Yes, it can make DivX and DVD more playable on older systems, but so can a new motherboard, which will make everything else more playable. It's a PCI card, not PCMCIA, so it's not useful for enhancing a laptop (which is more likeley to be underpowered), and for the $99 you'd spend on it, you can get a motherboard with ~1GHz AMD that still uses PC133 memory, or for similar prices you can get slightly faster systems that use other kinds of memory (so add $50.)
Disclaimer: I've only played movies on my work laptop, which is 1.1GHz, and haven't tried it on my 233 MHz PII at home, since I don't currently have a broadband connection and downloading by modem is too annoying:-)
OK, I haven't actually *read* usenet in years, but that was the canonical place for this sort of thing before it the internet got popular and Usenet got spammed to death.
Just think of the possibilities for this, especially if there's also a webcam on the thing. You can use the TV functions to watch Iron Chef while you're cooking, or have the refrigerator tell you what the Mystery Ingredient you'll be using for dinner tonight will be, or if you've got a high-speed net connection (which anybody spending money on this overpriced toy probably does;-), you can run your own Iron Chef game with your friends....
The technology doesn't work that way - some things are inherently symmetric, and some are inherently asymmetric, but they're not just allocating bandwidth on a shared simplex channel like an Ethernet or radio space. There are three common standards out there for broadband to the home:
Symmetric DSL versions - they're symmetric, and bandwidth is limited by the electrical characteristics of the wires. They usually need dedicated wires.
Asymmetric DSL versions - they play different electrical tricks to fit the signal onto the wire, and can line-share with analog phones, so they're becoming the most common home DSL. Typical speeds are 384/128, 608/128, and 1544/384.
Cable Modems - Cable TV depends on lots of Funky Analog Electrical Tricks just to work at all, and cable modems do even funkier tricks, and it's easier to do these tricks downstream, where you've got one signal source, than upstream, where you've got lots of sources at different points on the same wire which all want to bounce around and echo and interfere with each other unless you tune the thing right. It's much worse than the old ThickWire Ethernet. So it's easier for them to add as much downstream bandwidth as they want to pay for, but upstream's much harder. However, they're not giving you as much upstream bandwidth as they could, for a couple of reasons.
One is that they developed a bad performance reputation early on because of some bad equipment in the beta-test city, leading to high packet loss and all those Web Hog TV commercials by competitors, so they'd rather not push the limits of the network, because Bad Perception by the public is a killer.
Another is that the upstream is a shared medium, with total performance depending on the number of people sending right now and how fast they're sending, and if they let you have a lot more upstream, which they easily could, some users really would hog their neighborhood upstream, especially if they're running popular Pr0n Web Servers (see Bad Perception, above.)
They could manage the bandwidth of excessive users by using packet shapers like Packeteer, but those didn't really exist when they started, and still cost money today.
They either have to set all users to a lowest-common-denominator speed that will work everywhere, or they'd have to keep track of each individual user's setting and do much more complex engineering for each set of cable, and that's way too much work for a low-price service.
Most of the cable modem technology out there limits you to 128kbps upstream, but it could do more if they wanted to set it for that. Some of the cable modem companies offer business-class service with 256kbps upstream and much better repair time guarantees, but the economics of the consumer-priced services are based on the idea that it's really just television and if it goes out for a day or two you can read a book or go to the movies.
Digital Cable - This is the Mos Eisley of kitchen sink bandwidth allocation protocols, doing a huge variety of ugly things with different parts of the bitstream under different conditions. You really don't want to go there; it makes those ISDN Q.93x protocols designed by French Telecom Bureaucrats look positively clean and simple.
Hi! I'm Joe Schmuck, and I'm a Couch Potato. I don't create cool applications and services myself, I just run stuff other people create and leech off them, but I'm still the most important person out there that the cable company knows about, because I'm paying them $50/month to run Cool Stuff, and if there weren't Cool Stuff for us Couch Potatoes to use, I wouldn't bother. Here are some times I care - or don't - about upstream bandwidth.
I don't care when I'm running Napster - most people spend more time listening or ignoring it than downloading, so the asymmetry averages out.
I don't care about upstream bandwidth for my web server - it's mostly my vacation pictures and pictures of my kids, and it's much easier to use DigiCamWebSharer to have the pictures on my 20GB hard disk than to upload them to the wimpy 5MB that the cable company's website lets me store. It's mainly my relatives who look at it, plus a bunch of spiders.
I don't care when I'm running Quake, because it runs ok on modems and I can really kick ass on the cable modem.
I do care about upstream when I'm running VideoPhone, because my 128kbps upstream is good enough for talking heads and showing the kids when they sit still, but if they start running around, Grandma complains that they get all blocky, especially if I forget to turn off Napster.
I also care when I'm running VaporBlaster, since that needs 512kbps upstream. Unfortunately, not enough Couch Potatoes have better than 128k upstream or a few have 384k, so the VaporBlaster folks never finished writing the home version of the arcade game that would have gotten 30 million more Couch Potatoes to buy cable modem service, so I can only play it at the mall,and my cable bill keeps having inserts about how they're not filling up their OC48 backbone and could we download some more movies from their PayPerView site so they don't have to cut the monthly bandwidth limits again.
I also care when I'm running NeighborhoodWatchWebCam, because there've been a couple of car breakins this month and most of the neighbors are running theirs in slow-speed mode so we couldn't recognize the kids who did it.
This isn't a change to the communications protocols or any of the encryption - it's a change to the Unix implementation of the server to make it much less likely that any bugs can let someone break in. (Initially this works for OpenBSD, should be easy to port to other BSD implementations, probably to Linux and Solaris, maybe to WinNT but maybe not.) The basic way that a communications server like this works is
A process sits around listening to the well-known TCP port for connection requests. The process needs to be privileged for two reasons
The port is a system resource so only the system should be able to control it
When a user logs in (on Unix), their connection needs to operate with the permissions of that user, so the server needs to be root so it can start a session as any user who logs in (as opposed to a Web Server, which usually only needs access to publicly readable files.
When a request comes in, it hands it to a subroutine that handles requests for the server to do different functions, including authentication.
For some services, such as SSH and FTP, the server may set up multiple connections for things like transferring files, etc.You can write a server like this as one big single-threaded process, or as one big process with multiple threads if your operating system and programming environment support it, but it's more common, especially on Unix, for the main process to spin off several child processes to do the work and go back to listening for new incoming requests. In this case, it spins of one process to handle the control channel communications and that process spins off other processes to handle specific tasks like file transfers, after checking that the connection and the request are authenticated. In a simple-minded implementation, the control channel process runs as root, and any task channel processes start off as root, and maybe change their privileges to an individual user's privileges if they need to (for instance if you're using SSH to log in to a remote system.)
The problem with this is that if there are any bugs that let a remote connection send messages with unexpected data in ways that break or take over the server process, the server is running as root so it can do anything it wants, however evil or dangerous (or if it's a minor bug that doesn't lead to a complete takeover, it may still be able to burn critical resources and stall the system or do some other denial of service attack.) Two popular kinds of attacks are sending a message that overflows a field (the result of bad protection in the C language combined with careless programming), or sending a message that asks the process to do something that the programmer didn't expect and protect against, such as setting permissions on a system file or making a user's program privileged, so that it can be exploited later, either by another communication from the attacker or by routine activities by the system or the user.
What the new OpenSSH implementation does is takes the bottom two server processes (the control channel server and the task servers) and splits each of them into two parts that communicate with each other. One part of each processes is a master, that keeps running privileged if it needs to, and the other is a slave process that runs as a non-privileged user (either the user who's requesting the service, for tasks like logins, or as the "nobody" user) and does most of the actual work, passing messages back and forth to the master process to communicate about status and request anything that still requires privileges. This gives you a bunch of security advantages:
Each part of the system is smaller, with fewer functions to perform and well-defined interfaces to other parts, so you can do a better job of checking for bugs and each part can validate incoming messages before doing anything.
The parts of the system that need to be privileged aren't communicating directly with the remote user, only with the slave processes, so they have a much smaller set of messages to validate.
If there's some bug in the system that lets a remote attacker take over one of the control or task processes by sending an craftily designed message, the bug is in the non-privileged slave process, which doesn't run as root, can't do as much damage, and has a limited set of messages that the master process will accept from it.
The rest of it is basically detail about which functions they separated into which programs, how they made sure that each piece has enough capabilities to do the job without giving it too much power that could be exploited by an attacker, and some stuff about how they validated the pieces. It's adding more complexity to the total system, but each piece is more limited in function, and the security-critical pieces are much easier to validate against bugs and malicious input.
Forgot to add.... Yes, laptops all have PCMCIA on them, and lots of machines are laptop these days, but very few desktops have PCMCIA adapters (and the cost of adding one is about the cost of adding a CD-Burner, plus both technologies tend to have flaky drivers and application programs...)
Yes, carrying Linux on a Flashcard would be cool - but you've got to worry a lot more about Viruses if you go plugging writable devices into random machines, and lots of people aren't going to let *you* boot *their* laptop from your flash in case you might do Bad Things with it. We've gradually gotten PC users out of that habit by giving them Microsoft Virus-Propagating Email Systems instead:-)
Sure, CD-Burners aren't universal yet, but they're rapidly becoming that way. Prices are down to about $50, and the only reason to build a new PC without one is that you used a DVD/CDROM drive instead, and felt that CDROMs were too small to use for backups so why bother. My work laptop was just updated to a machine with a CDburner (otherwise I wouldn't have the opinion I do:-), and I upgraded my home desktop about six months ago when the old CDROM drive started to die. My lab still has a shortage of burners (only two, and we've got 3-4 non-connected networks depending on what kind of routing we're experimenting with that week), and half my Pentium60 doorstop linux boxes don't have CDROM readers either, so I really need floppies, but we're in a really rapid transition period right now - the things are starting to become universal.
Maybe you use floppy disks a lot more than I do (I'll admit to not building lots of different Linuxrouteroid systems using the things), but I've found that most of what I used to use floppies for was giving files to other users, and email really does that job better 95% of the time, and the rest of the time is almost always for files that don't fit on floppies.
At least for now. CD-Rs go on sale for as little as 15 cents, at which point it doesn't really _matter_ that they're write-once. And unlike floppies, the write-once feature makes them much less likely to propagate viruses, because you won't be reusing them.
OK, maybe I listen to different bands than you do (:-), but there are lots of two-CD album sets out there, and they've figured out how to cram that into a jewel box while making it only mildly dangerous to open while driving a car... It's probably more common for old hippie bands releasing lots more material, but unfortunately, a twice-the-capacity-of-CD disk isn't enough to hold an entire night's concert without compression (though if you make the player smart enough to handle shorten lossless compression you could fit most concerts on the new disk format, if not usually on the old.)
The anti-trust suit has been bogus from the beginning. There were four fundamental issues (three Federal, one state-level), and the proposed definitions of the "crime" and remedies for it don't fix them.
Microsoft gave away their browser for free! Those bastards! Of course, this complaint was loudly made in Congress by Netscape, who gained their market dominance by giving away their browser for free, which was hypocritical at best. The obvious cure for this problem is to force Microsoft to open-source their browser, i.e. give it away for free.... Oh, wait.... Microsoft has done a lot of work to integrate their browser into their operating system as an interface tool, perhaps as a defense against the anti-trust attacks, but since the late 90s, that's been a Technically Right Choice to make. It would be nice if they'd done it a bit better, and used a bit less non-standards-based content to do it, but it's still the right choice.
Microsoft wholesale contracts to PC hardware makers were aggressively obnoxious about "you must pay us for a copy of Windows on every box you ship if you want to get the best wholesale prices", which means that consumers who don't want Windows did end up paying about $30 more per PC than if they could have bought the bare metal. Perhaps this gets into anti-trust territory for the Feds, but Microsoft was backing down on this before the states got into the game.
Bill Gates is Obnoxiously Rich and that made lots of people jealous, especially liberals and old-industry conservatives. That's nobody's business, and if the Attorney General wants to regulate Sin, he should be going after Envy as well has his favorite target Lust.
The state-related issue: Feeding Frenzy!! The states got a bunch of cash out of the tobacco companies, and a bunch of state attorneys general got themselves re-elected for doing such a great job, and they're trying to do the same here.
I've proposed several remedies for the problems, none of which have a chance of getting adopted:-)
Bill Gates *should* have short-circuited the problem by taking $3B of his own money, saying "OK, Atty.Gen. Janet Reno, if you don't like our practices, here are 2 Million Macintoshes for the Federal Government to use, give back all your copies of Win95 for a $100 refund, and go bother Steve Jobs for a couple of years." Given the drop in MSFT stock price that resulted from the anti-trust attack, he'd have been better off personally by doing it:-)
Bill Gates still *can* tell the Feds and the States "OK, if you don't like it, we'll refund your purchase price for all your copies of Windows98 and Windows2000, except the ones that you copied illegally, here are 5 million blank CDROMs and a copy of BitTorrent, and go bother Linus for a couple of years."
Gates can propose that the if the states and the Feds don't like MS giving away Windows Exploiter for free, that they could pay $29 for each of their copies and require that anybody who's running Windows 95 or newer also pay MS $29 for it.
They do this sort of thing all the time, and sometimes they get away with it. *Plans* implies that they've gotten sufficiently wide internal buy-in to implement something, or at least to announce it. Simply leaking wish-list desires like this and seeing how the public reacts to it gives them deniability, and lets them pretend it was just an idea, and hey, maybe it'll take off and they'll get to push the envelope a little farther past what common sense and the Constitution actually authorize them to do. In addition, by putting a wide spectrum of proposals out there, from the reasonable to the totally totalitarian wacko, lets them not only know where the edge is, but lets them take any position they want and say "see, we've been talking about this for a long time, and we're just updating this long-discussed plan to reflect current circumstances". Remember Clipper? They got their teeth kicked in on that one. Remember CALEA? That passed, though the telcos resisted for a long time because the FBI wanted billions of dollars of infrastructure implemented in ways that disrupted the potential evolution of the telecom infrastructure and market without actually having to pay for any of it, but it's vague and fuzzy enough that they've been able to use it to gradually impmement some things, even if they're way beyond the Congressional approval level, much less the Constitutional one. Don't expect the ratchet to go back in the other direction without it getting pushed really hard - and this also means support your local so we can stop these things before they start.
It's definitely easy to control technically, including the ability to explicitly list what sites' links will be accepted. Unfortunately, there have been increasing numbers of companies out there trying to use policy statements and lawyers, and sometimes lawsuits, rather than understanding the technology and using it. The Shetland newspaper case was one of the first (one paper pointing to its competitors' stories), and unfortunately the UK judge didn't understand the issues, and other lawyers seem to think that was a good idea.
My office was a few blocks away from the train station, past the freeway underpass where a bunch of the local homeless camped. I'd guess the ratio was about 50-50 between cellphone headset users and drunks talking to themselves, but at least the drunks didn't need to write business plans and burn venture capital.
Many reasons for slow machines.
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Gentoo Linux 1.2
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· Score: 2
There are lots of reasons to have a slow machine. If you're a kid, maybe you've only got a hand-me-down machine and your parents are using the good machine for their applications (good application for removable disks.) If you're a parent, maybe you can't afford it because you've got kids, or maybe you've only got a hand-me-down machine because the kids are using the good machine for GameZ, while that old machine can do Linux just fine:-)
Or maybe you're trying to build a special-purpose machine, like something small and portable, or trying to reuse an old machine as a firewall or print server, or it's a laptop that didn't have a CDROM when you acquired it and isn't made any more.
I've got a labful of antiques at work, because procuring modern machines requires a Budget, while procuring leftover fully-depreciated boxes that the Centralized MIS Bureaucracy doesn't want any more gives me machines that are usually just fine for pinging and tracerouting to -- in a router training application, you need lots of endpoints that don't need to be very bright. Antique laptops are especially nice for this, because they don't take much space in a rack.
You can get used laptops for similar prices, and you should be able to run Linux as an X terminal if you don't think the applications are fast enough. You can certainly get new full-sized machines, and you can get Thin Clients for about $200 plus screen. Spending that much money for a machine that doesn't run a browser, doesn't have a big enough screen to read a page of text well, can't show color pictures... doesn't seem right.
The namespace needs something _like_ the current.org, where there aren't NameMongers telling you what's allowed to be there, even if some people would also like something else like.ngo or whatever that's more restrictive. There was a suggestion at one time that.org should be reserved for Organizations Registered With The US Government As Non-Profit Tax-Exempt or Tax-Deductable Bodies, but it was a really bad suggestion, and it wasn't the case for the first ~decade of DNS, and there were a number of.org names back when the namespace was run by Jon Postel before the commercial landrush or the Greedy Registrars racket. (This doesn't, of course, mean that the various commercial registrars weren't greedy, or that profit-seeking companies didn't also try to reserve.org namespace, especially after the sale of "altavista.com" gave everybody the idea that namespace was a commercially valuable asset.)
There are lots of domains that don't need to be in.com space - they're not something that's trying to be a business, and they're not providing infrastructure to the net, and they're not educational institutions (either the early flexible definition or the later Four-Year Officially-Accredited Universities), and they're not geographically limited (so they're not.us or.other-country-code.) It wasn't a big issue in the early days, when you had to be somehow tied to the US government to get on the ARPAnet, and most other people lived in UUCP or FIDO space, and computers tended to either be big and expensive (and not personal) or small and not sufficiently Internet-connected to run their own domain name, as opposed to using their ISP's namespace), but sometime in the early 90s, lots of my friends started getting domain names before the rest of the world knew that was cool:-)
So where would you hang a domain name for your family? Not under.com, and not under something geographically limited like gallo-family.modesto.ca.us unless you're all living down on the same family farm (and it'll be a while before stolzfus.northeast.birdinhand.lancaster-county.pa. us is on the net....) There's now a.name or whatever for that, but.org is ok.
And the "Offically Recognized Non-Profits Only" proposal would mean that a bunch of people who want to develop a piece of open-source software wouldn't be able to be mozilla.org or foo-widget.org because they weren't an sufficiently formal group to be exempt from US takes, though they could perfectly well be foo-widget.fsf.org if RMS likes them, which might be just fine. But what if the foo-widget.org project is not only a free software thing, but also gets sponsored by Big Hardware Incorporated, who happen to want a foo-widget around to make buying their hardware more attractive? Should they lose their.org namespace? (Hint - there's more of this than you'd expect; it's becoming an interesting business model for running and funding development of projects like free telephony clients.)
Yes, it's nice that they'll be using open source tools to maintain the database, and while it's much more important that they keep the data in open data formats, what are most critical are who owns the data and who controls access to the data?. The kind of data we're dealing with here is fundamentally simple - lists of domain names, IP addresses, some kind of names and contact information about the owners, passwords or public keys for validating change requests, and maybe billing information.
There are lots of kinds of tools that can manipulate it, and the only functions that have any excuse for needing special tools are the validation of change requests, and pretty much anybody who wants to run a name service can find cost-effective tools to run it on, whether they're open-source or not. There are closed-source tools that keep their data in non-open formats (ok, and open-source tools that keep their data in badly-documented formats:-), which may make it much more difficult for competing providers of registration service to use it, or for the Powers That Be to take back control of the registration space if whoever's running it does so unacceptably (regardless of whether the Bad Guys are the registration-mongers or the Powers) and for the real or claimed owners of the information to access the information in dispute resolutions, but that's mainly a problem if the registration-mongers aren't cooperating or if they're so incompetent that their database scribbles itself.
But the real issues here are who controls reading, writing, and storing the data, and who owns it in case of disputes. Obviously there's a master copy (plus backups and transaction journaling) that's the Authoritative information, and the registration-mongers need to validate changes to it somehow. But is the whole database going to be totally open for wholesale reading (so spammers can download the whole whois database, and competing registration-monger-wannabees can also do so), or for record-at-a-time reading (so you can find contact information for the people who are spamming you), and will you be required to provide your True Name, True ICBM-and-Lojack Address, and Blood Type to the whois database, or will you only be required to provide some kind of working contact information? What are the privacy policies, and will you be able to use competiting registries with different privacy policies or only the One ICANN-Approved Registration-Monger-Imposed Central Policy?
And who owns the intellectual property of the individual records and the collection of records? That's one thing that Network Solutions (or was it Verisign) did that really irked me, which was declaring that some parts of the DNS system were public information (the domain name and IP addresses), but that most of the rest was their private list of customers and billing information and didn't belong to ICANN or the Feds or the Internet-As-A-Whole-Community or whoever it was that the domain name system really belongs to.
Endemic + accelerating problem of communications
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Where Are You Publishing?
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· Score: 3, Insightful
This case is yet another symptom of an endemic and accelerating problem of governments' inability to deal with rapid, widespread open communications. Governments' authority and jurisdiction has traditionally been related to geography, and social values, which depend on communications patterns, have also generally cohered around geography - most people only communicate with people "near" them, and they mostly stay put most of the time, though there are major exceptions (emigration, large-scale wars, Vikings, colonizers, and more peaceful traders, Gypsies), but usually there's a strong correlation between governments, societies, and markets, and the kinds of laws governments can enforce are limited by the values of those societies. As communications get out of control, questions of jurisdiction get muddled and the traditional legal structures fail. The internet appears to be at least as disruptive as the cloth and shipping trade in medieval Europe - will it become a purely independent jurisdiction (ala John Perry Barlow's Declaration, or the evolution of commerce law), or some hybrid strongly or loosely subject to local control, and how will we resolve the demands of some people to make the laws equal to the most restrictive laws anywhere and of other people to make them equal to the least restrictive?
Controlling public access to information is a much more resource-effective means of social control than direct military/police action, so it's especially serious for people like Mugabe, but it's a serious problem for governments everywhere. They have enough trouble dealing with effective postal systems and telegraphs, which can often communicate faster than censorship can react, but pre-Internet broadcast media such as traditional newspaper publishing and radio/tv cost enough that most broadcast news is local or at least controllable
Newspapers cost enough and carry enough local news that most people read local papers, which can be censored or bullied, and occasional issues of wide-market papers like the NY or London Times or South China Morning Post can have their local distributions squelched for a day if needed
Local radio and TV stations have been government-regulated in most jurisdictions, either as government-owned monopolies or at least licensed in ways that control content
Short-wave broadcasting had largely been restricted by treaties, and mostly out-competed by television.
The growth of satellite television in the last decade or so is a serious threat to government opinion control, but at least it's run by a few big corporations that tend to push hierarchical homogenized values and ignore local issues outside their owners' main markets, so it's a slower-moving threat that it could be - the real impact is often on cultural and economic values rather than directly rocking the boat.
But the Internet is just there - once you've got it, you've got access to everything and tools for finding the things you want, and language differences may fragment it somewhat, but not only does much of the world speak English, Chinese, Spanish, or French, but the expatriates that you most wish would stay away and leave you alone now have a much easier time reaching your subjects, speak your local languages, and care about your local issues.
Even in more liberal countries that don't have vicious totalitarian-wannabee governments, the Internet is still disruptive to the cultural status-quo and sometimes to the government. Back during one of the Internet-rumormongering flaps (I forget if it was a Matt Drudge thing or a Who Shot Down TWA Flight 800 or some conspiracy thing), somebody asked Esther Dyson about the Internet encouraging this sort of thing, and she said that yes, it did, but that television was better for propaganda. We've seen a lot of resistance to Internet openness focused on cultural-value conflicts like pornography. In some places like the US, the issue might really *be* concern about pornography (e.g. Ashcroft covering up naked statues), but it's being used by other governments as an excuse to grab control of the Internet distribution before it totally gets out of hand - the Great Firewall of China and similar efforts are doomed in the long run, but it's about the only thing they can do if they want to keep any control over the information their people see.
Hard to prove in the US; easy in many other places
on
Where Are You Publishing?
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Libel is hard to prove in the US, because we have both old and new legal traditions making it difficult. That's not the case in many other countries
Many countries have laws against libelling the government or the ruling party, which are infinitely abusable.
Many British-derived legal systems don't do that, but do still make it easy for individuals to win libel cases.
US traditions are inherited from several cases in the British Colonies in North America
Truth as a defense - John Peter Zenger was a newspaper publisher in New York who wrote things about the British governor that the Gov didn't like, and got sued for libel. Zenger argued successfully to the jury that while the Gov may not like what he said, what he said was true, and saying so shouldn't be punishable.
Jury limitations on convictions - William Penn was accused of illegally preaching Quakerism, and the jury acquitted, because they believed the law to be unjust, following the traditions that had been gradually evolving under English Common Law. The judge threw them in jail to get them to change their minds, they appealed to a higher judge and got released, which substantially strengthened precedents about juries' ability to judge the law as well as the facts, and in the case of libel laws, this particularly affects a juries likelihood not to convict someone for libel even if the plaintiff really really doesn't like what was said about him.
Yes, Mike could go off the deep end, or get hit by a bus. But if he *does* get hit by a bus in the near future, we'll have a good idea who did it.:-)
Internet namespace, like many other activities, is an activity for civilized society to make intelligent decisions about. Governments sometimes get into power by being the most intelligent people in civil society, like Plato's hypothetical philosopher-kings, but they often get to power by being a bunch of violent corrupt thugs, or by being a more popular alternative group of people who led a popular revolution to overthrow a bunch of violent insane corrupt thugs, but that doesn't mean that either they have any skills for operating an internet or that they have any moral authority for doing so. And apparently they South African government has demonstrated that they don't have Clue 1 about how to run an Internet. It's simply not their skill set, and there's no reason for it to be their job.
Unlike non-country-code domains, where there's no obvious reason why there should be One Root To Rule Them All or why the US government should get to appoint the people to run it, country-code domains do have some obvious connection to the countries they're named after - but does that mean they should be run by the Post Office, or the One Phone Company, or by some internet standards committee (my preference), or by the Chamber of Commerce, or by the [Insert-Country-Name] National Geographic Society, or simply by the First-Come-First-Served rule? It's a hierarchical name space, and that inherently means somebody's in charge. Failing to define that up front, as the internet failed to do, leads to all this Root Wars nonsense, and it's not inherently fixable.
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Disclaimer: I've only played movies on my work laptop, which is 1.1GHz, and haven't tried it on my 233 MHz PII at home, since I don't currently have a broadband connection and downloading by modem is too annoying :-)
OK, I haven't actually *read* usenet in years, but that was the canonical place for this sort of thing before it the internet got popular and Usenet got spammed to death.
Sorry. Keep the bugs out of the kitchen :-) Just having a refrigerator that can traq where the bugs are isn't good enough....
Just think of the possibilities for this, especially if there's also a webcam on the thing. You can use the TV functions to watch Iron Chef while you're cooking, or have the refrigerator tell you what the Mystery Ingredient you'll be using for dinner tonight will be, or if you've got a high-speed net connection (which anybody spending money on this overpriced toy probably does ;-), you can run your own Iron Chef game with your friends....
Sorry, Dave, I can't do that...
Most of the cable modem technology out there limits you to 128kbps upstream, but it could do more if they wanted to set it for that. Some of the cable modem companies offer business-class service with 256kbps upstream and much better repair time guarantees, but the economics of the consumer-priced services are based on the idea that it's really just television and if it goes out for a day or two you can read a book or go to the movies.
When a request comes in, it hands it to a subroutine that handles requests for the server to do different functions, including authentication.
For some services, such as SSH and FTP, the server may set up multiple connections for things like transferring files, etc.You can write a server like this as one big single-threaded process, or as one big process with multiple threads if your operating system and programming environment support it, but it's more common, especially on Unix, for the main process to spin off several child processes to do the work and go back to listening for new incoming requests. In this case, it spins of one process to handle the control channel communications and that process spins off other processes to handle specific tasks like file transfers, after checking that the connection and the request are authenticated. In a simple-minded implementation, the control channel process runs as root, and any task channel processes start off as root, and maybe change their privileges to an individual user's privileges if they need to (for instance if you're using SSH to log in to a remote system.)
The problem with this is that if there are any bugs that let a remote connection send messages with unexpected data in ways that break or take over the server process, the server is running as root so it can do anything it wants, however evil or dangerous (or if it's a minor bug that doesn't lead to a complete takeover, it may still be able to burn critical resources and stall the system or do some other denial of service attack.) Two popular kinds of attacks are sending a message that overflows a field (the result of bad protection in the C language combined with careless programming), or sending a message that asks the process to do something that the programmer didn't expect and protect against, such as setting permissions on a system file or making a user's program privileged, so that it can be exploited later, either by another communication from the attacker or by routine activities by the system or the user.
What the new OpenSSH implementation does is takes the bottom two server processes (the control channel server and the task servers) and splits each of them into two parts that communicate with each other. One part of each processes is a master, that keeps running privileged if it needs to, and the other is a slave process that runs as a non-privileged user (either the user who's requesting the service, for tasks like logins, or as the "nobody" user) and does most of the actual work, passing messages back and forth to the master process to communicate about status and request anything that still requires privileges. This gives you a bunch of security advantages:
The rest of it is basically detail about which functions they separated into which programs, how they made sure that each piece has enough capabilities to do the job without giving it too much power that could be exploited by an attacker, and some stuff about how they validated the pieces. It's adding more complexity to the total system, but each piece is more limited in function, and the security-critical pieces are much easier to validate against bugs and malicious input.
Yes, carrying Linux on a Flashcard would be cool - but you've got to worry a lot more about Viruses if you go plugging writable devices into random machines, and lots of people aren't going to let *you* boot *their* laptop from your flash in case you might do Bad Things with it. We've gradually gotten PC users out of that habit by giving them Microsoft Virus-Propagating Email Systems instead :-)
Maybe you use floppy disks a lot more than I do (I'll admit to not building lots of different Linuxrouteroid systems using the things), but I've found that most of what I used to use floppies for was giving files to other users, and email really does that job better 95% of the time, and the rest of the time is almost always for files that don't fit on floppies.
At least for now. CD-Rs go on sale for as little as 15 cents, at which point it doesn't really _matter_ that they're write-once. And unlike floppies, the write-once feature makes them much less likely to propagate viruses, because you won't be reusing them.
OK, maybe I listen to different bands than you do (:-), but there are lots of two-CD album sets out there, and they've figured out how to cram that into a jewel box while making it only mildly dangerous to open while driving a car ... It's probably more common for old hippie bands releasing lots more material, but unfortunately, a twice-the-capacity-of-CD disk isn't enough to hold an entire night's concert without compression (though if you make the player smart enough to handle shorten lossless compression you could fit most concerts on the new disk format, if not usually on the old.)
look, somebody had to say it :-) And I've already modded myself down...
I've proposed several remedies for the problems, none of which have a chance of getting adopted :-)
It's definitely easy to control technically, including the ability to explicitly list what sites' links will be accepted. Unfortunately, there have been increasing numbers of companies out there trying to use policy statements and lawyers, and sometimes lawsuits, rather than understanding the technology and using it. The Shetland newspaper case was one of the first (one paper pointing to its competitors' stories), and unfortunately the UK judge didn't understand the issues, and other lawyers seem to think that was a good idea.
My office was a few blocks away from the train station, past the freeway underpass where a bunch of the local homeless camped. I'd guess the ratio was about 50-50 between cellphone headset users and drunks talking to themselves, but at least the drunks didn't need to write business plans and burn venture capital.
Or maybe you're trying to build a special-purpose machine, like something small and portable, or trying to reuse an old machine as a firewall or print server, or it's a laptop that didn't have a CDROM when you acquired it and isn't made any more.
I've got a labful of antiques at work, because procuring modern machines requires a Budget, while procuring leftover fully-depreciated boxes that the Centralized MIS Bureaucracy doesn't want any more gives me machines that are usually just fine for pinging and tracerouting to -- in a router training application, you need lots of endpoints that don't need to be very bright. Antique laptops are especially nice for this, because they don't take much space in a rack.
What changes will GCC3 make on the kernel? Is there something radically new going on, or is is just a bit better tuned and debugged?
You can get used laptops for similar prices, and you should be able to run Linux as an X terminal if you don't think the applications are fast enough. You can certainly get new full-sized machines, and you can get Thin Clients for about $200 plus screen. Spending that much money for a machine that doesn't run a browser, doesn't have a big enough screen to read a page of text well, can't show color pictures... doesn't seem right.
There was a suggestion at one time that
There are lots of domains that don't need to be in .com space - they're not something that's trying to be a business, and they're not providing infrastructure to the net, and they're not educational institutions (either the early flexible definition or the later Four-Year Officially-Accredited Universities), and they're not geographically limited (so they're not .us or .other-country-code.) It wasn't a big issue in the early days, when you had to be somehow tied to the US government to get on the ARPAnet, and most other people lived in UUCP or FIDO space, and computers tended to either be big and expensive (and not personal) or small and not sufficiently Internet-connected to run their own domain name, as opposed to using their ISP's namespace), but sometime in the early 90s, lots of my friends started getting domain names before the rest of the world knew that was cool :-)
So where would you hang a domain name for your family? Not under .com, and not under something geographically limited like gallo-family.modesto.ca.us unless you're all living down on the same family farm (and it'll be a while before stolzfus.northeast.birdinhand.lancaster-county.pa. us is on the net....) There's now a .name or whatever for that, but .org is ok.
And the "Offically Recognized Non-Profits Only" proposal would mean that a bunch of people who want to develop a piece of open-source software wouldn't be able to be mozilla.org or foo-widget.org because they weren't an sufficiently formal group to be exempt from US takes, though they could perfectly well be foo-widget.fsf.org if RMS likes them, which might be just fine. But what if the foo-widget.org project is not only a free software thing, but also gets sponsored by Big Hardware Incorporated, who happen to want a foo-widget around to make buying their hardware more attractive? Should they lose their .org namespace? (Hint - there's more of this than you'd expect; it's becoming an interesting business model for running and funding development of projects like free telephony clients.)
There are lots of kinds of tools that can manipulate it, and the only functions that have any excuse for needing special tools are the validation of change requests, and pretty much anybody who wants to run a name service can find cost-effective tools to run it on, whether they're open-source or not. There are closed-source tools that keep their data in non-open formats (ok, and open-source tools that keep their data in badly-documented formats :-), which may make it much more difficult for competing providers of registration service to use it, or for the Powers That Be to take back control of the registration space if whoever's running it does so unacceptably (regardless of whether the Bad Guys are the registration-mongers or the Powers) and for the real or claimed owners of the information to access the information in dispute resolutions, but that's mainly a problem if the registration-mongers aren't cooperating or if they're so incompetent that their database scribbles itself.
But the real issues here are who controls reading, writing, and storing the data, and who owns it in case of disputes. Obviously there's a master copy (plus backups and transaction journaling) that's the Authoritative information, and the registration-mongers need to validate changes to it somehow. But is the whole database going to be totally open for wholesale reading (so spammers can download the whole whois database, and competing registration-monger-wannabees can also do so), or for record-at-a-time reading (so you can find contact information for the people who are spamming you), and will you be required to provide your True Name, True ICBM-and-Lojack Address, and Blood Type to the whois database, or will you only be required to provide some kind of working contact information? What are the privacy policies, and will you be able to use competiting registries with different privacy policies or only the One ICANN-Approved Registration-Monger-Imposed Central Policy?
And who owns the intellectual property of the individual records and the collection of records? That's one thing that Network Solutions (or was it Verisign) did that really irked me, which was declaring that some parts of the DNS system were public information (the domain name and IP addresses), but that most of the rest was their private list of customers and billing information and didn't belong to ICANN or the Feds or the Internet-As-A-Whole-Community or whoever it was that the domain name system really belongs to.
Controlling public access to information is a much more resource-effective means of social control than direct military/police action, so it's especially serious for people like Mugabe, but it's a serious problem for governments everywhere. They have enough trouble dealing with effective postal systems and telegraphs, which can often communicate faster than censorship can react, but pre-Internet broadcast media such as traditional newspaper publishing and radio/tv cost enough that most broadcast news is local or at least controllable
- Newspapers cost enough and carry enough local news that most people read local papers, which can be censored or bullied, and occasional issues of wide-market papers like the NY or London Times or South China Morning Post can have their local distributions squelched for a day if needed
- Local radio and TV stations have been government-regulated in most jurisdictions, either as government-owned monopolies or at least licensed in ways that control content
- Short-wave broadcasting had largely been restricted by treaties, and mostly out-competed by television.
- The growth of satellite television in the last decade or so is a serious threat to government opinion control, but at least it's run by a few big corporations that tend to push hierarchical homogenized values and ignore local issues outside their owners' main markets, so it's a slower-moving threat that it could be - the real impact is often on cultural and economic values rather than directly rocking the boat.
But the Internet is just there - once you've got it, you've got access to everything and tools for finding the things you want, and language differences may fragment it somewhat, but not only does much of the world speak English, Chinese, Spanish, or French, but the expatriates that you most wish would stay away and leave you alone now have a much easier time reaching your subjects, speak your local languages, and care about your local issues.Even in more liberal countries that don't have vicious totalitarian-wannabee governments, the Internet is still disruptive to the cultural status-quo and sometimes to the government. Back during one of the Internet-rumormongering flaps (I forget if it was a Matt Drudge thing or a Who Shot Down TWA Flight 800 or some conspiracy thing), somebody asked Esther Dyson about the Internet encouraging this sort of thing, and she said that yes, it did, but that television was better for propaganda. We've seen a lot of resistance to Internet openness focused on cultural-value conflicts like pornography. In some places like the US, the issue might really *be* concern about pornography (e.g. Ashcroft covering up naked statues), but it's being used by other governments as an excuse to grab control of the Internet distribution before it totally gets out of hand - the Great Firewall of China and similar efforts are doomed in the long run, but it's about the only thing they can do if they want to keep any control over the information their people see.
- Many countries have laws against libelling the government or the ruling party, which are infinitely abusable.
- Many British-derived legal systems don't do that, but do still make it easy for individuals to win libel cases.
US traditions are inherited from several cases in the British Colonies in North AmericaInternet namespace, like many other activities, is an activity for civilized society to make intelligent decisions about. Governments sometimes get into power by being the most intelligent people in civil society, like Plato's hypothetical philosopher-kings, but they often get to power by being a bunch of violent corrupt thugs, or by being a more popular alternative group of people who led a popular revolution to overthrow a bunch of violent insane corrupt thugs, but that doesn't mean that either they have any skills for operating an internet or that they have any moral authority for doing so. And apparently they South African government has demonstrated that they don't have Clue 1 about how to run an Internet. It's simply not their skill set, and there's no reason for it to be their job.
Unlike non-country-code domains, where there's no obvious reason why there should be One Root To Rule Them All or why the US government should get to appoint the people to run it, country-code domains do have some obvious connection to the countries they're named after - but does that mean they should be run by the Post Office, or the One Phone Company, or by some internet standards committee (my preference), or by the Chamber of Commerce, or by the [Insert-Country-Name] National Geographic Society, or simply by the First-Come-First-Served rule? It's a hierarchical name space, and that inherently means somebody's in charge. Failing to define that up front, as the internet failed to do, leads to all this Root Wars nonsense, and it's not inherently fixable.