Canada is in the same situation as US, and there are often bandwidth caps too; Shaw for exampel have these plans: High-speed internet Lite (256kbps with max 10GB/month) CAD $22/month (standalone $29.95) High-speed (5mbps with max 60GB/month) CAD $32/month (standalone $40.95) High-Speed Xtreme-I (10mbps with max 100GB/month) CAD $42/month (standalone $50.95) High-Speed Nitro (25mbps with max 150GB/month) CAD $93/month (standalone 101.95)
How can you tell that the ISP is not throttling for entirely different reasons? - Lets say due to agreements with Blockbuster to cause all competitors to appear crappy for live video streams, cause all bit torrent traffic to be be limited as agreements with Hollywood/RIAA/etc? To limit competition making sure smaller ISP's cannot provide better services than the bigger ISP regardless if the smaller one in fact have better infrastructure in place for a community?
By the way - While onto it - if they are to ratelimit live sports events and do on, they MUST prioritize the version for hearing impaired which have a square with a commentator speaking in sign language in the corner ABOVE the one for the rest. This simply because it is illegal to discriminate against hearing impaired and everyone is able to see the screen even though a part of it might not be of such interest to most of us. Of course - if the hearing impaired could set these option themselves, then we don't need to degrade the performance for those not hearing impaired neither.
There is no more good reasons and not any easier for the ISP's to block or rate limit our web-use than it is to centrally control spam. People are different, and have different needs plain and square.
Who should have priority, and how to determine it? I can guarantee that if it is a packet flag, then spammers, virus writers, and even bit torrent users will find a way to use it. And regardless, consider the following:
- Which priority should online Live football have from site X? Should it have over the one from site Y, and Z, and the 1000+ others with different commentators and different languages? - What if you rather wanted live games? Or Live online music concerts? What should have higher priority? - What about your live online video rentals - stream from Netflix over one from Blockbuster or should maybe your own ISP be allowed to rate limit all the competition to sell their own? - What about my VoIP from Skype over Vonage, Gizmo, Provider X,Y,Z? - What about Online games from Xbox 360 above Playstation 3?
Who are to set the priorities? How on earth should the ISP know what my priorities are? How on earth should the football channel know they should not send with highest priority flags?
And there is also a much easier way that leaves the internet neutral: As with e-mail spam filtering - let the settings be neutral from the ISP side, then let us set up our own profile or custom rules for the downstream traffic.
So how do you prevent a virus writers/spammers from using the same real time protocol for trojans / viruses / spam communication? - What prevent Bit-torrent developers to flag their traffic as real time sensitive? - There are indeed live video torrents out there already, how can you tell if it is live or not?
- What about the +10000 different live radio channels out there? - Which priority should online Live football have from site X have over the one from site Y? - What if you rather wanted live games? Live online music concerts? - What about your live online video stream from Netflix over one from Blockbuster or maybe even your own ISP? - What about my VoIP from Skype over Vonage, Gizmo, Provider X? - What about Online games from Xbox 360 above PS3?
Who are to set the priorities? How on earth should the ISP know what my priorities are? How on earth should the football channel know they should not send with highest priority flags? There is also a much easier way: As with e-mail spam filtering - let the settings be neutral from the ISP side, then let us set up our own profile or custom rules for the downstream traffic.
Neutrality from the ISP side has been up too frequent regardless of if it is e-mail spam filtering, Throttling of bandwidth, content restriction or other limitation as to what you can use the Internet for.
See e-mail as an example - It was thought that the ISP's should filter our mail to prevent junk mail, but we all know that does not work well. The reason is easy; your needs are unique for you. Imagine the pharmacists needing e-mail confirmation of pills and drugs he must order/want to be informed of, the doctors needing to communicate the symptoms of a decease with his pears and drugs to help it, the anti-virus developer needing samples of fresh viruses, the system administrator needing... The list goes on and on... The ISP simply cannot make general rules as to what constitute spam.
The same holds obviously true for what you will use the internet for. Should your ISP prioritize Vonage above Skype or Gizmo? Xbox games over PS3 sites and games? What about online video rentals from Netflix vs. Blockbuster, or what about online football/sport live programs above online live concerts etc, or even worse - the Xbox game above your online video rental/live online concert, or visa verse? The list goes in reality on forever - the ISP cannot possibly prioritize according our needs any more than they can generally filter spam.
As with spam there is an easy solution: Let US do the filtering! Simply give us an interface on the ISP side to prioritize what we deem important to us. Complicated? Not really at really. whereas some of us do want more complicated throttling such as prioritizing packets such as ACK, it should be easy for end users to simply visit a page such as my_preferences..com and add such as the domain of my mail provider on top of a list of priorities, the game sites I use above everything, increase the priority of all communication with my video rental provider, decrease the priority of torrents and block access to sites deemed inappropriate for my children.
Someone here on/. commented some smaller mom and dad size ISP's already do offer these kind of services to their clients! I hope this to be true, and will be looking out for this now!
Note that the Internet must stay neutral - else expect to see service problems due to live football broad casts prioritized to your neighbor above your simultaneous online concert / video rental / online game. Note 2: Your neighbors can prioritize without harming you simply by letting each and every one of us prioritize the what is sent from the ISP, while keeping network neutrality. There is a win-win for everyone except the big name ISP's that really want to prioritize their own / their partners video rental / games sites / other content above that of everyone else.
The network MUST be neutral EXACTLY for this reason - the ISP cannot prioritize Movie service provider 1 above Movie service provider 2, or VoIP provider 1 above VoIP provider 2. Should btw. Live Football websites have priority over your WOW and/or Conan net games? Many would say yes, many would say no. I just see how this will turn : "This ISP is for Football entusiasts" "This one prioritize XBOX over Playstation", etc, etc. We cannot allow the ISP to control whether you will watch your news on an ISP approved website or not.
This discussion has happened before - should the ISP control what is SPAM and what is not? Imagine how that would be for the System Administrator or AV developers who need information and samples of viruses, the doctors that need emails about pills and effects. The Adult movie raters that need updates on what is happening in their field, and so on and so on. The ISP cannot prioritize our traffic any more than they can filter what is good and what is bad mail for us - they must remain neutral.
As with SPAM - note that the ISP often allow us to put our own Bayesian filters and other rules to our e-mail on the server side! The same can be done with our traffic - Give us the power to control what sites we want to prioritize - Give us the power to select what kind of packets that should have priority - the port numbers important for us and so on.
The Internet would then remain neutral and all essentially all problems would be solved - except ISP's selling services they are not able to deliver...
It was another poster here in this tread somewhere who claims that some smaller mom and dad size ISP's in fact often offer such services!!! I believe this would be a great reason for dropping the big ones!
As a Gamer I know I frequently bought much more bandwidth than what I really needed. I would hardly use any of it at all - it was just about latency. This would in fact likely change the picture! I would require much lower bandwidth connection if QoS in both directions always prioritized what I indeed wanted to prioritize!
To some this may seem like a good argument against net neutrality, but think about this; Should your ISP prioritize your Skype over Gizmo? Prioritize Xbox Games above World of Warcraft? The list goes on forever... If the ISP is not neutral, the ISP will dictate which providers you will have good results with and which that would fail for you, not a good thing.
The argument is a great one, one I think more people should consider more closly: Use of local small ISP that have the interest of prioritizing your needs! If the ISP allowed YOU to prioritize YOUR downstream traffic, then there is no problem - there would be no need at all for going away from net neutrality. The writer of this argument seems to claims that small ISP's in fact allow you to do this.
If you indeed can control your own traffic shaping the internet can remain neutral. You could select movie downloads from Netflix above Blockbuster and visa verse, and everyone is happy (except for the big name ISP's who intend to force you to use their much more expensive private video rental services etc.)
As stated in the article is that the ISP's are selling you 1 megabyte while really buying you 1/4th of a Megabyte... Network monitoring is in other words necessary to ensure you in other words only use 1/4th of a Megabyte for every Megabyte you buy. It's right there in his argument!
Starting to utilize services such as TOR, FreeNET and similar services are just as risky today as the underground movements against oppression in the past. Of course there are always risks involved fighting abuse done the powers supposed to protect us. I do agree that using SSH/SSL/TSL/VPN/HTTPS and would help with e-mail and other secure data, but it does not promote or protect privacy. We are talking about two different things here, and encryption is only a small part of privacy:
- How does using SSL prevent people for knowing you are visiting your political party's website frequently? - How about your reading habbits; books, newspapers, the kind of music you listen to, and so on?
It is a lot to learn from the "First they came..." poem by Martin Niemöller (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came...): When the Nazis came for the communists, I remained silent; I was not a communist. When they locked up the social democrats, I remained silent; I was not a social democrat. When they came for the trade unionists, I did not speak out; I was not a trade unionist. When they came for the Jews, I remained silent; I wasn't a Jew. When they came for me, there was no one left to speak out. --
- Right now it the fight is about the so "terrorists" - a foggy ever-changing group of people we cannot truly define. A group that does not include Osama bin Ladden when fighting in Afganistan for USA, but do include Osama bin Ladden when fighting against the states - or are you really trying to say USA sponsor terrorism...? - Another group is "Child pornographers" - even in imaginary forms such as Japanese cartoons where no child is abused or harmed - in which case we are protecting who? (are we accepting mind police now?) - In the USA you may get CIA / FBI on your door for obtaining literature deemed to be bad such as "the communist manifest" - We are fighting "Pirates" who are robbing "music", "movies", and so on; this group include your copying of your own purchased cd's and dvd's to Ipod's and other units. I am hearing about places (England?) where you already can be charged for playing the music loud outside on a beach, restaurant or other place as you have not bought a license to share the music with anyone else.
Do you believe it will end here? What signal do you need to wake up? Are you waiting for the time they actually come for you? Encrypting your e-mail communication, and other secure information is a good step in the right direction, but it is in itself not enough. We must speak up, but we must also take action and start organizing ourselves.
Whereas once we did this against a few oppressive regimes, we are now battling for our own freedom.
Lets fight back! Lets give our unused bandwidth for this cause. Lets set up TOR nodes sabotaging the logging by causing log entries not truly originating from our machines, preventing mapping of our own profile as well as that of those using the network.
Let the unused bandwidth you have paid for come to use for something truly important - our privacy - lets not just talk, but start the fight for our privacy!
If ISPs offered their true bandwidth limits, latency limits, and so on from the beginning and not false offers like "unlimited".
I have always had throttled connection - I used to throttled at 256kbps down and 56kbps up. Then I paid more and I with the exact same connection now got 512kbps down and 128kbps up. Then I got a better service and I with the exact same connection got 2Mbps down and 512kbps up..
They have throttled the connection all the time. The total use is irrelevant. What is is whether all users use the bandwidth at the same time or not.
The providers could simply offer what they not under the assumptions we only will use 0.1% of it, but actually use what we buy.
What is worse for the ISP: - if you download 2 GB a day (~60 GB a month) spread out evenly (continuously ~90kbps) - if you download only during peak hours one hour a day 0.5GB (~15GB/month) (continuously 1110 kbps)
What happens if the bandwidth is not used ? Do the ISP loose anything? It is their ability to provide to multiple people at the same time that matters; it is clearly worse for the ISP in the second case were one person downloaded only 15GB a month than in the one with 90GB.
The entire issue could be resolved by ISP's offering the valid numbers for upwards and downwards bandwidth and expected latency for the connection. Don't blame the customers for using what they paid for.
I have been wondering about when I would be able to encrypt my cells and pda's the way I encrypt my other data. There is a problem however - the phone must be on in order to get calls... That means the system password is mostly always already in use and thus making it very easy to obtain by cooling down and picking out the RAM and use a card reader.
So I am hoping for a two stage system where call logs, full content of my address book, notes, calendar and so on is stored and encrypted separately from basic parts of the system. Incoming calls logs could then be stored in a temporary mode until I enter my storage password in which moment I would get access to the secure data using a separate password.
There are of course problems here too - notifications of upcoming calendar events, and displaying name/number association for incoming calls, among other issues. It will be necessary to allow personal choice for what should be cached outside of secure memory, but I certainly look forward to having a more secure options for Cells and PDA's!
May 13th, Ivan Krstic, the man behind the security system in the XO-machine wrote a much harder critic ( http://radian.org/notebook/sic-transit-gloria-laptopi ) against the OLPC project talking about the recent complete change in direction the company has taken, taking orders without knowing how to ensure the 700.000 machines actually end up where intended as orders are often taken to places where even no postal services go?
- Is it true that "learning" never was part of OLPC's mission? - Are OLPC simply accepting orders without knowing how to deliver? - Are the machines ending up in the right hands? - How is theft and corruption prevented? - Does the project really need to link the interface to the underlying OS?
What is the probability that a Ghost in the Shell continuation by Dreamworks will have a 18+ years rating?
What is the probability that a Hollywood movie at all will touch mature subjects such as what we have seen in the past?
What is the probability of the movie to include food for thought at all - the main reason I so much have liked Ghost in a shell in the past.
I unfortunately do not believe Hollywood will handle Ghost in a Shell - this will probably become a watered down version - dumbed down but with many effects aimed to sell for a large audience, nothing like Ghost in a shell at all.
I hope I am wrong, but...
It was exactly my thought too - I do not believe in Hollywood for these kind of series - I now expect it to be too little thought and too much action.
I simply do not believe in Hollywood for this - the 3D focus already tells me already that the effects is in focus and not the story.
My own ranking the different Ghost in the Shell up to now would be 1) Ghost in the shell - Stand Alone Complex 1st GIG (Best series I have ever seen! Similarities to Puppet Master but with a better story and plot! Very cool integration with many phrases from big thinkers!) 2) Ghost in the shell - Puppet Master (Among the best movies ever made! Front runner to most modern Movies such as the Matrix - Brilliant 3) Ghost in the shell - Solid State Society (Latest movie - holds many references to Stand Alone Complex 1st and 2nd GIG. Increased my hope there may be a good series or movie yet to come) 4) Ghost in the shell - Stand alone Complex 2nd GIG (Far from the quality of the 1st GIG - did not think the series could recover until Solid State was released...) 5) Ghost in the shell2 - Innocence (Very dark - seems to assume Friedrich Nietzsche's Philosophy - not among my favorites - the improved animation does not help)
With Hollywood behind I am already thinking the great story is doomed and it will end up on the bottom together with Innocence for me - probably worse.
I believe the question should first be what defines a broadcast. Regular internet activity is not what I believe is broadcast as shows seen through such as Youtube are not synchronized and downloaded independently on a user basis.
The next question is when, lets say, BBC actually offers a Internet broadcast where you indeed simply join the stream at any point, not seeing what was delivered prior to that point. It is broadcast, but who is the Broadcaster? Is it correct to tax the ISP for this? In this case, would it represent a double tax on the same service already paid for by BBC, or will BBC this way not need to pay a fee?
There is another situation however - if the ISP in fact have agreements with program providers such as BBC to transmit broadcast to the ISP's clients. In this case the ISP is in control of these Broadcasts and I totally agree they should pay tax.
I would clearly recommend www.gandi.net as well. I have been using them for years exactly due to them declaring I am the owner of my domain and in charge of my domain, not them unlike most other registrars. The prices have increased over the last couple of years - they have been charging 12 Euro, which when I started clearly was among the best prices in the marked, but with the current strong Euro, you will be aware of the difference. The are now allowing payment in USD which is only $15/year now (thought the strong Euro would have cased higher dollar price). That said - I have used many registrars and I for one will select Gandi over the rest also for other reasons: I feel they are providing a much better overall experience than the rest. I once tried Godaddy as it was a bit cheaper than Gandi, and it seemed like a good provider... Not that I have ever had a problem such as this with them, but the services of Gandi are worth the difference for me, and Gandi do not spam me, or keep sending as much "renew your information" type messages and so on.
Some of the benefits I am using:
You are the owner of the domain name! : See https://www.gandi.net/contracts Section 1 Gandi includes DNS in its default service so you can edit directions of domains and sub domains without also paying for hosting! Gandi allows you without hosting to have 5 mail boxes with 1GB mailbox space - again without paying additional for hosting! Gandi also allow you to add wildcard mailbox aliasing og 1000 e-mail addresses, and may relay the mail to external mailboxes.
Under the current situation it might make sense to make this move by the RIAA: 1) In USA there are virtually no free media - everything is owned by one large corporation or the other - This include radio, TV, magazines and so on - tell me one TV station or national radio station - or even a one state radio station that is independent of big companies likes of NBC, Time Warner, Viacom, News Corp., and so on. 2) The Internet is not yet established enough as a channel of new music 3) In the current system you need - lets say 50 000 people listening to you to break even and be able to live by the art you make, by reducing the payout this will reduce the number of artists out there who may make enough to live by making music, however as they control the media, they may increase the airtime of fewer artists making them stay firm while the rest "disappears". 4) By focusing on online media as broadcasting, thus reducing artists revenue further, they may limit the possibility even further for artists using the online media as an alternative channel.
Prepare for even more commercials in music videos etc. Artists will likely need to more frequently require brands to pay part of their initial promotion to get media attention.
Is it just me, or does this seem to be an administrators nightmare?
Lets say I run a modified version of PHPwebsites under AGPL; I would then need to maintain a copy of the source code available for the rest of the world on my site(?). This would of course mean that the source code directory would indicate what version of the software I ran, as well as the patches I did to it. This in turn would not only open for easy detection of programming errors in the small local patches on my server, but as I could not apply the changes to the latest version without also announcing that I updated the software, which in turn would announce quite immediately to the world that my currently running version is out of date with vulnerabilities, as well as how much time I would usually take from a new version of the software is released, to I as admin have cleared it/activated the changes on my site.
So not only will I be more likely need to daily monitor every software used under this license to always run the latest version to avoid hostile takeovers of my server, but the attacker would be even one more step ahead of me, knowing when I would typically get things fixed - can only imagine how it would be to run a few applications on a server under a license such as this...
I did pay for having skype out, worked out perfectly, $25 for a year and can call out as much as I want to countries beyond USA/Canada. I have been quite satisfied with that service, however I was thinking I would have Skype-in too, however their price was not what I had in mind for that, and I found another service offering a phone number for where I live and unlimited reception of calls for $5-6 a month...
I have been surprised at how much additional understanding I have gained from learning more languages.
Sigmund Freud for example did the often quoted mistake but understandable mistake of claiming 'God' was invented as a 'Father figure', which obviously seen through the original languages in which it was written where the Hebrew word for God in fact does not have gender but is 'it' and not 'him' as in English and most if not all other Germanic languages.
In philosophy classes I had, David Hume's ideas related with complex ideas being formed by combining simpler ideas, where incorrectly put into some context which made perfect sense when used with Scandinavian grammatic rules, however made no sense at all when later tried with Spanish...
How we learn, and our understanding of the world is very related with the language we speak, and lots of knowledge as well as paths for understanding will be lost by the disappearance of many languages.
Not only that, but great works written are easily lost that way. Hebrew poetry for example have poems which starts at the first letter of the alphabet and finish at the last. This is impossible to reproduce in other languages, they simply loose all the beauty and the meanings implied through the play of words.
I made a mistake there, the SuSE award was from January; they have indeed been replaced with Ubuntu!
The presentation pages have errors in them on each of the last slides. Instead of linking to the current awards, they all link to the January edition!!!
There seem to be some inconsistencies in the awards, under the open source awards, Ubuntu win best client operating system award, but under best platforms, SuSE linux Enterprise wins the Best Linux Desktop award.
Agree, this totally depend upon what kind of files actually need to be synchronized with the server and how to deal with the files when both sides have updated one files since last sync.
For all text readable types of files, like webpages, source code, xml files, etc. I would certainly go Subversion, however binary files are not really well maintained in Subversion, so then rsync solutions could likely be a better choice. Then again it depends upon the size and the quantity of files that may be modified between each sync. Sync with 100 000's of small files that are infrequently updated would be a waste with rsync, done that with quite bad result with a large shared webserver, it works but it was way too much of an overhead... Found better solutions then through shell scripting and rsync in combination, but knowing subversion today, I would now opt for that instead since most of what change are text files.
The benefit of subversion is that even in situations where one file is changed on both sides, the page will typically allow you to merge both changes. The only exception is if the file is updated over the exact same lines and same spots.
Slashdot Mirror
Canada is in the same situation as US, and there are often bandwidth caps too; Shaw for exampel have these plans:
High-speed internet Lite (256kbps with max 10GB/month) CAD $22/month (standalone $29.95)
High-speed (5mbps with max 60GB/month) CAD $32/month (standalone $40.95)
High-Speed Xtreme-I (10mbps with max 100GB/month) CAD $42/month (standalone $50.95)
High-Speed Nitro (25mbps with max 150GB/month) CAD $93/month (standalone 101.95)
Source http://www.shaw.ca/en-ca/ProductsServices/Internet/ (prices from each service sub-page)
How can you tell that the ISP is not throttling for entirely different reasons? - Lets say due to agreements with Blockbuster to cause all competitors to appear crappy for live video streams, cause all bit torrent traffic to be be limited as agreements with Hollywood/RIAA/etc? To limit competition making sure smaller ISP's cannot provide better services than the bigger ISP regardless if the smaller one in fact have better infrastructure in place for a community?
A non-neutral net just screams "abuse me".
By the way - While onto it - if they are to ratelimit live sports events and do on, they MUST prioritize the version for hearing impaired which have a square with a commentator speaking in sign language in the corner ABOVE the one for the rest. This simply because it is illegal to discriminate against hearing impaired and everyone is able to see the screen even though a part of it might not be of such interest to most of us. Of course - if the hearing impaired could set these option themselves, then we don't need to degrade the performance for those not hearing impaired neither.
There is no more good reasons and not any easier for the ISP's to block or rate limit our web-use than it is to centrally control spam. People are different, and have different needs plain and square.
Who should have priority, and how to determine it? I can guarantee that if it is a packet flag, then spammers, virus writers, and even bit torrent users will find a way to use it. And regardless, consider the following:
- Which priority should online Live football have from site X? Should it have over the one from site Y, and Z, and the 1000+ others with different commentators and different languages?
- What if you rather wanted live games? Or Live online music concerts? What should have higher priority?
- What about your live online video rentals - stream from Netflix over one from Blockbuster or should maybe your own ISP be allowed to rate limit all the competition to sell their own?
- What about my VoIP from Skype over Vonage, Gizmo, Provider X,Y,Z?
- What about Online games from Xbox 360 above Playstation 3?
Who are to set the priorities? How on earth should the ISP know what my priorities are? How on earth should the football channel know they should not send with highest priority flags?
And there is also a much easier way that leaves the internet neutral:
As with e-mail spam filtering - let the settings be neutral from the ISP side, then let us set up our own profile or custom rules for the downstream traffic.
So how do you prevent a virus writers/spammers from using the same real time protocol for trojans / viruses / spam communication?
- What prevent Bit-torrent developers to flag their traffic as real time sensitive?
- There are indeed live video torrents out there already, how can you tell if it is live or not?
- What about the +10000 different live radio channels out there?
- Which priority should online Live football have from site X have over the one from site Y?
- What if you rather wanted live games? Live online music concerts?
- What about your live online video stream from Netflix over one from Blockbuster or maybe even your own ISP?
- What about my VoIP from Skype over Vonage, Gizmo, Provider X?
- What about Online games from Xbox 360 above PS3?
Who are to set the priorities? How on earth should the ISP know what my priorities are? How on earth should the football channel know they should not send with highest priority flags?
There is also a much easier way:
As with e-mail spam filtering - let the settings be neutral from the ISP side, then let us set up our own profile or custom rules for the downstream traffic.
Neutrality from the ISP side has been up too frequent regardless of if it is e-mail spam filtering, Throttling of bandwidth, content restriction or other limitation as to what you can use the Internet for.
See e-mail as an example - It was thought that the ISP's should filter our mail to prevent junk mail, but we all know that does not work well. The reason is easy; your needs are unique for you. Imagine the pharmacists needing e-mail confirmation of pills and drugs he must order/want to be informed of, the doctors needing to communicate the symptoms of a decease with his pears and drugs to help it, the anti-virus developer needing samples of fresh viruses, the system administrator needing... The list goes on and on... The ISP simply cannot make general rules as to what constitute spam.
The same holds obviously true for what you will use the internet for. Should your ISP prioritize Vonage above Skype or Gizmo? Xbox games over PS3 sites and games? What about online video rentals from Netflix vs. Blockbuster, or what about online football/sport live programs above online live concerts etc, or even worse - the Xbox game above your online video rental/live online concert, or visa verse? The list goes in reality on forever - the ISP cannot possibly prioritize according our needs any more than they can generally filter spam.
As with spam there is an easy solution: Let US do the filtering! Simply give us an interface on the ISP side to prioritize what we deem important to us. Complicated? Not really at really. whereas some of us do want more complicated throttling such as prioritizing packets such as ACK, it should be easy for end users to simply visit a page such as my_preferences..com and add such as the domain of my mail provider on top of a list of priorities, the game sites I use above everything, increase the priority of all communication with my video rental provider, decrease the priority of torrents and block access to sites deemed inappropriate for my children.
Someone here on /. commented some smaller mom and dad size ISP's already do offer these kind of services to their clients! I hope this to be true, and will be looking out for this now!
Note that the Internet must stay neutral - else expect to see service problems due to live football broad casts prioritized to your neighbor above your simultaneous online concert / video rental / online game. Note 2: Your neighbors can prioritize without harming you simply by letting each and every one of us prioritize the what is sent from the ISP, while keeping network neutrality. There is a win-win for everyone except the big name ISP's that really want to prioritize their own / their partners video rental / games sites / other content above that of everyone else.
The network MUST be neutral EXACTLY for this reason - the ISP cannot prioritize Movie service provider 1 above Movie service provider 2, or VoIP provider 1 above VoIP provider 2. Should btw. Live Football websites have priority over your WOW and/or Conan net games? Many would say yes, many would say no. I just see how this will turn : "This ISP is for Football entusiasts" "This one prioritize XBOX over Playstation", etc, etc. We cannot allow the ISP to control whether you will watch your news on an ISP approved website or not.
This discussion has happened before - should the ISP control what is SPAM and what is not? Imagine how that would be for the System Administrator or AV developers who need information and samples of viruses, the doctors that need emails about pills and effects. The Adult movie raters that need updates on what is happening in their field, and so on and so on. The ISP cannot prioritize our traffic any more than they can filter what is good and what is bad mail for us - they must remain neutral.
As with SPAM - note that the ISP often allow us to put our own Bayesian filters and other rules to our e-mail on the server side! The same can be done with our traffic - Give us the power to control what sites we want to prioritize - Give us the power to select what kind of packets that should have priority - the port numbers important for us and so on.
The Internet would then remain neutral and all essentially all problems would be solved - except ISP's selling services they are not able to deliver...
It was another poster here in this tread somewhere who claims that some smaller mom and dad size ISP's in fact often offer such services!!! I believe this would be a great reason for dropping the big ones!
As a Gamer I know I frequently bought much more bandwidth than what I really needed. I would hardly use any of it at all - it was just about latency. This would in fact likely change the picture! I would require much lower bandwidth connection if QoS in both directions always prioritized what I indeed wanted to prioritize!
To some this may seem like a good argument against net neutrality, but think about this;
Should your ISP prioritize your Skype over Gizmo? Prioritize Xbox Games above World of Warcraft? The list goes on forever...
If the ISP is not neutral, the ISP will dictate which providers you will have good results with and which that would fail for you, not a good thing.
The argument is a great one, one I think more people should consider more closly: Use of local small ISP that have the interest of prioritizing your needs!
If the ISP allowed YOU to prioritize YOUR downstream traffic, then there is no problem - there would be no need at all for going away from net neutrality. The writer of this argument seems to claims that small ISP's in fact allow you to do this.
If you indeed can control your own traffic shaping the internet can remain neutral. You could select movie downloads from Netflix above Blockbuster and visa verse, and everyone is happy (except for the big name ISP's who intend to force you to use their much more expensive private video rental services etc.)
As stated in the article is that the ISP's are selling you 1 megabyte while really buying you 1/4th of a Megabyte... Network monitoring is in other words necessary to ensure you in other words only use 1/4th of a Megabyte for every Megabyte you buy. It's right there in his argument!
Starting to utilize services such as TOR, FreeNET and similar services are just as risky today as the underground movements against oppression in the past. Of course there are always risks involved fighting abuse done the powers supposed to protect us. I do agree that using SSH/SSL/TSL/VPN/HTTPS and would help with e-mail and other secure data, but it does not promote or protect privacy. We are talking about two different things here, and encryption is only a small part of privacy:
- How does using SSL prevent people for knowing you are visiting your political party's website frequently?
- How about your reading habbits; books, newspapers, the kind of music you listen to, and so on?
It is a lot to learn from the "First they came..." poem by Martin Niemöller (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came...):
When the Nazis came for the communists, I remained silent; I was not a communist.
When they locked up the social democrats, I remained silent; I was not a social democrat.
When they came for the trade unionists, I did not speak out; I was not a trade unionist.
When they came for the Jews, I remained silent; I wasn't a Jew.
When they came for me, there was no one left to speak out.
--
- Right now it the fight is about the so "terrorists" - a foggy ever-changing group of people we cannot truly define. A group that does not include Osama bin Ladden when fighting in Afganistan for USA, but do include Osama bin Ladden when fighting against the states - or are you really trying to say USA sponsor terrorism...?
- Another group is "Child pornographers" - even in imaginary forms such as Japanese cartoons where no child is abused or harmed - in which case we are protecting who? (are we accepting mind police now?)
- In the USA you may get CIA / FBI on your door for obtaining literature deemed to be bad such as "the communist manifest"
- We are fighting "Pirates" who are robbing "music", "movies", and so on; this group include your copying of your own purchased cd's and dvd's to Ipod's and other units. I am hearing about places (England?) where you already can be charged for playing the music loud outside on a beach, restaurant or other place as you have not bought a license to share the music with anyone else.
Do you believe it will end here? What signal do you need to wake up? Are you waiting for the time they actually come for you? Encrypting your e-mail communication, and other secure information is a good step in the right direction, but it is in itself not enough. We must speak up, but we must also take action and start organizing ourselves.
Whereas once we did this against a few oppressive regimes, we are now battling for our own freedom.
Lets fight back!
Lets give our unused bandwidth for this cause.
Lets set up TOR nodes sabotaging the logging by causing log entries not truly originating from our machines, preventing mapping of our own profile as well as that of those using the network.
Let the unused bandwidth you have paid for come to use for something truly important - our privacy - lets not just talk, but start the fight for our privacy!
If ISPs offered their true bandwidth limits, latency limits, and so on from the beginning and not false offers like "unlimited".
I have always had throttled connection - I used to throttled at 256kbps down and 56kbps up.
Then I paid more and I with the exact same connection now got 512kbps down and 128kbps up.
Then I got a better service and I with the exact same connection got 2Mbps down and 512kbps up..
They have throttled the connection all the time. The total use is irrelevant. What is is whether all users use the bandwidth at the same time or not.
The providers could simply offer what they not under the assumptions we only will use 0.1% of it, but actually use what we buy.
What is worse for the ISP:
- if you download 2 GB a day (~60 GB a month) spread out evenly (continuously ~90kbps)
- if you download only during peak hours one hour a day 0.5GB (~15GB/month) (continuously 1110 kbps)
What happens if the bandwidth is not used ? Do the ISP loose anything? It is their ability to provide to multiple people at the same time that matters; it is clearly worse for the ISP in the second case were one person downloaded only 15GB a month than in the one with 90GB.
The entire issue could be resolved by ISP's offering the valid numbers for upwards and downwards bandwidth and expected latency for the connection.
Don't blame the customers for using what they paid for.
I have been wondering about when I would be able to encrypt my cells and pda's the way I encrypt my other data. There is a problem however - the phone must be on in order to get calls... That means the system password is mostly always already in use and thus making it very easy to obtain by cooling down and picking out the RAM and use a card reader.
So I am hoping for a two stage system where call logs, full content of my address book, notes, calendar and so on is stored and encrypted separately from basic parts of the system. Incoming calls logs could then be stored in a temporary mode until I enter my storage password in which moment I would get access to the secure data using a separate password.
There are of course problems here too - notifications of upcoming calendar events, and displaying name/number association for incoming calls, among other issues. It will be necessary to allow personal choice for what should be cached outside of secure memory, but I certainly look forward to having a more secure options for Cells and PDA's!
In March and April Ivan Krstic and Walder Bender, two of the most famous technologists of the project left the project, with the following feedback to the community: Maintaining Clarity: http://radian.org/notebook/maintaining-clarity and Where is Walter: http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/devel/2008-April/012986.html
May 13th, Ivan Krstic, the man behind the security system in the XO-machine wrote a much harder critic ( http://radian.org/notebook/sic-transit-gloria-laptopi ) against the OLPC project talking about the recent complete change in direction the company has taken, taking orders without knowing how to ensure the 700.000 machines actually end up where intended as orders are often taken to places where even no postal services go?
- Is it true that "learning" never was part of OLPC's mission?
- Are OLPC simply accepting orders without knowing how to deliver?
- Are the machines ending up in the right hands?
- How is theft and corruption prevented?
- Does the project really need to link the interface to the underlying OS?
What is the probability that a Ghost in the Shell continuation by Dreamworks will have a 18+ years rating? What is the probability that a Hollywood movie at all will touch mature subjects such as what we have seen in the past? What is the probability of the movie to include food for thought at all - the main reason I so much have liked Ghost in a shell in the past. I unfortunately do not believe Hollywood will handle Ghost in a Shell - this will probably become a watered down version - dumbed down but with many effects aimed to sell for a large audience, nothing like Ghost in a shell at all. I hope I am wrong, but...
It was exactly my thought too - I do not believe in Hollywood for these kind of series - I now expect it to be too little thought and too much action.
I simply do not believe in Hollywood for this - the 3D focus already tells me already that the effects is in focus and not the story.
My own ranking the different Ghost in the Shell up to now would be
1) Ghost in the shell - Stand Alone Complex 1st GIG (Best series I have ever seen! Similarities to Puppet Master but with a better story and plot! Very cool integration with many phrases from big thinkers!)
2) Ghost in the shell - Puppet Master (Among the best movies ever made! Front runner to most modern Movies such as the Matrix - Brilliant
3) Ghost in the shell - Solid State Society (Latest movie - holds many references to Stand Alone Complex 1st and 2nd GIG. Increased my hope there may be a good series or movie yet to come)
4) Ghost in the shell - Stand alone Complex 2nd GIG (Far from the quality of the 1st GIG - did not think the series could recover until Solid State was released...)
5) Ghost in the shell2 - Innocence (Very dark - seems to assume Friedrich Nietzsche's Philosophy - not among my favorites - the improved animation does not help)
With Hollywood behind I am already thinking the great story is doomed and it will end up on the bottom together with Innocence for me - probably worse.
I believe the question should first be what defines a broadcast. Regular internet activity is not what I believe is broadcast as shows seen through such as Youtube are not synchronized and downloaded independently on a user basis. The next question is when, lets say, BBC actually offers a Internet broadcast where you indeed simply join the stream at any point, not seeing what was delivered prior to that point. It is broadcast, but who is the Broadcaster? Is it correct to tax the ISP for this? In this case, would it represent a double tax on the same service already paid for by BBC, or will BBC this way not need to pay a fee? There is another situation however - if the ISP in fact have agreements with program providers such as BBC to transmit broadcast to the ISP's clients. In this case the ISP is in control of these Broadcasts and I totally agree they should pay tax.
I would clearly recommend www.gandi.net as well. I have been using them for years exactly due to them declaring I am the owner of my domain and in charge of my domain, not them unlike most other registrars. The prices have increased over the last couple of years - they have been charging 12 Euro, which when I started clearly was among the best prices in the marked, but with the current strong Euro, you will be aware of the difference. The are now allowing payment in USD which is only $15/year now (thought the strong Euro would have cased higher dollar price). That said - I have used many registrars and I for one will select Gandi over the rest also for other reasons: I feel they are providing a much better overall experience than the rest. I once tried Godaddy as it was a bit cheaper than Gandi, and it seemed like a good provider... Not that I have ever had a problem such as this with them, but the services of Gandi are worth the difference for me, and Gandi do not spam me, or keep sending as much "renew your information" type messages and so on.
Some of the benefits I am using:
You are the owner of the domain name! : See https://www.gandi.net/contracts Section 1
Gandi includes DNS in its default service so you can edit directions of domains and sub domains without also paying for hosting!
Gandi allows you without hosting to have 5 mail boxes with 1GB mailbox space - again without paying additional for hosting!
Gandi also allow you to add wildcard mailbox aliasing og 1000 e-mail addresses, and may relay the mail to external mailboxes.
Under the current situation it might make sense to make this move by the RIAA:
1) In USA there are virtually no free media - everything is owned by one large corporation or the other
- This include radio, TV, magazines and so on - tell me one TV station or national radio station - or even a one state radio station that is independent of big companies likes of NBC, Time Warner, Viacom, News Corp., and so on.
2) The Internet is not yet established enough as a channel of new music
3) In the current system you need - lets say 50 000 people listening to you to break even and be able to live by the art you make, by reducing the payout this will reduce the number of artists out there who may make enough to live by making music, however as they control the media, they may increase the airtime of fewer artists making them stay firm while the rest "disappears".
4) By focusing on online media as broadcasting, thus reducing artists revenue further, they may limit the possibility even further for artists using the online media as an alternative channel.
Prepare for even more commercials in music videos etc. Artists will likely need to more frequently require brands to pay part of their initial promotion to get media attention.
Is it just me, or does this seem to be an administrators nightmare?
Lets say I run a modified version of PHPwebsites under AGPL; I would then need to maintain a copy of the source code available for the rest of the world on my site(?). This would of course mean that the source code directory would indicate what version of the software I ran, as well as the patches I did to it. This in turn would not only open for easy detection of programming errors in the small local patches on my server, but as I could not apply the changes to the latest version without also announcing that I updated the software, which in turn would announce quite immediately to the world that my currently running version is out of date with vulnerabilities, as well as how much time I would usually take from a new version of the software is released, to I as admin have cleared it/activated the changes on my site.
So not only will I be more likely need to daily monitor every software used under this license to always run the latest version to avoid hostile takeovers of my server, but the attacker would be even one more step ahead of me, knowing when I would typically get things fixed - can only imagine how it would be to run a few applications on a server under a license such as this...
I did pay for having skype out, worked out perfectly, $25 for a year and can call out as much as I want to countries beyond USA/Canada. I have been quite satisfied with that service, however I was thinking I would have Skype-in too, however their price was not what I had in mind for that, and I found another service offering a phone number for where I live and unlimited reception of calls for $5-6 a month...
I totally agree with you.
I have been surprised at how much additional understanding I have gained from learning more languages.
Sigmund Freud for example did the often quoted mistake but understandable mistake of claiming 'God' was invented as a 'Father figure', which obviously seen through the original languages in which it was written where the Hebrew word for God in fact does not have gender but is 'it' and not 'him' as in English and most if not all other Germanic languages.
In philosophy classes I had, David Hume's ideas related with complex ideas being formed by combining simpler ideas, where incorrectly put into some context which made perfect sense when used with Scandinavian grammatic rules, however made no sense at all when later tried with Spanish...
How we learn, and our understanding of the world is very related with the language we speak, and lots of knowledge as well as paths for understanding will be lost by the disappearance of many languages.
Not only that, but great works written are easily lost that way. Hebrew poetry for example have poems which starts at the first letter of the alphabet and finish at the last. This is impossible to reproduce in other languages, they simply loose all the beauty and the meanings implied through the play of words.
I made a mistake there, the SuSE award was from January; they have indeed been replaced with Ubuntu!
The presentation pages have errors in them on each of the last slides. Instead of linking to the current awards, they all link to the January edition!!!
There seem to be some inconsistencies in the awards, under the open source awards, Ubuntu win best client operating system award, but under best platforms, SuSE linux Enterprise wins the Best Linux Desktop award.
Best Client Operating System Award:
http://www.infoworld.com/slideshow/2007/09/114-best_of_open_so-3.html
Best Linux Desktop Award:
http://www.infoworld.com/slideshow/2007/01/29-2007_technology-7.html
Agree, this totally depend upon what kind of files actually need to be synchronized with the server and how to deal with the files when both sides have updated one files since last sync.
For all text readable types of files, like webpages, source code, xml files, etc. I would certainly go Subversion, however binary files are not really well maintained in Subversion, so then rsync solutions could likely be a better choice. Then again it depends upon the size and the quantity of files that may be modified between each sync. Sync with 100 000's of small files that are infrequently updated would be a waste with rsync, done that with quite bad result with a large shared webserver, it works but it was way too much of an overhead... Found better solutions then through shell scripting and rsync in combination, but knowing subversion today, I would now opt for that instead since most of what change are text files.
The benefit of subversion is that even in situations where one file is changed on both sides, the page will typically allow you to merge both changes. The only exception is if the file is updated over the exact same lines and same spots.