Seriously, you don't need a rich member, if 100 people all pay a tenth of what they pay now, you can easily get a real "business line". Getting broadband internet access usually is no problem. The CCC gets aroung 20 GBit for their congresses, typically for free.
I mean seriously, you pay your ISP to constantly upgrade their equipment. It doesn't cost much to run it so much of the money should go to upgrades. If they don't manage to be able to do that, they should go out of business.
If nothing is done, the US will fall even further behind the rest of the world when it comes to internet access.
Furthermore, there is a lot you can do against this by yourself. Of course you probably cannot change your ISP in most regions as they often have local monopolies, but what you can do is to build your own networks. There's software around like OLSRd which you can install onto computers or routers. It implements a meshed routing protocoll. Essentially you turn your wireless network cards into ad-hoc mode. Assign IP-Addresses and start OLDRd. This programm (availiable for preety much all OSes, even Windows) negotiates routes with all the other nodes it can reach. This way you can easily build up large networks which configure themselves automatically. If a node fails, and there is still another way, the network will find it.
This way you can build an additional network, free of any greedy big ISPs. You can use it wherever you want for whatever you want.
I think the problem with those "the internet is insecure" people is that they have totally wrong assumptions.
The internet is strictly as secure as any other network can we which is not secure at all. No network can guarantee you that you actually talk to the machine you want to talk to, or that any other machine is the one which it claims to be, or that your conversation will not be intercepted or modified. The phone network claims that security, but we all know that it's not true when an attacker works together with the phone company.
So essentially the Internet has tought us one very important thing: Never trust networks! You just cannot trust them, because the owner of the network can compromise all of your data.
But this isn't a problem anymore. We have cryptography. Today we can encrypt any communication. We can have virtual persons whom we can securely determine their identity. (we cannot securely connect them to real persons, but I don't see any point in doing)
People also don't see the fraud especially possible on "secure" networks. Think of the whole "premium rate" hustles. People surely loose more money that way than with hypothetical problems on the Internet.
It's in a way like the credit card system. It's secure, because it's completely insecure. There is only one simple, but powerfull security mechanism. On the Internet it's cryptography, on credit cards it's that you can call back any purchase you made. So you only need to check your credit card bills and everything is secure.
However there is no solution against human stupidity.
Still with close elections beeing extremely likely that's no solution. It might only find completely defunkt machines, but none that just change the results slightly. In your system, elections get decided by very few votes.
Besides with a bit of organisation, counting votes it extremely quick and simple.
Just do it in 2 steps: First sort your ballots according to some system. If you have simple "choose one of the following 5" this is trivial. Then count those sorted ballots.
Believe me, Germany has one of the most complicated voting systems in the world, still we have official results in the papers, the next day.
Even if you have a short programm you still cannot guarante that it works because there's still a system surrounding it. In fact you could even manipulate the CPU hardware to give you false results.
The _only_ practicable and moderately secure way to do an election is by pen and paper and manual counting. It's done all over the world and it works near flawlessly. Everybody, not just programmers, can watch the process and see what's happening. There's no "black magic" involved and it's completely transparent.
As soon as there is some form of technology involved, people will cease to understand it, therefore making the whole system intransparent and prone to manipulation.
Well the simple solution is to simply forget all that virus scanner crap and find better solutions.
Simply put, the idea is to make bad ideas harder and good ideas easier.
Under Windows you download a file with the extension.exe and after that the browser will ask you if you want to execute it. That's usually a bad idea. Under other operating systems, you will not be able to execute the file directly, but will have to turn it executable first. You might now wonder how someone installs software. It's preety simple, you make good ideas easier. On ubuntu-Linux, for example, you have a little programm named "Install or Remove Software". With it you have easy access to large repositories of software, all, at least to some degree, looked over by people who know what they are doing. This greatly reduces the chance of downloading any malware.
Now, why are virus scanners such a bad idea. It's because they are often written by people who can't use their tools. The often use C and seem to be unable to prevent buffer overflows. This has caused them to often execute code from the file they wanted to scan. So in effect they potentially execute every file they scan which might be every file you download, including little pictures your browser needs.
Wait! If it's programmed it includes a computer which makes it a computer game.
There are only very few video games around. The most famous one is Pong. Games on consoles like the 2600 or the Nintendo NES are computer games as they are completely done in software executed by a computer.
There is virtually no alternative. I mean you cannot use floating point and need to guarantee a certain number of digits of precision. Other languages can only do this with lots of work. Besides COBOL probably doesn't do buffer overflows.
It's essentially the same question as why Fortran still is around. It simply is, to date, the best language for scientific processing. Unlike C it's easy to optimize by the compiler.
It'S not a video game, it has nothing to do with video. It's just an analog computer game, that's all. No video involved. And computer games are in fact probably even older, even digital ones.
10 Gigabits is not very high and you most likely can only get maybe 10 channels of that.
Using propper fiberobtic wires you can easily do those kinds of bandwidth today, but have the option of using hundreds of wavelengths to simply multiply your capacity on a single fiber. Plus as nobody actually digs in single fibers, you nearly always have more than one pair of fibers.
So this will not replace fiber, but maybe certain types of current microwave links. There are uses for it, but definitely not for bringing internet to the masses. For this MIMO-based meshed networks might be an alternative where fibers aren't availiable.
Well the problem probably lies in the image of hackers. I mean in germany, the CCC made a good name by talking publicaly about sensitive political issues and showing the dangers. Also by showing that certain "ohh we are so secure"-systems are completely insecure after all, etc. And of course the occational "fun, but everybody likes it" project like Blinkenlights.
What you guys in the US need is some kind of hacker association like the CCC. I mean 2600 is already quite nice, but it's commercial and therefore cannot do certain things like publishing all their issues on the web. And it's just a magazine, no institution.
The european congresses often get their bandwidth for free or almoust for free.
Well the high bandwidth conferences usually stream all their talks as high-quality video into the net.
I have no idea why bandwidth is seen as such a scarse resource in your country. The congresses usually get their bandwidth for free. I mean it's just a few gigabits for a few days, ISPs donate that to balance their peering agreements.
Absolutely, this looks like a passive RFID implant. Those don't really go far. And essentially you just need to put that person into a van. Neither the RFID-implant, nor GPS will get there.
So essentially you get a detector for those RFID implants, if you find a person with one, you pull it into a van smash the external device to pieces and get away. Meanwhile you can photograph that person and write that death threadt. If you are lucky the implant even can be cross referenced to a database containing the name and address of that person.
It's a great way to make abductions more efficient. In fact, you might even build a machine which automatically abducts people.
Sixt, a german car rental company which is mostly based on Linux (including the desktop) it is roughly 1:100. They have about 2000 employees and about a dozend of them are in the IT-department.
Yes, but with a simple normal mail provider you can easily have SSL and have a provider which might have some sense of privacy. With minimal cost you can even get webmail on your own little machine connected via DSL or something.
Besides that script kiddie probably won't do any real harm, the government most likely will.
I mean it's Google Mail, Google stores your e-mails till all ethernity and will surely hand it out to any dictator waving something which looks like an official document.
It doesn't matter much how secure the login is as the service itself is designed to be a gapping security hole.
If it's a company based in the US, forget it
on
Is Hushmail Still Safe?
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Seriously if it's a commercial company based in the US, forget about security. They can easily be pressured to do everything the government wants.
If you want security you have to do it yourself. Install Gnu Privacy Guard and encrypt all your e-mails. Then use TOR hidden services to set up your own e-mail servers to be sure your traffic information will stay private.
Just imagine beeing able to build extremely cheap wireless mesh routers and sticking them to every lamp-post in a city. You'd instantly have a completely unregulated network free of lawyers and companies and free to use.
This is actually simmilar to the microcomputer revolution. At first people only thought about putting those into mundane applications like microwave ovens or TV-sets, later people buildt their own computers around those chips, spurring the real revolution. I believe the same will happen here.
Kristof Obermann, he used to work at Arcor one of the bigger ISPs and phone companies in germany. He now works as a professor.
Besides, it's not like twice as much bandwidth costs twice as much money. Besides there's always redundancy. So in case one line breaks, you'll be at 100% peak utilisation. And then you will have problems as you will loose packets.
If those situations would exist, ISPs would use the TOS fields. Packets belonging would just be dropped more likely in case of a network overload. Nobody notices a missing packet at a download as the server will continue sending packets and the missing one eventually gets retransmitted a few seconds later. Missing packets are a _lot_ more noticable at web-browsing or interactive sessions.
Actually 5 percent is already a _lot_. The network should never be utiliced to more than 50%, even at peak times.
But it's not the fault of the customers, it's the fault of the company. It's their duty to constantly upgrade their network connections. Why else should they charge money.
If it really was about network congestion, they wouldn't block P2P-trafic, but they would give those packets lower priority. That way those packets only get dropped whenever there is an actual congestion.
What was that supposed to be? First of all, there are no real $20 HDMI cables. If you see one for that price rest asured that the shop bought it for less than $5 and the company which sold it from the shop got it from China for far less than $1 a piece.
Then second, what did we learn? Barely nothing! We only learned that that device exists and works. He didn't even open it.
Well there are still a few people left qho haven't noticed that biometics isn't complete and utter nonsense, even it's defeated in just about any TV-show or movie.
Besides having a camera in your laptop could also have it's advantages.
Slashdot Mirror
Seriously, you don't need a rich member, if 100 people all pay a tenth of what they pay now, you can easily get a real "business line". Getting broadband internet access usually is no problem. The CCC gets aroung 20 GBit for their congresses, typically for free.
I mean seriously, you pay your ISP to constantly upgrade their equipment. It doesn't cost much to run it so much of the money should go to upgrades. If they don't manage to be able to do that, they should go out of business.
I mean it's not like you have to dig up the road and lay new fibers. You can use wavelength multiplexing to get more and more data onto those.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wavelength-division_multiplexing
If nothing is done, the US will fall even further behind the rest of the world when it comes to internet access.
Furthermore, there is a lot you can do against this by yourself. Of course you probably cannot change your ISP in most regions as they often have local monopolies, but what you can do is to build your own networks. There's software around like OLSRd which you can install onto computers or routers. It implements a meshed routing protocoll. Essentially you turn your wireless network cards into ad-hoc mode. Assign IP-Addresses and start OLDRd. This programm (availiable for preety much all OSes, even Windows) negotiates routes with all the other nodes it can reach. This way you can easily build up large networks which configure themselves automatically. If a node fails, and there is still another way, the network will find it.
This way you can build an additional network, free of any greedy big ISPs. You can use it wherever you want for whatever you want.
http://www.olsr.org/
I think the problem with those "the internet is insecure" people is that they have totally wrong assumptions.
The internet is strictly as secure as any other network can we which is not secure at all. No network can guarantee you that you actually talk to the machine you want to talk to, or that any other machine is the one which it claims to be, or that your conversation will not be intercepted or modified. The phone network claims that security, but we all know that it's not true when an attacker works together with the phone company.
So essentially the Internet has tought us one very important thing: Never trust networks! You just cannot trust them, because the owner of the network can compromise all of your data.
But this isn't a problem anymore. We have cryptography. Today we can encrypt any communication. We can have virtual persons whom we can securely determine their identity. (we cannot securely connect them to real persons, but I don't see any point in doing)
People also don't see the fraud especially possible on "secure" networks. Think of the whole "premium rate" hustles. People surely loose more money that way than with hypothetical problems on the Internet.
It's in a way like the credit card system. It's secure, because it's completely insecure. There is only one simple, but powerfull security mechanism. On the Internet it's cryptography, on credit cards it's that you can call back any purchase you made. So you only need to check your credit card bills and everything is secure.
However there is no solution against human stupidity.
Still with close elections beeing extremely likely that's no solution. It might only find completely defunkt machines, but none that just change the results slightly. In your system, elections get decided by very few votes.
Besides with a bit of organisation, counting votes it extremely quick and simple.
Just do it in 2 steps:
First sort your ballots according to some system. If you have simple "choose one of the following 5" this is trivial.
Then count those sorted ballots.
Believe me, Germany has one of the most complicated voting systems in the world, still we have official results in the papers, the next day.
Even if you have a short programm you still cannot guarante that it works because there's still a system surrounding it. In fact you could even manipulate the CPU hardware to give you false results.
The _only_ practicable and moderately secure way to do an election is by pen and paper and manual counting. It's done all over the world and it works near flawlessly. Everybody, not just programmers, can watch the process and see what's happening. There's no "black magic" involved and it's completely transparent.
As soon as there is some form of technology involved, people will cease to understand it, therefore making the whole system intransparent and prone to manipulation.
Well the simple solution is to simply forget all that virus scanner crap and find better solutions.
Simply put, the idea is to make bad ideas harder and good ideas easier.
Under Windows you download a file with the extension .exe and after that the browser will ask you if you want to execute it. That's usually a bad idea. Under other operating systems, you will not be able to execute the file directly, but will have to turn it executable first.
You might now wonder how someone installs software. It's preety simple, you make good ideas easier. On ubuntu-Linux, for example, you have a little programm named "Install or Remove Software". With it you have easy access to large repositories of software, all, at least to some degree, looked over by people who know what they are doing. This greatly reduces the chance of downloading any malware.
Now, why are virus scanners such a bad idea. It's because they are often written by people who can't use their tools. The often use C and seem to be unable to prevent buffer overflows. This has caused them to often execute code from the file they wanted to scan. So in effect they potentially execute every file they scan which might be every file you download, including little pictures your browser needs.
Wait! If it's programmed it includes a computer which makes it a computer game.
There are only very few video games around. The most famous one is Pong. Games on consoles like the 2600 or the Nintendo NES are computer games as they are completely done in software executed by a computer.
There is virtually no alternative. I mean you cannot use floating point and need to guarantee a certain number of digits of precision. Other languages can only do this with lots of work. Besides COBOL probably doesn't do buffer overflows.
It's essentially the same question as why Fortran still is around. It simply is, to date, the best language for scientific processing. Unlike C it's easy to optimize by the compiler.
It'S not a video game, it has nothing to do with video. It's just an analog computer game, that's all. No video involved. And computer games are in fact probably even older, even digital ones.
10 Gigabits is not very high and you most likely can only get maybe 10 channels of that.
Using propper fiberobtic wires you can easily do those kinds of bandwidth today, but have the option of using hundreds of wavelengths to simply multiply your capacity on a single fiber. Plus as nobody actually digs in single fibers, you nearly always have more than one pair of fibers.
So this will not replace fiber, but maybe certain types of current microwave links. There are uses for it, but definitely not for bringing internet to the masses. For this MIMO-based meshed networks might be an alternative where fibers aren't availiable.
Well the problem probably lies in the image of hackers. I mean in germany, the CCC made a good name by talking publicaly about sensitive political issues and showing the dangers. Also by showing that certain "ohh we are so secure"-systems are completely insecure after all, etc. And of course the occational "fun, but everybody likes it" project like Blinkenlights.
What you guys in the US need is some kind of hacker association like the CCC. I mean 2600 is already quite nice, but it's commercial and therefore cannot do certain things like publishing all their issues on the web. And it's just a magazine, no institution.
The european congresses often get their bandwidth for free or almoust for free.
Well the high bandwidth conferences usually stream all their talks as high-quality video into the net.
I have no idea why bandwidth is seen as such a scarse resource in your country. The congresses usually get their bandwidth for free. I mean it's just a few gigabits for a few days, ISPs donate that to balance their peering agreements.
Absolutely, this looks like a passive RFID implant. Those don't really go far. And essentially you just need to put that person into a van. Neither the RFID-implant, nor GPS will get there.
So essentially you get a detector for those RFID implants, if you find a person with one, you pull it into a van smash the external device to pieces and get away. Meanwhile you can photograph that person and write that death threadt. If you are lucky the implant even can be cross referenced to a database containing the name and address of that person.
It's a great way to make abductions more efficient. In fact, you might even build a machine which automatically abducts people.
Sixt, a german car rental company which is mostly based on Linux (including the desktop) it is roughly 1:100. They have about 2000 employees and about a dozend of them are in the IT-department.
Ohh and of course cancer causes tissue to grow in non-functional ways, just like the myriards of features introduced into C++.
Yes, but with a simple normal mail provider you can easily have SSL and have a provider which might have some sense of privacy. With minimal cost you can even get webmail on your own little machine connected via DSL or something.
Besides that script kiddie probably won't do any real harm, the government most likely will.
I mean it's Google Mail, Google stores your e-mails till all ethernity and will surely hand it out to any dictator waving something which looks like an official document.
It doesn't matter much how secure the login is as the service itself is designed to be a gapping security hole.
Seriously if it's a commercial company based in the US, forget about security. They can easily be pressured to do everything the government wants.
If you want security you have to do it yourself. Install Gnu Privacy Guard and encrypt all your e-mails. Then use TOR hidden services to set up your own e-mail servers to be sure your traffic information will stay private.
Just imagine beeing able to build extremely cheap wireless mesh routers and sticking them to every lamp-post in a city. You'd instantly have a completely unregulated network free of lawyers and companies and free to use.
This is actually simmilar to the microcomputer revolution. At first people only thought about putting those into mundane applications like microwave ovens or TV-sets, later people buildt their own computers around those chips, spurring the real revolution. I believe the same will happen here.
Well you could just use a better power supply. That may, in case of cheap routers, even improve your power efficiency.
Well OK, of course. On the other side, if they wouldn't need up upgrade their equipment they wouldn't need as much people, etc.
But I see your point. The "so much"-part really is important.
Kristof Obermann, he used to work at Arcor one of the bigger ISPs and phone companies in germany. He now works as a professor.
Besides, it's not like twice as much bandwidth costs twice as much money. Besides there's always redundancy. So in case one line breaks, you'll be at 100% peak utilisation. And then you will have problems as you will loose packets.
If those situations would exist, ISPs would use the TOS fields. Packets belonging would just be dropped more likely in case of a network overload. Nobody notices a missing packet at a download as the server will continue sending packets and the missing one eventually gets retransmitted a few seconds later. Missing packets are a _lot_ more noticable at web-browsing or interactive sessions.
Actually 5 percent is already a _lot_. The network should never be utiliced to more than 50%, even at peak times.
But it's not the fault of the customers, it's the fault of the company. It's their duty to constantly upgrade their network connections. Why else should they charge money.
If it really was about network congestion, they wouldn't block P2P-trafic, but they would give those packets lower priority. That way those packets only get dropped whenever there is an actual congestion.
What was that supposed to be?
First of all, there are no real $20 HDMI cables. If you see one for that price rest asured that the shop bought it for less than $5 and the company which sold it from the shop got it from China for far less than $1 a piece.
Then second, what did we learn? Barely nothing! We only learned that that device exists and works. He didn't even open it.
Well there are still a few people left qho haven't noticed that biometics isn't complete and utter nonsense, even it's defeated in just about any TV-show or movie.
Besides having a camera in your laptop could also have it's advantages.