APR has been around for a while, I think... and certainly someone has used it to check mail.
Well it's at least been used for that purpose since 1987. I think that's the first time I saw two BBSes being connected using amateur radio equipment. Must have been two Fidonet boxes. The connection wasn't quite stable but it worked.
Around here, there's still two groups of people who still carry pagers: doctors and law enforcement officers. The pager system is still way more robust than GSM and serves as a fallback system for a lot of law enforcement agencies.
Doctors still carry them for two reasons: first of all, they're safe. Pagers have been in use for decades and are known to generally not interfere with hospital equipment (unlike GSM phones, which can cause really weird behaviour in some monitoring equipment). And secondly, they're reliable. In an emergency situation, when everybody grabs their cell to check on their loved ones cell coverage usually drops to 0% in a jiffie (yes, I know that GSM networks can be configured to prioritize certain SIMs through the HLR but I can tell you from experience that that doesn't really work reliably). Pagers, on the other hand, don't need a lot of bandwidth and work reliably.
Having said that, Blackberrys were a nice idea when they were first introduced. These days, though they're useless without effective filtering. I am subscribed to a bunch of mailing lists and I don't particularly like the idea of staring at a small b/w device for long periods of time to find that one important email I happen to be looking for. That's especially true if I have instant access to my IMAP account using my PDA (using WiFi, which tends to drain the battery, or my cell phone). Plus, around here, there's usually a computer nearby no matter where I go.
Yep, and we already had this discussion in January and then again a couple weeks later. I think the general consesus was that this won't do a thing to help stop counterfitting.
Re:Definately a bad choice on the part of the devs
on
A New Look For Firefox
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· Score: 4, Interesting
I agree. Most people I introduced to Mozilla were impressed by two features: the pop-up blocker and its feeling. Many remarked that it just felt "right". That's one of the biggest compliments you can pay to a UI designer: if the user doesn't feel that there's a transition period and can get started right away then you've done something right.
Personally, I'm more of an "I don't care how it looks as long as it works" guy but I agree that the Qute theme looks great and I always felt comfortable using it. I guess variety is a good thing but I'd much rather see them sort out their differences and stick with Qute.
The obvious weakness and insecurity of this aside, this just isn't a good idea. For starters, 90% is no where good enough. A password system like this would be a nightmare to setup and, more importantly, to maintain.
Imagine introducing something like this and being responsible for it during the rollout period. You'd have to have people on-call 24/7 just to reset passwords, check IDs and help people log on to their computers (which is the very thing they need to do to even start their work day).
Additionally, you'd have to allow more attempts to enter a password correctly before locking the account or nobody would be able to log in (at least while people got used to the system). And thereby you'd actually weaken security significantly.
I agree that from an engineering point of view this is pretty impressive. But I can't stop wondering why anyone would want to buy one of these, aside from the cool, 'look-at-me' factor.
I already have three TVs in my house. They have way better video and audio and don't suffer from the reception problems that these devices, naturally, suffer from. I have two computer screens at work that I could watch streaming video on (at least, financial networks usually offer streaming TV to business customers). Plus, there's a TV in the lobby. So that covers about 80% of my time.
There's also a bunch of TVs at the gym. The same is true for most coffee shops. I also do have a built-in TV tuner & screen in my car. So if I ever find myself waiting for someone I could, in theory, watch TV on that (I never do though). That pretty much covers the rest of my time. And when I am not at work, at the gym or at home I am probably somewhere outside relaxing and certainly won't feel like watching TV.
This reminds me of my High School Calculus class. We got HP 48s when they first came out. I remember everybody bitching about the price tag being ridiculously high.
After playing with the device for a few weeks, I built a data cable and, about half way into the trimster, did load an IR library onto the thing (think remote control emulation). Man, we had a lot of fun with that thing (my High School had cable TVs in every room and in the halls so we had a lot of fun).
And I still have that calculator and use it quite often -- it still works like a charm.
HBCI yet. HBCI is an open standard that's widely deployed throughout Europe (at least as far as I can tell). It incorporates encryption through OpenSSL and its source code is readily available on Sourceforge.
In my opinion, email disclaimers are counterproductive at best. As the article notes, the legality of these email disclaimers is questionable at best (there are, however, some circumstances when these disclaimers can be legally binding).
This is especially true considering the enforceability of these disclaimers, or rather lack thereof, when the recipient is subject to a different jurisdiction.
A few weeks ago I had to personally deal with email disclaimers. An acquaintance of mine had sent an email containing his company's email footer to multiple recipients at the same site (a big company) which neither of them ever received. Turns out, the spam filter caught the email and dropped it because of its low content-to-repetition (read garbage) ratio.
The site seems to be slashdotted already but here's the Moscow Times' take on this (the also broke the story almost three days ago, if I am not mistaken).
... this had, as the the article and the blurb mention, nothing to do with the federal CAN SPAM Act. It was rather based on the NY state attorney general's office pursuing the case (rather aggresively, if I may say so).
What the article doesn't mention is that Carmack was also indicted and convicted on 14 counts of forgery and falsifying business records.
Again, it's important to note that the conviction had little to nothing to do with him spamming or his using any electronic form of communication at all but rather with his business practices (of course, that didn't stop both the court and the prosecution to use this case to send a clear message to other spammers).
How do you know? If they did have a well kept secret, it's well kept so you might not have found out. I'm not trying to be rude, just trying to point out that just because you know some things, doesn't mean you know everything.
You make a good point. There's one more thing that I would like to add.
Many people seem to think that the terms 'government' and 'military' are interchangeable when it comes to conspiracy theories and the like. This is where a flaw in many theories lies.
Just because some government officials can't seem to keep their mouths shut (and let's face it, not all "leaks" are intentional) doesn't mean that classified military information can't be kept confidential. The military uses a different system. When you rely on strict need-to-know principles you reduce the number of PoFs (point of failure) to a minimum. Yes, there's always a few people who really do have a need-to-know but those can be hand-picked and are easier to monitor and control. Also, you can get away with implementing and enforcing a lot more stringent and intrusive security measures on military grounds than you can in a civilian workplace.
A lot of artists still do allow live recordings, even some major, commercially successful ones (the "Dave Matthews Band" being one, Phish being another). There's an active scene of music lovers, tapers and traders and the live records are usually of superb quality (the tapers go to great lenghts to ensure high quality recordings) and distributed in lossless formats (usually SHN). Check out etree for more information.
And, even though I realize that most of these bands that allow live recordings or even actively encourage them aren't exactly your garden variety pop band many of them seem to have quite a following. Maybe the grassroots, word-of-mouth approach isn't that bad afterall...
I am not so sure 3D would really work that great for a "Sim City"-style game. All ressource issues aside, isn't the point of "Sim City" to be actually running a city by keeping an eye on the big picture? I always found the decision making process to be most challenging and, frankly, most fun -- just like in the real world, as you're city grows you find yourself unable to please everyone and have to prioritize.
And I am just not sure the more "The Sims"-like approach will work all that well in a "Sim City" game (remember, "Sim Tower" which was about managing just one single building complex but in reality was little more than an elevator management simulation?).
Or, maybe I am just old-fashioned and like my 2D games way too much...;)
Well, in essence this is a good idea. Thin clients work great in certain environments and for certain target audiences. The problem, however, is that their applications are limited by nature, and are becoming more and more limited over time.
Sure, you can use PINE or tin on an older PC without problems. Sure, you can try and shift the computing and processing burden away from the (thin) client. That, however, won't make the end users happy. They are accustomed to a certain level of usability, both regarding speed and user interface. People just plain don't want to deal with anything other - or less - than what they're used to.
So, whilst there are still applications for older systems as thin clients you're mostly limited to situations where your intended user base simply doesn't have a choice. As soon as they're paying for it or depending on your it for their daily work most people just won't accept being forced to use an old computer. They want their new, shiny PC and their sexy, modern LCD screen.
In general, I am against the government getting too involved in anti-spam matters, especially if it's through legislation or code enforcement action. This is mostly because
History has shown that these measures have a tendency to backfire and, consequently, often make matters worse and not better.
Government, by definition, has a tendency to restrict individual freedom. Liberties seldomly are taken away by drastic measures or through major legislation, but rather step-by-step. That's why I view government intervention, as described above, as - at least - problematic.
Having said that, I'd suggest that we use this FCC rule to our advantage. Because, realistically, there's not really a lot we can do about it anyway.
The problem, however, becomes an advantage if we view it as just another tool in the anti-spammer's tool box. Yes, it will most likely not help in a lot of cases but it doesn't really have to. It's just another tool, one tool among many others. Maybe it helps to just inconvenience or even shut down a handful of spammers and that's a handful less I have to worry about.
Like others, I too would recommend using SoHo equipment. You can get it cheap, resell it at virtually no loss after the event and the world doesn't end when something breaks (trust me - it will; SoHo equipment wasn't designed for 24/7 use in rugged, outdoor terrain).
Also, try to stick with as few different vendors as possible. That way, you won't introduce unnecessary incompatibilities and you won't have to deal with different setups and configurations (that may not be such a big problem as long as you stick to using SoHo equipment, as it's usually fairly standard-compliant and easily configured through a web interface).
If your conference is really out in the middle of nowhere though consider turning to the pros. I have worked with T-Mobile techs on providing Internet access at an outdoor sports event in a fairly secluded area and have nothing but good things to say about them. Since there were no landlines and no WiFi coverage available we basically had to rely on cell transmissions. So we setup a IEEE 802.11 network and they provided the cell-phone backend. We had to put in a few restrictions (bandwidth throttling, etc) to ensure that the network was reasonably secure and to keep costs in check but it did work like a charm. Of course, that might not be an option depending on your choice of locale and your budget.
We used to use.project files to keep track of schedule changes, progress and project-related problems we had run into, too. It actually worked very well in small to medium-sized development groups.
We would timestamp our.project files and each of us would have their login script finger the other group members, compare the timestamp to the one stored in a flat database (ASCII file) and then, if there were any changes, display the output of the finger command.
Simple, yet effective (plus, it was geeky enough to make sure that nobody outside of R&D or Coding ever bothered to check the status of projects).
These days, unfortunately, hardly anyone seems to be running fingerd and it's virtually always firewalled off to the outside world.
Hmm, I don't think anyone is seriously contemplating using high-speed equipment like this in a SoHo environment. We're rather talking backbone infrastructure. And, when you're dealing with backbone setups you simply cannot have enough bandwidth. These days, the limiting factor isn't actually technology - it's money.
Well, I think the potential for abuse would just be too great.
Respidering a website doesn't just take up bandwidth but also a lot of CPU cycles. That's especially true if you're running extensive algorithm-based computations (like Google does) and not just doing a quick-and-dirty instant-add to a database. It would also allow webmasters to cheat the system: temporarily mirror some relevant, high-traffic site, have it reindexed, change the contents (porn, spam, you name it). After a while, the bot will reindex your site to see if your site's content has changed. At that point, all a rouge webmaster would have to do is, to repeat the process.
Cute? Check.
Futuristic-looking? Check.
Create enough hype to get VC, DARPA and NIH funding? Check.
In reality though, these are a far cry from being practical, cost-effective replacements for human security or maintenance personell. Well, maybe HP R&D does use them but that's about it as far as practical applications go (at least at this point). It just doesn't make sense to employ these outside of a tradeshow or R&D environment from a business point of view.
What happens, for instance, if an intruder does decide to jam the WiFi network (not really that hard to do)? Do the robots have the AI required to perform their scheduled tasks autonomously? Or will they require human supervision and internvetion (in that case, they aren't really anything more than cool, mobile surveillance cameras).
I'm sorry but I just don't see any practical applications (aside from, maybe, logistics) for these robots at this point.
According to this article it does if you have PageRank enabled. Of course, there's no way (at least that I can think of) to implement a PageRank-like system without having tracking usage.
Well, yes. That's probably because a lot of people use Google, as opposed to some obscure Amazon gizzmo that few people see value in and that, consequently, very few people use.
I think a lot of the criticism that's been levelled at Google has been motivated by the fact that people, at least on some level, like or even care about Google and don't want to see it go down the drain. Amazon, on the other hand, is just some company...
The security personell at my office do that. They do rounds at specified intervals. For insurance reasons, they installed barcode stickers on every floor they're supposed to check.
So, after they get off of the elevater they scan the barcode tag with a wireless barcode reader which is connected the security company's network. Then they check the individual offices, scan the tags there and, after they're finished scan the sticker by the elevater again.
I don't know what prevents people from tampering with the server they're keeping the log files on (or from just copying the barcode stickers, for that matter) but the insurance company seems to think this provides a sufficient degree of security.
Slashdot Mirror
Well it's at least been used for that purpose since 1987. I think that's the first time I saw two BBSes being connected using amateur radio equipment. Must have been two Fidonet boxes. The connection wasn't quite stable but it worked.
Doctors still carry them for two reasons: first of all, they're safe. Pagers have been in use for decades and are known to generally not interfere with hospital equipment (unlike GSM phones, which can cause really weird behaviour in some monitoring equipment). And secondly, they're reliable. In an emergency situation, when everybody grabs their cell to check on their loved ones cell coverage usually drops to 0% in a jiffie (yes, I know that GSM networks can be configured to prioritize certain SIMs through the HLR but I can tell you from experience that that doesn't really work reliably). Pagers, on the other hand, don't need a lot of bandwidth and work reliably.
Having said that, Blackberrys were a nice idea when they were first introduced. These days, though they're useless without effective filtering. I am subscribed to a bunch of mailing lists and I don't particularly like the idea of staring at a small b/w device for long periods of time to find that one important email I happen to be looking for. That's especially true if I have instant access to my IMAP account using my PDA (using WiFi, which tends to drain the battery, or my cell phone). Plus, around here, there's usually a computer nearby no matter where I go.
Yep, and we already had this discussion in January and then again a couple weeks later. I think the general consesus was that this won't do a thing to help stop counterfitting.
Personally, I'm more of an "I don't care how it looks as long as it works" guy but I agree that the Qute theme looks great and I always felt comfortable using it. I guess variety is a good thing but I'd much rather see them sort out their differences and stick with Qute.
Imagine introducing something like this and being responsible for it during the rollout period. You'd have to have people on-call 24/7 just to reset passwords, check IDs and help people log on to their computers (which is the very thing they need to do to even start their work day).
Additionally, you'd have to allow more attempts to enter a password correctly before locking the account or nobody would be able to log in (at least while people got used to the system). And thereby you'd actually weaken security significantly.
Aaah, my driver's license... No, wait, congratulations. You just intentionally destroyed government property.
I already have three TVs in my house. They have way better video and audio and don't suffer from the reception problems that these devices, naturally, suffer from. I have two computer screens at work that I could watch streaming video on (at least, financial networks usually offer streaming TV to business customers). Plus, there's a TV in the lobby. So that covers about 80% of my time.
There's also a bunch of TVs at the gym. The same is true for most coffee shops. I also do have a built-in TV tuner & screen in my car. So if I ever find myself waiting for someone I could, in theory, watch TV on that (I never do though). That pretty much covers the rest of my time. And when I am not at work, at the gym or at home I am probably somewhere outside relaxing and certainly won't feel like watching TV.
After playing with the device for a few weeks, I built a data cable and, about half way into the trimster, did load an IR library onto the thing (think remote control emulation). Man, we had a lot of fun with that thing (my High School had cable TVs in every room and in the halls so we had a lot of fun).
And I still have that calculator and use it quite often -- it still works like a charm.
HBCI yet. HBCI is an open standard that's widely deployed throughout Europe (at least as far as I can tell). It incorporates encryption through OpenSSL and its source code is readily available on Sourceforge.
This is especially true considering the enforceability of these disclaimers, or rather lack thereof, when the recipient is subject to a different jurisdiction.
A few weeks ago I had to personally deal with email disclaimers. An acquaintance of mine had sent an email containing his company's email footer to multiple recipients at the same site (a big company) which neither of them ever received. Turns out, the spam filter caught the email and dropped it because of its low content-to-repetition (read garbage) ratio.
The site seems to be slashdotted already but here's the Moscow Times' take on this (the also broke the story almost three days ago, if I am not mistaken).
What the article doesn't mention is that Carmack was also indicted and convicted on 14 counts of forgery and falsifying business records.
Again, it's important to note that the conviction had little to nothing to do with him spamming or his using any electronic form of communication at all but rather with his business practices (of course, that didn't stop both the court and the prosecution to use this case to send a clear message to other spammers).
You make a good point. There's one more thing that I would like to add.
Many people seem to think that the terms 'government' and 'military' are interchangeable when it comes to conspiracy theories and the like. This is where a flaw in many theories lies.
Just because some government officials can't seem to keep their mouths shut (and let's face it, not all "leaks" are intentional) doesn't mean that classified military information can't be kept confidential. The military uses a different system. When you rely on strict need-to-know principles you reduce the number of PoFs (point of failure) to a minimum. Yes, there's always a few people who really do have a need-to-know but those can be hand-picked and are easier to monitor and control. Also, you can get away with implementing and enforcing a lot more stringent and intrusive security measures on military grounds than you can in a civilian workplace.
And, even though I realize that most of these bands that allow live recordings or even actively encourage them aren't exactly your garden variety pop band many of them seem to have quite a following. Maybe the grassroots, word-of-mouth approach isn't that bad afterall...
And I am just not sure the more "The Sims"-like approach will work all that well in a "Sim City" game (remember, "Sim Tower" which was about managing just one single building complex but in reality was little more than an elevator management simulation?).
Or, maybe I am just old-fashioned and like my 2D games way too much... ;)
Sure, you can use PINE or tin on an older PC without problems. Sure, you can try and shift the computing and processing burden away from the (thin) client. That, however, won't make the end users happy. They are accustomed to a certain level of usability, both regarding speed and user interface. People just plain don't want to deal with anything other - or less - than what they're used to.
So, whilst there are still applications for older systems as thin clients you're mostly limited to situations where your intended user base simply doesn't have a choice. As soon as they're paying for it or depending on your it for their daily work most people just won't accept being forced to use an old computer. They want their new, shiny PC and their sexy, modern LCD screen.
Having said that, I'd suggest that we use this FCC rule to our advantage. Because, realistically, there's not really a lot we can do about it anyway.
The problem, however, becomes an advantage if we view it as just another tool in the anti-spammer's tool box. Yes, it will most likely not help in a lot of cases but it doesn't really have to. It's just another tool, one tool among many others. Maybe it helps to just inconvenience or even shut down a handful of spammers and that's a handful less I have to worry about.
Also, try to stick with as few different vendors as possible. That way, you won't introduce unnecessary incompatibilities and you won't have to deal with different setups and configurations (that may not be such a big problem as long as you stick to using SoHo equipment, as it's usually fairly standard-compliant and easily configured through a web interface).
If your conference is really out in the middle of nowhere though consider turning to the pros. I have worked with T-Mobile techs on providing Internet access at an outdoor sports event in a fairly secluded area and have nothing but good things to say about them. Since there were no landlines and no WiFi coverage available we basically had to rely on cell transmissions. So we setup a IEEE 802.11 network and they provided the cell-phone backend. We had to put in a few restrictions (bandwidth throttling, etc) to ensure that the network was reasonably secure and to keep costs in check but it did work like a charm. Of course, that might not be an option depending on your choice of locale and your budget.
We would timestamp our .project files and each of us would have their login script finger the other group members, compare the timestamp to the one stored in a flat database (ASCII file) and then, if there were any changes, display the output of the finger command.
Simple, yet effective (plus, it was geeky enough to make sure that nobody outside of R&D or Coding ever bothered to check the status of projects).
These days, unfortunately, hardly anyone seems to be running fingerd and it's virtually always firewalled off to the outside world.
Hmm, I don't think anyone is seriously contemplating using high-speed equipment like this in a SoHo environment. We're rather talking backbone infrastructure. And, when you're dealing with backbone setups you simply cannot have enough bandwidth. These days, the limiting factor isn't actually technology - it's money.
Respidering a website doesn't just take up bandwidth but also a lot of CPU cycles. That's especially true if you're running extensive algorithm-based computations (like Google does) and not just doing a quick-and-dirty instant-add to a database. It would also allow webmasters to cheat the system: temporarily mirror some relevant, high-traffic site, have it reindexed, change the contents (porn, spam, you name it). After a while, the bot will reindex your site to see if your site's content has changed. At that point, all a rouge webmaster would have to do is, to repeat the process.
Futuristic-looking? Check.
Create enough hype to get VC, DARPA and NIH funding? Check.
In reality though, these are a far cry from being practical, cost-effective replacements for human security or maintenance personell. Well, maybe HP R&D does use them but that's about it as far as practical applications go (at least at this point). It just doesn't make sense to employ these outside of a tradeshow or R&D environment from a business point of view.
What happens, for instance, if an intruder does decide to jam the WiFi network (not really that hard to do)? Do the robots have the AI required to perform their scheduled tasks autonomously? Or will they require human supervision and internvetion (in that case, they aren't really anything more than cool, mobile surveillance cameras).
I'm sorry but I just don't see any practical applications (aside from, maybe, logistics) for these robots at this point.
According to this article it does if you have PageRank enabled. Of course, there's no way (at least that I can think of) to implement a PageRank-like system without having tracking usage.
I think a lot of the criticism that's been levelled at Google has been motivated by the fact that people, at least on some level, like or even care about Google and don't want to see it go down the drain. Amazon, on the other hand, is just some company...
So, after they get off of the elevater they scan the barcode tag with a wireless barcode reader which is connected the security company's network. Then they check the individual offices, scan the tags there and, after they're finished scan the sticker by the elevater again.
I don't know what prevents people from tampering with the server they're keeping the log files on (or from just copying the barcode stickers, for that matter) but the insurance company seems to think this provides a sufficient degree of security.