I've gotten Nigerian 419 scams *purporting* to be from all kinds of places, but most of them have either been from free email providers (teenmail.co.za is especially popular, so it's still Africa, and virgilio.it or sometimes Hong Kong) or from IP addresses that are satellite connections to Nigeria, typically from cybercafes.
I've gotten very little that actually comes from African countries other than Nigeria (though obviously the emails pretty randomly pick corrupt countries for the corrupt official or dying cancer patient or whatever to be from, depending on what's been overused recently.) The traceable ones that aren't from Nigeria are usually from the Netherlands, but still seem to be Nigerians using cybercafes or occasionally hosting.
I received one of those calls a few years ago. The spammer didn't realize that it was a different time of day here in the Western US, much less that it was Sunday on a holiday weekend, or a loud science fiction convention:-) I tried to get the operator to trace the IP address the spammer was connecting from, but they didn't have the tools to do that. Extremely frustrating, especially since I was working for a phone company, though I don't remember which of the companies was doing the relay.
Apparently the government not only mandates that they provide the service, but also pays for it (I think it's Universal Service Fund or the Al Gore tax or the Spanish American War telephone tax or something.) And yeah, the employees aren't supposed to be able to tell the recipient "Yes, it's another Nigerian scammer" - tracerouting the source to a Nigerian cybercafe and telling the recipient that that's where it's from would help.
(Actually, recent research has shown that it's pretty much useless, except that echinacea tea fits into the "drink lots of hot liquids" set of advice just like hot tap water does.)
Authentication and encryption are really different problems.
At home, I don't mind if guests use my system, but I want my connections encrypted to prevent eavesdropping, and I'd like the system to allow any machine I've got to connect however it can if it doesn't support all the same options (e.g. I'd like old WEP-only stuff to get IP connectivity even if my main connections are using WPAx or whatever.) My connection to my office runs IPSEC anyway, and my email runs SMTP-over-SSL, but that doesn't mean I want anybody with a Netstumbler or Airsniffer to be able to watch what addresses I'm connecting to or what web pages I'm reading.
At work, obviously we only want authorized users to connect to anything inside the firewall, so making them use a password is ok, and we want encryption. The obvious solution is to put wireless *outside* the firewall as well as using whatever tools the wireless offers. (In reality, we've got wires to all our desks, and the wireless is a toy in the lab as well as supporting occasional visitors, so if it runs encryption that's only because somebody was playing with the encryption recently. But if we did use it for production, it'd be firewalled.)
All the APs I've tried so far seem to only give you encryption if you're also using authentication and passwords. That's annoying, and I can't tell from the documentation if that's the only option, or if it's required by the standards, or if it's just inadequate documentation (with my Netgear 802.11b, it's such appallingly bad documentation that it's not possible to tell. With my 3Com, the documentation's much better, but maybe there's something I'm missing, and it's too easy to use the "Set the slide switch to 'AP' and it Just Works" option, which gives a bridging-mode unencrypted AP that transparently passes through my firewall's DHCP support.)
Some older equipment wanted to support authentication without encryption, because they perceived encryption as requiring too much horsepower to fit on a PCMCIA card, in spite of how amazingly simple and low-impact RC4 is, and also because the US Government was still pretending that if they allowed encryption, Commie Spies might get it. (Also, some people had this idea that stronger encryption required more horsepower, which is wrong for RC4 - the key setup stage crunches the key bits into an initial table, and then everything else is identical from there.)
So am I missing something about the standards, or is there a way to get encryption without also requiring authentication.
Sure, it's nice to get some combination of wide area, long distance, and high bandwidth (though obviously you don't get max bandwidth and max area simultaneously), but how many simultaneous connections can it support with reasonably latency performance? For VOIP, you don't need a lot of bandwidth per user, typically 22-80kbps depending on your choices of codecs, but if you're handling a lot of customers over a wide area, you're going to need a lot of simultaneous connections. Will that number change if some of your users are also burning high bandwidth?
Interference is less of a problem than some people think. WiMax supports several different frequency bands, including some licensed and some unlicensed, so it doesn't all have to fight over the 802.11b/g 2.4 GHz band.
Memory sticks are fun (assuming your office's standard PC can boot from USB without haggling with the BIOS, and preferably has USB2 instead of USB1), but Knoppix on a CDROM or DVD, and mini-CD distributions like the Bootable Business Card, and special application systems like MythTV or a network security suite if your group does that sort of thing make good demos. Pop it in, reboot, show it off. Pop in a different demo, reboot, try it also. Pop out the disk and they're back to Windows again. Knoppix does a nice job of finding the user's own files on a Windows disk (at least if it's not NTFS), so you can also show off OpenOffice and a browser.
And showing Firefox is an obvious win, especially since you can demonstrate user-written extensions/themes/plugins like Linky and the various theme sets.
Firefox is, for the average user, much more accessible than many of the traditional Open Source tools like gcc and emacs. Popup Prevention *was* a really useful demo, though some Flash things seem to have gotten around it, and IE is starting to add popup prevention. Tabbed browsing is really nice, especially for applications like "So you want to open a bunch of articles from Google News / Your company website, etc. at once". Furthermore, you can show off how easy it is to install extensions (giving a plug for how Open Source makes it possible to write them) like Linky which lets you open a bunch of images in new tabs (so go to an image-rich website, open up the pictures, and tab through.)
Sigh. ISO downloads instead of bit-torrents. Maybe they figure the beta won't be popular enough to get lots of downloaders at once, but they still ought to be efficient about it.
Noise and speed are the main issues here (flash is slower for writing, but since there's no rotational latency they're quite nice for read-mostly applications like the OS, assuming you've got USB2 and not USB1.)
Sure, there are many applications for which laptop drives just fine, and it wasn't all that long ago that 20GB was a nice comfortable space to bounce around in and 40GB was luxury. On the other hand, once you start downloading jam-band concerts from eTree in lossless-compression mode instead of MP3s, your disk space is toast:-) 120GB starts looking kind of small after a while. Also, if you've got multiple machines and want online backups, as opposed to offline external drive backup systems, you'll also need the space.
A few years ago, a couple of Russian immigrants were found murdered in New Jersey. They were apparently spammers involved in a pump&dump stock scam. I don't think the crime was ever solved, but it was generally believed to be a Mafia deal (not sure if Russian Mafia or New York Traditional Mafia) by some investors who got burned.
It's not just Russians - there are lots of languages that don't have a sound like the Engish voiced and unvoiced "th" sounds, and native speakers of those languages often have trouble. I've got a friend whose first two languages are Hungarian and German, and while she did learn to make those sounds, she complains that it was really hard to get it right. Irish speakers also traditionally had trouble with it, though that's probably less of a problem now that most of Ireland speaks English rather than Gaelic.
Think about the classic New York / New Joisey accents with phrases like "Toity-Toid Street"...
Oh, hi, I wondered what your slashdot ID was, and couldn't find it when I looked for it; must have done something wrong.
Most business contracts with telcos have service level agreements, though the penalties are usually limited to "X% of your monthly bill back if the circuit is down for Y% of the time". The big issue for them isn't the actually amount of money the users would get back, which is probably either zero or very near zero - it's having 1000 people either calling their legal staff to complain about undocumented changes to the service, or calling their maintenance people to complain about not being able to reach the union web site.
In the US there'd be labor laws heavily regulating this sort of behaviour; I've got no idea whether Canada has much of that. On the other hand, Canada has all kinds of weird laws vaguely related to free speech and human rights, and it's possible that somebody could find one of them to spank Telus with (though it's also possible that Telus could spank the union with one of them.)
Apple annoyingly uses Antique measurement units, as opposed to metric, but the size is 3.3 x 0.98 x 0.33 = 1.067 cubic inches = 17484 mm3. (Not sure whether that's with the USB-jack cover on or not.) The cube is 13824 mm3. So the Shuffle is a bit larger, but yes, I'd rather carry a flat object than a clunky-shaped object.
But you don't put this thing in your pants pocket you'd need a really long headset cord and it'd get caught on things. Either you put it in your shirt pocket (where flat is also better), or you just leave it hanging from the cord, in which case flat is usually better as well.
I haven't seen any laptops in the category you're describing, unless you count PDAs, at least with good-resolution screens on them. There have been niche-market Transmeta laptops, but they get part of their battery life (and portability) by using relatively small screens. While there is certainly an emphasis on putting in too much CPU, so the specs look "better", there's a lot of demand for better screens, which keeps the price higher, and most of the machines I've seen with slower CPUs are simply older laptops, which still don't have good battery life.
I have a Netgear 802.11b router, which on first try gave me 300kbps throughput on wireless (tested at broadbandreports.com), compared to 1.5 Mbps on the wired side (so it's not a CPU limitation.) Partly this is because most of the 4-5 wireless access points I can see from here are all on the same channel. (So I tried to change the channel on the Netgear and found it's a totally cretinous untrustable box with appallingly bad documentation - DHCP doesn't work reliably, etc.)
I gave up on the thing, and now have a 3Com OfficeConnect 802.11g Travel Router, which gets me nearly-full use of my bandwidth (probably the difference is a bit of latency on the wireless), and looks like it should support much faster networking between my laptop and desktop if I want to do that.
Flash has gotten cheap enough that you can get a gigabyte for about $50, and most modern BIOSes can boot from USB drives. It's no what you're going to use for your whole system, but it's more than enough for a Knoppix-like operating system installation and the top level or two of your/home directories, so you can leave the disk drive for bulkier storage and use the power-management features to spin down the disk when it's not in use. I'm not doing this yet (my current USB stick is my iPod shuffle), but it's on the things-to-experiment with list.
The next trick is getting Linux and also Windows to work better in hybrid designs like that - having the full install on disk, and caching frequently-used programs onto the USB or whatever.
Obviously the phone companies can't offer you DSL if they don't have a set of phone wires connected to your house. But there's no reason they have to connect those wires to a phone switch or connect the voiceband parts of the analog spectrum to a phone switch or give you a phone number on that line. For SDSL service, normally they don't - the wires go directly to a DSLAM, and there's no voice service involved. (Typically you'll get that from carriers like Covad and from business-priced services from bigger ISPs.) The ADSL systems are designed so they *can* line-share between DSL and phone service, and it's simpler for the phone companies to connect everybody from the back of the DSLAM to the phone switch and do their record-keeping by giving each line a phone number, and they get to charge you money for the phone service as well as getting to rent the shared line to the ISP (or the layer 2 PVC, if they're running the DSLAM), so of course that's what they want to do. But it's strictly a regulatory and economics thing.
None of the articles I've seen say whether Telus is blocking IP packets to the union's website or whether they're blocking the DNS entries on their DNS servers. If it's DNS, there are lots of ways to work around it (e.g. get multiple names, or publish the IP address http://10.11.12.13/union-stuff.html, or get customers to use alternative DNS servers.) But if it's blocking the IP address, the ISP is failing to deliver "Internet Service" to its customers - it's only delivering partial service. That's a breach of contract. (Now, if they block spammer/zombie IP addresses, I suppose they're also doing the same thing, but that's usually something customers _want_.) ISPs may or may not be covered by various countries' common carrier laws, but a contract is a contract.
There are too many crypto systems out there that use persistent encryption keys when they don't need to. RSA's fine for sending somebody blind email, but if you're setting up a session, e.g. SSL or SMTP transfer, the right choice is to use a Diffie-Hellman key exchange to create a temporary session key, and use RSA/DSA/etc. signatures on the DH keyparts. That means that your persistent keys are only used for forgery prevention, not for encryption, and the keys that were used for the actual encryption aren't stored past the end of the session, so you've got nothing to hand over to the cops, and you can demonstrate that to them if they insist.
The new New York City policy that the police can "randomly" decide to search your backpack, and if you don't like it you can leave the subway station, includes the policy that if they find "contraband" in your backpack they can use it as evidence. And airport searches have been that way for years.
While much of US law derives from English Common Law, and much of the US revolution was about Englishmen in North America wanting their rights to be respected the way Englishmen in Great Britain often had their rights respected (but often had them violated as well). And the "Right to remain silent" phrasing comes from the Miranda decision in the mid 20th century - the right was inherent before that, and the 5th Amendment to the US Constitution clearly indicates the right not to testify against oneself, but court insistence that the police remind you of that before beating an answer out of you, and not letting them use evidence collected if they didn't do it, is relatively recent.
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I've gotten very little that actually comes from African countries other than Nigeria (though obviously the emails pretty randomly pick corrupt countries for the corrupt official or dying cancer patient or whatever to be from, depending on what's been overused recently.) The traceable ones that aren't from Nigeria are usually from the Netherlands, but still seem to be Nigerians using cybercafes or occasionally hosting.
Apparently the government not only mandates that they provide the service, but also pays for it (I think it's Universal Service Fund or the Al Gore tax or the Spanish American War telephone tax or something.) And yeah, the employees aren't supposed to be able to tell the recipient "Yes, it's another Nigerian scammer" - tracerouting the source to a Nigerian cybercafe and telling the recipient that that's where it's from would help.
Of course, anybody who's trying to teach their plants to meditate has probably been smoking some of them first...
see previous articles about reggae...
(Actually, recent research has shown that it's pretty much useless, except that echinacea tea fits into the "drink lots of hot liquids" set of advice just like hot tap water does.)
- At home, I don't mind if guests use my system, but I want my connections encrypted to prevent eavesdropping, and I'd like the system to allow any machine I've got to connect however it can if it doesn't support all the same options (e.g. I'd like old WEP-only stuff to get IP connectivity even if my main connections are using WPAx or whatever.) My connection to my office runs IPSEC anyway, and my email runs SMTP-over-SSL, but that doesn't mean I want anybody with a Netstumbler or Airsniffer to be able to watch what addresses I'm connecting to or what web pages I'm reading.
- At work, obviously we only want authorized users to connect to anything inside the firewall, so making them use a password is ok, and we want encryption. The obvious solution is to put wireless *outside* the firewall as well as using whatever tools the wireless offers. (In reality, we've got wires to all our desks, and the wireless is a toy in the lab as well as supporting occasional visitors, so if it runs encryption that's only because somebody was playing with the encryption recently. But if we did use it for production, it'd be firewalled.)
- Some older equipment wanted to support authentication without encryption, because they perceived encryption as requiring too much horsepower to fit on a PCMCIA card, in spite of how amazingly simple and low-impact RC4 is, and also because the US Government was still pretending that if they allowed encryption, Commie Spies might get it. (Also, some people had this idea that stronger encryption required more horsepower, which is wrong for RC4 - the key setup stage crunches the key bits into an initial table, and then everything else is identical from there.)
So am I missing something about the standards, or is there a way to get encryption without also requiring authentication.All the APs I've tried so far seem to only give you encryption if you're also using authentication and passwords. That's annoying, and I can't tell from the documentation if that's the only option, or if it's required by the standards, or if it's just inadequate documentation (with my Netgear 802.11b, it's such appallingly bad documentation that it's not possible to tell. With my 3Com, the documentation's much better, but maybe there's something I'm missing, and it's too easy to use the "Set the slide switch to 'AP' and it Just Works" option, which gives a bridging-mode unencrypted AP that transparently passes through my firewall's DHCP support.)
Oh, wait, this isn't the poll! Probably still a good idea, though...
Interference is less of a problem than some people think. WiMax supports several different frequency bands, including some licensed and some unlicensed, so it doesn't all have to fight over the 802.11b/g 2.4 GHz band.
And showing Firefox is an obvious win, especially since you can demonstrate user-written extensions/themes/plugins like Linky and the various theme sets.
Firefox is, for the average user, much more accessible than many of the traditional Open Source tools like gcc and emacs. Popup Prevention *was* a really useful demo, though some Flash things seem to have gotten around it, and IE is starting to add popup prevention. Tabbed browsing is really nice, especially for applications like "So you want to open a bunch of articles from Google News / Your company website, etc. at once". Furthermore, you can show off how easy it is to install extensions (giving a plug for how Open Source makes it possible to write them) like Linky which lets you open a bunch of images in new tabs (so go to an image-rich website, open up the pictures, and tab through.)
Sigh. ISO downloads instead of bit-torrents. Maybe they figure the beta won't be popular enough to get lots of downloaders at once, but they still ought to be efficient about it.
Sure, there are many applications for which laptop drives just fine, and it wasn't all that long ago that 20GB was a nice comfortable space to bounce around in and 40GB was luxury. On the other hand, once you start downloading jam-band concerts from eTree in lossless-compression mode instead of MP3s, your disk space is toast
A few years ago, a couple of Russian immigrants were found murdered in New Jersey. They were apparently spammers involved in a pump&dump stock scam. I don't think the crime was ever solved, but it was generally believed to be a Mafia deal (not sure if Russian Mafia or New York Traditional Mafia) by some investors who got burned.
Think about the classic New York / New Joisey accents with phrases like "Toity-Toid Street"...
Most business contracts with telcos have service level agreements, though the penalties are usually limited to "X% of your monthly bill back if the circuit is down for Y% of the time". The big issue for them isn't the actually amount of money the users would get back, which is probably either zero or very near zero - it's having 1000 people either calling their legal staff to complain about undocumented changes to the service, or calling their maintenance people to complain about not being able to reach the union web site.
In the US there'd be labor laws heavily regulating this sort of behaviour; I've got no idea whether Canada has much of that. On the other hand, Canada has all kinds of weird laws vaguely related to free speech and human rights, and it's possible that somebody could find one of them to spank Telus with (though it's also possible that Telus could spank the union with one of them.)
But you don't put this thing in your pants pocket you'd need a really long headset cord and it'd get caught on things. Either you put it in your shirt pocket (where flat is also better), or you just leave it hanging from the cord, in which case flat is usually better as well.
I haven't seen any laptops in the category you're describing, unless you count PDAs, at least with good-resolution screens on them. There have been niche-market Transmeta laptops, but they get part of their battery life (and portability) by using relatively small screens. While there is certainly an emphasis on putting in too much CPU, so the specs look "better", there's a lot of demand for better screens, which keeps the price higher, and most of the machines I've seen with slower CPUs are simply older laptops, which still don't have good battery life.
I gave up on the thing, and now have a 3Com OfficeConnect 802.11g Travel Router, which gets me nearly-full use of my bandwidth (probably the difference is a bit of latency on the wireless), and looks like it should support much faster networking between my laptop and desktop if I want to do that.
The next trick is getting Linux and also Windows to work better in hybrid designs like that - having the full install on disk, and caching frequently-used programs onto the USB or whatever.
Voices For Change, if you can access it, recommends using http://vfc.proxy.pfak.org/. The owner does not-for-profit hosting for a number of organizations. It's a Free-BSD box at an Undisclosed Location.
Obviously the phone companies can't offer you DSL if they don't have a set of phone wires connected to your house. But there's no reason they have to connect those wires to a phone switch or connect the voiceband parts of the analog spectrum to a phone switch or give you a phone number on that line. For SDSL service, normally they don't - the wires go directly to a DSLAM, and there's no voice service involved. (Typically you'll get that from carriers like Covad and from business-priced services from bigger ISPs.) The ADSL systems are designed so they *can* line-share between DSL and phone service, and it's simpler for the phone companies to connect everybody from the back of the DSLAM to the phone switch and do their record-keeping by giving each line a phone number, and they get to charge you money for the phone service as well as getting to rent the shared line to the ISP (or the layer 2 PVC, if they're running the DSLAM), so of course that's what they want to do. But it's strictly a regulatory and economics thing.
None of the articles I've seen say whether Telus is blocking IP packets to the union's website or whether they're blocking the DNS entries on their DNS servers. If it's DNS, there are lots of ways to work around it (e.g. get multiple names, or publish the IP address http://10.11.12.13/union-stuff.html, or get customers to use alternative DNS servers.) But if it's blocking the IP address, the ISP is failing to deliver "Internet Service" to its customers - it's only delivering partial service. That's a breach of contract. (Now, if they block spammer/zombie IP addresses, I suppose they're also doing the same thing, but that's usually something customers _want_.) ISPs may or may not be covered by various countries' common carrier laws, but a contract is a contract.
There are too many crypto systems out there that use persistent encryption keys when they don't need to. RSA's fine for sending somebody blind email, but if you're setting up a session, e.g. SSL or SMTP transfer, the right choice is to use a Diffie-Hellman key exchange to create a temporary session key, and use RSA/DSA/etc. signatures on the DH keyparts. That means that your persistent keys are only used for forgery prevention, not for encryption, and the keys that were used for the actual encryption aren't stored past the end of the session, so you've got nothing to hand over to the cops, and you can demonstrate that to them if they insist.
Welcome to the new Patriot Act America.
While much of US law derives from English Common Law, and much of the US revolution was about Englishmen in North America wanting their rights to be respected the way Englishmen in Great Britain often had their rights respected (but often had them violated as well). And the "Right to remain silent" phrasing comes from the Miranda decision in the mid 20th century - the right was inherent before that, and the 5th Amendment to the US Constitution clearly indicates the right not to testify against oneself, but court insistence that the police remind you of that before beating an answer out of you, and not letting them use evidence collected if they didn't do it, is relatively recent.