First of all, this kind of machine is going to use a much wimpier video display than a PVR wants, because it doesn't need anything really fancy. It you're adding TV handling, you want a higher-end video card, so you probably should go with a small-form-factor box that's got an AGP slot (unless you can find what you want in PCI).
Besides, if you're doing a PVR box, you want a much disk capacity as you can get away with, and you won't get that on laptop drives. Sure, you can probably get 40GB by now, but you'd be a lot better off with a box that's 3-4 times as large that can hold removable drives (e.g. the 3.5" 120-200GB drive in 5.25" form factor drawers, and you'll need enough power supply to drive the disks. If you really wanted to put one of these things in a 3-disk case, I suppose you could, but you should be able to find better form factors.
They really don't add much space. And if you look at the back of the case, it's pretty stacked with connectors - they can't really make it much shorter without getting rid of some of them. On the other hand, it's got an external power supply, which is annoying, though it's probably not very large, since it's only 60 watts.
They're different companies. AT&T sells voice and data services to businesses and consumers, including Internet dial and backbone. AT&T Wireless is a cell phone company that AT&T used to own, which still gets to license the Death Star logo. According to the press releases, in this project, it appears that AT&T is providing the internet infrastructure to the people who are managing the hotspots.
Look, if you were using dial in most of the US, you'd be paying $20/month for the ISP, and nearly $20 for a second phone line, once you count all the state taxes, federal taxes, AlGoreUniversalServiceFund taxes, and such. $50 for a much faster connection isn't a bad deal. (I'm paying $59.) In bigger markets, there's lots of competition for the ISP part of the business.
There are roughly three companies out there with AT&T Death Star logos attached to them. AT&T Wireless is a cell phone company, which was originally McCaw before AT&T bought it for a while. AT&T Broadband was the cable TV business, which AT&T just spun off and sold to Comcast. AT&T (just "AT&T", aka "AT&T Inc", aka "T") is the part of the old Bell System that's really still AT&T, and sells voice and data services to businesses and consumers, including lots of Internet dialup and a big Internet backbone. As near as I can tell from all the press releases, this part of AT&T is providing infrastructure to Cometa.
AT&T Wireless gets involved in spectrum auctions, but 802.11 isn't something that's auctioned off - it's non-licensed spectrum that anybody can use. (Most of the auctions have been for cellphone frequency bands.) AT&T does use some radio spectrum as well - mostly point-to-point digital radio used for infrastructure in low-density nasty-terrain places like South Utah where it doesn't pay to run fiber, and 38GHz microwave access circuits (typically T3 or OC3), which can be cheaper than local fiber loops, and are good diversity options for backing up fiber.
I agree with you that there's a major need for spectrum that isn't controlled by creativity-limiting FCC monopoly control, but I think your ideas of limiting who can use it are a mistake. Making more spectrum available to the public is a big win.
Some of the spam out there actually accepts email responses from suckers, but most of it doesn't - it's too vulnerable to people closing down the accounts. Far too much of it wants responses by phone, which go to an answering machine that catches the obscene angry calls, or else by postal mail, since they want you to send a check or a $5 bill to all the other people in the pyramid.
Of course, that doesn't mean that for spam that *does* want email responses, you shouldn't give those addresses to other spammers. No need for a chatbot of your own; there are plenty out there run by other spammers.
Would *unsubscribing* him from the lists work?
on
HOWTO: Annoy a Spammer
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· Score: 3, Funny
Subscribing him to all those lists would be wrong - unless of course he needs a copy of all of the postings for his files. But Unsubscribing him would be fine.
If the lawyer is defending his client in criminal cases, then yes, he's protecting the guy's rights, and that's an important job that even spammers should be able to get help with.
But if he's using the lawyer as an agent in negotiations with his customers, or in preparing contracts with his customers, or in defending him against tort or other civil actions brought by people who claim the spammer's actions has cost them money or damaged their stuff, it's not a civil rights issue, it's just business.
Making insulting phone calls to the *lawyer* for the spam would be inappropriate, but providing the lawyer with a large number of billable-with-15-minute-minimum activities to perform on behalf of his client strikes me as appropriate. After all, his client might very well be interested in friendly calls about ways to make m0n34 f4$t on the Internet, or getting reports analyzing the legality of different internet marketing plans, or market research about the sales of V1agra on the net, and somebody who wants to contract with his client about them would certainly want to ask what forms of contracts they know how to support, or what jurisdiction his client uses to resolve disputes in.
Wasting the lawyer's time would be a mean thing to do, but after all, you only need a 0.04% take rate to justify these things, and his client might really be interested in them. And delivering subpoenas for discovery is never a waste of time:-)
If *I* were getting spammed and slashdotted because of one of my clients, unless there were some real strong moral issues for keeping him, there'd either be a fast re-evaluation of whether the client's worth keeping, or a fast re-evaluation of the rates I'd be charging him...
So does Harrison have an email address? Is he a sole practitioner, or part of a law firm? It'd sure be nice to only have to contact him about spam we're sure is from Ralsky rather than having to check with him about all the spam we receive....
Immunity doesn't mean that Poindexter wasn't guilty of all the things he was charged with, including lying to Congress. It just means he can't be convicted for them, because Congress forced him to tell. That does mean that instead of the press sucking up to him and calling him "Admiral Poindexter", they should be addressing him as "Convicted Liar Poindexter" or "Disgraced Ex-Admiral Poindexter" or something along those lines.
So other than your preference for a seat in the oxygen-breathers section, and the amount of luggage you're planning to carry (unlike most US airlines, you're probably allowed to bring oxygen tanks on board with you...) how much gravity are you willing to put up with? Compare that with the G-forces that a hunk of satellite equipment can put up with if it's padded adequately.
Theoretically, the machine only has the vanilla software that it came with, plus a couple updates worth of AOL, but occasionally people send her email with tag lines about "upgrade your browser here" that she's unfortunately clicked on, installing Hotbar, which seems to be some sort of adware/spyware that makes sure to deliver tailored popup ads for whatever page you're looking at, as near as I can tell. Worse, there's some sort of "helpful" Compaq software running that keeps hosing things up instead of helping, and of course the documentation disappeared long ago...
Sometimes it makes sense to sue somebody while they're suing you, as a bargaining tactic that lets you both drop your suits against each other. But if you're not doing that, you're much more likely to succeed if you first win in their lawsuit against you, especially if you can get the court to award you your legal costs, which is a strong indication that their suit was bogus. In this case, the PanIP folks have gotten some people to pay them off rather than fighting a lawsuit, which makes their case look stronger, instead of looking like the bogus piece of fluff that it is, which is a bit tough on a preemptive countersuit.
The other way to play it is to tell them "drop the suit or we'll squash you into the ground for making a frivolous attack on us" and hope that works, but unfortunately the patent system is biased towards people who can talk the patent office into giving them patents, so this is difficult.
The article started by saying that, and also saying $15million of dope, which seems pretty pricy stuff:-) But if you read further, he had a warehouse full of 1000 plants. Feds and local cops get extra credit for rabidly overinflating the value of dope busts, and this comes to about $15000/plant, which is about a pound (about half a kilo) of sellable product at overinflated US prices. (Cops typically get credit for busting growing operations as if the plants were fully grown and harvested.) Also, any scary-looking gun tends to be called an "assault-rifle" these days, even if it's not an AK-47.
.... then put it on your web page. Inline the pictures, serve the banners from your own domain space, or whatever. The difficulty is finding a method for serving them that lets you convince the banner vendors that you're not faking hits, but that should be manageable.
What I really like about PopUP ads is that if you tell Mozilla not to load them, it won't load them. (I'm borrowing my mother-in-law's PC on vacation, and it only has IE - it's been popup city here....)
Hobbits usually put their pipeweed *in* their pipes to smoke it, but rolling it in joints and hanging out in pipes will do in a pinch, I suppose, as long as you're not overly adventurous about it and it doesn't make you late for dinner...
A long, long, time ago, the net was very decentralized, but not very scalable.
Then they (Al Gore) helped invent the ARPAnet, which was a backbone that all the regional nets tied into, which made things much more centralized - if the Arpanet routing protocols freaked, which they did periodically, parts or all of the net fell off, and the Acceptable Use Policy censored business use of the net, though fortunately it took an increasingly lax attitude toward interpreting the policies for "official" use.
Gradually things like the Commercial Internet Exchange helped ISPs build around the ARPAnet's backbone, the Feds funded FIX West and FIX East to manage their traffic, and funded the various MAE and NAP complexes partly to keep connectivity between the commercial and government-funded worlds, partly because it was cool, and partly because the Feds wanted to keep some control over what the Internet was doing even though it was no longer theirs. (Among other things, there were active wiretap reflectors running on MAE West.)
But the MAEs were too overloaded and non-scalable for ISPs to run reliable traffic, so they started building private peering, which has gradually become quite extensive. Most major ISPs do 90-99% of their traffic on private connections (either peering or transit, depending on how you follow the money.)
Access costs, operational costs, and economies of scale catalyzed building of internet hosting centers by a variety of businesses. During The Bubble, there was a wide ecosystem of businesses providing services within these spaces. Some of them were carrier-operated, with interconnections provided by the carriers, while others were carrier-neutral (or at least had 2-3 primary carriers instead of just 1), so the interconnection topologies varied greatly.
Competitive businesses are increasingly building carrier-neutral facilities to increase interconnections; some of them centralize the locations where private peering happens, but to a large extent they're mainly displacing interconnectivity that occerred in telco pops.
Europe's Internet connectivity is somewhat more dependent on centralized exchanges, such as LINX and AMSIX, in part because of former telecom monopoly policies on in-country and between-country facilities pricing.
Telecom liberalization in Europe and Asia has greatly increased the variety of connectivity between countries, and Global Crossing and their competitors have radically increased the amount of cross-ocean bandwidth and physical diversity. (It may seem otherwise, since it's one bankrupt carrier's fiber doing the majority of trashing everybody else's business model through first-mover advantage, but believe me, trans-ocean bandwidth was *much* less diverse a decade ago, and the internet fraction of that was even less diverse, even for the then-current definitions of "high bandwidth".)
The following 5-10 years will be dominated by chaos and anarchy, with major players appearing and going bankrupt, but unlike the software business, where a bankrupt company usually vanishes, a bankrupt fiber carrier sells off its access for pennies on the Euro to some new carrier who then proceeds to undercut the fragile stability of prices the other carriers are briefly enjoying. Some people like to predict that we'll end up with about 3 carriers before there's anything resembling stability, or at least before the price of the fiber bandwidth accross the ocean becomes cheaper and less interesting than the price of the bandwith in the last 100 meters or the uninterruptible power supply system at the destination.
DNS was originally Jon Postel's hosts.txt list, plus everybody else's hosts.txt, which was quite decentralized, and occasionally coordinated with the UUCP decentralized naming.
Then it was Jon's IANA, which was well-behaved, but alas, quite centralized.
There were a few competitive-root proposals, like Kashpureff's, but they never really caught on.
There were also country-code TLDs, which were decentralized governmental control (by a bunch of generally monopolist telecom authorities, but at least they weren't cooperating with each other, and weren't interested in.GOV being the US in charge of the World's governments.
The IETF's Ad-Hoc committee tried to broaden the DNS, but the Powers That Be squelched that.
ICANN emerged, declaring itself to be in charge, with US government backing, and enough people believed them that it now appears to be true, regardless of real legitimacy. They're strongly in favor of centralized control of any decisions affecting intellectual property, prevention of privacy, and dispute resolution, and discouraging experimentation with policy and technology.
In the non-US jurisdictions, country-code TLDs have become a hot commodity, and some countries have been willing to sell off use of their initials to various commercial companies which take a more divergent view of policies and pricing. Unfortunately, their power grab has included declaring ownership of the IPv6 namespace and setting prices at a level to discourage use of it.
To give ICANN some credit, they've at least called for decentralized pricing and sales, though with a centralized database registry, which has made it easier for commercial activity to provide some variety in names available to the world's general public.
The Distributed Denial of Service vandals demonstrated the continued efficiency of centralized control of distributed resources.
Some of the quasi-centralized Root Server cabal are developing decentralized implementations of servers for the centralized DNS namespace, which should help the centralization problems at least operationally.
His debt to society includes the 40-50 million Euros for the building, plus the interference with everybody's lives who used the building. Thank God nobody was killed. Just going to jail, without restitution for the damage he caused, doesn't fix it. If jail helps him confront his mental problems and deal with them, then maybe he'd be stable enough for someone to trust him with a job, but he won't have paid his debt to society until he has actually paid his debt to society.
4of12's suggestion for whitelisting is different from the RFC2870 advice. The RFC essentially permits the machines in root-servers.org to have a hidden master, but it doesn't apply to non-rootservers, such as the DNS servers at big ISPs, which is where most people get their DNS from. In fact, it forbids root-zone transfers from non-rootserver machines, though it permits the rootservers to run an FTP mirror for outsider downloads.
4of12's suggestion would let the rootservers run a server that's only accessible from known (and presumably important) addresses, such as the DNS servers for the big ISPs. That would take care of the most important uses of DNS, since most people get their DNS queries answered by their ISP's servers, either from cache or from recursive queries. Letting the big ISPs do zone transfers from a protected net would preserve that. (Without zone transfers, an obvious attack is for the zombies to look for bogus000001.com, bogus000002.com, etc.)
Beyond that, DNS queries and zone transfers aren't the only way to send the information around. DNS A-record data compresses well (Unfortunately, DNSSEC data doesn't, and it's much bulkier.) And everybody wants the same data, so multicasting can be an efficient way to transmit it (using your favorite reliable-multicast application.) A back-of-the-envelope guess is that the dot-com namespace would compress to somewhere between 100-300MB, which would take 10-30kbps to transmit it in a day - and most of it has a TTL that's much longer, so you could handle it efficiently with incremental updates. Another alternative to multicast would be a peer-to-peer app that's designed for handling big files, like BitTorrent. (BitTorrent's designed more for static content rather than dynamic, so you'd need some file naming scheme for fetching today's version.)
It's possible that the weird x.x.0.0 addresses were a programming bug (forgot to run a loop?), but my initial guess was that it was trying to trigger the old-style directed broadcasts (remember when all-zeros was the broadcast instead of all-ones?), guessing that many people have the sense to block all-ones directed broadcast.
It's actually been a long time since I've been to one, but when I was a kid, the free batteries were an attraction. (Some years they were green rather than red, I think, though it's possible that those were the better batteries that cost money...)
If some place I'm paying cash really insists on a name, and they're not Radio Shack, that's usually what they get. Zip code 00000, or 90210. Or 1600 pennsylvania ave, washington dc, 20006.
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Besides, if you're doing a PVR box, you want a much disk capacity as you can get away with, and you won't get that on laptop drives. Sure, you can probably get 40GB by now, but you'd be a lot better off with a box that's 3-4 times as large that can hold removable drives (e.g. the 3.5" 120-200GB drive in 5.25" form factor drawers, and you'll need enough power supply to drive the disks. If you really wanted to put one of these things in a 3-disk case, I suppose you could, but you should be able to find better form factors.
They really don't add much space. And if you look at the back of the case, it's pretty stacked with connectors - they can't really make it much shorter without getting rid of some of them. On the other hand, it's got an external power supply, which is annoying, though it's probably not very large, since it's only 60 watts.
They're different companies. AT&T sells voice and data services to businesses and consumers, including Internet dial and backbone. AT&T Wireless is a cell phone company that AT&T used to own, which still gets to license the Death Star logo. According to the press releases, in this project, it appears that AT&T is providing the internet infrastructure to the people who are managing the hotspots.
Look, if you were using dial in most of the US, you'd be paying $20/month for the ISP, and nearly $20 for a second phone line, once you count all the state taxes, federal taxes, AlGoreUniversalServiceFund taxes, and such. $50 for a much faster connection isn't a bad deal. (I'm paying $59.) In bigger markets, there's lots of competition for the ISP part of the business.
AT&T Wireless gets involved in spectrum auctions, but 802.11 isn't something that's auctioned off - it's non-licensed spectrum that anybody can use. (Most of the auctions have been for cellphone frequency bands.) AT&T does use some radio spectrum as well - mostly point-to-point digital radio used for infrastructure in low-density nasty-terrain places like South Utah where it doesn't pay to run fiber, and 38GHz microwave access circuits (typically T3 or OC3), which can be cheaper than local fiber loops, and are good diversity options for backing up fiber.
I agree with you that there's a major need for spectrum that isn't controlled by creativity-limiting FCC monopoly control, but I think your ideas of limiting who can use it are a mistake. Making more spectrum available to the public is a big win.
Of course, that doesn't mean that for spam that *does* want email responses, you shouldn't give those addresses to other spammers. No need for a chatbot of your own; there are plenty out there run by other spammers.
Subscribing him to all those lists would be wrong - unless of course he needs a copy of all of the postings for his files. But Unsubscribing him would be fine.
But if he's using the lawyer as an agent in negotiations with his customers, or in preparing contracts with his customers, or in defending him against tort or other civil actions brought by people who claim the spammer's actions has cost them money or damaged their stuff, it's not a civil rights issue, it's just business.
Making insulting phone calls to the *lawyer* for the spam would be inappropriate, but providing the lawyer with a large number of billable-with-15-minute-minimum activities to perform on behalf of his client strikes me as appropriate. After all, his client might very well be interested in friendly calls about ways to make m0n34 f4$t on the Internet, or getting reports analyzing the legality of different internet marketing plans, or market research about the sales of V1agra on the net, and somebody who wants to contract with his client about them would certainly want to ask what forms of contracts they know how to support, or what jurisdiction his client uses to resolve disputes in.
Wasting the lawyer's time would be a mean thing to do, but after all, you only need a 0.04% take rate to justify these things, and his client might really be interested in them. And delivering subpoenas for discovery is never a waste of time :-)
If *I* were getting spammed and slashdotted because of one of my clients, unless there were some real strong moral issues for keeping him, there'd either be a fast re-evaluation of whether the client's worth keeping, or a fast re-evaluation of the rates I'd be charging him...
So does Harrison have an email address? Is he a sole practitioner, or part of a law firm? It'd sure be nice to only have to contact him about spam we're sure is from Ralsky rather than having to check with him about all the spam we receive....
Immunity doesn't mean that Poindexter wasn't guilty of all the things he was charged with, including lying to Congress. It just means he can't be convicted for them, because Congress forced him to tell. That does mean that instead of the press sucking up to him and calling him "Admiral Poindexter", they should be addressing him as "Convicted Liar Poindexter" or "Disgraced Ex-Admiral Poindexter" or something along those lines.
Now it's gone, and we're starting up the Empire....
It may have been free on Monday, but today it's in the Subscribers-only section of the web site....
So other than your preference for a seat in the oxygen-breathers section, and the amount of luggage you're planning to carry (unlike most US airlines, you're probably allowed to bring oxygen tanks on board with you...) how much gravity are you willing to put up with? Compare that with the G-forces that a hunk of satellite equipment can put up with if it's padded adequately.
Theoretically, the machine only has the vanilla software that it came with, plus a couple updates worth of AOL, but occasionally people send her email with tag lines about "upgrade your browser here" that she's unfortunately clicked on, installing Hotbar, which seems to be some sort of adware/spyware that makes sure to deliver tailored popup ads for whatever page you're looking at, as near as I can tell. Worse, there's some sort of "helpful" Compaq software running that keeps hosing things up instead of helping, and of course the documentation disappeared long ago...
The other way to play it is to tell them "drop the suit or we'll squash you into the ground for making a frivolous attack on us" and hope that works, but unfortunately the patent system is biased towards people who can talk the patent office into giving them patents, so this is difficult.
The article started by saying that, and also saying $15million of dope, which seems pretty pricy stuff :-) But if you read further, he had a warehouse full of 1000 plants. Feds and local cops get extra credit for rabidly overinflating the value of dope busts, and this comes to about $15000/plant, which is about a pound (about half a kilo) of sellable product at overinflated US prices. (Cops typically get credit for busting growing operations as if the plants were fully grown and harvested.) Also, any scary-looking gun tends to be called an "assault-rifle" these days, even if it's not an AK-47.
What I really like about PopUP ads is that if you tell Mozilla not to load them, it won't load them. (I'm borrowing my mother-in-law's PC on vacation, and it only has IE - it's been popup city here....)
Hobbits usually put their pipeweed *in* their pipes to smoke it, but rolling it in joints and hanging out in pipes will do in a pinch, I suppose, as long as you're not overly adventurous about it and it doesn't make you late for dinner...
His debt to society includes the 40-50 million Euros for the building, plus the interference with everybody's lives who used the building. Thank God nobody was killed. Just going to jail, without restitution for the damage he caused, doesn't fix it. If jail helps him confront his mental problems and deal with them, then maybe he'd be stable enough for someone to trust him with a job, but he won't have paid his debt to society until he has actually paid his debt to society.
4of12's suggestion would let the rootservers run a server that's only accessible from known (and presumably important) addresses, such as the DNS servers for the big ISPs. That would take care of the most important uses of DNS, since most people get their DNS queries answered by their ISP's servers, either from cache or from recursive queries. Letting the big ISPs do zone transfers from a protected net would preserve that. (Without zone transfers, an obvious attack is for the zombies to look for bogus000001.com, bogus000002.com, etc.)
Beyond that, DNS queries and zone transfers aren't the only way to send the information around. DNS A-record data compresses well (Unfortunately, DNSSEC data doesn't, and it's much bulkier.) And everybody wants the same data, so multicasting can be an efficient way to transmit it (using your favorite reliable-multicast application.) A back-of-the-envelope guess is that the dot-com namespace would compress to somewhere between 100-300MB, which would take 10-30kbps to transmit it in a day - and most of it has a TTL that's much longer, so you could handle it efficiently with incremental updates. Another alternative to multicast would be a peer-to-peer app that's designed for handling big files, like BitTorrent. (BitTorrent's designed more for static content rather than dynamic, so you'd need some file naming scheme for fetching today's version.)
It's possible that the weird x.x.0.0 addresses were a programming bug (forgot to run a loop?), but my initial guess was that it was trying to trigger the old-style directed broadcasts (remember when all-zeros was the broadcast instead of all-ones?), guessing that many people have the sense to block all-ones directed broadcast.
It's actually been a long time since I've been to one, but when I was a kid, the free batteries were an attraction. (Some years they were green rather than red, I think, though it's possible that those were the better batteries that cost money...)
If some place I'm paying cash really insists on a name, and they're not Radio Shack, that's usually what they get. Zip code 00000, or 90210. Or 1600 pennsylvania ave, washington dc, 20006.