Check out the databases of several digitized French and Spanish cities, including Paris and Madrid. The stuff also has a navigation system, so you can literally walk around digitally.
The company who did this, the Société de Numérisation des Villes, as far as I can remember, had 20 photographs walking through every street in Paris during 6 months to start up the database. The database was kept current by regularly checking the city records of building authorizations. Now they're part of a bigger company, so who knows what will happen next.
I can't tell you how cool this thing is when you're looking for an apartment. "What's the address? Oh, it's that kind of building. Forget it then."
Part of the reason for high SMS cost is because the GSM network wasn't really meant to handle such traffic in the first place. SMS was built in as an extra feature, primarily for operator notification services (voice mail, overage warning...)
A GSM base station channelises the radio bandwidth into eight main voice channels and a few low-bandwidth signal channels. SMS is carried on top of one of the low-bandwidth signal channels, not in the main voice channels.
Therefore, even if there is ample bandwidth available on the voice channels, the SMS is constrained in a much smaller channel which can quickly be overloaded. And channel assignment is static: the only way to expand the channel is to install a new base station!
Add to that the fact that one SMS message provides 140 bytes of *reliable* traffic (i.e. 160 characters in 7-bit GSM encoding), but the real traffic can be much more because the reliability necessitates acknowledgments / retransmissions.
These are the technical reasons that I've heard of. Now phone companies could as well just be "money-grubbing rat bastards".:-)
In spite of all these inadequacies, SMS remains a killer even at this price for one simple reason: interoperability and reliability. It just plain works, across operators and handsets and network vendors.
Actually, on their most recent version they don't use this phrase anymore--my mistake. They must have changed this as a quick search will show that they used to call "Advanced" those potentially privacy-infringing features such as PageRank.
All equipment (phone, fax, computer...) would turn off at the press of one (1) button.
Then if somebody still tried to reach you, an automated voice or fax or email, as the case may be, would tell them: "I'm trying to have some quiet time here DAMMIT!"
The ability to be unreachable anywhere would be a terrific option for cell phone owners.
Blacklisting a whole network like UUNet, which -- that's the problem -- does not only host spammers, is exactly the approach that doesn't work, at least if you're relying on the Net for anything serious.
Imagine a company using black lists such as SpamCop: once in a while, they would happen to bounce customer email and the reason would be "you are spam"!! Not great customer care. Same goes for any communication of a company with the outside world (recruitment, PR, technical collaborations...).
That's why the solution cannot be blacklisting. You gotta find better than that!
At issue is the business model for interconnection agreements between carriers. When an IP carrier interconnects with another, the basic metric to see who pays whom and how much is the download/upload ratio of the connecting carrier. Peering (at-cost interconnects) is only granted to carriers with whom there is a level upload/download ratio.
So if you're an IP carrier with no or little hosting on your network, you mostly download from your interconnects. Therefore you pay more to interconnect with the big IP backbones like UUnet.
If you're UUnet, there is an economic incentive for you to host spammers, because it boosts your upload; therefore you pay less (or, in the case of UUnet, get more money) on interconnects.
If I was UUnet, I don't see why I would waste money on fighting spammers who (1) are my customers and (2) increase my bottom line by boosting upload at interconnects.
By considering all packets to be equal on the backbone, you're averaging "unwanted" traffic vs. "useful" traffic such as web traffic (aka porn). The side effect of this is, you're paying for spam with your Internet connection.
The remaining half of the e-mail then has to be filtered in a more sophisticated way. But by then the scale of the problem has been cut in half.
Solving "half" of the problem is pretty useless. Spammers -- assuming this technology is ever be widely adopted -- wouldn't be long to find a way to get their messages in the unfiltered heap. The only ones to suffer damage will be the legit email senders.
Says the Cat, "Instead of counting all the stars in the sky, you could just count half of them and multiply the number by two. You just halved the problem there."
There are basically two kinds of SSL:
* SSL with server-side authentication only, followed by client-side password authentication inside the SSL connection.
* SSL with mutual authentication (client side and server side at the same time).
If you're deploying or ever plan to deploy this VPN with client-side SSL authentication, check support for so-called "SSLv3" or TLS 1.0, versus SSLv2.
Another important point to check then is how you provision user accounts (in the case of SSLv3). Ask yourself questions such as, how do I give a new user access to the VPN, or what will the procedure be when (not "if") someone has lost/compromised their passwords or other form of credentials? It's a good idea to simulate all this and see if the config interface allows you to do all these tasks easily.
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Cardboard-based Italian lap thermal protectors for $10 only! Half the price of that thing! Get one with pizza inside for only $20!
Check out the databases of several digitized French and Spanish cities, including Paris and Madrid. The stuff also has a navigation system, so you can literally walk around digitally.
The company who did this, the Société de Numérisation des Villes, as far as I can remember, had 20 photographs walking through every street in Paris during 6 months to start up the database. The database was kept current by regularly checking the city records of building authorizations. Now they're part of a bigger company, so who knows what will happen next.
I can't tell you how cool this thing is when you're looking for an apartment. "What's the address? Oh, it's that kind of building. Forget it then."
Part of the reason for high SMS cost is because the GSM network wasn't really meant to handle such traffic in the first place. SMS was built in as an extra feature, primarily for operator notification services (voice mail, overage warning...)
:-)
A GSM base station channelises the radio bandwidth into eight main voice channels and a few low-bandwidth signal channels. SMS is carried on top of one of the low-bandwidth signal channels, not in the main voice channels.
Therefore, even if there is ample bandwidth available on the voice channels, the SMS is constrained in a much smaller channel which can quickly be overloaded. And channel assignment is static: the only way to expand the channel is to install a new base station!
Add to that the fact that one SMS message provides 140 bytes of *reliable* traffic (i.e. 160 characters in 7-bit GSM encoding), but the real traffic can be much more because the reliability necessitates acknowledgments / retransmissions.
These are the technical reasons that I've heard of. Now phone companies could as well just be "money-grubbing rat bastards".
In spite of all these inadequacies, SMS remains a killer even at this price for one simple reason: interoperability and reliability. It just plain works, across operators and handsets and network vendors.
Actually, on their most recent version they don't use this phrase anymore--my mistake. They must have changed this as a quick search will show that they used to call "Advanced" those potentially privacy-infringing features such as PageRank.
Like on the Google Bar
Ain't no evil, just "advanced" features?
All equipment (phone, fax, computer...) would turn off at the press of one (1) button.
Then if somebody still tried to reach you, an automated voice or fax or email, as the case may be, would tell them: "I'm trying to have some quiet time here DAMMIT!"
The ability to be unreachable anywhere would be a terrific option for cell phone owners.
When the ad plays, just background the ad window and post your first opinion on Slashdot!
Who RTFAs before posting anyway.
Blacklisting a whole network like UUNet, which -- that's the problem -- does not only host spammers, is exactly the approach that doesn't work, at least if you're relying on the Net for anything serious.
Imagine a company using black lists such as SpamCop: once in a while, they would happen to bounce customer email and the reason would be "you are spam"!! Not great customer care. Same goes for any communication of a company with the outside world (recruitment, PR, technical collaborations...).
That's why the solution cannot be blacklisting. You gotta find better than that!
At issue is the business model for interconnection agreements between carriers. When an IP carrier interconnects with another, the basic metric to see who pays whom and how much is the download/upload ratio of the connecting carrier. Peering (at-cost interconnects) is only granted to carriers with whom there is a level upload/download ratio.
So if you're an IP carrier with no or little hosting on your network, you mostly download from your interconnects. Therefore you pay more to interconnect with the big IP backbones like UUnet.
If you're UUnet, there is an economic incentive for you to host spammers, because it boosts your upload; therefore you pay less (or, in the case of UUnet, get more money) on interconnects.
If I was UUnet, I don't see why I would waste money on fighting spammers who (1) are my customers and (2) increase my bottom line by boosting upload at interconnects.
By considering all packets to be equal on the backbone, you're averaging "unwanted" traffic vs. "useful" traffic such as web traffic (aka porn). The side effect of this is, you're paying for spam with your Internet connection.
The remaining half of the e-mail then has to be filtered in a more sophisticated way. But by then the scale of the problem has been cut in half.
Solving "half" of the problem is pretty useless. Spammers -- assuming this technology is ever be widely adopted -- wouldn't be long to find a way to get their messages in the unfiltered heap. The only ones to suffer damage will be the legit email senders.
Says the Cat, "Instead of counting all the stars in the sky, you could just count half of them and multiply the number by two. You just halved the problem there."
There are basically two kinds of SSL:
* SSL with server-side authentication only, followed by client-side password authentication inside the SSL connection.
* SSL with mutual authentication (client side and server side at the same time).
If you're deploying or ever plan to deploy this VPN with client-side SSL authentication, check support for so-called "SSLv3" or TLS 1.0, versus SSLv2.
Another important point to check then is how you provision user accounts (in the case of SSLv3). Ask yourself questions such as, how do I give a new user access to the VPN, or what will the procedure be when (not "if") someone has lost/compromised their passwords or other form of credentials? It's a good idea to simulate all this and see if the config interface allows you to do all these tasks easily.