This may be difficult - even impossible - but that's never stopped the government before (can you say "Star Wars"?) We cannot afford to dismiss this just because we don't think they can't pull it off.
In order to actually build a system like this, the government would have to spend billions on monitoring gear, supercomputers to analyse the data and a vast beauracracy to run everything. In order to raise this money they will shift as much financial burden as possible onto the ISPs, who will have to raise their rates to stay in business. I also suspect they would try to tax internet use (hey, if they have an infrastructure to monitor everyone than it would be easier to tax everyone while they're at it).
Finally, for the purposes of accomplishing its intended task (catching bad, evil terrorists), it will be nigh-impossible to get such a system to ever work correctly. BUT for the purposes of creating an atmosphere of fear and paranioa, along with de facto censorship on the 'net - the system never has to work correctly, it merely has to exist.
In order for this type of argument to work, you have to make an assumption that demand is a constant. While this assumption is arguable in the case of food and gas, it's totally invalid in the case of bandwidth right now. If bandwidth became cheaper, a large population of consumers would increase their usage, thus making bandwidth a viable market to be in.
The other flaw with your argument is the assumption that dark fiber would not be very hard to tap. Transmitters, receivers, routers and last mile connections are all still prohibitively expensive and are obstacles to widespread deployment of broadband.
There are just too many players/potential players in this sector for the 'conspiracy of telcos' argument to work.
If you have/have access to your own domain, set a default rule in.virtualmail and give out a unique e-mail address to anyone who requires that you give them your email (324sd034@yadayada.com or something). When you receive spam on that account look up in your log the one organization in the world that you've given that address to and go scream at them. It won't solve all your spam problems by any length, but perhaps it'll make a dent.
Read (or re-read, given where I'm posting) Mostly Harmless. This sounds alot like the interaction between the future Guide and the "Whole Sort of General Mish Mash" described in that book. I believe chapter 17 has a good description.
I remember reading about this five or six years ago - it was called Lifestreams at the time, then later commercialized by a company called Mirror Worlds which now goes by the name Scopeware (whose server we are currently crashing). Here's an old paper on the subject. With videos!
The truly annoying part about this whole thing is that instead of improving the value of watching a movie in the theater, Hollywood seems to prefer the option of decreasing the value of buying a DVD by limiting what you can do with them. DIVX (the DVD competitor not the codec) was the kind of future that Hollywood wants to see. They'll keep trying to make it happen.
Touche. You are right, of course; homonyms, heteronyms, homophones and homographs are rampant throughout the language. They follow no easily classified patterns and wreak havoc with clear communication, though they do provide fodder for punsters and poets. But that is no reason to add another.
OK, this bugs me a little. I'm not a prescriptivist when it comes to (human) languages and in fact believe english should reflect the continuing evolution of social intercourse. I cheered when "d'oh" was added to the OED. But... In this case, the language would be losing functionality: two words with different meanings cannot be spelled the same way, one of the meanings would have to go and that would be a loss to the language and our ability to express ourselves.
According to the Guardian article, it's on Telstar 11 - which is a Ku only bird. Check the footprint to see if you are in the beam. Plus, of course, you'll need a Ku LNB.
If the military had to shift to commercial satellite space, then they're probably using a commercial uplink provider, transmitting analog or DVB signals. If that's the case than you can't encrypt anything until you spring maybe US$100K on hardware.
Er... they never said the actual video originated from a satellite. The video came from airplanes and was bounced to Virginia on a MilSat then bounced back to Europe on an unsecure commercial satellite.
The question isn't so much whether microwaves cook you (which nobody believes) but whether their high frequency EM radiation accelerates cell mutation thus increasing the chance of cancer. A lot of experts have weighed in on this issue, generally contradicting whatever the previous expert said. I'm not sure how I feel about the issue, though I can't help but remember those police officers who may have gotten cancer from their radar guns. OSHA EMF info here. FCC EMF page.
Uh... you're talking L-Band - there is no L-Band in space. I think they're on Galaxy 11 Ku @ 11720, 12120 and 12160 MHz Horizontal. I don't see a current listing for them on Satmex-5, but an L-Band of 1250 MHz would make it 12000 MHz Ku. It looks as if they're using MPEG-2 transport for their service so you may need some type of IRD in addition to the card, antenna, LNB, etc. (I'm speaking generally since I'm not sure about the exact hardware config that DirecPC uses). Finally, if it's DVB compliant MPEG-2, that standard allows for conditional access (specific IRD MAC addresses are authorized by the uplink) so that would be another hurdle. Don't know if this helps but HAVE FUN.
Your rhetoric seems a bit inflammatory - the worst case scenario here is that a spammer becomes aware that you have opened their e-mail (assuming you are online when you read it). What you describe as automatically executing code from a remote, untrusted source sounds scary, but it's just javascript! With the exception of the scriptlet/eyedog bug in IE5, javascript is pretty much harmless. So don't worry about it - report the spammer to Spam Cop, create a filter for your e-mail client or just delete, delete, delete.
Slashdot Mirror
This may be difficult - even impossible - but that's never stopped the government before (can you say "Star Wars"?) We cannot afford to dismiss this just because we don't think they can't pull it off.
In order to actually build a system like this, the government would have to spend billions on monitoring gear, supercomputers to analyse the data and a vast beauracracy to run everything. In order to raise this money they will shift as much financial burden as possible onto the ISPs, who will have to raise their rates to stay in business. I also suspect they would try to tax internet use (hey, if they have an infrastructure to monitor everyone than it would be easier to tax everyone while they're at it).
Finally, for the purposes of accomplishing its intended task (catching bad, evil terrorists), it will be nigh-impossible to get such a system to ever work correctly. BUT for the purposes of creating an atmosphere of fear and paranioa, along with de facto censorship on the 'net - the system never has to work correctly, it merely has to exist.
In order for this type of argument to work, you have to make an assumption that demand is a constant. While this assumption is arguable in the case of food and gas, it's totally invalid in the case of bandwidth right now. If bandwidth became cheaper, a large population of consumers would increase their usage, thus making bandwidth a viable market to be in.
The other flaw with your argument is the assumption that dark fiber would not be very hard to tap. Transmitters, receivers, routers and last mile connections are all still prohibitively expensive and are obstacles to widespread deployment of broadband.
There are just too many players/potential players in this sector for the 'conspiracy of telcos' argument to work.
If you have/have access to your own domain, set a default rule in .virtualmail and give out a unique e-mail address to anyone who requires that you give them your email (324sd034@yadayada.com or something). When you receive spam on that account look up in your log the one organization in the world that you've given that address to and go scream at them. It won't solve all your spam problems by any length, but perhaps it'll make a dent.
People are going to have to start attaching sig lines to anything they write:
"Any resemblance to fictional persons living or dead, is purely coincidental"
Um... he was joking. At least I hope so.
*heh*
Read (or re-read, given where I'm posting) Mostly Harmless . This sounds alot like the interaction between the future Guide and the "Whole Sort of General Mish Mash" described in that book. I believe chapter 17 has a good description.
I remember reading about this five or six years ago - it was called Lifestreams at the time, then later commercialized by a company called Mirror Worlds which now goes by the name Scopeware (whose server we are currently crashing). Here's an old paper on the subject. With videos!
It was touted as the way of the future then, too.
The truly annoying part about this whole thing is that instead of improving the value of watching a movie in the theater, Hollywood seems to prefer the option of decreasing the value of buying a DVD by limiting what you can do with them. DIVX (the DVD competitor not the codec) was the kind of future that Hollywood wants to see. They'll keep trying to make it happen.
Touche. You are right, of course; homonyms, heteronyms, homophones and homographs are rampant throughout the language. They follow no easily classified patterns and wreak havoc with clear communication, though they do provide fodder for punsters and poets. But that is no reason to add another.
OK, this bugs me a little. I'm not a prescriptivist when it comes to (human) languages and in fact believe english should reflect the continuing evolution of social intercourse. I cheered when "d'oh" was added to the OED. But... In this case, the language would be losing functionality: two words with different meanings cannot be spelled the same way, one of the meanings would have to go and that would be a loss to the language and our ability to express ourselves.
According to the Guardian article, it's on Telstar 11 - which is a Ku only bird. Check the footprint to see if you are in the beam. Plus, of course, you'll need a Ku LNB.
If the military had to shift to commercial satellite space, then they're probably using a commercial uplink provider, transmitting analog or DVB signals. If that's the case than you can't encrypt anything until you spring maybe US$100K on hardware.
Er... they never said the actual video originated from a satellite. The video came from airplanes and was bounced to Virginia on a MilSat then bounced back to Europe on an unsecure commercial satellite.
The question isn't so much whether microwaves cook you (which nobody believes) but whether their high frequency EM radiation accelerates cell mutation thus increasing the chance of cancer. A lot of experts have weighed in on this issue, generally contradicting whatever the previous expert said. I'm not sure how I feel about the issue, though I can't help but remember those police officers who may have gotten cancer from their radar guns. OSHA EMF info here. FCC EMF page.
Uh... you're talking L-Band - there is no L-Band in space. I think they're on Galaxy 11 Ku @ 11720, 12120 and 12160 MHz Horizontal. I don't see a current listing for them on Satmex-5, but an L-Band of 1250 MHz would make it 12000 MHz Ku. It looks as if they're using MPEG-2 transport for their service so you may need some type of IRD in addition to the card, antenna, LNB, etc. (I'm speaking generally since I'm not sure about the exact hardware config that DirecPC uses). Finally, if it's DVB compliant MPEG-2, that standard allows for conditional access (specific IRD MAC addresses are authorized by the uplink) so that would be another hurdle. Don't know if this helps but HAVE FUN.
Your rhetoric seems a bit inflammatory - the worst case scenario here is that a spammer becomes aware that you have opened their e-mail (assuming you are online when you read it). What you describe as automatically executing code from a remote, untrusted source sounds scary, but it's just javascript! With the exception of the scriptlet/eyedog bug in IE5, javascript is pretty much harmless. So don't worry about it - report the spammer to Spam Cop, create a filter for your e-mail client or just delete, delete, delete.
A wonderful dream... unfortunately you would still need expensive hardware to convert between PAL, SECAM and NTSC in many cases.