You could have used other mechanisms instead of cookies, e.g. building up complex URLs to maintain state, but for applications like shopping carts, cookies really are fairly effective - it's the kind of thing they were intended for.
What annoys me is the number of people who collect cookies for no good reason at all, specifically Apache users who collect an "Apache" cookie because that seems to be the default behaviour and they're too lazy to turn it off. And many of them are the same sorts of people who bitch about the privacy invasion from all these cookies.
Cookies weren't thought out in much detail when the spec was designed, and as you say they were mainly intended to make it easier to maintain state (as opposed to building ugly URLs to encode the state in.)
HTTP-REFERER lets an HTTP request indicate what page linked to the one you're requesting now. That means that a request for a banner ad contains the URL for the page that had the ad on it, so the banner ad company can track what page the ad was on. This not only wasn't thought out well, it wasn't even spelled correctly.
The two of them together are much worse. Browsers are only supposed to respond to cookie requests when the requesting web page is in the same domain as the cookie being requested. But HTTP-REFERER means that the advertiser's web page can be in banner-advertiser-example.com and still know that the main web page is in content-provider-example.com, and it can request a cookie that was left behind when other-content-provider.com's web page used a banner from banner-advertiser-example.com, because the banner advertiser is in the same domain even though the two web pages aren't.
That's nasty and annoying.
There are other ways advertisers can get some of the same information - instead of cookies, they can track by IP addresses, though that's obviously much less useful when ISPs do web caching or workers' PCs are behind company proxy firewalls, and banner-ads can also be built with ugly URLs as a substitute for HTTP-REFERER (e.g. http://banner-advertiser-example.com/ads/content-p rovider-3.jpg.) And advertisers will do many of these things when they can't get the cookies and referer data they'd like, but it's a start.
If you're using Mozilla, it's about four obvious menu steps deep, click the little radio button, and your job here is done. (Actually it's not quite done, because there will probably be sites where you do want the cookie - so use Tools->CookieManager->whatever.) Firefox probably has a slightly different menu chain, but it'll still be pretty obvious.
And stop being a simpering government-needs-to-help-me whiner. Spam shows up because spammers can guess your email address, but cookies only arrive when your browser asks for them. The nice friendly web page says "Hey, kid, wanna cookie?" and you're supposed to say nothing, like your momma told you, not answer "Oooooohhhh, cookies!".
Finland's pretty heavily wired to Sweden and mainland Europe. And if they're all trying to suck down content from outside Finland at the same time, that just means they hit bottlenecks on the international on inter-city links instead of the last kilometer link; they're still sharing as much bandwidth. Also, many of the reasons you'd want links that fast are because the ISPs want to sell you television (in case you RTFA), which from a data standpoint is locally generated and probably broadcast-mode (even if the TV show itself is imported), rather than coming from international links.
If the ISPs aren't stuipd, this will also make it easier for people to provide content, including Finnish-language and international-market material. (Of course, it also doesn't hurt performance if they run a major file-sharing server in Finland for Finnish users to access:-)
The most popular residential data services in the US, ADSL and Cable Modem, are both fundamentally asymmetric. The way the bandwidth is allocated, the way you distinguish signal from noise, the way the network controls who gets to transmit on what line and how collisions get resolved or avoided, and which end gets the expensive complex equipment vs. the cheap consumer-grade equipment are different in the two directions.
That doesn't mean that symmetric technologies aren't available (though the equipment is usually more expensive), or that the CLECs aren't picking what equipment to use based on what market they think they're selling to, because obviously they are, or that they aren't using them rudely or stupidly, but they really are asymmetric technologies. For a given amount of equipment cost, they could sell you a symmetric circuit (at least for DSL), but the downstream bandwidth would be slower than if they'd spent the same money on an asymmetric circuit, and residential consumers care a lot more about downstream speeds.
Monthly bandwidth caps aren't a technical issue - they're pure greed, and they seem to have originated with Telstra in Australia, who were always the Developed World's Most Clueless-for-data-users Telco, and because most other cable modem companes are also clueless and evil, their idea spread like wildfire around the cable industry. One of the Aussie telcos used to have a separate cap or pricing for Aussie vs. foreign content, because the overseas cables were still somewhat overpriced, while domestic bandwidth was much less of a problem (and most of it was local to two cities anyway.)
Anti-Server policies are a more complex case. Sure, some of it's because cable modem companies are suicidally clueless and think that they're better off selling to Couch Potatoes who treat the Internet like TV with different shows rather than to Real Users who create interesting content that other people want to download. But a lot of it dates to the early history of the industry. They didn't have traffic-shaping mechanisms, so a user really *could* swamp their block's total upstream, and the trial network in Fremont CA had equipment problems for a while, so a user could *really* *easily* swamp their block's total upstream, and PacBell (the local telco, who sold DSL service) did a bunch of dishonest but devastatingly effective "Web Hog" commercials about how if you were foolish enough to buy cable modem service instead of DSL, you'd couldn't depend on it and you'd have to do all your real use way after midnight when the network was quiet enough to work. Also, if you remember the popular-press issues of the time, the obvious thing that could generate enough upstream traffic to trash the network was a web server that had suddenly become popular, especially a (*gasp*) pr0n server, and they were trying to present a family-friendly sales pitch about how getting your kids on the network was really important if you wanted to keep up with the Joneses (and the Chens and the Kumars...), so if their network got bogged down by a pr0n server, it would be really bad PR for them. And since they couldn't manage bandwidth adequately anyway, they chose to ban servers instead, and to prevent users from treating that as damage and routing around it, they chose to ban anything that looked even vaguely server-like (including mail servers that *receive* mail, but have "server" in the name and are obviously for business.)
Dairy Farmers have traditionally hated DST. Not only do the cows need milking in the morning (which is much easier after sunrise than in the dark), but lots of *real* farmers also have day jobs, either in factories or stores, so if the day job starts an hour earlier during DST, they've got to get up earlier to deal with the cows. Farmers without cows don't care as much.
DST is there to make factory workers get up an hour earlier, without the government having to admit that it's telling everybody to get up earlier in the morning. Rather than messing with the clocks, they *could* just tell the TV stations to run earlier schedules, and most Americans would obey....
There's no reason to set the clock to some other time - during Standard Time, the sun is at its highest at 12 Noon in the middle of the timezone area, and you could just as well leave it there.
This is the second part of a four-part conversation between AlwaysOn editor-in-chief Tony Perkins, managing editor Rich Seidner, and Bob Metcalfe, the inventor of Ethernet and former CEO of 3Com who's now a general partner at Polaris Ventures. In Part 1, Mr. Metcalfe talks about the next big thing for the Internet (video); in Part 3, he tells the story behind Metcalfe's Law; and in Part 4 he tackles the blogosphere.
Internet Security and the Threshold of Pain
How bad do things need to get for organizations to be willing to switch to IPv6? Very, says Ethernet inventor Bob Metcalfe, who nonetheless believes that the time has come.
Bob Metcalfe [Polaris Ventures] | POSTED: 07.18.05 @08:20
AlwaysOn: I want to talk about open source. Our view is that open source is a metaphor for a lot of things. And it's all because Metcalfe's Law is finally coming into full bloom--because everything's on the network. Community is becoming really important, and people are sharing and uploading everything from photographs to blog posts. What are your thoughts in this area?
Bob Metcalfe: I'd like to point out that two major pieces of infrastructure were left out of the Internet when it was being built--largely because it was built by graduate students (and people like graduate students). They left out security and economics. So we have the spam problem (which can be traced directly to the lack of concern for security), and we have IP rules that are in flux because the Internet doesn't have the right tools for monetizing various activities. So we're busily trying to put security and economics into the Internet.
This is a little bit counter to the open-source mentality. You have to be careful, however, because open source isn't one group. There are a bunch of different, contending open-source groups. For example, the free-software people shouldn't be confused with everybody else in open source.
I think the problem with open source is that it doesn't quite have its economics worked out. There need to be ways to own things. Private property is a great technology; it's probably one of the major tools the West has. By granting private property to people, you stimulate economic growth. And I think the same thing applies to software. So open source will have to figure out how to get monetized to protect property over time.
If you look at Windows and Linux, both are based on 25-year-old technology. Windows is sort of a GUI version of the Mac's operating system, and Linux is of course Unix, which stems from 1968. These are both old clunkers. So the question is, Where are the new operating systems likely to come from? And will that OS come from the modern software corporation (of which Microsoft is the epitome), or will it spring out of some open-source initiative at some university somewhere? My bet is that the modern U.S. corporation--like Microsoft but not Microsoft in particular--is much more likely to come out with this new OS than a loosely coordinated band of volunteers in the open-source community.
AlwaysOn: Because?
Metcalfe: Because modern software corporations know how to align the interests of the people. They know how to motivate people. They know how to sustain themselves over a long period of time, whereas I'm suspicious about the motivational structure of an open-source community and wonder whether it's sustainable.
I'm thinking of investing in a company that sells software, and its competitors are open source. I've been speaking to the company's customers and asking them why they'd buy this software instead of just taking the open source. Their answer: 'We don't want to learn about the software, and we need it serviced and supported, so we're going to buy it from this company instead of taking it free from the open-source community.'
In that case, it's the motivation of customers. A little earlier I was talking about the motivation of employees:
The standard telephony codecs start with 3-4KHz analog (which was the quality of old analog equipment anyway), PCM-encodes it to 64kbps (8000 samples/sec at 8 bits per sample), and then optionally does fancy coding to get to a lower bit rate, without too much loss of perceptual voice quality.
There are other codecs that start with a higher sample rate, typically 11kHz or 22kHz (natural for Soundblaster-like PC sound cards) and compresses them. Skype uses some codecs from Global IP Sound, and I think that's one of the options they're using. There are other ways to get higher-than-telco fidelity - 7KHz audio with 48kbps ADPCM was an old standard that had better sound than PCM but still used very low CPU horsepower (the ADPCM codecs are simple adaptive compressors that model the sound waveform, as opposed to the complex perceptual modeling tricks used in tighter codecs.)
That would be a bad thing if they required it. But typical businesses have a PBX or key system that also needs power. VOIP phones without POE mean there's another thing to plug in at your desk besides your computer, and if you don't have a built-in UPS (like the one in your cellphone), then the phone won't work if the power's down, but in a typical office building you're not going to get much work done in the dark with your computer down. So you can use your cell phone while you walk outside with your coworkers.
Ok, "that'll be great until a storm floods out the buried conduits."
My part of town has the utilities buried, and doesn't have much of a flooding problem except when street construction crews do stupid things. But we still have momentary power outages 4-5 times a year, and occasionally have longer outages every year or two. The phones are a bit more reliable, but they've still gone down.
Cell phones make a fine backup - and it wouldn't be that hard for somebody to make a VOIP box with fallback cellphone service and a battery good for an hour of talk time, without the same size and weight constraints as a portable phone.
If you're trying to reduce the amount of wiring in your building, you still need either electric wires (+ wireless or Data-over-power) or data wires (+ POE), or both kinds of wires. POE may be good enough to power VOIP phones, but at 15 watts, it's not enough to power a CRT or a typical computer, even a laptop, so you're going to need electric power anyway. POE just really just eliminates the wall-warts, so your desk is a bit less cluttered, and it means that you only lose phone service when the rest of your data network loses power and dies.
Sometimes POE does simplify things, but wireless access points can be powered by wall-warts just fine, and they're reliable as long as the rest of your building has power. (And if your building loses electricity for very long, most of your computers will die, though laptops get you an hour or two of extra time if you don't mind working in the dark.)
Hey, I was a TSO wizard back in ~1980, but fortunately I haven't had to use that stuff in ages:-) However, you'll find that mainframe programmers mostly look like Sid in Userfriendly.org - either grey hair or no hair. Mainframe programmers, like Unix and Windows programmers, range from the old wizard who can answer really arcane questions about JCL syntax from memory to some Cobol drone who went to trade school, like the Visual Basic trade school drones of today.
The reasons mainframes are interesting, to the extent that they are, is that they can handle very large databases with very high reliability, which is not the same as being fast (though some of IBM's newer mainframe products are also quite fast.) That means there's a heavy emphasis on building and following processes for deployment and operations so that things won't break, ever, at all, even when the backup system's down for maintenance, and on building processes to feed data in and out of this rather hostile box so every bit gets bashed like it's supposed to. The programming environments have gotten better, but you're looking at a level of flexibility like Debian's Oldest-and-most-stable releases, not like Debian sid.
Any time you're putting a Windows machine on the net, you need a hardware firewall to protect you while you're getting it installed and patched, even if you have an install disk that's got SP2 with the firewalls turned on, because there may be newer attacks developed since the install disk came out. (And certainly if you're installing a pre-SP2 XP Distro and then planning to patch it.)
Once you've got everything installed, it's theoretically possible to be quasi-safe until the next interesting attack comes out, but it's fundamentally not worth it (especially since hardware firewalls are ~$29 these days, and usually have a built-in hub.) So you might as well leave the firewall in place.
Obviously for dialup it's not that simple, but there's a more limited attack space.
Philip Agee (interview about Plame/Wilson affair) worked for the CIA from 1957-1968, and left because he disagreed with what the CIA was doing - assassinations, overthrowing governments that weren't politically convenient for the US, supporting Latin American , that sort of thing. In 1975, he wrote a book "Inside the Company: CIA Diary" about his experiences there, which the CIA tried to prevent from being published, and sometime around that time he wrote about how to identify CIA agents from publicly available information - things like the kinds of jobs at US embassies or US military bases that were usually CIA agents. (Imagine if Google had been available back then!) Barbara Bush accused Agee of being a traitor, and George H.W. Bush got Congress to pass a law making it illegal to out CIA agents, and the US and its allies revoked his passport, making it harder for him to travel. I heard Agee speak at Berkeley in ?1979? - very interesting character.
The Don't-Out-CIA-Agents law that was passed to bust future Agees is now being used to possibly bust G.W.Bush's henchmen, probably his handler Karl Rove. The law makes it more illegal if you have access to classified information (which Rove does, but may or may not have used) and use that to reveal the identity of covert agents, but also makes it illegal to out them using publicly available information.
The White House has been weasel-wording about "Rove didn't tell Cooper Plame's name, just that she was Wilson's wife", but not only does the law talk about identifying people, not just specifically naming them, but somehow Novak, Cooper, and probably Judith Miller all found out she was an agent, so it wasn't just a "casual remark" intended to "correct mistaken impressions" - it was a well-organized campaign, and Novak apparently talked to two different Administration sources. Not only is Rove guilty, but he's trying to cover it up.
If you're always going to use the GPS with your laptop, then you can simplify things and use a cheap laptop-only GPS. The ones I've seen generally don't have a built-in user interface - they send coordinates and timestamps to your PC, and let your PC deal with the user interface. They used to be serial-port interfaces, but now they have USB which provides electricity as well as a data interface, so all you have to do is power your PC (which is pretty easy if you're driving a truck everywhere you go, but not the right choice if you're walking a lot and don't want to carry it.) There are also PCMCIA-card versions that fit into the PC directly.
Most standalone GPS's these days, except for the very cheap ones, do have PC cables as well as built-in user interfaces, so you can get the best of both worlds, but I don't know if they can run on USB power or if you'll need to mess with lots of rechargeable batteries.
Of course, if GPS is important, you need a spare one anyway, so you might as well bring both. They're fairly cheap here, so you may consider leaving one behind as a gift if it doesn't get broken, stolen, etc. while you're using it.
The US government would almost *never* consider an emergency severe enough to turn off GPS, except possibly an incoming nuclear cruise missile. That's a really extreme case. What they might do, if they were very upset about something, would be to toggle the Selective Availability switch, which reduces your GPS accuracy to about 50-100 meters instead of 10 meters (enough that a nuclear missile is unlikely to precisely hit the lid of a missile silo or other heavily armored target), but even that's very unlikely these days. And they can set that differently in different areas, so even if it's turned off in Iraq, it'd still be ok in Ghana.
Since you're talking about charting villages in Ghana, worst case is you'll have a 100 meter uncertainty in their locations, which is probably still much better than you have now. More likely you'd have a 5-10 meter uncertainty, and you'd have a similar uncertainty with nearby landmarks (so if the village is next to the river, they're both uncertain by 10 meters but you can see where the river is.)
There's only one kind of IP that ICANN cares about, and it's Intellectual Property, not the Internet Protocol. It's been extremely strident in insisting that everybody who participates in the registry and registrar processes must Respect their Authoritay, particularly about trademark disputes, and as part of that they insist on every registry and registrar violating every domain name user's privacy by requiring complete whois contact information and publishing all of it, so that trademark-lawsuit summonses and subpoenas can be delivered to the domain name owner, no matter what spammers may do with it or what political-correctness-enforcing governments may want to do with it or what violations of European data privacy laws it may cause. That's a significant expansion of the uses of whois's real functions, and it's a core part of their agenda.
There are other governments, such as China, that *like* doing this sort of thing to their citizens, and much of this WSISness is because they'd like to get ICANN-like powers to do it more effectively.
From a technical perspective, ICANN hasn't done a good job with Internationalized Domain Names, which is a serious problem because there are lots of counties where people need to use other character sets, and while Verisign came up with a couple of horribly botched approaches to the problem that worked for the web, didn't work adequately for email, and were totally useless for other protocols, the problem still needs to be solved. China's been threatening to split the root about it, though they could perfectly well hang anything they want under.cn and get the same effects. There are less serious issues (we really could use some more TLDs, and they've interfered with experimentation that could support alternate policies;.museum is the only TLD that's done anything interesting.) They decided to set a price on IPv6 space, which somewhat hindered IPv6 deployment in the US, though that's mainly a Cisco/Microsoft issue at this stage.
We've got such twisted values in this country. European friends of mine are amused by how much American politicians freaked out about Janet Jackson's still-covered nipple, but violence that's routine TV fare over here gets censored or condemned over there. If you wanted to find similar prudishness over there, you'd probably have to look in Bavaria.
"America's Army" is not only a pro-violence game, it's a piece of purely manipulative political propaganda, and it's rated "Teen". Sure, it's probably not as much *fun* killing all the Iraqis (or whoever they call the Bad Guys) with nice clean rifle shots as GTA's more personalized mayhem, but it's very carefully designed to teach kids that their leaders should pick enemies for them and they should go kill them, while GTA makes it obvious that this is *bad*, and makes it fun to do stuff that's outrageously over-the-top bad. So let's go kill all the Haitians, but don't even *think* about fragging your lieutenant....
I probably won't dig up a hard copy of the short story Lobsters, and I'll probably buy Iron Sunrise on dead trees before getting around to reading Accelerando online or in print. But Stross is a good writer, and book formats work better for longer works than e-books usually do, though back when I was commuting by train there were a number of books I read on my palm-pilot.
Not sure whether to feed the trolls here, or what. Stross has had a bunch of short stories and a few novels published, and many of them have been shortlisted for Hugo or Sturgeon awards, but if you don't read British Scifi or his technical books or well-known scifi magazines, you may not have seen them. He's writing them for the purpose of writing them, though he may be releasing them this way to make a point (or to avoid dealing with traditional editors.)
Cory gets published a lot in his sets of circles, and while I find "sez" annoying, there's a lot of worse stylistication around.
Lobsters is a really really strange short story, and you should go read it, ideally online while sitting in your favorite pub. Singularity Skyis a novel exploring a post-Singularity world, nanotech, clashes of cultures, reaction to post-scarcity economics and human (and post-human) creativity. It's deep stuff, and simultaneously a fun read, and he's an interesting guy to talk to if you're ever on the correct coast of the correct continent or island.
The US Military-Industrial Complex has really not known what to do since the Soviet Empire fell, because they don't have a significant enemy that could actually invade us, and nobody's going to put significant military capacity in space unless they've got a big industrial base and a big military. Sure, they went and invaded Iraq (who they'd just been supporting through 8 years of Iran-Iraq war) to remind everybody that we've still got a Military-Industrial Complex, and while Saddam was no prize, he wasn't really any worse than the Indonesians (who the US continued to provide military aid to, in spite of their treatment of East Timor), or than many of the Latin American military governments they supported. And they left that war unfinished for a decade until they needed it again, because it was politically useful to keep stringing them along in spite of the enemies it created in the Middle East and Southwest Asia.
Russia's still a big country with a lot of natural resources, but its industrial base was collapsing before the Soviet Union fell, and while it still has nuclear weapons and the totalitarians are starting to get some control back, it's basically a basket case run by a variety of Mafias. It might be able to damage Poland, and cause a lot of trouble, but it can't even really control Chechnya. It's not a serious player.
A few years ago the Republicans were totally pleased with themselves when they remembered that the Chinese government still called themselves Communists, because they hadn't seen any Commies in years except at Berkeley and Harvard and a few mayors in Italy and France. And China does have an industrial base and an army - but it's not really Communist any more, and the army's more concerned with making money running the industrial base and winning infighting between competing factions of the military for economic power than they are about actually fighting anybody. Sure, it's less liberal politically than Singapore, and it occasionally goes "booga booga booga" about Taiwan just for fun, but basically the Chinese leadership are neo-capitalists and Not Stupid. However, as military competitors go, there's nobody else out there.
Sure, there's North Korea, who might be able to make a bomb, but can't feed their own people, and would totally fail if they were to invade South Korea again. There's Pan-Arab Nationalism, but that's not a united political movement any more, and unless the House of Saud falls, the important parts are mostly supported politically and militarily by the US, even if there are economic squabbles about the price of oil - and they're certainly not putting anything into Space at the scale of colonizing the Lagrange points. India's running a small space program for reasons of national pride, but as satellites have been superseded by undersea fiber for telecommunications, and television satellites are easy enough to put up with commercial launch services from the US or Russians.
I was amused by the language in the article - the author's clearly a fanatic, operating from a viewpoint of fear. He's always saying that we "must" do this or that - not that we "should", or that we'd gain advantages from doing so, but that we "must". People who keep insisting that we "should" do this or that may insist that their side is always right, but they generally believe that there are other opinions, even if they believe the people who have those opinions are wrong. But in any political discussion I've been in where somebody keeps insisting that we "must"* do whatever they're advocating, the alternatives aren't usually "My answer"/"Your answer"/something-else - they're "My Answer" / "Nameless terror that I'm too afraid to examine".
High Frontier has never been the place to go for unbiased non-militaristic reporting - it's not trying to be "Aviation Leak and Space Technology" or the New York Times or even Stars&Stripes. I haven't followed the field enough over the last few decades to know if this author is a regular there, or influential, or if he's just a random Air Force officer who likes writing but isn't going to get any funding.
[*Internet standards documents are an exception to this principle - they say "must" a lot, but with the specific meaning of "if your box doesn't do what I say, it won't talk to my box successfully." When we're ranting, we say things are "considered harmful" or use more general-audience insults. ]
I don't remember having any trouble with ours, but that's a version of "no trouble" compared to the wet-process beasts. It's quite possible that there were things wrong with it that I've forgotten - paper jams or whatever - but photocopiers of the day had a lot of trouble with those too. The software didn't always get along with other things, but it was easy to hack BSD LPR to do something reasonable, and not too hard to hack System V LPQ once I got the hang of it (and by that time we had a Mac Laserwriter which was more finicky to talk to from a non-Mac shop...)
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What annoys me is the number of people who collect cookies for no good reason at all, specifically Apache users who collect an "Apache" cookie because that seems to be the default behaviour and they're too lazy to turn it off. And many of them are the same sorts of people who bitch about the privacy invasion from all these cookies.
And stop being a simpering government-needs-to-help-me whiner. Spam shows up because spammers can guess your email address, but cookies only arrive when your browser asks for them. The nice friendly web page says "Hey, kid, wanna cookie?" and you're supposed to say nothing, like your momma told you, not answer "Oooooohhhh, cookies!".
If the ISPs aren't stuipd, this will also make it easier for people to provide content, including Finnish-language and international-market material. (Of course, it also doesn't hurt performance if they run a major file-sharing server in Finland for Finnish users to access :-)
Hey, M00se pings can be pretty painful, y'know....
That doesn't mean that symmetric technologies aren't available (though the equipment is usually more expensive), or that the CLECs aren't picking what equipment to use based on what market they think they're selling to, because obviously they are, or that they aren't using them rudely or stupidly, but they really are asymmetric technologies. For a given amount of equipment cost, they could sell you a symmetric circuit (at least for DSL), but the downstream bandwidth would be slower than if they'd spent the same money on an asymmetric circuit, and residential consumers care a lot more about downstream speeds.
Monthly bandwidth caps aren't a technical issue - they're pure greed, and they seem to have originated with Telstra in Australia, who were always the Developed World's Most Clueless-for-data-users Telco, and because most other cable modem companes are also clueless and evil, their idea spread like wildfire around the cable industry. One of the Aussie telcos used to have a separate cap or pricing for Aussie vs. foreign content, because the overseas cables were still somewhat overpriced, while domestic bandwidth was much less of a problem (and most of it was local to two cities anyway.)
Anti-Server policies are a more complex case. Sure, some of it's because cable modem companies are suicidally clueless and think that they're better off selling to Couch Potatoes who treat the Internet like TV with different shows rather than to Real Users who create interesting content that other people want to download. But a lot of it dates to the early history of the industry. They didn't have traffic-shaping mechanisms, so a user really *could* swamp their block's total upstream, and the trial network in Fremont CA had equipment problems for a while, so a user could *really* *easily* swamp their block's total upstream, and PacBell (the local telco, who sold DSL service) did a bunch of dishonest but devastatingly effective "Web Hog" commercials about how if you were foolish enough to buy cable modem service instead of DSL, you'd couldn't depend on it and you'd have to do all your real use way after midnight when the network was quiet enough to work. Also, if you remember the popular-press issues of the time, the obvious thing that could generate enough upstream traffic to trash the network was a web server that had suddenly become popular, especially a (*gasp*) pr0n server, and they were trying to present a family-friendly sales pitch about how getting your kids on the network was really important if you wanted to keep up with the Joneses (and the Chens and the Kumars...), so if their network got bogged down by a pr0n server, it would be really bad PR for them. And since they couldn't manage bandwidth adequately anyway, they chose to ban servers instead, and to prevent users from treating that as damage and routing around it, they chose to ban anything that looked even vaguely server-like (including mail servers that *receive* mail, but have "server" in the name and are obviously for business.)
DST is there to make factory workers get up an hour earlier, without the government having to admit that it's telling everybody to get up earlier in the morning. Rather than messing with the clocks, they *could* just tell the TV stations to run earlier schedules, and most Americans would obey....
There's no reason to set the clock to some other time - during Standard Time, the sun is at its highest at 12 Noon in the middle of the timezone area, and you could just as well leave it there.
This is the second part of a four-part conversation between AlwaysOn editor-in-chief Tony Perkins, managing editor Rich Seidner, and Bob Metcalfe, the inventor of Ethernet and former CEO of 3Com who's now a general partner at Polaris Ventures. In Part 1, Mr. Metcalfe talks about the next big thing for the Internet (video); in Part 3, he tells the story behind Metcalfe's Law; and in Part 4 he tackles the blogosphere.
Internet Security and the Threshold of Pain
How bad do things need to get for organizations to be willing to switch to IPv6? Very, says Ethernet inventor Bob Metcalfe, who nonetheless believes that the time has come.
Bob Metcalfe [Polaris Ventures] | POSTED: 07.18.05 @08:20
AlwaysOn: I want to talk about open source. Our view is that open source is a metaphor for a lot of things. And it's all because Metcalfe's Law is finally coming into full bloom--because everything's on the network. Community is becoming really important, and people are sharing and uploading everything from photographs to blog posts. What are your thoughts in this area?
Bob Metcalfe: I'd like to point out that two major pieces of infrastructure were left out of the Internet when it was being built--largely because it was built by graduate students (and people like graduate students). They left out security and economics. So we have the spam problem (which can be traced directly to the lack of concern for security), and we have IP rules that are in flux because the Internet doesn't have the right tools for monetizing various activities. So we're busily trying to put security and economics into the Internet.
This is a little bit counter to the open-source mentality. You have to be careful, however, because open source isn't one group. There are a bunch of different, contending open-source groups. For example, the free-software people shouldn't be confused with everybody else in open source.
I think the problem with open source is that it doesn't quite have its economics worked out. There need to be ways to own things. Private property is a great technology; it's probably one of the major tools the West has. By granting private property to people, you stimulate economic growth. And I think the same thing applies to software. So open source will have to figure out how to get monetized to protect property over time.
If you look at Windows and Linux, both are based on 25-year-old technology. Windows is sort of a GUI version of the Mac's operating system, and Linux is of course Unix, which stems from 1968. These are both old clunkers. So the question is, Where are the new operating systems likely to come from? And will that OS come from the modern software corporation (of which Microsoft is the epitome), or will it spring out of some open-source initiative at some university somewhere? My bet is that the modern U.S. corporation--like Microsoft but not Microsoft in particular--is much more likely to come out with this new OS than a loosely coordinated band of volunteers in the open-source community.
AlwaysOn: Because?
Metcalfe: Because modern software corporations know how to align the interests of the people. They know how to motivate people. They know how to sustain themselves over a long period of time, whereas I'm suspicious about the motivational structure of an open-source community and wonder whether it's sustainable.
I'm thinking of investing in a company that sells software, and its competitors are open source. I've been speaking to the company's customers and asking them why they'd buy this software instead of just taking the open source. Their answer: 'We don't want to learn about the software, and we need it serviced and supported, so we're going to buy it from this company instead of taking it free from the open-source community.'
In that case, it's the motivation of customers. A little earlier I was talking about the motivation of employees:
There are other codecs that start with a higher sample rate, typically 11kHz or 22kHz (natural for Soundblaster-like PC sound cards) and compresses them. Skype uses some codecs from Global IP Sound, and I think that's one of the options they're using. There are other ways to get higher-than-telco fidelity - 7KHz audio with 48kbps ADPCM was an old standard that had better sound than PCM but still used very low CPU horsepower (the ADPCM codecs are simple adaptive compressors that model the sound waveform, as opposed to the complex perceptual modeling tricks used in tighter codecs.)
That would be a bad thing if they required it. But typical businesses have a PBX or key system that also needs power. VOIP phones without POE mean there's another thing to plug in at your desk besides your computer, and if you don't have a built-in UPS (like the one in your cellphone), then the phone won't work if the power's down, but in a typical office building you're not going to get much work done in the dark with your computer down. So you can use your cell phone while you walk outside with your coworkers.
My part of town has the utilities buried, and doesn't have much of a flooding problem except when street construction crews do stupid things. But we still have momentary power outages 4-5 times a year, and occasionally have longer outages every year or two. The phones are a bit more reliable, but they've still gone down.
Cell phones make a fine backup - and it wouldn't be that hard for somebody to make a VOIP box with fallback cellphone service and a battery good for an hour of talk time, without the same size and weight constraints as a portable phone.
Sometimes POE does simplify things, but wireless access points can be powered by wall-warts just fine, and they're reliable as long as the rest of your building has power. (And if your building loses electricity for very long, most of your computers will die, though laptops get you an hour or two of extra time if you don't mind working in the dark.)
The reasons mainframes are interesting, to the extent that they are, is that they can handle very large databases with very high reliability, which is not the same as being fast (though some of IBM's newer mainframe products are also quite fast.) That means there's a heavy emphasis on building and following processes for deployment and operations so that things won't break, ever, at all, even when the backup system's down for maintenance, and on building processes to feed data in and out of this rather hostile box so every bit gets bashed like it's supposed to. The programming environments have gotten better, but you're looking at a level of flexibility like Debian's Oldest-and-most-stable releases, not like Debian sid.
Once you've got everything installed, it's theoretically possible to be quasi-safe until the next interesting attack comes out, but it's fundamentally not worth it (especially since hardware firewalls are ~$29 these days, and usually have a built-in hub.) So you might as well leave the firewall in place.
Obviously for dialup it's not that simple, but there's a more limited attack space.
The Don't-Out-CIA-Agents law that was passed to bust future Agees is now being used to possibly bust G.W.Bush's henchmen, probably his handler Karl Rove. The law makes it more illegal if you have access to classified information (which Rove does, but may or may not have used) and use that to reveal the identity of covert agents, but also makes it illegal to out them using publicly available information.
The White House has been weasel-wording about "Rove didn't tell Cooper Plame's name, just that she was Wilson's wife", but not only does the law talk about identifying people, not just specifically naming them, but somehow Novak, Cooper, and probably Judith Miller all found out she was an agent, so it wasn't just a "casual remark" intended to "correct mistaken impressions" - it was a well-organized campaign, and Novak apparently talked to two different Administration sources. Not only is Rove guilty, but he's trying to cover it up.
Most standalone GPS's these days, except for the very cheap ones, do have PC cables as well as built-in user interfaces, so you can get the best of both worlds, but I don't know if they can run on USB power or if you'll need to mess with lots of rechargeable batteries.
Of course, if GPS is important, you need a spare one anyway, so you might as well bring both. They're fairly cheap here, so you may consider leaving one behind as a gift if it doesn't get broken, stolen, etc. while you're using it.
Since you're talking about charting villages in Ghana, worst case is you'll have a 100 meter uncertainty in their locations, which is probably still much better than you have now. More likely you'd have a 5-10 meter uncertainty, and you'd have a similar uncertainty with nearby landmarks (so if the village is next to the river, they're both uncertain by 10 meters but you can see where the river is.)
There are other governments, such as China, that *like* doing this sort of thing to their citizens, and much of this WSISness is because they'd like to get ICANN-like powers to do it more effectively.
From a technical perspective, ICANN hasn't done a good job with Internationalized Domain Names, which is a serious problem because there are lots of counties where people need to use other character sets, and while Verisign came up with a couple of horribly botched approaches to the problem that worked for the web, didn't work adequately for email, and were totally useless for other protocols, the problem still needs to be solved. China's been threatening to split the root about it, though they could perfectly well hang anything they want under .cn and get the same effects. There are less serious issues (we really could use some more TLDs, and they've interfered with experimentation that could support alternate policies; .museum is the only TLD that's done anything interesting.) They decided to set a price on IPv6 space, which somewhat hindered IPv6 deployment in the US, though that's mainly a Cisco/Microsoft issue at this stage.
"America's Army" is not only a pro-violence game, it's a piece of purely manipulative political propaganda, and it's rated "Teen". Sure, it's probably not as much *fun* killing all the Iraqis (or whoever they call the Bad Guys) with nice clean rifle shots as GTA's more personalized mayhem, but it's very carefully designed to teach kids that their leaders should pick enemies for them and they should go kill them, while GTA makes it obvious that this is *bad*, and makes it fun to do stuff that's outrageously over-the-top bad. So let's go kill all the Haitians, but don't even *think* about fragging your lieutenant....
I probably won't dig up a hard copy of the short story Lobsters, and I'll probably buy Iron Sunrise on dead trees before getting around to reading Accelerando online or in print. But Stross is a good writer, and book formats work better for longer works than e-books usually do, though back when I was commuting by train there were a number of books I read on my palm-pilot.
Cory gets published a lot in his sets of circles, and while I find "sez" annoying, there's a lot of worse stylistication around.
Lobsters is a really really strange short story, and you should go read it, ideally online while sitting in your favorite pub. Singularity Skyis a novel exploring a post-Singularity world, nanotech, clashes of cultures, reaction to post-scarcity economics and human (and post-human) creativity. It's deep stuff, and simultaneously a fun read, and he's an interesting guy to talk to if you're ever on the correct coast of the correct continent or island.
Russia's still a big country with a lot of natural resources, but its industrial base was collapsing before the Soviet Union fell, and while it still has nuclear weapons and the totalitarians are starting to get some control back, it's basically a basket case run by a variety of Mafias. It might be able to damage Poland, and cause a lot of trouble, but it can't even really control Chechnya. It's not a serious player.
A few years ago the Republicans were totally pleased with themselves when they remembered that the Chinese government still called themselves Communists, because they hadn't seen any Commies in years except at Berkeley and Harvard and a few mayors in Italy and France. And China does have an industrial base and an army - but it's not really Communist any more, and the army's more concerned with making money running the industrial base and winning infighting between competing factions of the military for economic power than they are about actually fighting anybody. Sure, it's less liberal politically than Singapore, and it occasionally goes "booga booga booga" about Taiwan just for fun, but basically the Chinese leadership are neo-capitalists and Not Stupid. However, as military competitors go, there's nobody else out there.
Sure, there's North Korea, who might be able to make a bomb, but can't feed their own people, and would totally fail if they were to invade South Korea again. There's Pan-Arab Nationalism, but that's not a united political movement any more, and unless the House of Saud falls, the important parts are mostly supported politically and militarily by the US, even if there are economic squabbles about the price of oil - and they're certainly not putting anything into Space at the scale of colonizing the Lagrange points. India's running a small space program for reasons of national pride, but as satellites have been superseded by undersea fiber for telecommunications, and television satellites are easy enough to put up with commercial launch services from the US or Russians.
High Frontier has never been the place to go for unbiased non-militaristic reporting - it's not trying to be "Aviation Leak and Space Technology" or the New York Times or even Stars&Stripes. I haven't followed the field enough over the last few decades to know if this author is a regular there, or influential, or if he's just a random Air Force officer who likes writing but isn't going to get any funding.
[*Internet standards documents are an exception to this principle - they say "must" a lot, but with the specific meaning of "if your box doesn't do what I say, it won't talk to my box successfully." When we're ranting, we say things are "considered harmful" or use more general-audience insults. ]
I don't remember having any trouble with ours, but that's a version of "no trouble" compared to the wet-process beasts. It's quite possible that there were things wrong with it that I've forgotten - paper jams or whatever - but photocopiers of the day had a lot of trouble with those too. The software didn't always get along with other things, but it was easy to hack BSD LPR to do something reasonable, and not too hard to hack System V LPQ once I got the hang of it (and by that time we had a Mac Laserwriter which was more finicky to talk to from a non-Mac shop...)