Don't know how much of a Linux user you are but I built a couple of wireless access points/relays for my neighbors that hook up the to the sflan network.
I used a couple of old junker laptops running Linux. This should be completely scalable to your situation.
Here's a link to how I did it. For a relay/access point the same principle applies, just use two cards, one with a directional antenna the links to you, the other with an omnidirectional that serves DHCP. I found that cheapo cards on old hardware works great.
There are plenty of sites that have intructions for building directional antennas. From my experience you don't need to spend a lot of money for this kind of thing.
I'm glad your sharing your bandwidth. More people need to do this. Hopefully, one day the Internet will be entirely wireless and free. Free meaning you don't have to pay an ISP, you just buy your equipment and you're online. Just like CB radio.
Feel free to use my email address at the above site if you have any questions.
By John Gribbin got me started in science. It's a bit light on the math and is somewhat non technical but pretty much covers the entire history of astronomy, the problems faced at each stage of discovery and how they were overcome.
For me it was a kind of aventure story whose protagonists were the scientists struggling to understand the meaning behind their observations. And how the next generation always builds on the discoveries of the previous.
You learn how we began to measure distance in the universe, how you theorize that such a galaxary is so many million light years away, from sodium lines in a laboratory to the composition of the stars, how you deduce everything is moving away from everything else, how a few clever people began to theorectically wind the clock back and apply basic physics principles to deduce a model of the early universe. Fascinating stuff for a geek.
Again, so much a technical book, but inspiring non the less.
This is an obscure bug that only occurs with the iptables "tcp-option" and even then the worse someone can do is DOS you and probably couldn't even do that if you configure iptables to drop ICMP packets.
The Microsft hole is much more significant -- keystroke logging that can send your banking account and social security numbers to a third party. I mean that's pretty serious. I know what you mean about people beating up on MS but there's no comparison here.
They seem to be more interested in their Stratellite(TM) than the Wi-Fi aspect. I suspect getting their high altidude airship in place will be the easier part of the project.
Issues not covered on their site:
What standards, if any will they be using? Will it be 802.X or will they develop their own Standard(TM)? Developing their own could be very expensive. And who will make the hardware for it? Will consumers pay the price?
What about power? The FCC restricts 802 to 100-200mW. If they want more they'll have to "pay off" the FCC and for that they'll probably need $100,000,000+, a very high initial investment.
Until we see more info on overcoming the bandwidth, interference, and power problems we'll probably have to conclude that this is all hype.
Your Linux cluster is the cheapest method I've found. I have one such TB box with 10 old/used/cheapo SCSI disks and using software RAID I built about 4 years ago. It acts as a backup server using rsync in a shell script that collects data from 15+ networked servers every night.
No, you're quite right. I agree. I guess my point of contention is with the FCC. IMHO local communties should decide on power limitations. So for a small town with a few users over a large area it may be more beneficial to use higher powered trancievers than for a densely populated city. But local municipalities should be able to make decisions about how much interference is acceptable through their own elected representatives.
The FCC's one-size-fits-all model is hindering WiFi's expansion.
BTW, in the O'Reilly 802.11 book a suggestion is made about speeding things up by disabling the RTS/CTS mechanism and allowing the CA system to handle contention. I guess, as always, experimentation is the key.
Yes, but with 802.11g and 802.16 the specs allow for up to 50+Mbps, several T1s. For surfing the net and reading email this is enough to supprort more users than may be commonly found in the limited area covered by the current power restrictions.
The 802.X specs cleverly implement CSMA/CA, a collision avoidance system that seems to work pretty well. From my rooftop (downtown San Francisco), I can see 150+ networks yet never experience any symptoms of interference.
Also, in setting the 802.11 limits on power the FCC seems to have overlooked the "skin depth" wavelength/2*pi attenuation factor that limits microwave ranges by a factor exponetially greater than for the longer wavelengths of many cell phones.
I operate a couple of nodes as part of the
sflan project and it would be nice if we could reduce the "line of sight" requirement just a tad by boosting the power, say from 200mW to 800mW.
It just ain't fair than big bucks phone comapanies can "buy" an FCC license and blast away at 1500W while us folks trying to provide a free community service have to operate with our hands tied.
A system collects the geographic information and allows web sites or other entities to request the geographic location of their visitors. The database of geographic locations may be stored in a central location or, alternatively, may be at least partially located at the web site.
Sounds like a patent on keeping geographical IP addresses in a database. These folks are truly great "inventors". Thanks to the PO for promoting the useful arts and sciences. Without such exclusive rights, nothing would get invented.
On a mission critcal HP-UX server containing millions of dollars of financial and payroll data and serving hundreds of users, I once did "rm -fr bin", thinking I was in my/home/root directory when I was actually in "/usr".
I could no longer "ls" or "cd" as HP-UX keeps those commands in/usr/bin. I had a tarred backup on tape, but no "tar" command to retrieve it and no "ftp" command to download a tar binary from another site.
Forunately, I had a another backup that was created with HP's fbackup utility and was able to do an frecover (which resides in/usr/sbin). Alas I was able to restore the/usr/bin dir in a few minutes.
If you do not agree with the license you can take it back and get a refund. There is no exception to this, if you bitch enough they will send you a cheque in exchange for your CD's.
Not so, unfortunately. I bought an IPAQ and installed Linux on it. Neither HP nor Microsoft would give me a refund for the MS operating system. Each told me to talk to the other.
The DOJ told me the MS vs. States ruling was an antitrust case and therefore you have to be out at least $50,000 for the DOJ to get involved.
My prediction: They'll be another MS antitrust case circa 2008 and this time MS will be broken up.
6. IF SUCH DOWNLOAD SHALL ALTER THE SPEED THE COMPUTER TRANSMITS DATA AND IF SO WHAT SUCH ALTERATION SHALL BE IN BITS PER SECOND.
Note the non technical term speed to describe bits per second.
Downloading doesn't alter the rate your computer transmits data,
it depends on bandwith capacity.
We need to inovate, not litigate. Spyware protection should to be built into the computer not regulated by the government.
It seems difficult to imagine how these kinds of operations promote the progress of useful arts.
What about our freedom to fulfill a fundamental human desire to
parse and disseminate knowledge and information?
From the DOJ anouncement: The investigations focused on individuals and organizations, known as ?warez? release groups, that s
pecialize in the Internet distribution of pirated materials. Release groups are the first-providers - t
he original source for most of the pirated works traded or distributed online. Once a release group pre
pares a stolen work for distribution, the material is distributed in minutes to secure, top-level warez
servers and made available to a select clientele. From there, within a matter of hours, the pirated wo
rks are further distributed throughout the world, ending up on public channels on IRC and peer-to-peer
file sharing networks accessible to anyone with Internet access.
What they describe is a highly efficient and cost effective file distribution method.
Society should be embracing this technology and maximizing its potential instead
of criminalizing those who use it.
When information is truly free the world will change in ways we cannot possibly imagine.
In the bigger picture DirecTV should have no right to control information it beams
over public airways. Unfortunately, the television industry, like the record industry before
it, will die a slow and litigious death.
I urge everyone, download DirecTV programs to your hard drive, convert to mpegs
using transcode,
and distribute on gnutella.
A senseless waste of our tax dollars.
This won't work because spammers know how to hide behind
hijacked computers and open relays, etc.. Having glanced through
these guides I couldn't
help thinking how easy it would be to distrubute spam containing
child pornography while posing as your competitor.
It's ironic that our elected officials can't take on tough issues like
health care but seem to have plenty of time to pen 161 pages
of rendantly abominable extraneous verbosity.
We've had the DMCA, now it's CAN-SPAM. What troubles me about these
laws is that they're ineffectual. People will copy DVDs and distribute
them, others will send unsolicited advertisements to any email address
they can get. Relax people. This is no biggy. For the domains I manage
I get about 1500 emails/day (webmaster, postmaster, admin, etc.) but I
use a spam filter and a procmail script to deal with it.
What we're asking here is for the government to control what comes into
our inboxes. I'm sure CAN-SPAM will be tied up in the courts for years
over it's implications on the First Amendment. The whole thing is a waste
of society's resources.
The essential building blocks of all technology come
the pursuit of truth, not dollars.
I think the general public really believes that
money is the sole incentive of technical creativity.
I agree money can be a good incentive if you're selling
televisions or computers, but the real
underlying work that went into the ability to produce
these things was done, not for profit, but more
because people were compelled by the process of discovery.
The integrated circuit is a good example. Most
of the fundamental research that went into the chip
came from a lot of painstaking research in solid state
physics and was carried out by researchers in university labs
making less than they would working for a Fortune 500 OEM.
People really are capable of doing things just for fun, because they're interested
in them, or just like knowing how things work.
However, people do need to get paid. But the question here should
be, how do we bring people together to create technology?
Wouldn't it be great to get all the top cancer
researchers together and see if they could make some headway on understanding tumors?
But how do we meet their needs, keep them happy, make sure they
are adequately compensated, etc.? Though this may be difficult to
accomplish under our current economic system, I think you'll
agree it's something we need to work towards as it seems to me a much better
approach than saying, "we have a pattent system, and if you
can find the cure for cancer, you can make a lot of money."
This seems so inefficient as comapanies tend to scramble over each
other, reinventing the wheel, keeping their research secret
and trying to make as much money as they can.
I'm a sys admin for about 20 Gnu/Linux servers. The reason I don't use proprietory software is, not because the company can't afford it(we certainly don't mind paying programmers to write for us). The the open stuff is so much better because.
There's nothing like ./configure make make install
It's so much easier to troubleshoot a missing library or edit some code to fix a problem.
The documentation that comes with proprietary software is usually lacking. But then the most important documentation, the source, is often never available at all.
I'm sorry this guy had such a hard time. But I'd stay away from those all-in-one commercial products. There's a reason why sendmail, samba, apache, etc. have been around so long. They may be
diffuclt to install and configure but have infinite flexibility
Who cares about the logos. I would think Mozilla would be glad of the free publicity. I use Firefox on linux, but if they're going to start suing T-shirt vendors I guess I'll be looking for a new browser.
A ridiculous monstrosity of redundant verbiage. But funny.
Notice they make an exception for JavaScript, but not for Java Applets or Servlets?
(Part 1, section 5b, iii).
I suppose Utah will be searching sourceforge for violators.
They also make an exception for obtaining the name of your operating system
(Part 1, section 5c).
They're legislating $ENVIRONMENT_VARIABLES?
This kind of thing should be up to the user. Why don't they fix health care.
Nothing to worry about here. Relax folks, it won't happen. This is just politicians
hoping for campaign contributions to their favorite political parties and leading
the entertainment industry into believing they can get something for them.
As soon as they start trying to word such legislation they'll be trouble. People will ask
difficult questions like:
What's peer-to-peer? If I telnet to port 25 of some host and start
piping a file would this constitute a P2P network? Why not?
Where do I put the warning for my sourceforge project?
Is a README.txt enough? Or do I have to have WARNING-FROM-MY-GOVERNMENT.txt?
Or should the warning be embedded in the program? My program is command-line only,
where does the warning go?
I'm firm believer in zero documentation. People should read the source if they need to know.
Therefore I won't be including your warning. Are you going to lock me up for refusing to
include documentation in software I wrote under my First Amendment right to free expression?
--
The pump don't work cause the vandals took the handle. --Dylan
1. Microsft will license the Gnu/Linux code from
SCO, incorporate that code into Windows then sell it as Microsoft binaries
under a non GPL Microsoft license.
2. SCO will lose their license claims in court, thus invalidating the Microsoft licenses.
3. Gnu/Linux lawyers will then sue Microsft and win.
4. Whistle blowers will begin to give evidence that Microsoft
engaged in anti competetive practices in attemting to aquire rights to Gnu/Linux.
5. Everyone who was inconvenienced by the SCO lawsuit will then sue
Microsoft under the Clayton and Sherman Anti Trust Acts and
this Microsoft will be broken up into separate companies.
Remember, Microsft was sued by 20 states and they lost! If they're found
guilty again of the same offense, a judge will likely have no other option.
This will happen around 2008.
1. The FBI is only "asking" the FCC which, anyway, lacks jurisdiction to tell IRC programmers how to program.
2. The Internet is becoming more decentralzed (e.g. anonymous wireless LANS,P2P networks, etc.) so there will be too many small time non compliant ISPs to go after. And the government, not for want of trying, has so far shown only futile attempts at regulating the Internet.
3. The only people for this are the FBI and a few conservative politicians. They're going up against the communications giants and equipment manufacuters -- financially secure industries with campaign contributions, lobby groups, and lots of lawyers.
4. Besides all that, they just don't get it. Any two connected nodes communicating by pulses (ones and zeros) can always encrypt their conversation. Language is a secret handshake.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't know how much of a Linux user you are but I built a couple of wireless access points/relays for my neighbors that hook up the to the sflan network.
I used a couple of old junker laptops running Linux. This should be completely scalable to your situation. Here's a link to how I did it. For a relay/access point the same principle applies, just use two cards, one with a directional antenna the links to you, the other with an omnidirectional that serves DHCP. I found that cheapo cards on old hardware works great.
There are plenty of sites that have intructions for building directional antennas. From my experience you don't need to spend a lot of money for this kind of thing.
I'm glad your sharing your bandwidth. More people need to do this. Hopefully, one day the Internet will be entirely wireless and free. Free meaning you don't have to pay an ISP, you just buy your equipment and you're online. Just like CB radio.
Feel free to use my email address at the above site if you have any questions.
By John Gribbin got me started in science. It's a bit light on the math and is somewhat non technical but pretty much covers the entire history of astronomy, the problems faced at each stage of discovery and how they were overcome.
For me it was a kind of aventure story whose protagonists were the scientists struggling to understand the meaning behind their observations. And how the next generation always builds on the discoveries of the previous.
You learn how we began to measure distance in the universe, how you theorize that such a galaxary is so many million light years away, from sodium lines in a laboratory to the composition of the stars, how you deduce everything is moving away from everything else, how a few clever people began to theorectically wind the clock back and apply basic physics principles to deduce a model of the early universe. Fascinating stuff for a geek.
Again, so much a technical book, but inspiring non the less.
This is an obscure bug that only occurs with the iptables "tcp-option" and even then the worse someone can do is DOS you and probably couldn't even do that if you configure iptables to drop ICMP packets.
The Microsft hole is much more significant -- keystroke logging that can send your banking account and social security numbers to a third party. I mean that's pretty serious. I know what you mean about people beating up on MS but there's no comparison here.
They seem to be more interested in their Stratellite(TM) than the Wi-Fi aspect. I suspect getting their high altidude airship in place will be the easier part of the project.
Issues not covered on their site:
What standards, if any will they be using?
Will it be 802.X or will they develop their own Standard(TM)? Developing their own could be very expensive. And who will make the hardware for it? Will consumers pay the price?
What about power? The FCC restricts 802 to 100-200mW. If they want more they'll have to "pay off" the FCC and for that they'll probably need $100,000,000+, a very high initial investment.
Until we see more info on overcoming the bandwidth, interference, and power problems we'll probably have to conclude that this is all hype.
does the "common man" need 1.6TB?
When the IBM introduced the first PC back in th 1980s, it was often described as a solution without a problem.
If you could put 1.6TB on something the size of a postage stamp, the "comman man" would soon find a need for it.
Your Linux cluster is the cheapest method I've found. I have one such TB box with 10 old/used/cheapo SCSI disks and using software RAID I built about 4 years ago. It acts as a backup server using rsync in a shell script that collects data from 15+ networked servers every night.
Never had a problem with it.
Guess that's what the "I" in RAID is for.
No, you're quite right. I agree. I guess my point of contention is with the FCC. IMHO local communties should decide on power limitations. So for a small town with a few users over a large area it may be more beneficial to use higher powered trancievers than for a densely populated city. But local municipalities should be able to make decisions about how much interference is acceptable through their own elected representatives.
The FCC's one-size-fits-all model is hindering WiFi's expansion.
BTW, in the O'Reilly 802.11 book a suggestion is made about speeding things up by disabling the RTS/CTS mechanism and allowing the CA system to handle contention. I guess, as always, experimentation is the key.
Yes, but with 802.11g and 802.16 the specs allow for up to 50+Mbps, several T1s. For surfing the net and reading email this is enough to supprort more users than may be commonly found in the limited area covered by the current power restrictions.
The 802.X specs cleverly implement CSMA/CA, a collision avoidance system that seems to work pretty well. From my rooftop (downtown San Francisco), I can see 150+ networks yet never experience any symptoms of interference.
Also, in setting the 802.11 limits on power the FCC seems to have overlooked the "skin depth" wavelength/2*pi attenuation factor that limits microwave ranges by a factor exponetially greater than for the longer wavelengths of many cell phones.
I operate a couple of nodes as part of the sflan project and it would be nice if we could reduce the "line of sight" requirement just a tad by boosting the power, say from 200mW to 800mW.
It just ain't fair than big bucks phone comapanies can "buy" an FCC license and blast away at 1500W while us folks trying to provide a free community service have to operate with our hands tied.
Many of these problems can be easily solved with more power. The FCC has imposed severe power limitations on 802.11 of about 100-200mW per channel.
If the FCC would allow us amatuers to use, say, half the power that cell phone companies do, we'd be able to Wi-Fi the whole country.
Give us the tools and we'll finish job.
A system collects the geographic information and allows web sites or other entities to request the geographic location of their visitors. The database of geographic locations may be stored in a central location or, alternatively, may be at least partially located at the web site.
Sounds like a patent on keeping geographical IP addresses in a database. These folks are truly great "inventors". Thanks to the PO for promoting the useful arts and sciences. Without such exclusive rights, nothing would get invented.
On a mission critcal HP-UX server containing millions of dollars of financial and payroll data and serving hundreds of users, I once did "rm -fr bin", thinking I was in my /home/root directory when I was actually in "/usr".
/usr/bin. I had a tarred backup on tape, but no "tar" command to retrieve it and no "ftp" command to download a tar binary from another site.
/usr/sbin). Alas I was able to restore the /usr/bin dir in a few minutes.
I could no longer "ls" or "cd" as HP-UX keeps those commands in
Forunately, I had a another backup that was created with HP's fbackup utility and was able to do an frecover (which resides in
The users never noticed.
If you do not agree with the license you can take it back and get a refund. There is no exception to this, if you bitch enough they will send you a cheque in exchange for your CD's.
Not so, unfortunately. I bought an IPAQ and installed Linux on it. Neither HP nor Microsoft would give me a refund for the MS operating system. Each told me to talk to the other.
The DOJ told me the MS vs. States ruling was an antitrust case and therefore you have to be out at least $50,000 for the DOJ to get involved.
My prediction: They'll be another MS antitrust case circa 2008 and this time MS will be broken up.
6. IF SUCH DOWNLOAD SHALL ALTER THE SPEED THE COMPUTER TRANSMITS DATA AND IF SO WHAT SUCH ALTERATION SHALL BE IN BITS PER SECOND.
Note the non technical term speed to describe bits per second. Downloading doesn't alter the rate your computer transmits data, it depends on bandwith capacity.
We need to inovate, not litigate. Spyware protection should to be built into the computer not regulated by the government.
It seems difficult to imagine how these kinds of operations promote the progress of useful arts.
What about our freedom to fulfill a fundamental human desire to parse and disseminate knowledge and information?
From the DOJ anouncement:
The investigations focused on individuals and organizations, known as ?warez? release groups, that s pecialize in the Internet distribution of pirated materials. Release groups are the first-providers - t he original source for most of the pirated works traded or distributed online. Once a release group pre pares a stolen work for distribution, the material is distributed in minutes to secure, top-level warez servers and made available to a select clientele. From there, within a matter of hours, the pirated wo rks are further distributed throughout the world, ending up on public channels on IRC and peer-to-peer file sharing networks accessible to anyone with Internet access.
What they describe is a highly efficient and cost effective file distribution method. Society should be embracing this technology and maximizing its potential instead of criminalizing those who use it.
When information is truly free the world will change in ways we cannot possibly imagine.
Start here: open proxies
In the bigger picture DirecTV should have no right to control information it beams over public airways. Unfortunately, the television industry, like the record industry before it, will die a slow and litigious death.
I urge everyone, download DirecTV programs to your hard drive, convert to mpegs using transcode, and distribute on gnutella.
That'll learn them.
Let the world change. Out with old.
A senseless waste of our tax dollars. This won't work because spammers know how to hide behind hijacked computers and open relays, etc.. Having glanced through these guides I couldn't help thinking how easy it would be to distrubute spam containing child pornography while posing as your competitor.
It's ironic that our elected officials can't take on tough issues like health care but seem to have plenty of time to pen 161 pages of rendantly abominable extraneous verbosity.
We've had the DMCA, now it's CAN-SPAM. What troubles me about these laws is that they're ineffectual. People will copy DVDs and distribute them, others will send unsolicited advertisements to any email address they can get. Relax people. This is no biggy. For the domains I manage I get about 1500 emails/day (webmaster, postmaster, admin, etc.) but I use a spam filter and a procmail script to deal with it.
What we're asking here is for the government to control what comes into our inboxes. I'm sure CAN-SPAM will be tied up in the courts for years over it's implications on the First Amendment. The whole thing is a waste of society's resources.
The essential building blocks of all technology come the pursuit of truth, not dollars.
I think the general public really believes that money is the sole incentive of technical creativity. I agree money can be a good incentive if you're selling televisions or computers, but the real underlying work that went into the ability to produce these things was done, not for profit, but more because people were compelled by the process of discovery.
The integrated circuit is a good example. Most of the fundamental research that went into the chip came from a lot of painstaking research in solid state physics and was carried out by researchers in university labs making less than they would working for a Fortune 500 OEM.
People really are capable of doing things just for fun, because they're interested in them, or just like knowing how things work.
However, people do need to get paid. But the question here should be, how do we bring people together to create technology? Wouldn't it be great to get all the top cancer researchers together and see if they could make some headway on understanding tumors? But how do we meet their needs, keep them happy, make sure they are adequately compensated, etc.? Though this may be difficult to accomplish under our current economic system, I think you'll agree it's something we need to work towards as it seems to me a much better approach than saying, "we have a pattent system, and if you can find the cure for cancer, you can make a lot of money." This seems so inefficient as comapanies tend to scramble over each other, reinventing the wheel, keeping their research secret and trying to make as much money as they can.
Thoughts?
I'm a sys admin for about 20 Gnu/Linux servers. The reason I don't use proprietory software is, not because the company can't afford it(we certainly don't mind paying programmers to write for us). The the open stuff is so much better because.
./configure
There's nothing like
make
make install
It's so much easier to troubleshoot a missing library or edit some code to fix a problem.
The documentation that comes with proprietary software is usually lacking. But then the most important documentation, the source, is often never available at all.
I'm sorry this guy had such a hard time. But I'd stay away from those all-in-one commercial products. There's a reason why sendmail, samba, apache, etc. have been around so long. They may be diffuclt to install and configure but have infinite flexibility
Who cares about the logos. I would think Mozilla would be glad of the free publicity. I use Firefox on linux, but if they're going to start suing T-shirt vendors I guess I'll be looking for a new browser.
A ridiculous monstrosity of redundant verbiage. But funny.
Notice they make an exception for JavaScript, but not for Java Applets or Servlets? (Part 1, section 5b, iii). I suppose Utah will be searching sourceforge for violators.
They also make an exception for obtaining the name of your operating system (Part 1, section 5c). They're legislating $ENVIRONMENT_VARIABLES?
This kind of thing should be up to the user. Why don't they fix health care.
Nothing to worry about here. Relax folks, it won't happen. This is just politicians hoping for campaign contributions to their favorite political parties and leading the entertainment industry into believing they can get something for them.
As soon as they start trying to word such legislation they'll be trouble. People will ask difficult questions like:
What's peer-to-peer? If I telnet to port 25 of some host and start piping a file would this constitute a P2P network? Why not?
Where do I put the warning for my sourceforge project? Is a README.txt enough? Or do I have to have WARNING-FROM-MY-GOVERNMENT.txt? Or should the warning be embedded in the program? My program is command-line only, where does the warning go?
I'm firm believer in zero documentation. People should read the source if they need to know. Therefore I won't be including your warning. Are you going to lock me up for refusing to include documentation in software I wrote under my First Amendment right to free expression?
--
The pump don't work cause the vandals took the handle. --Dylan
America was founded on civil disobediance. The founding fathers broke English law to establish a better life.
1. Microsft will license the Gnu/Linux code from SCO, incorporate that code into Windows then sell it as Microsoft binaries under a non GPL Microsoft license.
2. SCO will lose their license claims in court, thus invalidating the Microsoft licenses.
3. Gnu/Linux lawyers will then sue Microsft and win.
4. Whistle blowers will begin to give evidence that Microsoft engaged in anti competetive practices in attemting to aquire rights to Gnu/Linux.
5. Everyone who was inconvenienced by the SCO lawsuit will then sue Microsoft under the Clayton and Sherman Anti Trust Acts and this Microsoft will be broken up into separate companies. Remember, Microsft was sued by 20 states and they lost! If they're found guilty again of the same offense, a judge will likely have no other option. This will happen around 2008.
Wouldn't worry about this.
1. The FBI is only "asking" the FCC which, anyway, lacks jurisdiction to tell IRC programmers how to program.
2. The Internet is becoming more decentralzed (e.g. anonymous wireless LANS,P2P networks, etc.) so there will be too many small time non compliant ISPs to go after. And the government, not for want of trying, has so far shown only futile attempts at regulating the Internet.
3. The only people for this are the FBI and a few conservative politicians. They're going up against the communications giants and equipment manufacuters -- financially secure industries with campaign contributions, lobby groups, and lots of lawyers.
4. Besides all that, they just don't get it. Any two connected nodes communicating by pulses (ones and zeros) can always encrypt their conversation. Language is a secret handshake.