The cynic in me thinks it will go this way: They make this announcement today. For the next few months, they do absolutely nothing. Then, they fabricate a bunch of data, and announce that they've determined that 99% of all P2P traffic is protected by copyright. Authorities cowtow, and those "three-strikes" laws get put in place (and enforced) everywhere.
It doesn't matter that the data was faked...they expressly stated that it would all be anonymised and not linked to any specific customer...so how can anyone prove it's been faked?
There is another way of looking at it. Though I can't see it gaining much traction on here.
I don't imagine most ISPs really want to start cutting off their customers by the thousand. Particularly not when it's a tough enough business with very slim margins as it is.
What if their numbers (fabricated or otherwise) showed the exact opposite? That 99% of P2P traffic is not illegally traded copyright material? Suddenly that "3 strikes" rule is starting to look a little harder to defend...
The only plausible explanation we could think of was that someone was intercepting and decrypting traffic in real time and filtering what they didn't like.
What would be the motive?
The only one we could come up with is that SIP is used for VoIP, and one of the offices was in a country well-known for protecting the national telco.
It's not that difficult. Depending on the design of clamp, there are a few methods:
1. Some clamps don't have chains, they just surround the tyre. Solution: Let the tyre down, jack up the car, cut the inside circumference from behind, turn it inside out and take the clamp off. Obviously you now need a new tyre but that may be cheaper.
2. I've actually seen clamps so incompetently applied that they weren't locked in place - they could literally just be pulled away.
3. (If the clamp is chained behind the wheel into the suspension) Jack up the car then remove the wheel at the suspension arm. Remove clamp, re-attach wheel, drive away. Certainly in the UK, this is perfectly legal. Though clampers tend to be very large intimidating shaved apes who will make all sorts of threatening noises...
Virgin are in a strong position in the UK and they know it.
Firstly, ADSL 2 has yet to see widespread rollout. If you're in a cabled area, they hold a nationwide monopoly over that cable and it's far and away the fastest option for Internet access.
Secondly, every time something like this is announced virtually every other ISP is not far behind. It's unlikely - nay, unthinkable - that the company flogging this to Virgin isn't trying to flog it to every other ISP and with the government seriously advocating a "three strikes and you're out" rule, I can see such a product being quite attractive.
If they can tell what files I'm sending over an encrypted VPN link, then they have some impressive technology indeed.
At the risk of being branded a tinfoil-hat wearing nutcase, my employer used to use CIPE for a VPN between two offices. At the time I started, CIPE had already been discredited as being fundamentally insecure but nobody really thought it was going to be intercepted unless you had pissed off a government somewhere.
Then we had a problem. SIP traffic of any description going over that VPN link didn't make it across. (Kind of important when your employer produces SIP software).
Everything else made it fine. And there wasn't a firewall on the traffic going over the VPN. But SIP? Nope, ethereal on both ends proved that what went in one end didn't make it out the other - and it wasn't random packet loss. Just one protocol. The only plausible explanation we could think of was that someone was intercepting and decrypting traffic in real time and filtering what they didn't like.
Unfortunately, it's not practical to keep the public keys of every single organisation on the planet you may wish to trust.
So instead, certificate authorities (a trusted third party) vouch that the public key you are being presented really is from who it claims to be.
Which is well and good but unless you have a certificate authority which only ever grants certificates to people who are not part of the ISP or the music industry, it's more or less useless for this purpose.
I hate to defend Microsoft in this, but most likely this is what the end-users wanted. Well, not the multi-lingual ones (and current localization is fucked up beyond repair regarding this). Consider that a French user will not think of the word "Sum" when he wants to make a sum. He'll think of "Somme".
Quite correct. Which is why the function should have an internal name (which is used in saved files, by OLE when copying/pasting etc) and a separate i18n layer which deals with presenting it to the end user in the language they expect.
Or you just rename everything for every different version and experience the problems the GP described.
Sounds like absolutely typical Microsoft localisation - rumour has it that their first attempts involved putting everything through an automated translator then cleaning up the result.
I'm given to understand that this caused quite a bit of trouble with a postscript printer driver....
What's next, will we have the People's Assembly of China send a letter to the European Commission saying "You guys over-reacted on the whole toxic paint on child's toys thing" ???
I'm not sure if it's intentional, but you've made a hell of a good point right there.
I strongly suspect that the manufacturing capacity of Europe is rather a lot smaller than the total EU-wide demand for consumer goods (eg. childs toys). It follows that if the EC were to receive such a letter, they couldn't very well respond by saying "Fine. We'll embargo all your products" for very long - they'd drive the prices for a lot of items up so high that the politicians in member states would have Hell to pay.
I've seen exactly what I described before - now while that was at a private school so I can't speak for government, I wouldn't be at all surprised if it's typical and IMO it was more through ignorance than corruption.
Certainly in that case, the senior staff had got it into their heads that their needs were unusual and required a specialist in education - probably because (in the UK at least) most of the big vendors that chase after schools make a big deal of being "specialists in education".
The best way to do that is to do the best job for the best price. That's why something "smells" here..
If you'll excuse my saying so, that's an incredibly naive way of seeing things.
IME there are lots of business plans which history has shown can all work very well indeed.
Off the top of my head, there's:
Provide a good product at a reasonable price, and try your damndest to have just one slight edge over the competition - maybe cheaper by a very narrow margin, maybe a slightly better product. (This is basically the one you describe, and is the most obvious).
Order 1,000 leaflets announcing you are "specialists in Education" and send them to every school you can think of. Don't worry too much about the quality of your product/service or its price.
As above, but the leaflets announce that you are "specialists in supplying the public sector" and send them to every government body you can think of.
If you have a small enough laptop bring it. No need for a new power cord, just get a plug adapter, unless your power brick really won't handle 240 V (most modern ones do).
Some US companies are selling power bricks that don't handle 240V.
(We had a US colleague blow up four on the trot that way. I think he was let go shortly after that...)
The whole point is that the compilation step isn't necessary, you could attach it to an email and it'd get clean through most filters. All you need to do then is socially engineer a person into running it by first renaming it to.exe.
Of course, this will fail horribly against anyone who's set up their email system with the aid of more than two or three brain cells. Any sensible system will look directly at the file, not its extension.
I remember reading that what Rupert Murdoch actually wants is headlines to be trawled as currently done, but for actual news items to be paid for.
How is he going to do this when nobody who works for him has actually written a news item themselves (rather than just repeated a press release or copied directly from AP or Reuters) for years?
Any living language changes over time; at one time many English towns had roads called "Gropecunte Lane" and a former president of the US made a faux pas by translating the speech he was going to make to the French himself. Baiser had acquired different connotations since he was in school; his plane landed and he informed the eagerly awaiting French that he wanted to hump them
High-res CCDs are relatively cheap and since the phones don't advertise the resolution of the image as stored, it's a great marketing ploy.
High res CCDs are cheap but the image quality you get out of a camera is strongly influenced by the physical size of the CCD versus its resolution. Put simply, a 5MP CCD that's 10mm on the diagonal will show less noise than an 8MP CCD of the same size. The difference is even more pronounced when you're looking at the miniscule CCDs that go into mobile phones.
There is, but you and I don't get much say in the design of a typical laptop and a significant amount of computer kit doesn't have filters on the air inlets.
Slashdot Mirror
The cynic in me thinks it will go this way: They make this announcement today. For the next few months, they do absolutely nothing. Then, they fabricate a bunch of data, and announce that they've determined that 99% of all P2P traffic is protected by copyright. Authorities cowtow, and those "three-strikes" laws get put in place (and enforced) everywhere.
It doesn't matter that the data was faked...they expressly stated that it would all be anonymised and not linked to any specific customer...so how can anyone prove it's been faked?
There is another way of looking at it. Though I can't see it gaining much traction on here.
I don't imagine most ISPs really want to start cutting off their customers by the thousand. Particularly not when it's a tough enough business with very slim margins as it is.
What if their numbers (fabricated or otherwise) showed the exact opposite? That 99% of P2P traffic is not illegally traded copyright material? Suddenly that "3 strikes" rule is starting to look a little harder to defend...
What would be the motive?
The only one we could come up with is that SIP is used for VoIP, and one of the offices was in a country well-known for protecting the national telco.
Which is fine if you're downloading a file which comes in its entirety from a single source (eg. an HTTP download).
It's not, however, quite so useful when the file is coming from a number of sources simultaneously (eg. BitTorrent).
It's not that difficult. Depending on the design of clamp, there are a few methods:
1. Some clamps don't have chains, they just surround the tyre. Solution: Let the tyre down, jack up the car, cut the inside circumference from behind, turn it inside out and take the clamp off. Obviously you now need a new tyre but that may be cheaper.
2. I've actually seen clamps so incompetently applied that they weren't locked in place - they could literally just be pulled away.
3. (If the clamp is chained behind the wheel into the suspension) Jack up the car then remove the wheel at the suspension arm. Remove clamp, re-attach wheel, drive away. Certainly in the UK, this is perfectly legal. Though clampers tend to be very large intimidating shaved apes who will make all sorts of threatening noises...
I think you overestimate the anger that would be experienced.
While most people may do it, they usually know full well it's illegal. It's just that the risk of suffering any serious consequences is miniscule.
My guess is that most people will shrug their shoulders and say "Ah well. It was nice while it lasted".
Be interesting to see how many people continue to subscribe to the most expensive, fastest deal though...
Virgin are in a strong position in the UK and they know it.
Firstly, ADSL 2 has yet to see widespread rollout. If you're in a cabled area, they hold a nationwide monopoly over that cable and it's far and away the fastest option for Internet access.
Secondly, every time something like this is announced virtually every other ISP is not far behind. It's unlikely - nay, unthinkable - that the company flogging this to Virgin isn't trying to flog it to every other ISP and with the government seriously advocating a "three strikes and you're out" rule, I can see such a product being quite attractive.
If they can tell what files I'm sending over an encrypted VPN link, then they have some impressive technology indeed.
At the risk of being branded a tinfoil-hat wearing nutcase, my employer used to use CIPE for a VPN between two offices. At the time I started, CIPE had already been discredited as being fundamentally insecure but nobody really thought it was going to be intercepted unless you had pissed off a government somewhere.
Then we had a problem. SIP traffic of any description going over that VPN link didn't make it across. (Kind of important when your employer produces SIP software).
Everything else made it fine. And there wasn't a firewall on the traffic going over the VPN. But SIP? Nope, ethereal on both ends proved that what went in one end didn't make it out the other - and it wasn't random packet loss. Just one protocol. The only plausible explanation we could think of was that someone was intercepting and decrypting traffic in real time and filtering what they didn't like.
We stopped using CIPE shortly after that.
How about some peer-to-peer mechanism that bypasses the ISP's altogether?
Easy enough if you're using dialup. Kind of hard, however, when the ISP owns the line going into your house.
Unfortunately, it's not practical to keep the public keys of every single organisation on the planet you may wish to trust.
So instead, certificate authorities (a trusted third party) vouch that the public key you are being presented really is from who it claims to be.
Which is well and good but unless you have a certificate authority which only ever grants certificates to people who are not part of the ISP or the music industry, it's more or less useless for this purpose.
I hate to defend Microsoft in this, but most likely this is what the end-users wanted. Well, not the multi-lingual ones (and current localization is fucked up beyond repair regarding this). Consider that a French user will not think of the word "Sum" when he wants to make a sum. He'll think of "Somme".
Quite correct. Which is why the function should have an internal name (which is used in saved files, by OLE when copying/pasting etc) and a separate i18n layer which deals with presenting it to the end user in the language they expect.
Or you just rename everything for every different version and experience the problems the GP described.
Sounds like absolutely typical Microsoft localisation - rumour has it that their first attempts involved putting everything through an automated translator then cleaning up the result.
I'm given to understand that this caused quite a bit of trouble with a postscript printer driver....
What's next, will we have the People's Assembly of China send a letter to the European Commission saying "You guys over-reacted on the whole toxic paint on child's toys thing" ???
I'm not sure if it's intentional, but you've made a hell of a good point right there.
I strongly suspect that the manufacturing capacity of Europe is rather a lot smaller than the total EU-wide demand for consumer goods (eg. childs toys). It follows that if the EC were to receive such a letter, they couldn't very well respond by saying "Fine. We'll embargo all your products" for very long - they'd drive the prices for a lot of items up so high that the politicians in member states would have Hell to pay.
Maybe things are different where you are but in the UK most of the police forces nationwide publish crime statistics annually on their website.
While serious crime generally does tend to get cleared up, most of the forces have an absolutely lousy rate for non-violent offences.
I've seen exactly what I described before - now while that was at a private school so I can't speak for government, I wouldn't be at all surprised if it's typical and IMO it was more through ignorance than corruption.
Certainly in that case, the senior staff had got it into their heads that their needs were unusual and required a specialist in education - probably because (in the UK at least) most of the big vendors that chase after schools make a big deal of being "specialists in education".
The best way to do that is to do the best job for the best price. That's why something "smells" here..
If you'll excuse my saying so, that's an incredibly naive way of seeing things.
IME there are lots of business plans which history has shown can all work very well indeed.
Off the top of my head, there's:
If you have a small enough laptop bring it. No need for a new power cord, just get a plug adapter, unless your power brick really won't handle 240 V (most modern ones do).
Some US companies are selling power bricks that don't handle 240V.
(We had a US colleague blow up four on the trot that way. I think he was let go shortly after that...)
*whooosh*
carried by an African swallow. There's another one behind carrying a coconut.
That only becomes an issue if someone finds a way of persuading the email client to attempt to execute the text of the message.
Which is not to say there isn't some obscure bug somewhere which does this, but I don't think this is the end of the world.
The whole point is that the compilation step isn't necessary, you could attach it to an email and it'd get clean through most filters. All you need to do then is socially engineer a person into running it by first renaming it to .exe.
Of course, this will fail horribly against anyone who's set up their email system with the aid of more than two or three brain cells. Any sensible system will look directly at the file, not its extension.
If the weight ratio is too great, you could simply have two planes and suspend the pilot on a line between the wings.
Probably necessary in more northern latitudes such as Europe, but in Africa I reckon one plane could easily carry the pilot.
I remember reading that what Rupert Murdoch actually wants is headlines to be trawled as currently done, but for actual news items to be paid for.
How is he going to do this when nobody who works for him has actually written a news item themselves (rather than just repeated a press release or copied directly from AP or Reuters) for years?
You're wasting your time.
Any living language changes over time; at one time many English towns had roads called "Gropecunte Lane" and a former president of the US made a faux pas by translating the speech he was going to make to the French himself. Baiser had acquired different connotations since he was in school; his plane landed and he informed the eagerly awaiting French that he wanted to hump them
High-res CCDs are relatively cheap and since the phones don't advertise the resolution of the image as stored, it's a great marketing ploy.
High res CCDs are cheap but the image quality you get out of a camera is strongly influenced by the physical size of the CCD versus its resolution. Put simply, a 5MP CCD that's 10mm on the diagonal will show less noise than an 8MP CCD of the same size. The difference is even more pronounced when you're looking at the miniscule CCDs that go into mobile phones.
I have and it has been.
There's always this thing called a "filter"
There is, but you and I don't get much say in the design of a typical laptop and a significant amount of computer kit doesn't have filters on the air inlets.