF hardware. It currently consumes 6-7 amps at 24 volts. It's expected that by throwing away a lot of our "excess" silicon, we'll be dropping that to an ampere or two, simply because EVERYTHING on that board is massive overkill.
If you are fine with purely mechanical steering (Note, the array must be turned in unison as one large unit), simple phasing lines will do.
If you want to have each dish stay in place and aim individually, you're screwed because electronic steering will be needed.
Hams have been doing this for years with monster Yagi arrays for moonbounce - But suffice it to say these were NOT to get around antenna restrictions.:)
One implementation (Although not exactly automated) of such an idea can be found at www.relatia.com - Unfortunately, www.freefor.com does not seem to resolve to anything, otherwise I'd play with it.
There are already technologies that let a phone get a general idea of its location based on what tower it's talking to (Palm.net and the VII/i705 - why oh why doesn't CDMA data have this feature? And I don't think GSM has this sort of integration, partly because both data services were designed for phones possible with an external data device, not integrated solutions like the Kyocera 6035 or the Treo)
I see in the future a variation of IM software (Why use current IM solutions when you have SMS???) in which you mark yourself as saying, "I'm available" with possibly a little bit of personal info (age 18-25 or whatever), that shows up to anyone looking to find people in their immediate area. (Maybe defined as "my tower and adjacent x towers" since I believe the GPS capabilities in E-911 are on demand and NOT user controlled.)
New to a city? Take a bus to the city center and mark yourself available to meet people. (As opposed to the mentions of such activities existing already that require you to already have the phone # of the person you're messaging.)
People would be able to create "networks" on the fly that anyone could find and join into.
Very often someone 100 miles away from a station can't hear it while someone 1000 miles away can.
Still, if you're in the same city as the transmitter, you should be able to hear it unless the antennas are aimed very oddly, and even then at 50 kilowatts you should hear something scattered from the sidelobes... Heck, when W2CXM (Cornell radio club) tunes into a *dummy load* at a kilowatt, you can hear it if you're tuned in a few miles away due to the watt or two that gets leaked out.
Unfortunately, California is also the home of Hollywood, which more than balances this out. I have a feeling that (especially with the current tech economy) Hollywood brings far more money into the state than Silicon Valley does.
North Carolina is a different story - They have RTP, but they have no Hollywood to balance it.
Slashdot Mirror
In addition to filters being individually tuned, the system allows for "whitelists" - Any mail address on the user's whitelist automagically bypasses the filter.
The difference between this and other whitelist approaches is that "new" people who are sending you legit mail (Like Horny Teenager's latest BF/GF) will likely get through, as opposed to having to authenticate in some manner.
Give out free hardware.
They should've given out some Intellimouse Explorers. The whole conference would've flocked there, happy to receive one of M$'s few decent products.
These boards have too much power. I don't think he EVER supported what they did or could've done anything about it beyond what he did do, which didn't do much except get him fired.
Earlier in this thread, someone mentioned exactly such a database.
I *believe* it was called Bitzi.
I had cable (Time Warner) up in Ithaca, NY at school.
Now that I'm back home in central Jersey, where my parents refuse to get cable, I'm stuck with broadcast until I get around to installing a Dish receiver (dependent on if/when my current summer internship turns into a permanent job).
Analog cable blows away analog broadcast. Period. And we have a pretty decent antenna pointed towards NYC. Only 1-2 channels could possibly compete with the quality of analog cable, and after 9/11, it became even worse. (Another advantage to cable - If a terrorist blows up a cable junction or distribution center, it's not too expensive to rebuild an equivalent system. When a terrorist attack destroys the WTC, there is NO replacement for one of the tallest antenna towers in the country.)
Now a terrorist zorching one of the geosync TV satellites would be a different story - But the likelihood of that is EXTREMELY low unless it gets cracked. Given the kind of target such a sat presents to crackers, if it hasn't been cracked already, it's VERY unlikely it will ever be cracked.
I'm not counting client-side free TV cracks in the above example. I'm talking about Captain Midnight style takeover/DoS attacks.
Digital TV consumes the same amount as analog TV, OR LESS.
Broadcasters have two options going digital: Higher quality, same channel bandwidth. Or current quality, something like 1/4 channel bandwidth.
Color TV was a better signal in the same bandwidth, and had a lot to offer for the consumer. Full res HDTV is the closest analog to this, but offers less to the consumer.
When FM started there was plenty of spectrum in the broadcast band - In fact, the FCC gave broadcasters excessively wide channel spacings. (Needed for technical reasons at the time, no longer necessary. This is being taken advantage of by current standards proposed for digital radio broadcasting that have both the old analog signal AND the digital signal occupying the same channel.) FM also offered a lot for the consumer.
The problem with standard-res low-bandwidth TV is that it offers very little of visible benefit to the consumer. The beneficiaries are the broadcasters (Theoretically they can broadcast 4 standard-def streams in the bandwidth they are already licensed for), and later the consumers, although indirectly. As someone pointed out in the recent Sprint/2.5G/3G cellular thread, the main thing holding back 3G is spectrum. Care to take a guess where some of that spectrum was supposed to come from??? Yup, bandwidth freed up by moving TV broadcasts to digital.
I have yet to lose digital coverage and features with my phone in ANY area where my roaming light wasn't on, and I've done a lot of traveling up and down the Northeast. My roaming light rarely turns on. Verizon blew away Sprint in Ithaca, and it's marginally better where I'm currently living in Central Jersey.
If you want a better example, try inputting 08836 as your zip code for Sprint.
Compare Sprint's coverage of New Jersey (50% coverage of one of the most densely populated states in the country? You've got to be kidding me!!!) to Verizon's 100% coverage, which has yet to go to analog fallback or lose features for me. (I am now living in central Jersey.)
Basically, Verizon and its predecessors had superior coverage 2-3 years ago to what Sprint has now, and will always remain ahead of the game.
Yet another person spews out regurgitated Sprint PCS "The Clear Alternative to Ourselves" commercials.
Verizon may be a patchwork, but even their digital area is larger than Sprint's puny "nationwide" network.
Look at a coverage map of Verizon's America's Choice plan (These are the digital coverage areas - I don't think the analog towers have the advanced roaming features needed for such a plan). Then look at the coverage for Sprint's plans.
Sprint's "roaming" area is about 75% of the map. Verizon's "covered" area with America's Choice is 60%+ of the map.
I have complete digital coverage with all features over most of upstate New York (the boonies), including where I went to school in Ithaca. Sprint??? Syracuse, Buffalo, and recently Binghamton, that's it. Oh, Ithaca now has service as of a few months ago, but if you leave town with Sprint you're roaming. The entire region was digital for Frontier Cellular (now Verizon) customers over three years ago.
Rabbit can't be compared to Wi-Fi in very many ways at all, if any.
Rabbit had to compete on the high end with cellular phones, giving seamles coverage over large areas.
And it had to compete on the low end with pay phones - A MUCH cheaper alternative that it had few advantages over.
What competes with Wi-Fi? There's no mobile equivalent, while 3G may be "fast", Wi-Fi is 10-100 times faster.
Rabbit used a proprietary phone that became a paperweight if service died - Such unease makes customers hesistant. Wi-Fi uses standard hardware that you can use without any service, in your own home.
The problem wISPs will have is "the network" - Coverage is what makes people switch cellular providers, coverage is what will make people switch/sign up for WiFi providers. The founder of Earthlink has found what I consider a pretty good solution to the problem of building a network - It's the exact same technique he used to build Earthlink into a nationwide dialup ISP - Don't build the network yourself, partner with a multitude of ISPs for maximum coverage, eventually buying them if it makes sense to do so.
There's only one comparison to be made here - Just as Rabbit was a souped-up cordless pay phone, Wi-Fi is a souped-up cordless RJ-45 jack. The only decent competition I can see for Wi-Fi is a provider that puts Ethernet hubs in hot-spots to compete - An easy threat for a wISP to avoid - Simply be the one providing and charging for the Ethernet ports too. Once you've got an AP with a connection to the outside network (the hard/expensive part), adding wired Ethernet drops is easy.
Does it have to be a ground/water-only robot?
If it can fly, everything becomes simple.
One person already pointed out combining a GPS with an R/C plane - Maybe that would work, although there's the issue of landing - The "finish line" may not have room allow a glide-in landing.
Put a GPS and a computer in a chopper, though... Someone had a link to an open-source helicopter autopilot project a few robotics articles ago.
Looks like our trolls, including the Alan Thicke Is Dead one, headed over there. Kinda like Australia, Britain, and convicts.
Let's hope they stay there and lead a productive life instead of returning here. (yeah right...)
How about a whole bank vault??? :)
I worked in competitive analysis at Lucent (now Avaya) 4-5 years ago. Some of our competitors used Dialogic boards in their systems, and part of my job was cost analysis - In small quantities, even basic Dialogic boards were $1500 or so. You could get MAJOR volume discounts, but to drop the price below $500 you needed to buy a LOT of boards. (You could get thr price to below $300-400 if you bought enough IIRC...)
Cool hardware, but WAY too much $$$$$ unles prices have gone down.
Right now, a spammer has no qualms about shotgun-spamming people, on the hopes that 0.01% (One in 10,000) will respond positively to his email.
The 50%+ of people who are pissed off are of no concern to him/her.
The 1-10% that are so pissed off they'd sue if they had the option are of no concern.
If even 0.1% of the recipients of a given spam (1 in 1000) responded with a lawsuit, the spammer would give up VERY quickly.
Less of the spam out there is "masked" than you'd think. Probably 90%+ of my spam originates from semilegit spamops claiming to have "opt-in" marketing, when they're "opt-out" at best. (Most, especially Azoogle, Inc., seem to just shotgun spam without a care, not even bothering to see if a mail bounces or not.) If a law against spam is passed, these guys will all go out of business VERY quickly.
Probably between 10-30% of my spam (varies day-to-day) is from azoogle.com, a supposed "opt-in" spamhaus. They have an "opt-out" system that says to put in your email address - Once I got so desperate to stop THEIR spam only (not caring if they might resell it) that I put in my email address.
It didn't work.
While azoogle's site lists their location as Canada, their domain registration contacts are in NYC.
A 45-minute train ride away.
The minute I find an applicable law (The fact that I have requested that they refrain from contacting me and contact continues means I may have a harassment case) I am taking those bozos to court.
"You just verified your address as valid" - azoogle doesn't CARE if your mail is valid or not - I have procmail configured so that any mail from my spam blocklist gets bounced with a "user not available" message from MAILER-DAEMON. It works with some spammers (I got a message saying, "You have been unsubscribed from list greatsex2@somedomain" due to 4 or more bounced mails. Please correct this and click on the link below to restart your subscription." YEAH RIGHT!), but azoogle has been ignoring the bounces for over a month.
If the modchips are indeed 29F040 chips, that means that the EXACT same chips, even the "old stock" modchips will work.
That F means flash - Take old stock, stick it in the burner again, you have current up-to-date modchips.
When developing a system, it's always typical to overspec hardware a LOT so you don't have to make many hardware changes during the design process.
At work I'm dealing with a system that has a few FPGAs and DSPs on it, along with some RF hardware. It currently consumes 6-7 amps at 24 volts. It's expected that by throwing away a lot of our "excess" silicon, we'll be dropping that to an ampere or two, simply because EVERYTHING on that board is massive overkill.
Well, it depends.
:)
If you are fine with purely mechanical steering (Note, the array must be turned in unison as one large unit), simple phasing lines will do.
If you want to have each dish stay in place and aim individually, you're screwed because electronic steering will be needed.
Hams have been doing this for years with monster Yagi arrays for moonbounce - But suffice it to say these were NOT to get around antenna restrictions.
http://www.uksmg.org/k6qxy.htm
One implementation (Although not exactly automated) of such an idea can be found at www.relatia.com - Unfortunately, www.freefor.com does not seem to resolve to anything, otherwise I'd play with it.
There are already technologies that let a phone get a general idea of its location based on what tower it's talking to (Palm.net and the VII/i705 - why oh why doesn't CDMA data have this feature? And I don't think GSM has this sort of integration, partly because both data services were designed for phones possible with an external data device, not integrated solutions like the Kyocera 6035 or the Treo)
I see in the future a variation of IM software (Why use current IM solutions when you have SMS???) in which you mark yourself as saying, "I'm available" with possibly a little bit of personal info (age 18-25 or whatever), that shows up to anyone looking to find people in their immediate area. (Maybe defined as "my tower and adjacent x towers" since I believe the GPS capabilities in E-911 are on demand and NOT user controlled.)
New to a city? Take a bus to the city center and mark yourself available to meet people. (As opposed to the mentions of such activities existing already that require you to already have the phone # of the person you're messaging.)
People would be able to create "networks" on the fly that anyone could find and join into.
But WWV may not have local phone numbers anywhere other than their physical location (Boulder, CO)
I'm not sure where the 303 area code is though, so I could be wrong.
Very often someone 100 miles away from a station can't hear it while someone 1000 miles away can.
Still, if you're in the same city as the transmitter, you should be able to hear it unless the antennas are aimed very oddly, and even then at 50 kilowatts you should hear something scattered from the sidelobes... Heck, when W2CXM (Cornell radio club) tunes into a *dummy load* at a kilowatt, you can hear it if you're tuned in a few miles away due to the watt or two that gets leaked out.
Yes, California is tech-savvy.
Unfortunately, California is also the home of Hollywood, which more than balances this out. I have a feeling that (especially with the current tech economy) Hollywood brings far more money into the state than Silicon Valley does.
North Carolina is a different story - They have RTP, but they have no Hollywood to balance it.
Either the 6035 or the upcoming 7135 - Integrated Palm and cellphone. Install PalmVNC and you're ready to go. :)
But I'm willing to bet that Coble's political career is toast.
Note that in one article on the situation (can't remember if the linked one had it), it mentions that the bill is sponsored by Coble (R-NC).
North Carolina.
I have three words for Mr. Coble: Research Triangle Park.
NC is becoming a tech hotspot, and he probably just lost a significant number of votes in the Durham/RTP region.
WTF was he smoking?
We have a tradeoff here:
One one hand, untraceability.
On the other hand, effectiveness. You do this, you will effectively DDoS the anonymizer proxy and not your intended target.
These are plain-jane web requests - They're not illegal anyway, at least not in a way that's provable in court.