The President's statement says that the search engine will be developed with funding from internet entrepreneur Eric Brewer. Brewer is one of the founders of Inktomi, which developed a highly scalable search engine, which was adopted by many of the search engine companies. They've adapted that technology to be a web caching system, and several of the caching companies out there use it. About Inktomi
I'd guess that the firstgov.gov search engine will piggyback off Inktomi's existing search systems, so it will probably cost them less than building one from scratch. The interesting problems are getting more government material onto the net where it can be found.
Internet purchases of tangible goods are no different than mail order purchases; the "internet tax moratoriums" are just maintaining status quo. Most US states have a "use tax" on buyers that complements the sales tax on sellers - if you buy something out of state, and haven't paid sales tax on it where you bought it. So if you buy that mail-order PC from some other state, the sellers don't pay sales tax on selling it, but your state will want to collect their cut instead; if you drive across the border, buy the PC from the store and pay sales tax on it, your state normally doesn't get a cut, though if the place you bought it has a lower sales tax, many states want the difference. If you're a business, the rules on use tax may be different; many businesses don't have to pay sales tax on purchases because the state gets their cut in different ways, so check with your accountants.
Back when I lived in New Jersey, where lots of people buy stuff in Delaware (no sales tax) or New York (higher taxes, but PC stores will play games like shipping you the power cord by mail and letting you carry the fragile expensive parts yourself), the State Tax Goons would send a mailing with the state income tax form saying "Yes, we know there's absolutely no way we can enforce this, but tell us what you bought anyway and send us the tax payment", which everybody ignored. And New York City (which has an even higher tax than New York State, which was higher than Jersey) would send tax goons to cruise mall parking lots in New Jersey taking down license plate numbers of New York cars and sending them "Better tell us what you bought and pay up" letters.
The US is not a single government. It's a bunch of agencies and individual politicians with different agendas, different constitutencies, and different long-term and short-term activies. There are clues about lots of things scattered throughout the government - but very few people there have lots of clues, and some of them use the good clues as warnings about things that will interfere with their own plans. Some examples:
Bureaucracies always want more information because it makes their jobs easier.
Bureaucracies don't mind telling other people what to do - even if they're well-intentioned, this gives them more power and control. Other bureaucracies are better at avoiding being regulated than the general public is. So agencies like the Federal Trade Commission are happy to produce Privacy Law regulations that apply to corporations, even though most of the rest of the government wants to collect data for government use.
Computers make it very cheap and easy to correlate information, especially if there are common identifiers like SSNs, but even name+address works pretty well. So corporate data mining can always piggyback on government-mandated information collection, and short-term convenience to the bureaucrats is more important than long-term privacy protection, so piggybacking can always win.
Tax agencies want everybody to use highly traceable identification in everything they do, so they want SSNs or other taxpayer IDs in everything. Particularly, they want employer s to have SSNs for all their employees, which makes it convenient for employers to use those to track employee records, and use these with medical care providers.
Government-paid Medical Care need all the data collection it can get, partly to provide better care for individual patients, but primarily to prevent the system from being massively ripped off by medical service providers. Private medical insurance companies have the same problem. So everybody you deal with in the medical business has to use SSNs for dealing with Medicare, and the insurance companies need to use them for correlating with Medicare, so they basically require them for everything.
Medical privacy protection advocates in the Federal government aren't going to get rid of pervasive SSN use or coordination of information collection - it's too valuable to the providers. Everything else they can do is nice, but it's pretty much window dressing.
"Law Enforcement" usually lobbies for more laws to give them more things to enforce.
Some laws have victims who will complain to the police if they're violated - but many laws, such as victimless crimes and tax evasion, require privacy invasion to enforce them, because the participants have no desire to tell the police about them. Some of us think those laws are mostly bad (:-), but police are constantly encouraging the creation of laws and regulations that reduce privacy so they can do their jobs.
Motor Vehicle Departments are inherently privacy-invasive - and to the extent that they perform a useful function of keeping bad drivers off the road, there's a high incentive for bad drivers to evade them, so they've got a high need to collect more information and correlate it with each other, so again they want National IDs like SSNs.
Because the right to travel is critical to everybody, motor vehicle licensing is a convenient handle for politicians to hang their own agendas on - like harassing Deadbeat Dads and immigrants. So DMVs in places like California sometimes insist on citizenship papers, because everybody knows that you can't drive safely while speaking Spanish. (That doesn't mean other government agencies don't require them to print materials in Spanish and Chinese, but it's who the laws are written for.)
Traffic flow cameras - big cities like New York and San Francisco and LA have horrendous traffic problems, and cheap cameras make it easier to manage. When San Francisco was planning to shut down the Central Freeway a couple years ago, they used the traffic cams to take pictures of license plates of cars entering the road, looked up the license plates of the cars, and sent postcards to the owners asking them to take a different route. Worked pretty well. They didn't use fancy OCR technology, since it didn't need to be done in real-time - they just had a bunch of cheap labor read the videos of the plates. Prisoners used to make license plates, now they read them....
National Security and Terrorism - Sure, the right way to prevent terrorism is to have foreign policies that don't piss off people in small countries, and "terrorism" is mainly used as an excuse for increased power for various government agencies, who tend to cooperate in getting resources. But suppose for argument's sake you think about the job seriously for a minute, from the perspective of a well-intentioned government employee who wants to try to prevent people who are already pissed off from doing Bad Things. It's a scary, difficult problem, and the main things you can do about it are maximize the amount of privacy-invading technology you've got available when you need it, maximize the amount of data collection you've got to track potential threats, like foreigners from little countries, before they do things, keep the population in a state of mild fear so they'll always show their papers at airports and let you search their bags, and so dumber Bad Guys will decide they can't get away with things - you can't stop smarter Bad Guys, but if you discourage most of the dumb ones it's easier to catch the few dumb ones who try. And you'd multiply your resources by getting airlines to collect information and track people for you,
Government data privacy laws are a mixed bag at best. Not only is it hard to figure out what privacy means in a way that enhances your privacy without ripping off mine, but there's an inherent contradiction between the agencies in government who might benefit from providing protection laws and most other agencies who are doing data collection, which will resist any regulation that interferes with them requiring businesses and individuals to use Social Security Numbers, Taxpayer ID numbers, and other centralized identifiers and databases that the agencies need or want. The economics of computers and communication (cheap and getting massively cheaper all the time) make private data correlation valuable and easy already, and with mandatory use of common database keys (SSNs are great, but even telephone numbers or name+address work surprisingly well), there's minimal incentive for businesses to structure their databases in ways that are hard to correlate.
European data privacy laws don't just control big annoying corporations in ways that don't affect you - they also let governments into everybody's computers, including yours and including corporations that have records on you. In some countries, they make it illegal to keep databases of any kind of personal information online unless you register them with the government.
Have you registered your online address book with them?
Or the email from your girlfriend with her phone number?
Or the mailing list for your anti-nuclear group
or your church
or your football team
or your anarchist literature-and-beer-drinking society?
There's a good article on Swedish network regulations - the early ones banned computer conferencing systems, because they were on computers, and might have discussions including the names of participants, or their religious or political views, etc. They've calmed down a bit, but not enough.
In some countries, including Sweden and the US, it's safer if you're a journalist, because there are press freedom laws protecting the privacy of journalists' work. Of course, in Cyberspace, everybody can be a journalist. You've probably got Journalistic Works In Progress, which have special legal protection, on your home computer, haven't you? ......... No? Well, then go write some! However, it's not safe to be a journalist everywhere.
On the bright side, if European Data Protection Laws don't let you keep personal records, your anonymous remailer really can't go keeping logs, can it?
David Brin has written a lot of stuff about privacy, particularly The Transparent Society, about how the economics of surveillance, cheap cameras, and databases are unstoppable, so give up and focus on the important issue, which is making sure the public can watch the government so it behaves itself. I don't agree with it all, but he makes a lot of good points.
A more scientific version of this was reported a while back - Margaret Fleck and David Forsyth did work at Berkeley and Iowa in about 1996 that finds naked people or horses using descriptions of shapes of bodies. Wired Article. This slashdot story doesn't appear to be related to it.
Depends a lot on your business objectives. For some customers, what matters is fast transfer when you need it; for others, it volume-driven. If your business revenue model is correlated to the number of pages you ship, paying by volume makes sense. If it's correlated with peak performance, then sometimes paying for that makes sense. If your traffic needs fast performance but not very often, you'd like to pay by the GB shipped, but if you need full-time relatively constant volume, it's probably better to pay by pipe size.
If you want additional options to deal with bursting, check out content distribution services like Akamai and AT&T, which you can use in addition to your basic hosting system to handle peaks, or to provide other tweaks to your pricing model.
It's not fast enough to take out nukes, but it's an interesting play for taking out spy satellites. Since it wasn't developed by the military, it doesn't cost much, which means that multiple countries and occasional private citizens may have an interest in buying them.
The price of RF is as much government rent-seeking as corporate rent-seeking. Governments, especially in Europe, have been collecting billions of euros or dollars in return for access to spectrum which would otherwise be publicly available. That's especially ludicrous with spread-spectrum technology like CDMA, where multiple users can share the same spectrum space. RF space in the broadcast bands is more monopolistic - radio regulations in the US were particularly promulgated to reduce competition for stations and prevent little guys from getting involved, but corporations were able to do that because it increases the government's power and influence, so the government's happy to sell that service.
Colo's a fairly wide business, with different providers offering different topologies, and hosting businesses piggybacking on colo businesses, professional services businesses consulting for both, some colo provided by IP carriers, other by pure colo providers. You need to think about what you're trying to accomplish, what your busines needs are, how much management you want to do, and anything special you want beyond the vanilla service (e.g. lots of electricity, access to local telco facilities, etc.) Here are a few categories of services and providers
Shared hosting - you're not renting a box, you're just renting capacity on a box.
Dedicated managed host - the provider is still managing the computer, but it's all yours
Dedicated unmanaged host - you're renting the machine, but you're root; extra fees for hands-on help. You may or may not have physical access.
Cage/Rack rentals - You're renting real estate, power, and network feed. Physical access is usually somewhat restricted, but some places let you do whatever you want in your cage. If you need more power than a vanilla colo, e.g. you've got a lot of 1U servers, check with the vendor carefully - some places can't handle it, or can only handle it in some of their buildings.
Content Distribution/Caching Services - This is an alternative to using your own systems to distribute everything - pre-cached or demand-cached servers handle lots of the content, especially static graphics. Akamai is the best known, but other players such as AT&T are getting involved, and everybody's got their niche.
------
Pure-Colo/Hosting, Few Locations - some companies aren't in the datacom business. They're generally located in one or more NAP/MAE cities, and rent telecom from big ISPs. Check out their service providers and peering, but think about your performance needs - for some customers, the extra few milliseconds of response are critical; for others it's the quality of technical support, or price or quantity of the raw bandwidth.
ISPs providing Colo - Level 3, AT&T, Frontier Globalcenter, etc. - these providers have backbones, and customers on their backbones, and may be providing peering from their backbone rather than their hosting centers - or they may do both.
Telco Cage Space - AT&T and some Bell telcos rent cage space in their offices. If your business needs a large number of physical locations, or better connectivity to the telephone network than colo vendors provide (e.g. for modem pools, or DSL, or lots of T1s, or lots of DS3s or OC3s between your locations), these may be an interesting alternative. They tend to be extremely secure - and therefore hard to get access to at times - with exceptionally good power systems, fire/earthquake/flood resistance, and cooling. They're usually more bureaucratic to set up, e.g. needing to know power and HVAC needs upfront, but they're located almost everywhere.
(Disclaimer: I work for AT&T, but not in the hosting group., and this is my personal commentary, not a company statement, in spite of the occasional shameless plug in the content.)
I used to use a diskless Sun ELC as my desktop machine - it was silent except when I had the CD running, and didn't waste much space. It was Black&White, so I occasionally needed to go to the lab to use a color screen, and it honked out when somebody did disk backups across the LAN, but it was usually just great, and 1153x900 still beats most PCs I use.
Back when we used dumb terminals, they usually came with fans. But they were usually from Hewlett Packard, and therefore overengineered and highly reliable. My boss would simply disconnect the fan in his machine - the top of the case eventually got a bit warped, but it still worked just fine, and he could reconnect it if he ever needed to get it repaired.
My friend Hugh had his computers in a kitchen cabinet, with cables running out the back to his desk in the living room, with three big monitors, keyboards, etc., but all the noisy stuff was stashed away.
The purpose of micropayment technology is to reduce transaction costs enough that you can do things like charge a penny for reading a page. Credit cards have been the primary payment mechanism because they're fairly universally accepted, and many of the micropayment systems use them as a bridge in and out of the money system, but use variations on crypto digital cash, green stamps, small-denomination accounts that only pay when you aggregate enough tokens, etc. to avoid paying transaction costs except when you've got enough money to make it worthwhile.
Yes, there may be Hubris at Foresight, but the Masthead Name you need to mention is Eric Drexler, author of "Engines Of Creation", isbn://0385199732 , the 1986 seminal book in the field, and the main promoter of nanotech for the last N years.
You're probably thinking of "How to Mutate and Take Over the World: An Exploded Post-novel" by R.U. Sirius, & St. Jude and the Internet 21. I can't tell you the ISBN number because it's out of print, and my copy has gone to the Great Box'O'Books In the Back Closet somewhere. It was lots of fun, partly due to the collaborative writing process (they took donations), but, well, it wasn't all that good outside the "you had to be there at the time" context.
All of the algorithms you should even think about using have key lengths long enough to prevent brute force attacks within the lifetime of your threat model, and in general there's seldom a good reason to use something that can be brute forced within the expected lifetime of the planet. The real concerns are the expected time until either a mathematical breakthrough that changes the fundamental difficulties of the algorithms, or until somebody notices a bug in the algorithm design that can be exploited in some way much more effective than brute force, or until someone discovers a mistake in the way you're using the algorithm that violates the requirements for using it strongly. For instance, RC4 with 128-bit keys is just as fast as RC4 with 40-bit keys, but takes 2**88 times as long to crack, which is basically forever. But you have to never use the same key twice, so Microsoft's PPTP implementation that uses the same key for both directions of the conversation is instant toast.
A more serious example is the MD5 hashing algorithm. Hans Dobbertin's work from the last couple of years looks like it's possible to generate hash collisions, at least under some conditions that can be realistic, so everybody's having to move to SHA-1 hashes for anything new. It's unfortunate - MD5 was fast, and the 128-bit output was a useful size for use as 128-bit keys. On the other hand, there are applications where a birthday-attack collision means you only need to try about 2**64 attempts instead of 2**128, so for those applications, MD5's 128 bits wasn't enough, because it's becoming possible to brute-force things of that size, while a similar attack on SHA1 would require 2**80 tries, which is a significantly larger number - and that's more important than the relative speed differences between SHA1 and MD5.
Name space is a different issue from having a network entry. Of course.invalid isn't there - nobody owns it, and it's not *supposed* to have a network attached to it..uucp works the way sethg described it, and it's similarly not something that the internic would have a good way to register - for instance, there's no central DNS server that's authoritative and nobody in charge. But the names are still part of the DNS name space.
Sure, it provides an additional place for pornographers to advertise their wares, and an additional set of names for the registrars to sell, some for high prices, like whoever first registers sex.sex and sells it. (It might even be a good way for the name registrars to finance themselves:-) But it's unrealistic in a world-wide society without perfectly effective censorship to expect that there won't be large-commercial porn under.com, and there certainly will be small-business commercial porn, amateur porn, and people who post their photographs from their trip to the beach or their last party that have naked people in them, and people who use Bad Language on their web pages, all of which will stay in.com. And the rapidly emerging free disk space and photo exchange services, which live in.com and.net, have significant numbers of nude pictures on them.
Basically, it's unworkable, but that doesn't mean that a few politicians won't encourage it as a way of telling their constituents that They're Doing Something.
There are two current TLDs that the ICANN web page doesn't mention. They're both special..invalid is something that Brad Templeton got approved, which is a reserved name for syntactically correct use in books, local networks, and other things that aren't supposed to propagate to the real world. And.uucp is a wierd domain-like thing for hanging uucp names off of.
Brin's book The Transparent Society talks about lots of issues related to ubiquitous cheap camera and audio techology. One suggestion he has for dealing with crime, bad cops, etc. is portable video cameras that transmit back to wherever (your car using short-distance high-bandwidth links, your house, etc.) So you can have a "Rodney King" camera in your pocket or on your shoulder when that cop stops you for DWB.
You need to cache 1 or 2 pictures to avoid having to write to the disk in real-time. The compression ratio they're using is about 1MB/picture (160 pix per 156MB disk), so that's 1-2MB. They could either do this with flash, or just use regular RAM (which they need to have for their compression/processing stuff anyway.) RAM is cheaper, but you need to keep it powered while you're using it, so there's a risk of losing the last picture you've taken if you run out of battery, but flash has a limit on how many times you can write to it, which isn't a good thing for the memory that you copy every picture to before saving on disk.
Lots of people want to provide the one fast box that controls lots of other things in your home. The cable TV industry wants to provide a set-top box that not only controls your TV, but gets to provide other services to your home, and there are all kinds of appallingly ugly standards trying to evolve for splitting up spectrum to piggyback data on digital TV. CableLabs has pointers to some of them. The cable modem people (who overlap a bit with cable TV, but aren't the same thing) and the DSL people want to provide IP connectivity to your house, and use it to not only take over telephony but also provide broadcast television. Some of the game console people just want to sell you games, but Sony's organization that does games understands that it's selling the fastest computer in most people's houses, and selling modems to do interactive gaming, and therefore they can do lots of cool stuff with it, like make all the other Sony electronics entertainment equipment talk to it. Of course, the PC people want to control everything also, and they overlap a bit with the cablemodem/dsl folks, but you've still got to decide which one gets to run the phones once we replace the phone company. Oh, yeah, then there's satellite - it's a bit more limited, and needs a modem uplink, but they've been including TiVo-like stuff lately as well as offering one-way data. Anybody else trying to take over the world*?
*World Domination is a trademark of that innocent-looking penguin...
NS2 worked fine in that environment, at least to the extent that running anything on Win3.1 was fine. Javascript had just emerged, and leaked memory badly enough to crash on the standard scrolling-banner decoration , but otherwise the stuff ran blazingly fast given the 14.4 modem feeding it.
If John Brown's IHighway company were located in San Jose, he'd have dozens of options. But he's in Albuquerque, and if he doesn't like paying for an access line to Phoenix or Denver to connect to UUNET, he can get service from AT&T. The backbone map at http://www.ipservices.att.com/backbone/ shows that we've got a concentrator location there - with multiple OC3 connections, so it's relatively new construction. Until recently, the best choice from AT&T would probably have been connecting to Denver, since local business in Phoenix mainly has data centers for the financial-services and semiconductor industries, so traffic to non-AT&T locations would haul to one of the peering cities anyway. It wasn't that long ago that all those companies moved down to Phoenix to get cheap land and good cost of living for their employees and then started complaining that there wasn't enough telecom bandwidth out in the middle of the desert:-) Eventually DWDM fiber technology made it worthwhile and economically feasible to upgrade the bandwidth connecting Phoenix to the West Coast and then to Dallas and Denver, but it took a while - and the Internet was just starting to explode commercially while it did.
The separate question is whether IHighway is big enough to be a peer or if they've got to buy transit service. Most of the Tier I providers will peer with other large nationwide carriers, but will treat local ISPs like they treat other non-ISP businesses, and charge money for service unless there's a really interesting traffic mix.
The assertion that 90% of the network's traffic goes through the MAEs or NAPs is bogus. If somebody's paying you to deliver traffic for them, there's no way you'd want to deliver through the heavily overloaded public peering points if you've got a working private connection to the destination carrier, because packet loss is too high, except for overflow traffic and disaster recovery. The reason you build private peering connections is precisely to avoid the NAPs, as well as to save costs and occasionally deal with geography.
That doesn't mean that the peering isn't in the same cities as the NAPs - The Tier 1 providers have a lot of bandwidth there, so a packet may occasionally go more distance to get to a peering point, but the connections are still private, so the load management depends only on the two carriers involved, not the entire group of users on the NAPs. I don't know UUNET's peering objectives, but AT&T's objective is to deliver at least 90% of our off-net traffic using private connections, and only use the NAPs when there isn't a better way to get somewhere.
(I'm using the term "peering" to refer to the technical aspects of the connection, not whether money changes hands in the process - that's going to be driven by traffic balances, special applications, and whatever ego-based negotiations happen between contract lawyers:-)
Hosting centers are clearly changing the balance of traffic on the net - Exodus and the non-carrier based hosting centers connect to several major ISPs, and most of the major ISPs either run hosting centers or are partnering with them, and they're being built as fast as the real estate mavens can get them built. (Who'd have guessed that Bay Area building contractors would be one of the industry's critical resources?:-) Also, the emerging caching business may skew traffic levels differently between NAPs and private peering - I'm not sure which direction, and some of the skew is affected by different caching architectures - some caching systems put big shared caches on the outgoing side of a multiple peering point as opposed to more but smaller non-shared caches on the incoming side.
Ryandev's assertion that UUNET owns "30% of all the destination ip-space" isn't very clear - they certainly don't own 30% of the IP address space, though their market share for direct-connection IP customers is probably about that big, depending on which pieces they get to keep in the merger (e.g. they sold of much of MCI's business to Cable&Wireless during the Worldcom-MCI acquisition.)
Also, the MAEs and NAPs don't just run on public money - they charge for connecting to them, and I'm not sure if the NSF subsidy is still there. The important issue is that they're a finite solution to a near-infinite demand, and traffic can grow faster than they can scale. While lots of traffic has moved off to private peering, they're still a huge and critical resource, so they both need to use bleeding-edge technology and cause real havoc if the technology doesn't work well enough - and there's nowhere else to test it adequately before using it....
Internap does have some interesting BGP path-manipulation technology; I've seen it described but haven't played with it directly. Their business model is to buy transit from the big fiber-based ISP carriers and sell services to end users, so their success depends largely on how well they can manage and implement their networks, as well as on their BGP technology. Unlike the Fortune columnist whining about how mean and nasty UUNET is and how Somebody Should Do Something, they're going out and building competition, and good luck to them. (Hey, it's the Internet - they're our competition and our customer also:-) And no, they don't have a POP in Albuquerque either - their closest is Denver.
(Disclaimer: I work for AT&T, though I primarily do Layer 2 and Layer 1 technology rather than Layer 3, so I may be out of date on some details. This is my personal opinion; if you wanted an official position, you'd be reading a press release or talking to a sales person, not reading a rant on slashdot...:-)
That's Mike *Godwin*, the former EFF lawyer
on
DeCSS Update
·
· Score: 2
It's interesting to see Mike using press credentials here - he's normally thought of as a lawyer who used to work for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and is a frequent commentator on the Cyberia-L legal issues in cyberspace mailing list.
Slashdot Mirror
About Inktomi
I'd guess that the firstgov.gov search engine will piggyback off Inktomi's existing search systems, so it will probably cost them less than building one from scratch. The interesting problems are getting more government material onto the net where it can be found.
Most US states have a "use tax" on buyers that complements the sales tax on sellers - if you buy something out of state, and haven't paid sales tax on it where you bought it. So if you buy that mail-order PC from some other state, the sellers don't pay sales tax on selling it, but your state will want to collect their cut instead; if you drive across the border, buy the PC from the store and pay sales tax on it, your state normally doesn't get a cut, though if the place you bought it has a lower sales tax, many states want the difference. If you're a business, the rules on use tax may be different; many businesses don't have to pay sales tax on purchases because the state gets their cut in different ways, so check with your accountants.
Back when I lived in New Jersey, where lots of people buy stuff in Delaware (no sales tax) or New York (higher taxes, but PC stores will play games like shipping you the power cord by mail and letting you carry the fragile expensive parts yourself), the State Tax Goons would send a mailing with the state income tax form saying "Yes, we know there's absolutely no way we can enforce this, but tell us what you bought anyway and send us the tax payment", which everybody ignored. And New York City (which has an even higher tax than New York State, which was higher than Jersey) would send tax goons to cruise mall parking lots in New Jersey taking down license plate numbers of New York cars and sending them "Better tell us what you bought and pay up" letters.
Not only is it hard to figure out what privacy means in a way that enhances your
privacy without ripping off mine,
but there's an inherent contradiction between the agencies in government who might benefit from
providing protection laws and most other agencies who are doing data collection,
which will resist any regulation that interferes with them requiring businesses and individuals
to use Social Security Numbers, Taxpayer ID numbers, and other centralized identifiers and databases that
the agencies need or want. The economics of computers and communication (cheap and getting massively
cheaper all the time) make private data correlation valuable and easy already, and with mandatory
use of common database keys (SSNs are great, but even telephone numbers or name+address work surprisingly well),
there's minimal incentive for businesses to structure their databases in ways that are hard to correlate.
European data privacy laws don't just control big annoying corporations in ways that
don't affect you - they also let governments into everybody's computers,
including yours and including corporations that have records on you.
In some countries, they make it illegal to keep databases of any kind of personal information online
unless you register them with the government.
Have you registered your online address book with them?
Or the email from your girlfriend with her phone number?
Or the mailing list for your anti-nuclear group
or your church
or your football team
or your anarchist literature-and-beer-drinking society?
There's a good article on
Swedish network regulations
- the early ones banned computer conferencing systems,
because they were on computers, and might have discussions including the names of
participants, or their religious or political views, etc.
They've calmed down a bit, but not enough.
In some countries, including Sweden and the US, it's safer if you're a journalist,
because there are press freedom laws protecting the privacy of journalists' work.
Of course, in Cyberspace, everybody can be a journalist.
You've probably got Journalistic Works In Progress, which have special legal protection, on your home computer, haven't you?
......... No? Well, then go write some!
However, it's not safe
to be a journalist everywhere.
On the bright side, if European Data Protection Laws don't let you keep personal records, your anonymous remailer really can't go keeping logs, can it?
(Most of this rant is on my web pages.)
David Brin has written a lot of stuff about privacy, particularly
The Transparent Society, about how the economics of surveillance, cheap cameras, and databases are unstoppable, so give up and focus on the important issue, which is making sure the public can watch the government so it behaves itself. I don't agree with it all, but he makes a lot of good points.
A more scientific version of this was reported a while back - Margaret Fleck and David Forsyth did work at Berkeley and Iowa in about 1996 that finds naked people or horses using descriptions of shapes of bodies. Wired Article.
This slashdot story doesn't appear to be related to it.
If you want additional options to deal with bursting, check out content distribution services like Akamai and AT&T, which you can use in addition to your basic hosting system to handle peaks, or to provide other tweaks to your pricing model.
It's not fast enough to take out nukes, but it's an interesting play for taking out spy satellites. Since it wasn't developed by the military, it doesn't cost much, which means that multiple countries and occasional private citizens may have an interest in buying them.
The price of RF is as much government rent-seeking as corporate rent-seeking. Governments, especially in Europe, have been collecting billions of euros or dollars in return for access to spectrum which would otherwise be publicly available. That's especially ludicrous with spread-spectrum technology like CDMA, where multiple users can share the same spectrum space. RF space in the broadcast bands is more monopolistic - radio regulations in the US were particularly promulgated to reduce competition for stations and prevent little guys from getting involved, but corporations were able to do that because it increases the government's power and influence, so the government's happy to sell that service.
(Disclaimer: I work for AT&T, but not in the hosting group., and this is my personal commentary, not a company statement, in spite of the occasional shameless plug in the content.)
Which South Park episode was that?
~~~~~~
Duck and Cover beats Nuclear Bomb....
Back when we used dumb terminals, they usually came with fans. But they were usually from Hewlett Packard, and therefore overengineered and highly reliable. My boss would simply disconnect the fan in his machine - the top of the case eventually got a bit warped, but it still worked just fine, and he could reconnect it if he ever needed to get it repaired.
My friend Hugh had his computers in a kitchen cabinet, with cables running out the back to his desk in the living room, with three big monitors, keyboards, etc., but all the noisy stuff was stashed away.
The purpose of micropayment technology is to reduce transaction costs enough that you can do things like charge a penny for reading a page. Credit cards have been the primary payment mechanism because they're fairly universally accepted, and many of the micropayment systems use them as a bridge in and out of the money system, but use variations on crypto digital cash, green stamps, small-denomination accounts that only pay when you aggregate enough tokens, etc. to avoid paying transaction costs except when you've got enough money to make it worthwhile.
Yes, there may be Hubris at Foresight, but the Masthead Name you need to mention is Eric Drexler, author of "Engines Of Creation", isbn://0385199732 , the 1986 seminal book in the field, and the main promoter of nanotech for the last N years.
You're probably thinking of
"How to Mutate and Take Over the World: An Exploded Post-novel" by R.U. Sirius, & St. Jude and the Internet 21. I can't tell you the ISBN number because it's out of print, and my copy has gone to the Great Box'O'Books In the Back Closet somewhere. It was lots of fun, partly due to the collaborative writing process (they took donations), but, well, it wasn't all that good outside the "you had to be there at the time" context.
A more serious example is the MD5 hashing algorithm. Hans Dobbertin's work from the last couple of years looks like it's possible to generate hash collisions, at least under some conditions that can be realistic, so everybody's having to move to SHA-1 hashes for anything new. It's unfortunate - MD5 was fast, and the 128-bit output was a useful size for use as 128-bit keys. On the other hand, there are applications where a birthday-attack collision means you only need to try about 2**64 attempts instead of 2**128, so for those applications, MD5's 128 bits wasn't enough, because it's becoming possible to brute-force things of that size, while a similar attack on SHA1 would require 2**80 tries, which is a significantly larger number - and that's more important than the relative speed differences between SHA1 and MD5.
Name space is a different issue from having a network entry. Of course .invalid isn't there - nobody owns it, and it's not *supposed* to have a network attached to it. .uucp works the way sethg described it, and it's similarly not something that the internic would have a good way to register - for instance, there's no central DNS server that's authoritative and nobody in charge. But the names are still part of the DNS name space.
Basically, it's unworkable, but that doesn't mean that a few politicians won't encourage it as a way of telling their constituents that They're Doing Something.
There are two current TLDs that the ICANN web page doesn't mention. They're both special. .invalid is something that Brad Templeton got approved, which is a reserved name for syntactically correct use in books, local networks, and other things that aren't supposed to propagate to the real world. And .uucp is a wierd domain-like thing for hanging uucp names off of.
Brin's book The Transparent Society talks about lots of issues related to ubiquitous cheap camera and audio techology. One suggestion he has for dealing with crime, bad cops, etc. is portable video cameras that transmit back to wherever (your car using short-distance high-bandwidth links, your house, etc.) So you can have a "Rodney King" camera in your pocket or on your shoulder when that cop stops you for DWB.
You need to cache 1 or 2 pictures to avoid having to write to the disk in real-time. The compression ratio they're using is about 1MB/picture (160 pix per 156MB disk), so that's 1-2MB. They could either do this with flash, or just use regular RAM (which they need to have for their compression/processing stuff anyway.) RAM is cheaper, but you need to keep it powered while you're using it, so there's a risk of losing the last picture you've taken if you run out of battery, but flash has a limit on how many times you can write to it, which isn't a good thing for the memory that you copy every picture to before saving on disk.
*World Domination is a trademark of that innocent-looking penguin...
NS2 worked fine in that environment, at least to the extent that running anything on Win3.1 was fine. Javascript had just emerged, and leaked memory badly enough to crash on the standard scrolling-banner decoration , but otherwise the stuff ran blazingly fast given the 14.4 modem feeding it.
The separate question is whether IHighway is big enough to be a peer or if they've got to buy transit service. Most of the Tier I providers will peer with other large nationwide carriers, but will treat local ISPs like they treat other non-ISP businesses, and charge money for service unless there's a really interesting traffic mix.
goes through the MAEs or NAPs is bogus. If somebody's
paying you to deliver traffic for them, there's no way you'd want to deliver through the heavily overloaded public peering points if you've got a working private connection to the destination carrier, because packet loss is too high, except for overflow traffic and disaster recovery. The reason you build private peering connections is precisely to avoid the NAPs, as well as to save costs and occasionally deal with geography.
That doesn't mean that the peering isn't in the same cities as the NAPs - The Tier 1 providers have a lot of bandwidth there, so a packet may occasionally go more distance to get to a peering point, but the connections are still private, so the load management depends only on the two carriers involved, not the entire group of users on the NAPs. I don't know UUNET's peering objectives, but AT&T's objective is to deliver at least 90% of our off-net traffic using private connections, and only use the NAPs when there isn't a better way to get somewhere.
(I'm using the term "peering" to refer to the technical aspects of the connection, not whether money changes hands in the process - that's going to be driven by traffic balances, special applications, and whatever ego-based negotiations happen between contract lawyers :-)
Hosting centers are clearly changing the balance of traffic on the net - Exodus and the non-carrier based hosting centers connect to several major ISPs, and most of the major ISPs either run hosting centers or are partnering with them, and they're being built as fast as the real estate mavens can get them built. (Who'd have guessed that Bay Area building contractors would be one of the industry's critical resources? :-)
Also, the emerging caching business may skew traffic levels differently between NAPs and private peering - I'm not sure which direction, and some of the skew is affected by different caching architectures - some caching systems put big shared caches on the outgoing side of a multiple peering point as opposed to more but smaller non-shared caches on the incoming side.
Ryandev's assertion that UUNET owns "30% of all the destination ip-space" isn't very clear - they certainly don't own 30% of the IP address space, though their market share for direct-connection IP customers is probably about that big, depending on which pieces they get to keep in the merger (e.g. they sold of much of MCI's business to Cable&Wireless during the Worldcom-MCI acquisition.)
Also, the MAEs and NAPs don't just run on public money - they charge for connecting to them, and I'm not sure if the NSF subsidy is still there. The important issue is that they're a finite solution to a near-infinite demand, and traffic can grow faster than they can scale. While lots of traffic has moved off to private peering, they're still a huge and critical resource, so they both need to use bleeding-edge technology and cause real havoc if the technology doesn't work well enough - and there's nowhere else to test it adequately before using it....
Internap does have some interesting BGP path-manipulation technology; I've seen it described but haven't played with it directly. Their business model is to buy transit from the big fiber-based ISP carriers and sell services to end users, so their success depends largely on how well they can manage and implement their networks, as well as on their BGP technology. Unlike the Fortune columnist whining about how mean and nasty UUNET is and how Somebody Should Do Something, they're going out and building competition, and good luck to them. (Hey, it's the Internet - they're our competition and our customer also :-) And no, they don't have a POP in Albuquerque either - their closest is Denver.
(Disclaimer: I work for AT&T, though I primarily do Layer 2 and Layer 1 technology rather than Layer 3, so I may be out of date on some details. This is my personal opinion; if you wanted an official position, you'd be reading a press release or talking to a sales person, not reading a rant on slashdot... :-)