No, generally a router has an inside and an outside, and sometimes a third port as a DMZ; you're thinking of a router with an ethernet hub attached, like many home routers. There are routers with more routed ports, and there are one-armed routers also, though that's less likely to be useful.
It's $35 plus shipping for the development board with the module soldered on it, so it's about the same as an Arduino; the $89 price was for two of them plus accessories like cables and power supplies. They're asking for not very much money to finish their software development, and the real question is whether their software is any good.
Sure, if you're just routing, and don't want to connect to various hardware I/O things, you can get a simpler board. But if you want to talk to sensors or build yourself a toaster controller or weather station or add lots of blinky lights or whatever, they're useful.
It's $20 for the module, $35 for a development board with the module soldered on it (which you'd almost certainly want), $45 for that AC power, cables, $50 for the board plus a spare module and pre-installed software, about $5-8 for shipping.
The reason the VPN connection went fast isn't that EEEVILLL Verizon was throttling the customer's Netflix connections by doing deep packet routing and didn't do that to the VPN. The pipes Netflix bought to deliver movies to their paying customers who use Verizon weren't big enough to carry all the demand, at least at the peering* point that customer's traffic went through, while the pipes they bought or peering they got for free were big enough to reach the VPN endpoint, and the VPN endpoint had bought enough bandwidth from their ISPs to get from there to their peering point with Verizon, so there was enough bandwidth on the whole route to carry the movie that way.
That's not to say that there aren't ISPs harassing particular content (there was at least one well-publicized case a few years ago of some telco ISP blocking VOIP, and of course most of the cable modem and some DSL providers block home web servers), but this ain't one of them.
(*Peering unfortunately means two different things here - it's giving each other service for free, and it's having BGP-managed interconnections, usually at the big internet exchange locations, to pass traffic, not necessarily for free.)
The problem isn't from Verizon's backbone to the customer - otherwise the VPN connection would have also been slow. It's the pipes from Netflix and their peering/transit providers to Verizon, which aren't big enough to handle all the Netflix customers on Verizon, at least in that region.
Also, what do you mean "has to set aside 8tb for sync"? Do you mean the ISP has to provide 8TB of some kind of storage hardware, or 8 terabits per second of traffic from somewhere to somewhere else? That's fairly huge, considering that most data connections aren't much bigger than 10 Gbps per wavelength (some carriers use 40, but it's not usually price-competitive.)
Netflix either buys bandwidth or convinces ISPs to give it to them for free as peering. Its peers / transit providers are either big enough to peer with Verizon for free, or buy bandwidth from Verizon, and they don't have fat enough connections to Verizon to carry all of Netflix's traffic to this customer, at least at the peering point that Netflix's traffic uses to reach that customer (Netflix may have enough bandwidth to reach VZ customers in the other part of the country, e.g. LA peering is full while Seattle or DC isn't.)
The customer's VPN provider may very well provide free/cheap connectivity to Netflix (or at least fast enough), maybe even one of the providers Netflix buys from, because they're cheap. And they may also get it from somebody who has good bandwidth to Verizon. But peering's just peering - it's not transit.
(First of all, to reply to the parent article, the test isn't for people graduating from college, it's for people in high school who will get to use the results to place out of courses in college. In my case that meant I could start more advanced calculus classes a year early, which was really useful, and got some extra credits for biology that didn't affect anything but probably looked good, and if I'd been at a college where tuition prices were by the course instead of the semester, it would have probably saved me some money.)
So it's nice that 39,000 students had enough high-level CS courses in high school that they were able to take the test, but that's a pretty small fraction of the number of kids entering college, even just in the STEM fields, and it's also limited to those high schools that had a good enough CS program to make it worth taking the test, so the statistics are probably not all that representative*.
(*And the fact that I misspelled "representative" in the title doesn't mean I'm bad at English; I ran out of characters in the title box.:-)
Because nobody out there has "customers who bought X also bought Y and Z" features! (But maybe this one will let Apple take some more market share from Amazon.)
Residential rates matter a bit if you're trying to get people to install low-flow toilets or drought-tolerant non-grass landscaping, but if you live near the Niagara river, you can afford a lot more land than almost anybody in LA (except the folks on unstable hilltops.)
But that's not where California's water goes. 80% is for agriculture, and about half of that is for feeding cattle. It's at subsidized prices one or two orders of magnitude cheaper than residential water. There's also a good chunk of it going to industry.
Most vegetables are seasonal, not perennials, and in most climates you'd want year-round ground cover. It's ok if that's grasses that go dormant in the summer or winter, as long as they still prevent erosion and mud, but growing zucchini not only won't do the job, but you won't be able to find enough grocery bags to leave it all on your neighbors' doorsteps. Most of the SF Bay Area isn't quite right for desert-style xeroscaping (even though prickly pear cactus grows really well here), but there's a lot of low-water native vegetation that does ok.
HOAs would have a fit. But boomers were the hippie generation - we approved of healthy food, organically grown veggies, all that stuff. (As long as somebody else does the hard work:-) In my case, I don't have ground-level dirt of my own, just pots on a balcony, and the squirrels have already stolen both tomatoes, but I liked doing extensive gardening back when I had a yard. And with a yard full of zucchini, I wouldn't have to tell you kids to get off my lawn.
Given what the actual authors of TOR have said about their system over the years, the likelihood that the talk was cancelled because they've suddenly become evil (or have suddenly revealed that they've been evil all along!) vs. the likelihood that it was cancelled because the lawyers at CMU were being overly conservative and paranoid, I'll go for the latter explanation. There are projects for which that wouldn't be the case.
TOR has its limitations and weaknesses, and the developers have always tried to be upfront and public about them, both for the threat model / design and for the code itself.
No, we wouldn't need our own live smallpox to construct a vaccine against a weaponized smallpox. The original vaccine was made from cowpox, and eventually the closely related vaccinia disease, and was much safer than smallpox-based inoculation which was the other prevention available at the time.
The only reason to keep the stuff around is to attack the Russians in case they attack us with their smallpox, and we can be better people than that. Time to destroy it, and convince Putin to destroy his stockpiles also.
If you look at the program in its entirety, terrorist rockets, missiles, and bombs have killed about 600 Israeli citizens in the last few weeks. 2 of those citizens were Jews killed by Hamas rockets. The rest of the Israeli citizens were Palestinians, primarily civilians in Gaza, and Iron Dome did nothing to stop them. It may have stopped some of Hamas's incompetent rocket attacks, but it didn't protect Israeli civilians from the militant Army's better equipment.
It was too long ago, and I didn't save them. I think one was named something like "Login123". Basically all of their "repair" tools were remote login tools, probably run by entirely different companies that they were just customers of, and they'd load the actual attacks after they got in.
Yup - Dark matter is simply stuff we haven't seen yet. It might be tiny particles of types we don't understand, it might be supermassive black holes, it might be lots of small black holes, it might be lots of free-floating planets not around stars, or Jupiter-sized gas planets that weren't big enough to ignite into stars, it might be little rocks, it might be accounting errors. It might be weird stuff, it might be non-weird stuff. There's enough of whatever it is to have enough mass that galaxies act differently that we'd expect from the amount of matter we can see (i.e. mostly stars.)
Dark energy is a lot weirder. It's not defined as just the energy form of dark-matter-on particles, it's a different problem.
Rachel never calls my cellphone; she's only called my wife's cellphone once or twice. Her robot army calls my kitchen landline phone a couple of times a day.
Tracing the phone calls hasn't worked very well, but the way to go is to follow the money. Flooding them with honeypot credit card numbers would generate a trail that might be followable (e.g. have an FTC web page that'll generate a credit card number and billing name/address, and have Visa track the merchant information for anybody trying to process a charge against those numbers; the risk is that you have to make sure those numbers don't get used for fraud, even if they're set up to always reject charges.)
I don't know how much information the scammers try to get, such as SSNs; generating fake ones of those has its own risks, though it's always fun to give them 078-05-1120 or Richard Nixon's SSN 567-68-0515. It turns out there is a publicly available official list of SSNs of dead people, which is intended to detect people using invalid SSNs, but it's possible that Rachel's gang doesn't bother filtering on it, considering that they don't filter on phone numbers of people who've told them not to call back.
They really did go away for a while, or at least slow down a lot, when one of the big "Rachel from Cardholder Services" gangs got busted and shut down. But it's such an easily replicable scam, and probably multiple sets of it are being run independently. I'm pretty sure the call center end is independent contractors or else shady call-centers (I know some are in Canada, and I suspect some are run by prison-labor call centers and some are in the Caribbean.)
First of all, Caller ID is trivially easy to fake, and the scammers all do it. For now, most of them pick random or fake numbers to avoid getting blacklisted, but if whitelists were common, they'd start forging real numbers to get through.
But many people (ok, me, at least) get lots of calls from numbers I don't recognize, and robocalls that I want that might not come from the number I recognize for somebody. Most of the robocalls are the pharmacy saying I've got something to pick up, or the dentist's office with a reminder about an appointment, or that kind of thing, and the calls from humans might be from some doctor my wife is going to or some business we were trying to reach that has different numbers for outgoing calls than incoming (like the painter calling from his cellphone instead of his office, or a big business calling from their call center or local office instead of their toll-free number.)
And yes, I could just let the answering machine pick up, and you can too. Some of the robocallers' robots do a better job of dealing with that than others.
It's a virtual machine. Running Linux. Firefox instead of Internet Exploder (Sorry, it's a work machine, the IT department installs Firefox instead of IE.) With NoScript and AdBlockPlus. Amazing how much stuff just "didn't work" when I tried it - I'd go to their web pages, and I'd hit the Download button and nothing would happen, or I'd run the installer and it wouldn't work. (I wanted to see all the different things they were trying - most of them were different Remote Login or Remote Execution programs that would have let him log into my machine and then do his real attacks.)
After about half an hour the guy realized I was faking him out, and we had another entertaining half hour while he tried to convince me that what he was doing really was a legitimate kind of business, and after that his boss came on and spent five or ten minutes yelling at me for wasting his employee's time.
At least in most states, DSL service from the main telco can not only carry telco-provided ISP services, but also competitive ISPs, such as Sonic and Speakeasy and whatever Megapath and Covad are called these days. The competitors tend to cost a bit more, but also offer things like static IP addresses at more reasonable prices, and usually don't have usage caps or "no servers at home" policies. They may be renting just the wire from the telco, or maybe the wire and the DSLAM, and usually also some regional distribution network, but it's usually their own email and web servers and upstream bandwidth.
My experience with Sonic.net is that about every 5 years, something goes wrong that takes a day or two to fix, either a telco problem in a box down the street, or my DSL modem getting too old and dying. So I call them up by phone or send them email from work or Starbucks, and get a quick response back from somebody who can diagnose the problem but may need to call the telco to actually fix.
Fiber-based telco services don't have to share with competitors, unlike copper, and I'm not sure if AT&T U-Verse gets resold or not. But copper DSL is definitely not just the local monopoly.
I work from home most days, and Rachel and her robot army usually call a couple of times a day. I've tried anything from stringing them along to yelling at them for being criminals to putting the phone down, and they still call back. (The one serious thing I haven't tried is the combination of reorder tone and a "The number you are calling has been disconnected" announcement, which I should just have as a handy.wav to play at them.)
I wonder where they get their labor - some of it sounds like Canadian or Caribbean call centers, but there are a lot of US prisons, including the for-profit ones, that run call centers as something more lucrative to have prisoners doing than farm work or making license plates. Given how they're wasting their workers' time almost as badly as the people they call, it must be really cheap.
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No, generally a router has an inside and an outside, and sometimes a third port as a DMZ; you're thinking of a router with an ethernet hub attached, like many home routers. There are routers with more routed ports, and there are one-armed routers also, though that's less likely to be useful.
It's $35 plus shipping for the development board with the module soldered on it, so it's about the same as an Arduino; the $89 price was for two of them plus accessories like cables and power supplies. They're asking for not very much money to finish their software development, and the real question is whether their software is any good.
Sure, if you're just routing, and don't want to connect to various hardware I/O things, you can get a simpler board. But if you want to talk to sensors or build yourself a toaster controller or weather station or add lots of blinky lights or whatever, they're useful.
It's $20 for the module, $35 for a development board with the module soldered on it (which you'd almost certainly want), $45 for that AC power, cables, $50 for the board plus a spare module and pre-installed software, about $5-8 for shipping.
The reason the VPN connection went fast isn't that EEEVILLL Verizon was throttling the customer's Netflix connections by doing deep packet routing and didn't do that to the VPN. The pipes Netflix bought to deliver movies to their paying customers who use Verizon weren't big enough to carry all the demand, at least at the peering* point that customer's traffic went through, while the pipes they bought or peering they got for free were big enough to reach the VPN endpoint, and the VPN endpoint had bought enough bandwidth from their ISPs to get from there to their peering point with Verizon, so there was enough bandwidth on the whole route to carry the movie that way.
That's not to say that there aren't ISPs harassing particular content (there was at least one well-publicized case a few years ago of some telco ISP blocking VOIP, and of course most of the cable modem and some DSL providers block home web servers), but this ain't one of them.
(*Peering unfortunately means two different things here - it's giving each other service for free, and it's having BGP-managed interconnections, usually at the big internet exchange locations, to pass traffic, not necessarily for free.)
The problem isn't from Verizon's backbone to the customer - otherwise the VPN connection would have also been slow. It's the pipes from Netflix and their peering/transit providers to Verizon, which aren't big enough to handle all the Netflix customers on Verizon, at least in that region.
Also, what do you mean "has to set aside 8tb for sync"? Do you mean the ISP has to provide 8TB of some kind of storage hardware, or 8 terabits per second of traffic from somewhere to somewhere else? That's fairly huge, considering that most data connections aren't much bigger than 10 Gbps per wavelength (some carriers use 40, but it's not usually price-competitive.)
Netflix either buys bandwidth or convinces ISPs to give it to them for free as peering. Its peers / transit providers are either big enough to peer with Verizon for free, or buy bandwidth from Verizon, and they don't have fat enough connections to Verizon to carry all of Netflix's traffic to this customer, at least at the peering point that Netflix's traffic uses to reach that customer (Netflix may have enough bandwidth to reach VZ customers in the other part of the country, e.g. LA peering is full while Seattle or DC isn't.)
The customer's VPN provider may very well provide free/cheap connectivity to Netflix (or at least fast enough), maybe even one of the providers Netflix buys from, because they're cheap. And they may also get it from somebody who has good bandwidth to Verizon. But peering's just peering - it's not transit.
(First of all, to reply to the parent article, the test isn't for people graduating from college, it's for people in high school who will get to use the results to place out of courses in college. In my case that meant I could start more advanced calculus classes a year early, which was really useful, and got some extra credits for biology that didn't affect anything but probably looked good, and if I'd been at a college where tuition prices were by the course instead of the semester, it would have probably saved me some money.)
So it's nice that 39,000 students had enough high-level CS courses in high school that they were able to take the test, but that's a pretty small fraction of the number of kids entering college, even just in the STEM fields, and it's also limited to those high schools that had a good enough CS program to make it worth taking the test, so the statistics are probably not all that representative*.
(*And the fact that I misspelled "representative" in the title doesn't mean I'm bad at English; I ran out of characters in the title box. :-)
Because nobody out there has "customers who bought X also bought Y and Z" features! (But maybe this one will let Apple take some more market share from Amazon.)
The Russians didn't shoot down that plane. Ukrainian separatists did, using missiles they got from the Russians.
And it's not like the US hasn't accidentally shot down civilian aircraft before, if you remember that Iranian plane the USS Vincennes shot down.
Residential rates matter a bit if you're trying to get people to install low-flow toilets or drought-tolerant non-grass landscaping, but if you live near the Niagara river, you can afford a lot more land than almost anybody in LA (except the folks on unstable hilltops.)
But that's not where California's water goes. 80% is for agriculture, and about half of that is for feeding cattle. It's at subsidized prices one or two orders of magnitude cheaper than residential water. There's also a good chunk of it going to industry.
Most vegetables are seasonal, not perennials, and in most climates you'd want year-round ground cover. It's ok if that's grasses that go dormant in the summer or winter, as long as they still prevent erosion and mud, but growing zucchini not only won't do the job, but you won't be able to find enough grocery bags to leave it all on your neighbors' doorsteps. Most of the SF Bay Area isn't quite right for desert-style xeroscaping (even though prickly pear cactus grows really well here), but there's a lot of low-water native vegetation that does ok.
HOAs would have a fit. But boomers were the hippie generation - we approved of healthy food, organically grown veggies, all that stuff. (As long as somebody else does the hard work :-) In my case, I don't have ground-level dirt of my own, just pots on a balcony, and the squirrels have already stolen both tomatoes, but I liked doing extensive gardening back when I had a yard. And with a yard full of zucchini, I wouldn't have to tell you kids to get off my lawn.
Given what the actual authors of TOR have said about their system over the years, the likelihood that the talk was cancelled because they've suddenly become evil (or have suddenly revealed that they've been evil all along!) vs. the likelihood that it was cancelled because the lawyers at CMU were being overly conservative and paranoid, I'll go for the latter explanation. There are projects for which that wouldn't be the case.
TOR has its limitations and weaknesses, and the developers have always tried to be upfront and public about them, both for the threat model / design and for the code itself.
No, we wouldn't need our own live smallpox to construct a vaccine against a weaponized smallpox. The original vaccine was made from cowpox, and eventually the closely related vaccinia disease, and was much safer than smallpox-based inoculation which was the other prevention available at the time.
The only reason to keep the stuff around is to attack the Russians in case they attack us with their smallpox, and we can be better people than that. Time to destroy it, and convince Putin to destroy his stockpiles also.
If you look at the program in its entirety, terrorist rockets, missiles, and bombs have killed about 600 Israeli citizens in the last few weeks. 2 of those citizens were Jews killed by Hamas rockets. The rest of the Israeli citizens were Palestinians, primarily civilians in Gaza, and Iron Dome did nothing to stop them. It may have stopped some of Hamas's incompetent rocket attacks, but it didn't protect Israeli civilians from the militant Army's better equipment.
It was too long ago, and I didn't save them. I think one was named something like "Login123". Basically all of their "repair" tools were remote login tools, probably run by entirely different companies that they were just customers of, and they'd load the actual attacks after they got in.
Actually, yes, this might be because a Rickfail due to the copyright goons telling YouTube to take down the original RIckroll video.
Yup - Dark matter is simply stuff we haven't seen yet. It might be tiny particles of types we don't understand, it might be supermassive black holes, it might be lots of small black holes, it might be lots of free-floating planets not around stars, or Jupiter-sized gas planets that weren't big enough to ignite into stars, it might be little rocks, it might be accounting errors. It might be weird stuff, it might be non-weird stuff. There's enough of whatever it is to have enough mass that galaxies act differently that we'd expect from the amount of matter we can see (i.e. mostly stars.)
Dark energy is a lot weirder. It's not defined as just the energy form of dark-matter-on particles, it's a different problem.
Rachel never calls my cellphone; she's only called my wife's cellphone once or twice. Her robot army calls my kitchen landline phone a couple of times a day.
Tracing the phone calls hasn't worked very well, but the way to go is to follow the money. Flooding them with honeypot credit card numbers would generate a trail that might be followable (e.g. have an FTC web page that'll generate a credit card number and billing name/address, and have Visa track the merchant information for anybody trying to process a charge against those numbers; the risk is that you have to make sure those numbers don't get used for fraud, even if they're set up to always reject charges.)
I don't know how much information the scammers try to get, such as SSNs; generating fake ones of those has its own risks, though it's always fun to give them 078-05-1120 or Richard Nixon's SSN 567-68-0515. It turns out there is a publicly available official list of SSNs of dead people, which is intended to detect people using invalid SSNs, but it's possible that Rachel's gang doesn't bother filtering on it, considering that they don't filter on phone numbers of people who've told them not to call back.
They really did go away for a while, or at least slow down a lot, when one of the big "Rachel from Cardholder Services" gangs got busted and shut down. But it's such an easily replicable scam, and probably multiple sets of it are being run independently. I'm pretty sure the call center end is independent contractors or else shady call-centers (I know some are in Canada, and I suspect some are run by prison-labor call centers and some are in the Caribbean.)
First of all, Caller ID is trivially easy to fake, and the scammers all do it. For now, most of them pick random or fake numbers to avoid getting blacklisted, but if whitelists were common, they'd start forging real numbers to get through.
But many people (ok, me, at least) get lots of calls from numbers I don't recognize, and robocalls that I want that might not come from the number I recognize for somebody. Most of the robocalls are the pharmacy saying I've got something to pick up, or the dentist's office with a reminder about an appointment, or that kind of thing, and the calls from humans might be from some doctor my wife is going to or some business we were trying to reach that has different numbers for outgoing calls than incoming (like the painter calling from his cellphone instead of his office, or a big business calling from their call center or local office instead of their toll-free number.)
And yes, I could just let the answering machine pick up, and you can too. Some of the robocallers' robots do a better job of dealing with that than others.
It's a virtual machine. Running Linux. Firefox instead of Internet Exploder (Sorry, it's a work machine, the IT department installs Firefox instead of IE.) With NoScript and AdBlockPlus. Amazing how much stuff just "didn't work" when I tried it - I'd go to their web pages, and I'd hit the Download button and nothing would happen, or I'd run the installer and it wouldn't work. (I wanted to see all the different things they were trying - most of them were different Remote Login or Remote Execution programs that would have let him log into my machine and then do his real attacks.)
After about half an hour the guy realized I was faking him out, and we had another entertaining half hour while he tried to convince me that what he was doing really was a legitimate kind of business, and after that his boss came on and spent five or ten minutes yelling at me for wasting his employee's time.
At least in most states, DSL service from the main telco can not only carry telco-provided ISP services, but also competitive ISPs, such as Sonic and Speakeasy and whatever Megapath and Covad are called these days. The competitors tend to cost a bit more, but also offer things like static IP addresses at more reasonable prices, and usually don't have usage caps or "no servers at home" policies. They may be renting just the wire from the telco, or maybe the wire and the DSLAM, and usually also some regional distribution network, but it's usually their own email and web servers and upstream bandwidth.
My experience with Sonic.net is that about every 5 years, something goes wrong that takes a day or two to fix, either a telco problem in a box down the street, or my DSL modem getting too old and dying. So I call them up by phone or send them email from work or Starbucks, and get a quick response back from somebody who can diagnose the problem but may need to call the telco to actually fix.
Fiber-based telco services don't have to share with competitors, unlike copper, and I'm not sure if AT&T U-Verse gets resold or not. But copper DSL is definitely not just the local monopoly.
I work from home most days, and Rachel and her robot army usually call a couple of times a day. I've tried anything from stringing them along to yelling at them for being criminals to putting the phone down, and they still call back. (The one serious thing I haven't tried is the combination of reorder tone and a "The number you are calling has been disconnected" announcement, which I should just have as a handy .wav to play at them.)
I wonder where they get their labor - some of it sounds like Canadian or Caribbean call centers, but there are a lot of US prisons, including the for-profit ones, that run call centers as something more lucrative to have prisoners doing than farm work or making license plates. Given how they're wasting their workers' time almost as badly as the people they call, it must be really cheap.