Hey, if it's only sending the data between Google email accounts, no problem - everything stays in the LAN / SAN networks instead of hitting the real Internet, or optionally just sends pointers to the original without duplicating it.
Crypto algorithms and protocols aren't something you can just roll-your-own with (assuming you actually care about security.) I hope all this brokenness is in the user interface part?
Any 12 people who can't get off jury duty aren't *my* peers...
I view jury service as an important civic activity, and a critical part of providing justice. However, there are some times it's just not convenient to do jury time, and in general, if you're an intelligent person who has unique opinions and thinks for yourself instead of believing everything you're told to believe, you're not the kind of person that either side wants on the jury anyway, so your objective is to let them know that that's the case. (As you said, your coworker is an engineer, so they didn't keep him.) But it may take more than a day, depending on how inefficient your local court system is.
A friend of mine who owns a horse spent a 4-day weekend out near Bakersfield helping friends do their haying. After she got back, she said how *amazingly* glad she was to have a desk job and not have to do farm work for a living.
Termcap was originally an ascii-format file used by curses to describe different computer terminals. (Remember terminals?) Terminfo was an AT&T Bell Labs rewrite that used a binary data format, compiled from an ascii format that was a bit more complex than termcap. In the process of creating the terminfo file, they cleaned up the language. This most common "offensive" term that got zapped was "brain-damaged" - sometimes it got deleted entirely, and sometimes replaced with "broken" when it couldn't be totally avoided. (The old Haseltine terminals couldn't really be described adequately without using the term "brain-damaged" or something pretty much like it.)
When the Netscape folks released their code as open source, they apparently cleaned up much of the language. Somebody at the big Mozilla party handed out a printout of all the good deleted comments.
If you look at their web site, the patent itself is 6,687,746 granted Feb 2004. The *patent* says it's for an automated procedure, but the letters demanding that everybody *license* their patent appear to be going to anybody licensing third-level domains, regardless of what method they use to issue them. This is similar to the abuse that Frank Weyer's 6,671,714 patent on URLs of the form emailaddress.domain.TLD has been used for. It's unconscionably tacky, and some patents seem to be written in obfuscated terms to let the actually useful (and non-original) claim get slipped in.
In this case, not only does the patent ignore the HTTP 1.1 prior art, which existed as an RFC two years before the patent application, but it makes a bunch of bogus claims about motivation - things like each domain name requiring a separate IP address (wasn't true after HTTP 1.1), domain names being expensive (they weren't then, and they're cheaper now), DNS name propagation time being 1-3 days (I think Verisign was updating 2LDs faster than daily in those days, and update time for subdomains is instantaneous - as fast as you can update your name server), manual entry of names taking a long time and lot of cost (that's what very small shell scripts are for), etc.
The amount of time to fix it depends on what kinds of facilities they're running through the tunnel.
If the building that a phone switch is in catches fire, that's severely ugly, potentially weeks before most people have service.
Copper Cables connecting telco offices to end-users usually aren't diverse; if you lose a bundle of them, it's really annoying - splicing big fat bundles of copper takes days, and it's going to be a few days before it's safe to go into the tunnel and assess the damage, much less fix it.
Fiber optic long-haul trunks connecting telco offices *shouldn't* be a big problem, unless they've done a really bad job of diversity planning. They're usually arranged in ring or mesh topologies, with enough excess capacity that they can reroute the traffic around any (single) failures. In the US (at least for the telco I work for), that rerouting would happen in seconds or minutes, if there's enough capacity available to restore all the service, and the rest of it would be scrounged up with manual intervention, usually much faster than physical restoration (certainly true in this case.) For short stretches of physical restoration around damage (they have a mile here, which is a bit long), it's not uncommon to run temporary fiber above ground on poles or in as protected a route as you can cobble together, and post a bunch of guys in orange vests to watch it until they get the regular circuit rebuilt.
Fiber circuits to local end-users (mostly large businesses) and fibers feeding local telephone-copper concentrators are normally built in rings, with enough spacing between them that they're not supposed to have multiple failures from a single event, and restoration is simple and happens in under a second. The main exception to this is supposed to be multiple simultaneous failures - TWO street construction crews not checking before they dig, or a big flood.
The description of the "44 bundles of 24 fibers" sounds like long-haul, but maybe it's metro ring stuff. This sounds disturbingly like they had a bunch of access that wasn't diverse enough, because they assumed that the tunnels were safe from careless backhoe drivers, but maybe it's not that bad.
Manchester is ~300km from London, on the other side of the country, and it's not the side that the undersea cables to North America or Continental Europe go through. 200 miles may not seem that far away to Americans, but as far as the infrastructure goes it's pretty far.
It's interesting, and not surprising, to see a Duncan Campbell byline on the research. Duncan became well-known in the mid-90s for doing the journalistic work to publicize the NSA's Echelon wiretapping-the-world system. http://www.gn.apc.org/duncan/ has some older articles of his.
Bill Jones is a California Republican who's running for Senate this year against Barbara Boxer. Back in 2002, when he was Secretary of State and trying to get the Republican nomination to run for governor (Bill Simon beat him, and lost to Gray Davis, who was later recalled and replaced by Ahnold), his campaign sent out a bunch of email spam, and got spanked by the net.
So here in California, the Republicans already have lots of practice annoying Internet users. Let's hope they keep it up!
Single popups are bad enough, but just wait until the Republicans try those rapid-fire take-over-your-screen can't-hit-the-X-fast-enough popups. "Terrorists might be hiding under your bed!" "Democrats are Liberal Liberal Liberal!" "Weapons of Mass Destruction!" "Our Enemies are EEEEVILLLLL!" "Yellow AlertNo, Orange Alert!No, Yellow Alert!" "Pink Alert - Gay People Might Destroy Your Marriage Unless You let Us Repeal The Constitution!" "Don't Vote Democrat or Terrorists Will Squish This Hamster!" "Be Afraid, Be Very Afraid!" "Don't Worry, Republicans Will Protect You!" "Pay No Attention to the Web Bug Behind This Window!" "CLick the Dancing Osama To Fight Terrorism!" "Click the Dancing Osama to Vote Republican!" "If you Don't see the Fnords, they won't eat you!" "Homeland Security works if We All Cooperate!"
Terraforming other planets is fun, but first we really need to terraform Earth. Between desertification, global warming, overfishing, pollution, habitat destruction, slash&burn traditional farming, chemically-enhanced modern farming, genetic engineering of plants, moving species between ecological niches, sooting up the polar regions in ways that reduce the planet's albedo, and a lot of other things those pesky primates have been up to, this planet is becoming significantly less Earth-like. It's time to look at changing that. There have been a range of proposals to do things about it, from the Kyoto politics to Giant solar reflector shields in space to Bruce Sterling'sViridianManifesto.
Sure, there have been allegations of UFOs on Mars. But multiple news sources have carried that Martian Air Force Denials that they're real - just harmless weather balloons. These reports suggest that the real explanation may in fact be swamp gas. Either way, there's no evidence of intelligent life on nearby planets.
More commonly, in gambling-related news, people are transported from Atlantic City to Teaneck NJ or the Meadowlands on accounta not payin' their gambling debts, and nobody saw nothin'.
Linear Congruential Generators are pretty good for simulations - the results are decent, and they take near-zero work to calculate, and simulations aren't supposed to be deliberately malicious. They're not useful for cryptography, because it's too easy to predict the stream of numbers given one sample if you know the parameters or a couple of samples if you don't. That's why any crypto program using LCGs usually has the phrase "Snake Oil" in any review of it...
Gambling problems are much more like cryptography than like simulations. The players usually aren't out to get *you*, they're just out to get your money. If they're professionals, they're willing to invest a fair amount of horsepower into getting it.
If the casinos get the government to declare "playing to win" to be a "crime", then when the casino throws you out and calls the cops it's because *you're* a bad person.
If it's a purely private matter between a public casino and you, and they throw you out because you beat them, then they're "sore losers" and "not playing fair" and look bad.
If the casino is a private club and you're playing to win using inappropriate technology, and they hand back your bet, decline to pay you, and ask you to leave, because you were acting in an ungentlemanly fashion, well that's a perfectly private matter, just as using marked cards when playing poker with your friends would be. But it doesn't scale very well when the casinos are trying to attract lots of middle-class folks with disposable income.
I think the casinos here are acting inappropriately, and it's far more inappropriate for the law to help them - throwing you out for using computer-assisted technology to predict roulette wheels is fine, but claiming that you were engaging in "theft by deception" isn't. Throwing you out for card-counting isn't ok; calling the police if you get caught marking the cards by nicking them might well be.
And "deception" in poker not only isn't criminal - it's an admired skill, part of the game, and it'd be really boring to play against you if you didn't ever try to deceive the other players. Keeping an ace up your sleeve or having an accomplice standing behind the other players is cheatin', and it's appropriate for the house to throw you out to avoid having their furniture broken in the equally-appropriate bar brawl. But deceiving the other players about your abilities or the cards in your hand is definitely expected.
It's not going to give you a huge boost in storage capacity, because it is designed for 2.5" laptop drives rather than 3.5" desktop drives, which generally have lots more capacity and much lower prices per volume. Your movie collection would be much better off on a 200 MB desktop drive.
On the other hand, this thing sits safely on the shelf at home, while you're going to carry your laptop around, drop it occasionally, have it xrayed by the goons at the airport, spill coffee on it, and do things that are generally risky, so if you've only got a laptop, you really need some storage at home, though that usb/firewire external can do that more cost-effectively.
Obviously 802.11foo doesn't have useful encryption, so if you're worried about that black van parked across the street or your downstairs neighbor's high-school kid illegally copying your MP3 collection, you need more protection than that. And 802.11g is potentialy more dangerous than 802.11b, because its range is probably better, ymmv.
But that just means you need to only use encrypted file systems on top of the network file system you're carrying over the wireless, so you only store encrypted data blocks. That's not a bad policy in general, even for wired networks.
iSCSI isn't mainstream yet. Windows file sharing protocols are, and that's 90% of the market. I don't know if Macs can access Windows file sharing, but I assume they can and Linux can?
As far as not all apps working on them, if you're a Windows user you're used to not all apps working... The ones that don't can run on a wired box.
Spamming from domains you own is fine - a domain name costs you $6-10 from a bulk registrar, and whois data for spammers is usually either obviously bogus or else non-informative, but seldom useful for tracing. Many of the big domain registrars offer whois-privacy services, and most of them don't verify the information, as long as they get paid.
Sure, that's more expensive than a free yahoo account or a forged address pretending to be at yahoo, but it's still basically free and highly disposable. It's less than the cost of a list of N million freshly verified opt-in spam-free email addresses, and it's less than the profit on that first bottle of fake herbal Viagra you get some sucker to buy.
SPF doesn't try to guarantee that a given domain is ok - only that mail claiming to be from that domain probably is from that domain. If that's a domain you recognize, that may be meaningful; if it's a domain you don't recognize, it's not highly meaningful. Smalltime spammers aren't going to pay $2K for a Spamhaus certificate, partly because they often don't have the money and partly because they aren't sure it'll make them enough additional profit to justify it; they'll probably pay $10 for yet another new domain name. On the other hand, big legitimate bulk emailers (like commercial newsletter publishers, or product-support mail) might very well pay $2K because they hope to save that much money on email administrator time due to reduced bounces, plus they'll be able to support more paying customers.
Actually, no, I'm referring to jurisdiction, which is an assertion about legal legitimacy. The US has more ability to enforce things outside its borders than it has legitimacy for its actions. US forces occasionally do things in other countries, and they engage in lots of piracy on the high seas (err, they usually call that "drug law enforcement".) And it's done a lot of bullying of other countries through trade policy to get cooperation on laws it doesn't have legitimacy for - the bank secrecy issues are especially serious problems.
The US laws against internet gambling are fairly inappropriate, constitutionally, but it's especially easy to firewall your way around US-based spam laws by using a couple of foreign corporations. You don't need to be personally responsible for spamming - some foreign corporation can do it, and they can also hire you to provide them with perfectly legal services that seem to use up most of their profits from spamming. And you don't even need to go offshore - you spend $100 to set up a Delaware corporation, and you don't do the spamming, the corporation does, and if it gets caught, well, bummer, John Ashcroft can burn its corporate papers at the stake at high noon and you're still not in jail. (OK, you've got to spend another $100 for your next spammer-shell, but you've gotten your couple of thousand dollars cut from selling fake Viagra pills to the hundred suckers who fell for your 10,000,000-message spam.
Slashdot Mirror
ok, I'll go mod myself down now....
Hey, if it's only sending the data between Google email accounts, no problem - everything stays in the LAN / SAN networks instead of hitting the real Internet, or optionally just sends pointers to the original without duplicating it.
Crypto algorithms and protocols aren't something you can just roll-your-own with (assuming you actually care about security.) I hope all this brokenness is in the user interface part?
I view jury service as an important civic activity, and a critical part of providing justice. However, there are some times it's just not convenient to do jury time, and in general, if you're an intelligent person who has unique opinions and thinks for yourself instead of believing everything you're told to believe, you're not the kind of person that either side wants on the jury anyway, so your objective is to let them know that that's the case. (As you said, your coworker is an engineer, so they didn't keep him.) But it may take more than a day, depending on how inefficient your local court system is.
A friend of mine who owns a horse spent a 4-day weekend out near Bakersfield helping friends do their haying. After she got back, she said how *amazingly* glad she was to have a desk job and not have to do farm work for a living.
Termcap was originally an ascii-format file used by curses to describe different computer terminals. (Remember terminals?) Terminfo was an AT&T Bell Labs rewrite that used a binary data format, compiled from an ascii format that was a bit more complex than termcap. In the process of creating the terminfo file, they cleaned up the language. This most common "offensive" term that got zapped was "brain-damaged" - sometimes it got deleted entirely, and sometimes replaced with "broken" when it couldn't be totally avoided. (The old Haseltine terminals couldn't really be described adequately without using the term "brain-damaged" or something pretty much like it.)
When the Netscape folks released their code as open source, they apparently cleaned up much of the language. Somebody at the big Mozilla party handed out a printout of all the good deleted comments.
In this case, not only does the patent ignore the HTTP 1.1 prior art, which existed as an RFC two years before the patent application, but it makes a bunch of bogus claims about motivation - things like each domain name requiring a separate IP address (wasn't true after HTTP 1.1), domain names being expensive (they weren't then, and they're cheaper now), DNS name propagation time being 1-3 days (I think Verisign was updating 2LDs faster than daily in those days, and update time for subdomains is instantaneous - as fast as you can update your name server), manual entry of names taking a long time and lot of cost (that's what very small shell scripts are for), etc.
Bad, bad, bad.
- If the building that a phone switch is in catches fire, that's severely ugly, potentially weeks before most people have service.
- Copper Cables connecting telco offices to end-users usually aren't diverse; if you lose a bundle of them, it's really annoying - splicing big fat bundles of copper takes days, and it's going to be a few days before it's safe to go into the tunnel and assess the damage, much less fix it.
- Fiber optic long-haul trunks connecting telco offices *shouldn't* be a big problem, unless they've done a really bad job of diversity planning. They're usually arranged in ring or mesh topologies, with enough excess capacity that they can reroute the traffic around any (single) failures. In the US (at least for the telco I work for), that rerouting would happen in seconds or minutes, if there's enough capacity available to restore all the service, and the rest of it would be scrounged up with manual intervention, usually much faster than physical restoration (certainly true in this case.) For short stretches of physical restoration around damage (they have a mile here, which is a bit long), it's not uncommon to run temporary fiber above ground on poles or in as protected a route as you can cobble together, and post a bunch of guys in orange vests to watch it until they get the regular circuit rebuilt.
- Fiber circuits to local end-users (mostly large businesses) and fibers feeding local telephone-copper concentrators are normally built in rings, with enough spacing between them that they're not supposed to have multiple failures from a single event, and restoration is simple and happens in under a second. The main exception to this is supposed to be multiple simultaneous failures - TWO street construction crews not checking before they dig, or a big flood.
The description of the "44 bundles of 24 fibers" sounds like long-haul, but maybe it's metro ring stuff. This sounds disturbingly like they had a bunch of access that wasn't diverse enough, because they assumed that the tunnels were safe from careless backhoe drivers, but maybe it's not that bad.Manchester is ~300km from London, on the other side of the country, and it's not the side that the undersea cables to North America or Continental Europe go through. 200 miles may not seem that far away to Americans, but as far as the infrastructure goes it's pretty far.
It's interesting, and not surprising, to see a Duncan Campbell byline on the research. Duncan became well-known in the mid-90s for doing the journalistic work to publicize the NSA's Echelon wiretapping-the-world system. http://www.gn.apc.org/duncan/ has some older articles of his.
So here in California, the Republicans already have lots of practice annoying Internet users. Let's hope they keep it up!
Single popups are bad enough, but just wait until the Republicans try those rapid-fire take-over-your-screen can't-hit-the-X-fast-enough popups. "Terrorists might be hiding under your bed!" "Democrats are Liberal Liberal Liberal!" "Weapons of Mass Destruction!" "Our Enemies are EEEEVILLLLL!" "Yellow Alert No, Orange Alert! No, Yellow Alert!" "Pink Alert - Gay People Might Destroy Your Marriage Unless You let Us Repeal The Constitution!" "Don't Vote Democrat or Terrorists Will Squish This Hamster!" "Be Afraid, Be Very Afraid!" "Don't Worry, Republicans Will Protect You!" "Pay No Attention to the Web Bug Behind This Window!" "CLick the Dancing Osama To Fight Terrorism!" "Click the Dancing Osama to Vote Republican!" "If you Don't see the Fnords, they won't eat you!" "Homeland Security works if We All Cooperate!"
Terraforming other planets is fun, but first we really need to terraform Earth. Between desertification, global warming, overfishing, pollution, habitat destruction, slash&burn traditional farming, chemically-enhanced modern farming, genetic engineering of plants, moving species between ecological niches, sooting up the polar regions in ways that reduce the planet's albedo, and a lot of other things those pesky primates have been up to, this planet is becoming significantly less Earth-like. It's time to look at changing that. There have been a range of proposals to do things about it, from the Kyoto politics to Giant solar reflector shields in space to Bruce Sterling's Viridian Manifesto.
Sure, there have been allegations of UFOs on Mars. But multiple news sources have carried that Martian Air Force Denials that they're real - just harmless weather balloons. These reports suggest that the real explanation may in fact be swamp gas. Either way, there's no evidence of intelligent life on nearby planets.
these aren't the moons you're looking for.
More commonly, in gambling-related news, people are transported from Atlantic City to Teaneck NJ or the Meadowlands on accounta not payin' their gambling debts, and nobody saw nothin'.
Gambling problems are much more like cryptography than like simulations. The players usually aren't out to get *you*, they're just out to get your money. If they're professionals, they're willing to invest a fair amount of horsepower into getting it.
I think the casinos here are acting inappropriately, and it's far more inappropriate for the law to help them - throwing you out for using computer-assisted technology to predict roulette wheels is fine, but claiming that you were engaging in "theft by deception" isn't. Throwing you out for card-counting isn't ok; calling the police if you get caught marking the cards by nicking them might well be.
And "deception" in poker not only isn't criminal - it's an admired skill, part of the game, and it'd be really boring to play against you if you didn't ever try to deceive the other players. Keeping an ace up your sleeve or having an accomplice standing behind the other players is cheatin', and it's appropriate for the house to throw you out to avoid having their furniture broken in the equally-appropriate bar brawl. But deceiving the other players about your abilities or the cards in your hand is definitely expected.
On the other hand, this thing sits safely on the shelf at home, while you're going to carry your laptop around, drop it occasionally, have it xrayed by the goons at the airport, spill coffee on it, and do things that are generally risky, so if you've only got a laptop, you really need some storage at home, though that usb/firewire external can do that more cost-effectively.
But that just means you need to only use encrypted file systems on top of the network file system you're carrying over the wireless, so you only store encrypted data blocks. That's not a bad policy in general, even for wired networks.
The other canonical hiding place is that hollowed out book in your bookshelf - the one with the power cord coming out the back...
As far as not all apps working on them, if you're a Windows user you're used to not all apps working... The ones that don't can run on a wired box.
Sure, that's more expensive than a free yahoo account or a forged address pretending to be at yahoo, but it's still basically free and highly disposable. It's less than the cost of a list of N million freshly verified opt-in spam-free email addresses, and it's less than the profit on that first bottle of fake herbal Viagra you get some sucker to buy.
SPF doesn't try to guarantee that a given domain is ok - only that mail claiming to be from that domain probably is from that domain. If that's a domain you recognize, that may be meaningful; if it's a domain you don't recognize, it's not highly meaningful. Smalltime spammers aren't going to pay $2K for a Spamhaus certificate, partly because they often don't have the money and partly because they aren't sure it'll make them enough additional profit to justify it; they'll probably pay $10 for yet another new domain name. On the other hand, big legitimate bulk emailers (like commercial newsletter publishers, or product-support mail) might very well pay $2K because they hope to save that much money on email administrator time due to reduced bounces, plus they'll be able to support more paying customers.
The US laws against internet gambling are fairly inappropriate, constitutionally, but it's especially easy to firewall your way around US-based spam laws by using a couple of foreign corporations. You don't need to be personally responsible for spamming - some foreign corporation can do it, and they can also hire you to provide them with perfectly legal services that seem to use up most of their profits from spamming. And you don't even need to go offshore - you spend $100 to set up a Delaware corporation, and you don't do the spamming, the corporation does, and if it gets caught, well, bummer, John Ashcroft can burn its corporate papers at the stake at high noon and you're still not in jail. (OK, you've got to spend another $100 for your next spammer-shell, but you've gotten your couple of thousand dollars cut from selling fake Viagra pills to the hundred suckers who fell for your 10,000,000-message spam.