Sure, there probably are people in the US government who are actually worried about disease prevention, and they try to do their jobs even when the propaganda people aren't using them. Good for them, and it's too bad the politicians won't let them also deal with problems like needle-spread diseases like AIDS and hepatatis, or problems like VD and teenage pregnancy that require admitting that YOUR teenagers might be having sex.
But that hasn't been what the Pandemic Flu scares have been about, except for the first couple of months of the avian flu when there were some real concerns. The political side of the Bush Administration and the Homeland Security crowd want to keep the people afraid, whether it's afraid of terrorists or sick birds or married gay people, because that gives them political power they can use. The Pandemic Flu stuff has been how they've kept technology businesses helping keep people scared, and lets them reach a segment of the population who aren't as good at buying into the Moslem Terrorists scare or the married gay people scare. (Note that I didn't say "The Republicans" - some of these people are also partisan Republicans, and some of them are the civil-service or military types who've been helping the Administration's propaganda war for years, and the traditional Republicans weren't really into this sort of thing except when there were Commies to be scared of or nuclear weapons and Star Wars defenses to build.)
Of course there are businesses that are pushing this sort of thing for business reasons. Most of them are consultants (either individual or big-firm types) selling consulting services, or Internet-related companies that want to sell bandwidth or VPN appliances or data center space, and this is yet another way to make money along with exploiting earthquakes and hurricanes and Chicago tunnel floods and 9/11/01 and other infrastructure disasters to get customers to think about building reliable data infrastructures. But you may notice that the government keeps reminding businesses about how they need to prepare for Pandemic Flu, and doesn't keep reminding them that they need to prepare for hurricanes.
A lot of the recommendations that these exercises come out with seems trivial to people in the high-tech business, like making sure people can work from home, but as a friend of mine here in Silicon Valley says "Not only are you not an 'average computer user', but nobody you know is an 'average computer user' either." I've been doing some work from home since the days of 1200 baud modems, and for the last 15 years I've generally had field jobs that mean I need to be able to work just as well from a customer's office as well as my company's office, which means that I can just as well work from home as from the office unless I need specialized equipment like photocopies or the big laser printer or the padded boxes we use to mail computers in for hardware repairs, and while in-person meetings are nice, we usually just use conference bridges. There's some benefit into bullying old-style managers into giving their workers more flexibility and build some reliability into their data centers, and if it takes scaring them with the pandemic flu to do so I'll put up with a bit of it, but it's never really been about anything other than politics.
It's actually both hilarious and sad, but as you say it's not new.
The Wikipedia article on the Karmapa Succession Controversy talks about the issue some - apparently in the 1790s, the Tibetan government forbade the Sharmapa lama from reincarnating, among other things because his job was to recognize the newly reincarnated Karmapa lama, who's the first line of reincarnated lamas. So the next few Sharmapa reincarnations stayed secret and did their job undercover.
Sure, the posting is a bit overrated, but it does make an important point, and it's harder to tie to gether the better-written reply threads if you can't see the Mod -1 parent article:-)
It's certainly not off-topic - headscarf laws are an offensive government interference into religion, just as this is, though they don't have the same level of absurdity to them.
(And of course just because government shouldn't be banning the things, that doesn't mean banks are likely to allow masked people into their buildings. On the other hand, in the cultures where women wear the things, they can send their husband or father to the cash machine when they need money, so they don't need to go to the bank themselves.)
It's not just that you need surviving kids to remember you after you're gone - it's that you need surviving kids to take care of you in your old age when you can no longer hunt or do heavy farm work yourself. That _is_ how Social Security used to work in most of the world, though in more communal villages it might be other people's kids as well as your own.
Llamas seem to be fairly popular in the rural areas around San Francisco. So is naming them "Dalai" or "Dolly" or whatever, though the only llama-owning friend of mine around here did enough Tibetan Buddhism that she could be slightly excused for doing so.
Of course, given China's current program of encouraging Chinese to move to Tibet, it's not clear how long that'll be true - depends partly on the politics, and partly on whether the economics of Tibet can support a large immigrant population. The business / middle-class sector is rapidly absorbing Chinese immigrants, but that doesn't mean that significant numbers of Chinese want to become nomadic yak herders or small-holding barley farmers or other agriculturalists, who are most of the population outside Lhasa.
The question of whether a conversation can be recorded with one, two, or all of the participants knowing isn't relevant here (though thanks for the interesting pointer.)
RTFA - This is about police setting up calls so they can bug a conversation with Zero of the participants knowing that the conversation is being recorded, and there's not only the question of whether that's legal at all (without a warrant), but also whether the information they gather can be used in court.
Scooter's question about "Do VOIP conversations have the same legal protection that PSTN conversations have?" isn't the right question here (because this isn't what this bugging technique does), but it also probably doesn't have a well-defined answer. When the Feds wanted to force VOIP companies to make their infrastructures wiretappable, they argued that VOIP providers have the same responsibility to give the FBI a blank check that the telcos have, and any of them that are subject to US regulation have had to comply (so lots of the VOIP product literature talks about CALEA as well as 911 support.) On the other hand, when the Feds want to wiretap VOIP calls without doing as much work as they need to do for a standard wiretap warrant, they tend to argue that they don't need it.
In the Bush Administration environment, there's been a sufficiently rabid attack on privacy that they can probably get away with non-warrant VOIP wiretapping legally, even now that Gonzales has left, and I haven't heard any of the leading Democrats saying they plan to change this and force DoJ, DoD, and Homeland Security to start acting like Americans. (In particular, my memories of John Edwards's debates when he was trying to get the Democratic nomination in 2004 were that he was all in favor of the wiretapping-for-national-security crowd. And while it's possible that we'll end up with the major parties nominating Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul, I think it's rather more likely that lightning will strike all the FBI buildings at once.)
I'm not a lawyer, but I have played a politician on TV.
This isn't the same thing as listening in on calls between your target and someone else. This is making a call to somebody and bugging their conversations. You're probably supposed to get a warrant, at least in pre-Bush America. (Though in the real pre-Bush America, that mainly mattered if you wanted to use what you heard in court or needed the telco's help for the wiretap; otherwise you just happen to have gotten "an anonymous tip" that your target met so-and-so and talked about such-and-such, which was enough evidence to get a real warrant from a judge.)
Encryption can help against some attacks, but this is partly an authentication / permission issue (who do you accept calls from and when? SIP is peer-to-peer with proxies, and you might want your PBX to be doing presence management and voicemail handling for you, etc.), and partly a user interface design problem (the phone received a call, didn't ring the ringer, and didn't ask for user permission before answering? Yikes! Who let that through the feature definitions phase?) It's one think to have the *user* able to choose answering methods (e.g. do I want voice-enabled answering so that I can tell the phone "Ok Answer", or do I only want it to answer if I hit a button on the earpiece or open the flip-phone?) But having the caller pick the answering criteria is just wrong.
Next thing you know, there'll be attacks where people call up your phone, turn on the speakerphone instead of the mike, volume up to 11, and start talking without you hitting a button to answer. So not only can the FBI call up and listen to your conversations, but the Nigerian Bureau of Investigation can call up and tell you about this money they're trying to get out of the country.
Maybe it's time to get a Linux mobile phone after all, so this sort of bugging is fixable...
ICANN only cares about one kind of IP, and it's Intellectual Property, not Internet Protocol - that's really been its goal since the beginning and the IP Industry are who ICANN mainly works for. One of the things it has always insisted on, and to some extent even the Internet Ad-Hoc Committee that preceded it did this, is that domain registration information needs to be collected and published so that if there's a trademark dispute, the trademark owners can send a process server to the ICBM address of the domain name owner, which means they want a True Name and True Address, regardless of any privacy implications or of the history of how the whois information is used. ICANN's rules for registries and for new global TLDs insist that registrars always have to collect privacy-violating amounts of allegedly-true information.
There are alternative ways to handle trademark disputes, and there's been a lot of scope creep in how various special interests want to use the whois information since it's there, whether that's the RIAA who want to find the owner of a website that has allegedly-copyrighted MP3s on it or cops and spooks who want to find out who's published some thoughtcrime on the web.
The original purpose of whois information is to be able to contact the people who run a domain so that broken things can be fixed and bills can get paid. Contacting somebody doesn't mean you need to know their True Name, ICBM address of their house, pager, and home phone number - it means that you've got an email that reaches somebody who'll do something, a name or title to include in the message, and if there's a phone number that can reach somebody appropriate or a fax number to get them a message, it's there. So names like "Admin Contact" and email addresses like "DomainRegistration@example.com" are perfectly adequate for that. If you need to have a bill sent on paper to generate a company invoice, as opposed to sending the bill by email, then you also need a paper address, but it can certainly be a mailbox at a mailbox store rather than the home address of the registrant, because it's for sending bills, not subpoenas or SWAT teams. There are politicians and net.politicians who want to change this, but they're not only interested in violating your privacy, they're clueless about the real functions of whois.
If you don't provide contact information that's complete enough to fix a problem, then either the problem doesn't get fixed, or it gets fixed in ways that don't have your input.
If your billing information doesn't have a working paper address and the email information doesn't reach you, that means that next year you won't see the bill, and you'll lose the domain for non-renewal, and bummer for you, unless you've used some alternative payment mechanism like paying in advance or checking your bill at the registrar's web page. It shouldn't be treated like it's a crisis either way for the registrar; if you don't care, they don't need to care, and some of them will provide more alternatives for handling billing and payment, and others of them will make money selling expired domain names to ad-banner domainsquatters.
If the nameserver for your domain isn't working, then people aren't going to be able to access your domain. It's useful to have a technical contact to fix that, and if your email isn't working because your nameserver is broken, it's useful to have a phone number or fax, or at least an email address somewhere else like GMail. But if you haven't provided that information, then bummer for you, it stays broken. That's not ICANN's problem.
The interesting problem is disputes over domain name ownership, and ICANN's somewhat sensible position is that *they* don't want to have to be in the middle of domain disputes in ways that get them sued or cost them lawyer time, and they don't want the registry or registrars to have to do that either - they want that to be a problem between domain name owners and people who want to take the owners to court.
The two good tequilas I've had that I like if I'm drinking it straight are Milagro and Cazadores, though I'm more likely to drink scotch if I want a sipping liquor.
Usually, though, if I'm drinking tequila it's in a margarita, and the subtleties of good tequila get lost in that, and if anything the flavors of an anejo don't work well so an el cheapo tequila can do better - the quality of the mixers matters a lot more. I tend to prefer cheap gold tequila; my wife tends to prefer cheap clear tequila.
A few years back we were down in Mazatlan, and went to a restaurant called Tony's where one of our friends is a regular. Most of the people ordered the fish ("What kind of fish is it today?" "It's Tony's Fish!") Tony kept pouring tequila for us - it was unlabeled, but of course it was "Tony's Tequila". I later looked in one of the local liquor stores, and I'm guessing that it was probably about $5/gallon:-)
This guy's theory, as far as I can tell without reading the book, has nothing to do with Creationism - it's that biological development is all about different shapes of Donuts. He's a businessman, so obviously the explanation for his theory is that he's spent too much time in boring meetings, doodling while waiting for a break so he can go get another donut and some more coffee, and perhaps we could speculate about what's in the brownies at afternoon meeting-break time.
There have been other major origin theories competing with Darwin's theories besides Creationism and its relatives, UFO cults, Scientology scames, and pre-Darwin attempts at science. Lysenkoism is one of the best-known - it's important because of the damage it did to Russian science.
But the worst of them tend to come from people who *say* they believe in Evolution but Just Don't Get It. Most of them are either a view of "Evolution" as "Progress", or a view of "Survival of the Fittest" as a moral imperative and an excuse for anything from self-congratulation to racism and sterilizing the UnFit. The "Progress" types are at least friendlier - they're mostly wooly-headed liberals who believe that we're all getting Better and Better, though one technology columnist I like did refer to us evolving into something even cooler. The Social Darwinist types are generally nasty.
And both of these types are teaching in our schools, confusing kids about how evolution works and providing handy strawmen for the Intelligent Design movement. Unlike Creationists, who school boards can generally recognize for what they are, these guys get in without getting caught.
There are milder forms of these errors as well - the "slow, steady gradual evolution" model tends to be popular because it fits our worldviews the way Donuts fit Pivar's, and Gould's punctuated-equilibrium arguments are important counterweights to them. And people tend to mix up Darwinism with things we've learned later, like Mendel's genetics, details embedded in DNA, etc. Darwin's _actual_ work had a lot of big holes in it and occasional wrong assumptions. There's a lot of room for criticizing the Original Darwinism, and because it's a scientific theory, that's just fine. Knee-jerk defenses of Darwinism don't do it any favors - if anything they make it easier for the Creationists.
This kneejerk attack against Christians, assuming that somebody who writes a crackpot theory as an alternative to Darwinism must be one of them pushing creationism, is insulting and in really bad taste. Your prejudice would be more obvious if you'd insulted Jews rather than Christians.
At least RTFA before you go insulting people, and then insult the *right* people. This crackpot appears to be saying that it's "Donuts all the way down".
Skype said the problem wasn't the specific patches, but the fact that everybody rebooted at once. Patch Tuesday doesn't always require rebooting your machine, but my home machine got rebooted; my work machine also rebooted but sometimes that's because of what else my IT department wants to do when they're downloading the Microsoft patches, so it's hard for me to tell.
Maybe the average machine had more downtime on this month's reboot? Or the reboots happened in a more concentrated time window?
Look, the article's content-free hype from a high-level bureaucrat reported by a non-technical newspaper writer, saying that he's obtaining funding for committees to develop future projects that'll be Really Cool. Nothing to see here, move along....
...
Oh, still here? Presumably the research he's talking about isn't just IPv6, because that's starting way too late, and lots of good work was actually done in Japan. Maybe it's something transport-related or router-related or content-related, which could mean user interfaces or could mean HDTV-ng over IPv6 or better-rendered interactive tentacle animations or whatever. Saying that it'll improve transmission rates while preventing viruses says there isn't really much coherence.
Certainly the Internet itself will have changed a bit by 2020....
WiMax certainly isn't going to fix the TV-over-Internets distribution problem - it doesn't have close to enough bandwidth or range, and you'd basically be better off keeping broadcast TV... The sweet spot for performance seems to be about 10 Mbps at 5 miles - it can go faster, or it can go farther, but there's a distance-speed tradeoff and the more d**2 area you cover the more users you get competing for the total throughput.
The main differences between carriers who are looking at deploying WiMax are whether they're trying to use unlicensed bandwidth (competing with 802.11abgn, cordless phones, and microwave ovens) or paying for licensed bandwidth (more predictable performance but higher costs), and of course how to sell/market it. The markets for primary service to a site (competing with wireline telcos) are different from the business continuity market (getting reliability by providing separate connectivity that's backhoe-proof), and the roaming data market is not only different but requires more WiMax technology development.
One of the US Army's favorite alternatives to lead is Depleted Uranium. It's 70% denser than lead, and was initially developed for attacking heavily armored Soviet tanks. It has lots of potential problems, none of which apply when the Bush Administration uses it.
I don't know if there are other commonly used materials for tank shells - steel or something?
It looks like the enterprise product is packaging new releases of several of their components -- there's a 64-bit hypervisor version 3.1 that uses the Intel and AMD hardware tricks, APIs, management tools, and XenMotion, which lets you move running virtual machines around. According to Xen's product page, the free-beer XenExpress version gets the hypervisor, APIs, and some of the management tools, but not the fancier management or XenMotion, and it's somewhat crippled in terms of capacity (max 4 VMs, 2 CPUs, 4GB RAM, while the commercial versions support 128GB total RAM, larger VMs, and unlimited VMs and CPUs.)
(But will it run Linux?) It will run Linux -- one of the data sheets implies that Linux only runs in 32-bit mode, while Windows can run 64-bit. Perhaps there's more documentation that provides more details."
How free is it? I don't know; I haven't read the licenses, so I don't know if it's free-beer-only-closed-source or Fully Stallman Compliant (unlikely) or somewhere in between (probably.)
I wrote one of those submissions:-) I mostly commented on the product rather than the buyout. Here you go:
"XenSource has been in the news twice this week -- Monday they release a product, then Tuesday they get bought for $500m by Citrix. Here's Network World's take on the buyout and on the product. It looks like the product is packaging new releases of several of their components -- there's a 64-bit hypervisor version 3.1 that uses the Intel and AMD hardware tricks, APIs, management tools, and XenMotion, which lets you move running virtual machines around. According to Xen's product page, the free-beer XenExpress version gets the hypervisor, APIs, and some of the management tools, but not the fancier management or XenMotion, and it's somewhat crippled in terms of capacity (max 4 VMs, 2 CPUs, 4GB RAM, while the commercial versions support 128GB total RAM, larger VMs, and unlimited VMs and CPUs.)
(But will it run Linux?) It will run Linux -- one of the data sheets implies that Linux only runs in 32-bit mode, while Windows can run 64-bit. Perhaps there's more documentation that provides more details."
I normally uselocalhost / 127.0.0.1 for stuff that's really supposed to be on my machine.
127.0.0.2,.3, etc. makes it easier to track the source of sites I'm killhostfiling, in case I care - are they stuff from an imported list, or stuff I've added explicitly? Also, it's a bit more obvious that they're not pointing to the real system.
Then of course there was the famous troll about there being a bunch of Scientology documents at ftp://127.0.0.1/:-)
I tend to reserve localhost for things that really _are_ on my local host.
I've heard that somebody makes a trivial webserver that 404s every request, so it's useful for pointing your ad requests to without wasting much CPU time or hitting the file system if you don't need to serve real web pages.
I first heard it from an ex-Navy guy; in his version the Navy's approach to securing a computer is to tie it down so it won't bounce around when you ship it. (The Marines did armed guards, the air force still did a purchase order, and I don't think he mentioned the Army, but nobody did what we think of as securing computers.) Dave was _much_ neater than I was at handling cables - they'd get stowed carefully in drawers, or fastened to the rack with cable tie instead of hanging around like spaghetti. He was pretty good at _actual_ computer security as well.
The alternative to peering with somebody isn't degrading their traffic - it's not accepting it from a direct connection, only from another ISP. Degrading the traffic would not only be a spectacularly bad thing to do, it would take extra work. Degrading normally becomes an issue only when some content provider wants better-than-average quality of service rather than best-effort - your Google http connection is always going to work fine, but that video feed or voice call not only wants the bits delivered in order without losing too many of them, it also needs better real-time performance and needs to crowd out your http and Bittorrent traffic rather than the other way around.
There's a bit of subtlety to these discussions because "peering" has some technical meanings in addition to financial ones, but normally the two are aligned - either Company A and Company B think they'll both benefit from accepting each other's traffic (so they'll split the cost of an interconnection, or meet at an exchange point where they're both paying for their own pipe into the exchange, but won't charge each other money for the bandwidth), or else at least one of them doesn't think that, in which case that one will say "you can connect to me for $X for a pipe of size Y". Usually peering happens if both companies are carriers of similar size, or sometimes if they have synergistic market niches (e.g. one is an access provider with lots of eyeballs trying to get content to attract more access customers, and the other is a content provider with lots of content, and their political power is balanced.) The details are also somewhat different in Europe, where distances are much shorter and everybody uses a couple of major exchange points in London and Amsterdam, than they are in the US, where distances are much longer, with a couple dozen major long-haul carriers interconnecting in 5-10 cities (mostly on both coasts.)
If Carrier A doesn't think Company B can deliver as much benefit as they're getting, they won't build a pipe to B unless B pays them. B can pay Carrier C for service, and if A and C are peers, then A will accept BGP routes to B servers on their peering pipe with C. But if B convinces C to do free peering, A generally won't accept B's BGP routes on their Carrier C peering pipe; they may only accept it from Carrier D that B decided they did have to pay. Sometimes this leads to users who can't reach the whole Internet - we've seen that occasionally in the US when one of the very-low-priced marginally-Tier-1 carriers has trouble with former peers and doesn't want to pay for transit.
Normally it would be surprising that the BBC gets free peering from carriers (assuming it's free as opposed to paid-for peering) rather than having to pay transit to all of them, but perhaps the politics are such that access providers think the Beeb is important enough to their customer base that they're willing to give away the connections. For instance, a small DSL reseller needs to have connectivity to Google, so they may give Google a direct connection), but a large semi-monopoly cable-modem company doesn't need to have connectivity to Obscure Video Content Inc., so they're not going to give them a free pipe.
Romney reminded me a lot of Nathan Petrelli from Heroes.
Unfortunately, the writers for the series made that less useful by having Petrelli do something decent at the end of the story arc instead of continuing to be the nasty scum that he was most of the first season:-)
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But that hasn't been what the Pandemic Flu scares have been about, except for the first couple of months of the avian flu when there were some real concerns. The political side of the Bush Administration and the Homeland Security crowd want to keep the people afraid, whether it's afraid of terrorists or sick birds or married gay people, because that gives them political power they can use. The Pandemic Flu stuff has been how they've kept technology businesses helping keep people scared, and lets them reach a segment of the population who aren't as good at buying into the Moslem Terrorists scare or the married gay people scare. (Note that I didn't say "The Republicans" - some of these people are also partisan Republicans, and some of them are the civil-service or military types who've been helping the Administration's propaganda war for years, and the traditional Republicans weren't really into this sort of thing except when there were Commies to be scared of or nuclear weapons and Star Wars defenses to build.)
Of course there are businesses that are pushing this sort of thing for business reasons. Most of them are consultants (either individual or big-firm types) selling consulting services, or Internet-related companies that want to sell bandwidth or VPN appliances or data center space, and this is yet another way to make money along with exploiting earthquakes and hurricanes and Chicago tunnel floods and 9/11/01 and other infrastructure disasters to get customers to think about building reliable data infrastructures. But you may notice that the government keeps reminding businesses about how they need to prepare for Pandemic Flu, and doesn't keep reminding them that they need to prepare for hurricanes.
A lot of the recommendations that these exercises come out with seems trivial to people in the high-tech business, like making sure people can work from home, but as a friend of mine here in Silicon Valley says "Not only are you not an 'average computer user', but nobody you know is an 'average computer user' either." I've been doing some work from home since the days of 1200 baud modems, and for the last 15 years I've generally had field jobs that mean I need to be able to work just as well from a customer's office as well as my company's office, which means that I can just as well work from home as from the office unless I need specialized equipment like photocopies or the big laser printer or the padded boxes we use to mail computers in for hardware repairs, and while in-person meetings are nice, we usually just use conference bridges. There's some benefit into bullying old-style managers into giving their workers more flexibility and build some reliability into their data centers, and if it takes scaring them with the pandemic flu to do so I'll put up with a bit of it, but it's never really been about anything other than politics.
The Wikipedia article on the Karmapa Succession Controversy talks about the issue some - apparently in the 1790s, the Tibetan government forbade the Sharmapa lama from reincarnating, among other things because his job was to recognize the newly reincarnated Karmapa lama, who's the first line of reincarnated lamas. So the next few Sharmapa reincarnations stayed secret and did their job undercover.
It's certainly not off-topic - headscarf laws are an offensive government interference into religion, just as this is, though they don't have the same level of absurdity to them.
(And of course just because government shouldn't be banning the things, that doesn't mean banks are likely to allow masked people into their buildings. On the other hand, in the cultures where women wear the things, they can send their husband or father to the cash machine when they need money, so they don't need to go to the bank themselves.)
It's not just that you need surviving kids to remember you after you're gone - it's that you need surviving kids to take care of you in your old age when you can no longer hunt or do heavy farm work yourself. That _is_ how Social Security used to work in most of the world, though in more communal villages it might be other people's kids as well as your own.
Llamas seem to be fairly popular in the rural areas around San Francisco. So is naming them "Dalai" or "Dolly" or whatever, though the only llama-owning friend of mine around here did enough Tibetan Buddhism that she could be slightly excused for doing so.
Of course, given China's current program of encouraging Chinese to move to Tibet, it's not clear how long that'll be true - depends partly on the politics, and partly on whether the economics of Tibet can support a large immigrant population. The business / middle-class sector is rapidly absorbing Chinese immigrants, but that doesn't mean that significant numbers of Chinese want to become nomadic yak herders or small-holding barley farmers or other agriculturalists, who are most of the population outside Lhasa.
Yao! (If you remember that Visa Card commercial....)
RTFA - This is about police setting up calls so they can bug a conversation with Zero of the participants knowing that the conversation is being recorded, and there's not only the question of whether that's legal at all (without a warrant), but also whether the information they gather can be used in court.
Scooter's question about "Do VOIP conversations have the same legal protection that PSTN conversations have?" isn't the right question here (because this isn't what this bugging technique does), but it also probably doesn't have a well-defined answer. When the Feds wanted to force VOIP companies to make their infrastructures wiretappable, they argued that VOIP providers have the same responsibility to give the FBI a blank check that the telcos have, and any of them that are subject to US regulation have had to comply (so lots of the VOIP product literature talks about CALEA as well as 911 support.) On the other hand, when the Feds want to wiretap VOIP calls without doing as much work as they need to do for a standard wiretap warrant, they tend to argue that they don't need it.
In the Bush Administration environment, there's been a sufficiently rabid attack on privacy that they can probably get away with non-warrant VOIP wiretapping legally, even now that Gonzales has left, and I haven't heard any of the leading Democrats saying they plan to change this and force DoJ, DoD, and Homeland Security to start acting like Americans. (In particular, my memories of John Edwards's debates when he was trying to get the Democratic nomination in 2004 were that he was all in favor of the wiretapping-for-national-security crowd. And while it's possible that we'll end up with the major parties nominating Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul, I think it's rather more likely that lightning will strike all the FBI buildings at once.)
This isn't the same thing as listening in on calls between your target and someone else. This is making a call to somebody and bugging their conversations. You're probably supposed to get a warrant, at least in pre-Bush America. (Though in the real pre-Bush America, that mainly mattered if you wanted to use what you heard in court or needed the telco's help for the wiretap; otherwise you just happen to have gotten "an anonymous tip" that your target met so-and-so and talked about such-and-such, which was enough evidence to get a real warrant from a judge.)
Next thing you know, there'll be attacks where people call up your phone, turn on the speakerphone instead of the mike, volume up to 11, and start talking without you hitting a button to answer. So not only can the FBI call up and listen to your conversations, but the Nigerian Bureau of Investigation can call up and tell you about this money they're trying to get out of the country.
Maybe it's time to get a Linux mobile phone after all, so this sort of bugging is fixable
There are alternative ways to handle trademark disputes, and there's been a lot of scope creep in how various special interests want to use the whois information since it's there, whether that's the RIAA who want to find the owner of a website that has allegedly-copyrighted MP3s on it or cops and spooks who want to find out who's published some thoughtcrime on the web.
The original purpose of whois information is to be able to contact the people who run a domain so that broken things can be fixed and bills can get paid. Contacting somebody doesn't mean you need to know their True Name, ICBM address of their house, pager, and home phone number - it means that you've got an email that reaches somebody who'll do something, a name or title to include in the message, and if there's a phone number that can reach somebody appropriate or a fax number to get them a message, it's there. So names like "Admin Contact" and email addresses like "DomainRegistration@example.com" are perfectly adequate for that. If you need to have a bill sent on paper to generate a company invoice, as opposed to sending the bill by email, then you also need a paper address, but it can certainly be a mailbox at a mailbox store rather than the home address of the registrant, because it's for sending bills, not subpoenas or SWAT teams. There are politicians and net.politicians who want to change this, but they're not only interested in violating your privacy, they're clueless about the real functions of whois.
If you don't provide contact information that's complete enough to fix a problem, then either the problem doesn't get fixed, or it gets fixed in ways that don't have your input.
Usually, though, if I'm drinking tequila it's in a margarita, and the subtleties of good tequila get lost in that, and if anything the flavors of an anejo don't work well so an el cheapo tequila can do better - the quality of the mixers matters a lot more. I tend to prefer cheap gold tequila; my wife tends to prefer cheap clear tequila.
A few years back we were down in Mazatlan, and went to a restaurant called Tony's where one of our friends is a regular. Most of the people ordered the fish ("What kind of fish is it today?" "It's Tony's Fish!") Tony kept pouring tequila for us - it was unlabeled, but of course it was "Tony's Tequila". I later looked in one of the local liquor stores, and I'm guessing that it was probably about $5/gallon
There have been other major origin theories competing with Darwin's theories besides Creationism and its relatives, UFO cults, Scientology scames, and pre-Darwin attempts at science. Lysenkoism is one of the best-known - it's important because of the damage it did to Russian science.
But the worst of them tend to come from people who *say* they believe in Evolution but Just Don't Get It. Most of them are either a view of "Evolution" as "Progress", or a view of "Survival of the Fittest" as a moral imperative and an excuse for anything from self-congratulation to racism and sterilizing the UnFit. The "Progress" types are at least friendlier - they're mostly wooly-headed liberals who believe that we're all getting Better and Better, though one technology columnist I like did refer to us evolving into something even cooler. The Social Darwinist types are generally nasty.
And both of these types are teaching in our schools, confusing kids about how evolution works and providing handy strawmen for the Intelligent Design movement. Unlike Creationists, who school boards can generally recognize for what they are, these guys get in without getting caught.
There are milder forms of these errors as well - the "slow, steady gradual evolution" model tends to be popular because it fits our worldviews the way Donuts fit Pivar's, and Gould's punctuated-equilibrium arguments are important counterweights to them. And people tend to mix up Darwinism with things we've learned later, like Mendel's genetics, details embedded in DNA, etc. Darwin's _actual_ work had a lot of big holes in it and occasional wrong assumptions. There's a lot of room for criticizing the Original Darwinism, and because it's a scientific theory, that's just fine. Knee-jerk defenses of Darwinism don't do it any favors - if anything they make it easier for the Creationists.
At least RTFA before you go insulting people, and then insult the *right* people. This crackpot appears to be saying that it's "Donuts all the way down".
Maybe the average machine had more downtime on this month's reboot? Or the reboots happened in a more concentrated time window?
Oh, still here? Presumably the research he's talking about isn't just IPv6, because that's starting way too late, and lots of good work was actually done in Japan. Maybe it's something transport-related or router-related or content-related, which could mean user interfaces or could mean HDTV-ng over IPv6 or better-rendered interactive tentacle animations or whatever. Saying that it'll improve transmission rates while preventing viruses says there isn't really much coherence.
Certainly the Internet itself will have changed a bit by 2020....
The main differences between carriers who are looking at deploying WiMax are whether they're trying to use unlicensed bandwidth (competing with 802.11abgn, cordless phones, and microwave ovens) or paying for licensed bandwidth (more predictable performance but higher costs), and of course how to sell/market it. The markets for primary service to a site (competing with wireline telcos) are different from the business continuity market (getting reliability by providing separate connectivity that's backhoe-proof), and the roaming data market is not only different but requires more WiMax technology development.
I don't know if there are other commonly used materials for tank shells - steel or something?
(But will it run Linux?) It will run Linux -- one of the data sheets implies that Linux only runs in 32-bit mode, while Windows can run 64-bit. Perhaps there's more documentation that provides more details."
How free is it? I don't know; I haven't read the licenses, so I don't know if it's free-beer-only-closed-source or Fully Stallman Compliant (unlikely) or somewhere in between (probably.)
"XenSource has been in the news twice this week -- Monday they release a product, then Tuesday they get bought for $500m by Citrix. Here's Network World's take on the buyout and on the product. It looks like the product is packaging new releases of several of their components -- there's a 64-bit hypervisor version 3.1 that uses the Intel and AMD hardware tricks, APIs, management tools, and XenMotion, which lets you move running virtual machines around. According to Xen's product page, the free-beer XenExpress version gets the hypervisor, APIs, and some of the management tools, but not the fancier management or XenMotion, and it's somewhat crippled in terms of capacity (max 4 VMs, 2 CPUs, 4GB RAM, while the commercial versions support 128GB total RAM, larger VMs, and unlimited VMs and CPUs.)
(But will it run Linux?) It will run Linux -- one of the data sheets implies that Linux only runs in 32-bit mode, while Windows can run 64-bit. Perhaps there's more documentation that provides more details."
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2007/081507-citr
127.0.0.2,
Also, it's a bit more obvious that they're not pointing to the real system.
Then of course there was the famous troll about there being a bunch of Scientology documents at ftp://127.0.0.1/
I've heard that somebody makes a trivial webserver that 404s every request, so it's useful for pointing your ad requests to without wasting much CPU time or hitting the file system if you don't need to serve real web pages.
I first heard it from an ex-Navy guy; in his version the Navy's approach to securing a computer is to tie it down so it won't bounce around when you ship it. (The Marines did armed guards, the air force still did a purchase order, and I don't think he mentioned the Army, but nobody did what we think of as securing computers.) Dave was _much_ neater than I was at handling cables - they'd get stowed carefully in drawers, or fastened to the rack with cable tie instead of hanging around like spaghetti. He was pretty good at _actual_ computer security as well.
There's a bit of subtlety to these discussions because "peering" has some technical meanings in addition to financial ones, but normally the two are aligned - either Company A and Company B think they'll both benefit from accepting each other's traffic (so they'll split the cost of an interconnection, or meet at an exchange point where they're both paying for their own pipe into the exchange, but won't charge each other money for the bandwidth), or else at least one of them doesn't think that, in which case that one will say "you can connect to me for $X for a pipe of size Y". Usually peering happens if both companies are carriers of similar size, or sometimes if they have synergistic market niches (e.g. one is an access provider with lots of eyeballs trying to get content to attract more access customers, and the other is a content provider with lots of content, and their political power is balanced.) The details are also somewhat different in Europe, where distances are much shorter and everybody uses a couple of major exchange points in London and Amsterdam, than they are in the US, where distances are much longer, with a couple dozen major long-haul carriers interconnecting in 5-10 cities (mostly on both coasts.)
If Carrier A doesn't think Company B can deliver as much benefit as they're getting, they won't build a pipe to B unless B pays them. B can pay Carrier C for service, and if A and C are peers, then A will accept BGP routes to B servers on their peering pipe with C. But if B convinces C to do free peering, A generally won't accept B's BGP routes on their Carrier C peering pipe; they may only accept it from Carrier D that B decided they did have to pay. Sometimes this leads to users who can't reach the whole Internet - we've seen that occasionally in the US when one of the very-low-priced marginally-Tier-1 carriers has trouble with former peers and doesn't want to pay for transit.
Normally it would be surprising that the BBC gets free peering from carriers (assuming it's free as opposed to paid-for peering) rather than having to pay transit to all of them, but perhaps the politics are such that access providers think the Beeb is important enough to their customer base that they're willing to give away the connections. For instance, a small DSL reseller needs to have connectivity to Google, so they may give Google a direct connection), but a large semi-monopoly cable-modem company doesn't need to have connectivity to Obscure Video Content Inc., so they're not going to give them a free pipe.
Unfortunately, the writers for the series made that less useful by having Petrelli do something decent at the end of the story arc instead of continuing to be the nasty scum that he was most of the first season