A more realistic fake evidence was the Amateur Action pornography BBS. They were shipped, unsolicited, child porn from a postal inspector in another state. They never opened the box, since they hadn't even ordered it. There's a fairly good write-up of the event at http://www.loundy.com/CDLB/AABBS.html.
They got convicted for other charges, in another state with which they did not knowingly do business, with evidence gathered from this attempted entrapment for an original crime they did not, in fact, commit. Proper forensic analysis is demonstrably trumped by a prosecutor with an agenda and a willingness to bend or break the constitution to get whomever they see as 'the bad guy'.
This is an unheard level of competence and careful chains of custody in the work I've seen. Take a good look at what happened with Grady Ward's hard drives, where his hard drives were seized and handed over directly to the plaintiffs, the church of Scientology, who secretly replaced the drives with copies of their cult secret documents removed, then claimed it would be a violation of their religious beliefs to return the originals. And they were not, to the best of my knowledge, punished for this. When that kind of brazen mishandling of evidence occurs, it's very helpful to have deep pockets and a reputation for ferocity in court on your side.
In other cases, the investigating officers were too clueless to understand even the basic tools of computer evidence handling, and I've wound up giving a fast explanation that no, you do *NOT* run a fancy recovery tool and go typing in passwords, you image the drive first with a live CD and work on the image, unless you want to spend one heck of a lot of extra money and go to examining the physical media for overwritten data.
If you want to write from scratch, write your own compiler and build your own system from melted glass. The time wasted encountering and solving a variety of problems already solved by others is very, very easy to describe, and there is little guarantee of even the limited success demonstrated by the best of the older code.
The amount of time I've wasted arriving after some in-house project that one person wrote, everyone got stuck with, and needed to be ripped out and replaced with the standard open source tool when that one person got transferred away or they discovered its limitations the hard way would have given me a month off of work every year of my professional life. Chat clients may be the worst of the bunch: watching those harsh lessons relearned by every sophomore who just learned a new language and thinks the new language won't run into the same issues is in for big, big surprises.
Good luck with that, then. Have you really dealt with more than a 100 clients? The ability of poor clients to use up far, far more than their share of your resources expands when you're providing a service to a whole town and it's almost impossible to refuse any one person business. But since you've apparently actually _done_ some similar work, I hope it goes well for you.
Now wait until you try to get zoning permits to run cable through some medically retired state rep's backyard. That is one of the most painful things I've ever seen an ISP try to do.
A lot of them don't have enough bandwidth yet to be effective filesharing sources. As soon as that occures, we should see a real explosion of the schemes there to limit their bandwidth usage.
I've seen such confusion with cell phone plans. There's a famous recording of a tech support call where the tech support people refused to understand that the advertised number such as $.0001/Kbyte added up to 10 cents/Mbyte, not $10/MByte. The poor caller went through a number of such staff who could not do simple math.
Great: do you have _any idea_ what the infrastructure costs of something like that are? Backup fiber, alternative, bandwidth peering costs? And getting the Tier 1 or even Tier 3 providers to give you a feed, with the 'business lunches' that their VP's are fed, pack in their wallets, or suck up their noses?
I've had to deal with some of the bandwidth salespeople of mid-size and larger ISP's, and they're worse than retirement home salesmen. They tell you to "dream" a lot, but don't want to talk about the details of how their disaster recovery works, how many fibers they'll actually install, or about where they keep coming up with this "5 9's" number, since it's obvious from the news reports that they can't even make 98% claims for the last 3 years.
The costs of having a commercial ISP deal with that for me is like the cost of paying a mechanic to change my oil: it's well worth the price to keep my hands clean.
Install a RedHat package mirror on some host that has peering with both networks. Then buy RedHat licenses, but install CentOS to get the best of both worlds: just don't tell RedHat that you're actually using CentOS. (The RedHat Network software management system is one of the single worst things about their OS, that pipeline to their central update is notoriously overwhelmed and awkward to mirror internally, and their package manager ignores locally set preferences for other repositories.)
I've built, and rebuilt, plenty of boxes for salvage and custom-built systems. I'm glad you're finding good success in your _custom built_ systems. But the average desktop drive has been, in my experience, considerably more noisy. SATA was a good step, especially to provide cleaner cabling and better airflow for all systems. It can let you have a noticeably smaller fan, for example, and it has let us _throw out SCSI mis-connections_ and misnegotiations by not doing that hated chaining together of drives.
But I can certainly hear them. When working in a busy environment, where I might have six machines near my desk, it's quite noticeable. And when playing a "first-person sneaker" game, like the old "Thief", or listening to music that wasn't remastered for modern CD recording and actually has a normal dynamic range, it's more of a problem.
A PXE and DHCP setup that provides a local OS image to load and run works very well in server environments, and in large identical client configurations like university computer rooms. Updating the single primary image becomes trivial.
You've apparently not been stuck with a typical desktop computer, in a quiet house or apartment. It makes it hard to hear soft sounds: music and video played by the computer itself, for example, is cluttered with the fan and drive noise. You may not notice it, because you've gotten used to it or have a noisy environment.
Then you can't use most IM clients, which are notoriously bad at security for their transactions. Jabber, for example, had 'jabberd' as their archetype installer. That installer used a text file of clear-text passwords, with no encryption of the transaction, as the default server configuration. The time you save using a simple, commercial, well-supported, and well-respected solution can be better applied to securing your backups, making sure your user accounts are Kerberized, making sure former employees don't have privileges that will let them into your buildings or networks, etc.
I've done several Jabber setups and other IM clients, and most of them had major flaws. Unless Jabber, or some implementation of it, has matured a lot, I just can't see it as robust.
In this case, for once, I have to say just use a commercial solution. Maintaining your own servers is expensive, and supporting it is a headache your IT people don't need. Just go with Skype if you want video and free phone service as well, that is very multi-platform. It's not open source, I admit, but it works well.
And high-end graphics is one of the flaws of virtualization. You really need to talk to the graphics card, directly, to do that.
I can play a number of modest games well under Xen virtualization. I'll be very interested in what RedHat does with their new support of KVM virtualization, and whether they manage to do this in Fedora.
Would you care to make a bet on that Windows 7? Microsoft remains driven by feature addition, not speed. We can expect their integration of.NET, Palladium's DRM features (mislabeled Trusted Computing), and new gaming features (to finally prevent the use of new games or software on XP).
Windows 7 will be bent on killing off XP. That may force it to avoid the 'features' that have made Vista a dog, but there's no chance of going to the simpler tools and final integration fo the NT kernel to a consumer OS that made XP work well. They just don't have anywhere new to go with it in a new feature way, unless Microsoft's 'Cloud Computing' takes off. And that's unlikely.
This is not for 'the network'. This is for the patients whose data is on those systems, and for whome it's life-critical private information. It's also for the lawyers, to be able to say "we encrypted it on the servers and laptops, it didn't get stolen from us".
It's also much easier, and in many cases cheaper, to say "encrypt everything!" than to work out policies and exceptions. Maintaining those exceptions cost expensive technical and management time: is making the exception worth it? Or can you just buy another encrypted server to split the load?
They were found to be unconstitutional when they were run by the State Department, and they were quickly transferred to the Department of Commerce when Dan Bernstein won his lawsuit over it. These are not the only such export regulations, but these are the ones that prevent your telephone calls, banking transactions, and email from having far more robust protection end to end. This government, and previous ones do not want to permit robust protection from foreign or from their own country's uses. This would otherwise present a great deal of warrant-free and unlimited monitoring, such as that done by the US 'Carnivore' program, which is still in use with a new name, and the kind of backbone monitor over which the EFF is suing the NSA and AT&T.
Make no mistake, those regulations are unconstitutional. Nothing magically changed except liability when they got moved, and now the specter of 'terrorism' is being raised to prevent their end.
Do you want someone who pushes for your interests, or who actually gets them? Having lots of gumption is great. If you want that, I'm sure we could send you Cheney. But getting you anything you actually need, I hear Bill Clinton needs a new job. I wouldn't want to be in that house with Hillary right now, and a nice retirement away from the USA might give him or them something else to do.
The card should have been locked into the machine until the voter said 'OK' or cleared the screen, and locked it in with an alert and a deactivation warning if the person left the booth without doing either. Anyone can get confused about simple directions for an entirely new system. How many of us have tried to walk away from an ATM with our card still in it because we were distracted?
Documenting, via open hardware standards, how to make or read a paperback book does no good when the paperbacks are manufactured with acid-laden paper. Ask your local librarian how difficult it is to preserve popular paperback novels, and how many they have to destroy each year.
Now compare that to magnetic abd today's optical media. Floppies do not last long without careful handling and temperature control. Magnetic tape is subject to serious problems of the tightly wrapped tape affecting the bits on the next layer, which is why we used to rewind old magtapes every year or so and keep them in circulation rather than relying on them sitting on a shelf. Even CD's and DVD's, with well documented formats and with potentially open source content, have lifespans far shorter than the 100 years they were being advertised with. So the idea that simply keeping the formats open is clearly doomed to failure.
Imagine a world without the DMCA, where videos mocking the business school graduates and advertising people who came up with 'Web 2.0' could have discredited it and left it dead on the vine. Imagine all the dancing bears, freed from their pointless jobs of serving Web 2.0 applications for no other reason than to make the demo look interesting. Imagine a world where IP lawyers have to actually win their case to get paid, instead of being 'big stick' used by people to harass those who cannot afford to have such big sticks as part of their corporate staff.
Imagine, indeed.
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A more realistic fake evidence was the Amateur Action pornography BBS. They were shipped, unsolicited, child porn from a postal inspector in another state. They never opened the box, since they hadn't even ordered it. There's a fairly good write-up of the event at http://www.loundy.com/CDLB/AABBS.html.
They got convicted for other charges, in another state with which they did not knowingly do business, with evidence gathered from this attempted entrapment for an original crime they did not, in fact, commit. Proper forensic analysis is demonstrably trumped by a prosecutor with an agenda and a willingness to bend or break the constitution to get whomever they see as 'the bad guy'.
This is an unheard level of competence and careful chains of custody in the work I've seen. Take a good look at what happened with Grady Ward's hard drives, where his hard drives were seized and handed over directly to the plaintiffs, the church of Scientology, who secretly replaced the drives with copies of their cult secret documents removed, then claimed it would be a violation of their religious beliefs to return the originals. And they were not, to the best of my knowledge, punished for this. When that kind of brazen mishandling of evidence occurs, it's very helpful to have deep pockets and a reputation for ferocity in court on your side.
In other cases, the investigating officers were too clueless to understand even the basic tools of computer evidence handling, and I've wound up giving a fast explanation that no, you do *NOT* run a fancy recovery tool and go typing in passwords, you image the drive first with a live CD and work on the image, unless you want to spend one heck of a lot of extra money and go to examining the physical media for overwritten data.
If you want to write from scratch, write your own compiler and build your own system from melted glass. The time wasted encountering and solving a variety of problems already solved by others is very, very easy to describe, and there is little guarantee of even the limited success demonstrated by the best of the older code.
The amount of time I've wasted arriving after some in-house project that one person wrote, everyone got stuck with, and needed to be ripped out and replaced with the standard open source tool when that one person got transferred away or they discovered its limitations the hard way would have given me a month off of work every year of my professional life. Chat clients may be the worst of the bunch: watching those harsh lessons relearned by every sophomore who just learned a new language and thinks the new language won't run into the same issues is in for big, big surprises.
Good luck with that, then. Have you really dealt with more than a 100 clients? The ability of poor clients to use up far, far more than their share of your resources expands when you're providing a service to a whole town and it's almost impossible to refuse any one person business. But since you've apparently actually _done_ some similar work, I hope it goes well for you.
Now wait until you try to get zoning permits to run cable through some medically retired state rep's backyard. That is one of the most painful things I've ever seen an ISP try to do.
A lot of them don't have enough bandwidth yet to be effective filesharing sources. As soon as that occures, we should see a real explosion of the schemes there to limit their bandwidth usage.
I've seen such confusion with cell phone plans. There's a famous recording of a tech support call where the tech support people refused to understand that the advertised number such as $.0001/Kbyte added up to 10 cents/Mbyte, not $10/MByte. The poor caller went through a number of such staff who could not do simple math.
Great: do you have _any idea_ what the infrastructure costs of something like that are? Backup fiber, alternative, bandwidth peering costs? And getting the Tier 1 or even Tier 3 providers to give you a feed, with the 'business lunches' that their VP's are fed, pack in their wallets, or suck up their noses?
I've had to deal with some of the bandwidth salespeople of mid-size and larger ISP's, and they're worse than retirement home salesmen. They tell you to "dream" a lot, but don't want to talk about the details of how their disaster recovery works, how many fibers they'll actually install, or about where they keep coming up with this "5 9's" number, since it's obvious from the news reports that they can't even make 98% claims for the last 3 years.
The costs of having a commercial ISP deal with that for me is like the cost of paying a mechanic to change my oil: it's well worth the price to keep my hands clean.
Install a RedHat package mirror on some host that has peering with both networks. Then buy RedHat licenses, but install CentOS to get the best of both worlds: just don't tell RedHat that you're actually using CentOS. (The RedHat Network software management system is one of the single worst things about their OS, that pipeline to their central update is notoriously overwhelmed and awkward to mirror internally, and their package manager ignores locally set preferences for other repositories.)
I've built, and rebuilt, plenty of boxes for salvage and custom-built systems. I'm glad you're finding good success in your _custom built_ systems. But the average desktop drive has been, in my experience, considerably more noisy. SATA was a good step, especially to provide cleaner cabling and better airflow for all systems. It can let you have a noticeably smaller fan, for example, and it has let us _throw out SCSI mis-connections_ and misnegotiations by not doing that hated chaining together of drives. But I can certainly hear them. When working in a busy environment, where I might have six machines near my desk, it's quite noticeable. And when playing a "first-person sneaker" game, like the old "Thief", or listening to music that wasn't remastered for modern CD recording and actually has a normal dynamic range, it's more of a problem.
A PXE and DHCP setup that provides a local OS image to load and run works very well in server environments, and in large identical client configurations like university computer rooms. Updating the single primary image becomes trivial.
Why replace something that will never be used?
You've apparently not been stuck with a typical desktop computer, in a quiet house or apartment. It makes it hard to hear soft sounds: music and video played by the computer itself, for example, is cluttered with the fan and drive noise. You may not notice it, because you've gotten used to it or have a noisy environment.
There are massive legal precedents. It's called 'salvage'. In easy terms, it's finders-keepers for property on non-territorial waters.
Then you can't use most IM clients, which are notoriously bad at security for their transactions. Jabber, for example, had 'jabberd' as their archetype installer. That installer used a text file of clear-text passwords, with no encryption of the transaction, as the default server configuration. The time you save using a simple, commercial, well-supported, and well-respected solution can be better applied to securing your backups, making sure your user accounts are Kerberized, making sure former employees don't have privileges that will let them into your buildings or networks, etc.
I've done several Jabber setups and other IM clients, and most of them had major flaws. Unless Jabber, or some implementation of it, has matured a lot, I just can't see it as robust.
In this case, for once, I have to say just use a commercial solution. Maintaining your own servers is expensive, and supporting it is a headache your IT people don't need. Just go with Skype if you want video and free phone service as well, that is very multi-platform. It's not open source, I admit, but it works well.
And high-end graphics is one of the flaws of virtualization. You really need to talk to the graphics card, directly, to do that.
I can play a number of modest games well under Xen virtualization. I'll be very interested in what RedHat does with their new support of KVM virtualization, and whether they manage to do this in Fedora.
Would you care to make a bet on that Windows 7? Microsoft remains driven by feature addition, not speed. We can expect their integration of .NET, Palladium's DRM features (mislabeled Trusted Computing), and new gaming features (to finally prevent the use of new games or software on XP).
Windows 7 will be bent on killing off XP. That may force it to avoid the 'features' that have made Vista a dog, but there's no chance of going to the simpler tools and final integration fo the NT kernel to a consumer OS that made XP work well. They just don't have anywhere new to go with it in a new feature way, unless Microsoft's 'Cloud Computing' takes off. And that's unlikely.
This is not for 'the network'. This is for the patients whose data is on those systems, and for whome it's life-critical private information. It's also for the lawyers, to be able to say "we encrypted it on the servers and laptops, it didn't get stolen from us".
It's also much easier, and in many cases cheaper, to say "encrypt everything!" than to work out policies and exceptions. Maintaining those exceptions cost expensive technical and management time: is making the exception worth it? Or can you just buy another encrypted server to split the load?
They were found to be unconstitutional when they were run by the State Department, and they were quickly transferred to the Department of Commerce when Dan Bernstein won his lawsuit over it. These are not the only such export regulations, but these are the ones that prevent your telephone calls, banking transactions, and email from having far more robust protection end to end. This government, and previous ones do not want to permit robust protection from foreign or from their own country's uses. This would otherwise present a great deal of warrant-free and unlimited monitoring, such as that done by the US 'Carnivore' program, which is still in use with a new name, and the kind of backbone monitor over which the EFF is suing the NSA and AT&T.
Make no mistake, those regulations are unconstitutional. Nothing magically changed except liability when they got moved, and now the specter of 'terrorism' is being raised to prevent their end.
Do you want someone who pushes for your interests, or who actually gets them? Having lots of gumption is great. If you want that, I'm sure we could send you Cheney. But getting you anything you actually need, I hear Bill Clinton needs a new job. I wouldn't want to be in that house with Hillary right now, and a nice retirement away from the USA might give him or them something else to do.
You want George Bush to win the election in Finland?
The card should have been locked into the machine until the voter said 'OK' or cleared the screen, and locked it in with an alert and a deactivation warning if the person left the booth without doing either. Anyone can get confused about simple directions for an entirely new system. How many of us have tried to walk away from an ATM with our card still in it because we were distracted?
Documenting, via open hardware standards, how to make or read a paperback book does no good when the paperbacks are manufactured with acid-laden paper. Ask your local librarian how difficult it is to preserve popular paperback novels, and how many they have to destroy each year.
Now compare that to magnetic abd today's optical media. Floppies do not last long without careful handling and temperature control. Magnetic tape is subject to serious problems of the tightly wrapped tape affecting the bits on the next layer, which is why we used to rewind old magtapes every year or so and keep them in circulation rather than relying on them sitting on a shelf. Even CD's and DVD's, with well documented formats and with potentially open source content, have lifespans far shorter than the 100 years they were being advertised with. So the idea that simply keeping the formats open is clearly doomed to failure.
Try '10 minutes'. That format is simply not stable.
Imagine a world without the DMCA, where videos mocking the business school graduates and advertising people who came up with 'Web 2.0' could have discredited it and left it dead on the vine. Imagine all the dancing bears, freed from their pointless jobs of serving Web 2.0 applications for no other reason than to make the demo look interesting. Imagine a world where IP lawyers have to actually win their case to get paid, instead of being 'big stick' used by people to harass those who cannot afford to have such big sticks as part of their corporate staff. Imagine, indeed.