Another useful tool is http://www.sitefinder.ofcom.org.uk/ - from the regulator, this shows the exact position and type of base stations (cell towers) in the UK, for all networks apart from T-Mobile. The user interface is a bit annoying and only worked on Internet Explorer, but the data is very useful, particularly for external antenna planning.
- http://sucuri.net/ - monitors your site for free to detect compromises that affect readable pages
Final point: don't "filter out" dangerous characters, this is never ending and can never be done - instead, for any given parameter or input field, define the valid characters (e.g. alphanumeric, date, etc) and specifically allow ONLY those characters. This 'filtering in' approach is far safer.
The only problem is that UK residents can't combine all the networks' coverage without swapping SIM cards - there is no roaming agreement between UK operators. However, this is changing with the merger of Orange and T-Mobile (http://www.shinyshiny.tv/2010/05/orange_and_t-mobile_everything_everywhere.html), and also network sharing between some other operators.
Ironically a visitor with a non-UK phone will see much better coverage - even UK residents willing to pay extra can't get access to this coverage without using a foreign SIM card.
They aren't reselling mobile operator services or bandwidth - this is another way to access the mobile network, and will be sold by mobile operators and others, rather like a new handset. The charges will be whatever the operator charges - possibly a special package as data usage will be heavier than a phone, maybe like 3G dongle charges plus a bit to cover extra usage by several people in a house.
Enjoy your free WiFi - it won't last, most likely. Governments around the world are tightening the screws on copyright infringement, and open WiFi is in the cross-hairs - see one example here: http://www.openrightsgroup.org/blog/2010/the-death-of-open-wifi
I'm at a 20,000 employee company that is normally quite conservative in IT, and mostly skipped Vista, but they've already started the early stages of Windows 7 rollout - when my XP laptop's hard disk failed recently, the IT guys suggested I have a Win7 image as a replacement. This is noticeably faster on a Core 2 Duo 2.2 GHz with 2GB RAM - Win7 makes better use of memory, boots faster, suspends faster, etc. There are many small improvements - I do install the open source Classic Shell to get a more sane start menu (also lets you use the new Win7 menu search via shift-click), and the new Windows Explorer is a bit annoying, but not too bad after a while.
I've already set up Win7 on a home desktop and laptop, migrating from XP, and it's working pretty well. The only hassle is that Cygwin 1.7 has some bugs causing it to fail sometimes, but hopefully that will be fixed soon.
As well as Network Manager, I'd recommend umtsmon and wvdial for USB 3G modems - the former tracks your data usage, the latter is just a standard PPP dialler that can be put into scripts.
I'm written to my MP, and I suggest writing to David Cameron, since the Conservatives have a big say in the "wash-up" process now that this bill passed its second reading yesterday in just 90 minutes. Yay, democracy...
The UK government has bypassed the normal line by line debate in committees etc and there is a strong chance this bill will become law in the next few weeks, in closed meetings between party leaders as part of this "wash-up" process - already, the Conservatives have got a specific broadband tax (to fund fiber to the home) removed, in return for a concession on an unrelated bill. So it's quite possible to get specific clauses removed even now.
The proposed law will essentially enable the copyright holder to get warning letters sent to those who are believed to be illegally sharing files - these go to the broadband account holder, and if the incidents continue, they can be disconnected (or other unspecified "technical measures" may be taken). It doesn't matter if a family member or guest did the file sharing, or someone freeloading on your WiFi.
Oh yes, this also means the death of open WiFi hotspots, because the hotspot may well be disconnected when someone using it does illegal filesharing. So they either need to sign up users individually (imagine a cafe doing that), outsource to a paid hotspot service, or close their hotspot.
Another provision makes it possible to have websites blocked by ISPs if they are deemed to be breaching copyright - Youtube will be an interesting example.
If you live in the UK, write to your MP or David Cameron now via 38degrees - it only takes a few minutes, just put in your postcode. I think it's pointless to write to government ministers as they will toe the party line.
For those who are not in the UK: Similar laws are being passed or planned in many other countries - search for "three strikes" or "graduated response" plus "broadband" and the name of your country.
You made sense up until the "not having to buy any more winter clothing" - it's actually *climate change* with local changes meaning colder, warmer, dryer or wetter weather in various places. Average increases can cover local decreases.
In related news: The UK government is rushing through a law on filesharing in the last week of parliamentary business before the general election. It's bypassing the normal line by line debate in committees etc and will become law shortly after next Tuesday April 6th on current plans.
The proposed law will essentially enable the copyright holder to get warning letters sent to those who are believed to be illegally sharing files - these go to the broadband account holder, and if the incidents continue, they can be disconnected (or other unspecified "technical measures" may be taken). It doesn't matter if a family member or guest did the file sharing, or someone freeloading on your WiFi.
If you live in the UK, write to your MP now - it only takes a few minutes via the link above, just put in your postcode.
If you have mod points, please consider modding this up so that more people will write to their MP (member of parliament), and if you agree, then blog/twitter/Facebook/etc about this issue. Similar laws are being passed or planned in many other countries.
The UK government is rushing through a law on filesharing in the last week of parliamentary business before the general election. It's bypassing the normal line by line debate in committees etc.
The proposed law, which will become law shortly after April 6th on current plans, will essentially enable the copyright holder to get warning letters sent to those who are believed to be illegally sharing files - these go to the broadband account holder, and if the incidents continue, they can be disconnected (or other unspecified "technical measures" may be taken). It doesn't matter if a family member or guest did the file sharing, or someone freeloading on your WiFi.
The relevance to this story is that the UK students that Warner is recruiting might well uncover the "filesharing incidents" that would feed into this heavy handed enforcement mechanism.
This is a simple and good change - current systems use a mix of kilobytes and kibibytes with no real clarity on which they are using. Using the SI-based kilobytes everywhere will make life a lot simpler, and I'm sure there will be options to display in kibibytes if needed.
Sadly geeks are rather bad at adapting to this sort of thing, even though it's purely a software problem to show the units the way the user wants them.
It might be useful to extend the locale system (from internationalisation) so that the system will adopt the user's preference of KB or KiB.
Google uses a range of technologies but as far as I can tell it doesn't use Windows on its servers, partly because it needs the flexibility to do quite advanced things with Linux to gain performance. The big attraction of.NET is not the CLR but the.NET libraries, which still aren't replicated on Mono - so why would Google choose to use.NET and limit its options to a closed source OS owned by its biggest competitor?
Portal is working fine for me in Crossover Games (as are the Half-Life 2 series games) on Linux - using NVidia cards, 7900GS and now GTX260. I had to mess around a bit (using -novid -dxlevel 81 on command lines) initially on the 7900GS, but everything renders pretty well now. The only real omission is anti-aliasing (supposed to work with some hacks) and 5.1 sound (not supported by WINE except in a very recent update), but not having to reboot is a huge win.
Steam is "DRM done right" as far as that's possible - on PC, it lets you run your games on any PC quite legally. The only restriction is that when you log onto one PC, you are logged out of any other. So this 'Mac and PC' support is just an extension of that, though it's good to see.
When you compare to some of the ridiculous DRM schemes out there, Steam is really pretty good, and very convenient - makes it very easy to install games you've bought earlier on a new PC.
As the website explains, one of Comcast's 3 transition strategies is based on DS-Lite, which essentially means a big provider-based NAT that allows IPv4 only devices such as games consoles to connect via a new IPv4/IPv6 home router (dual stack) over v6 infrastructure to an end server that is v4 based.
You're right, and in fact in the UK, the BBC has created a Wii channel (downloadable app) for iPlayer, their TV streaming service: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8357777.stm
The real solution is to get on your feet, which the Wii remote and this controller both enable - it's really not tiring to hold the Wiimote for an hour or so because you are moving your whole body, as long as the arm / hand movements are somewhat varied. The problem with keyboard/mouse fatigue is the single static position that the body is in, combined with repetive arm/hand movements with little variation.
I really like being able to install extensions without restarting the browser - Firefox should have this, it can already do this for plugins bizarrely enough (even Netscape had this feature though it wasn't easy to invoke).
The middle click behaviour is annoying but the speed of Chrome is enough to make me use it more. All I need now is for Xmarks to come out of beta.
AdThwart is a much better ad blocking extension for Chrome than Adblock+. AdThwart uses the EasyList from Firefox's Adblock Plus, and it seems to block everything pretty well. It's totally unconfigurable but since EasyList works very well that's fine by me. AdThwart is at https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/cfhdojbkjhnklbpkdaibdccddilifddb
On Ubuntu Hardy, I find that this version works well: 4.0.267.0~svn20091208r34029-0ubuntu1~ucd1~hardy (from the Ubuntu Chromium PPA). Once you find a version that works well it's best to hold it in your package manager (e.g. "wajig hold" on Ubuntu or Debian) so that you don't get a daily update to a version that crashes on launch, as happened to me recently. Generally Chromium is very impressive for an alpha browser (I'm using the dev channel on Ubuntu via the PPA at https://launchpad.net/~chromium-daily/+archive/ppa ) - very fast, and leaves maximum screen area for content.
http://blogs.chron.com/techblog/archives/2006/09/free_public_wif.html. points out that any time you connect to a WiFi SSID, your laptop will then appear to be hosting an adhoc SSID of the same name.... weird but true, at least on XP, and explains why I see so many "Free Public WiFi" adhoc mode SSIDs almost anywhere, including on trains where I know there is no official WiFi hotspot. Most of these are probably not hackers trying to do a MITM attack, since this is something XP does automatically.
How can items 4 to 7 be considered as 'problems'? They are mostly 'this has not improved' statements. Kernel mode setting (KMS) is a very new feature in the kernel, and a slight delay due to this is hardly a big issue considering Ubuntu now boots much faster than a few years ago.
Memory usage reporting in Linux is notoriously inaccurate, but perhaps something has changed there due to the various kernel changes. Fedora etc on the same kernel are likely to have the same behaviour.
I booted 9.10 from a USB key on a Core 2 Duo laptop in just 35 seconds, which is really amazing, and it had no problem detecting my hardware including built-in Intel WiFi.
I find Ubuntu really impressive - I run it on several PCs at home without any problems, and it takes almost no time to keep it up to date. Upgrading to a new release is more time consuming, but that's still less time than consumed by Windows.
Once something is working in Ubuntu, and assuming you don't upgrade (stick to LTS if you want stability), it simply keeps on working. By contrast, Hibernate in Windows has broken yet again - I applied a specific XP hotfix to get it to work initially, but something has now stopped this working in a different way. While XP doesn't crash very often, it frequently gets to a point where I have to reboot my laptop (same one mentioned above), which takes about 5 to 10 minutes just for the disk to stop thrashing and the system to become usable.
Running Ubuntu and XP on the same hardware made me realise how fast Linux is - Firefox launched in less than 2 seconds from the Live USB stick, compared to 30 to 60 seconds on XP.
Slashdot Mirror
Another useful tool is http://www.sitefinder.ofcom.org.uk/ - from the regulator, this shows the exact position and type of base stations (cell towers) in the UK, for all networks apart from T-Mobile. The user interface is a bit annoying and only worked on Internet Explorer, but the data is very useful, particularly for external antenna planning.
Here are a few pointers, mostly around PHP web app security:
- http://www.owasp.org/ - the Open Web Application Security Project has a comprehensive list of things to cover - see their http://www.owasp.org/index.php/PHP_Top_5 (top 5 PHP issues) in particular
- http://www.sitepoint.com/article/php-security-blunders/ Top 7 PHP security blunders - use =htmlspecialchars= for output of variables to page and do MySQL string escaping
- http://www.phpbuilder.com/columns/ian_gilfillan20050707.php3 - ensure include files can't be reached directly from HTTP.
- http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1121901&cid=26797895 - use http://us2.php.net/manual/en/function.filter-var.php -PHP Filter features]] (only in PHP 5.2.0 onwards)
- http://sucuri.net/ - monitors your site for free to detect compromises that affect readable pages
Final point: don't "filter out" dangerous characters, this is never ending and can never be done - instead, for any given parameter or input field, define the valid characters (e.g. alphanumeric, date, etc) and specifically allow ONLY those characters. This 'filtering in' approach is far safer.
The only problem is that UK residents can't combine all the networks' coverage without swapping SIM cards - there is no roaming agreement between UK operators. However, this is changing with the merger of Orange and T-Mobile (http://www.shinyshiny.tv/2010/05/orange_and_t-mobile_everything_everywhere.html), and also network sharing between some other operators.
Ironically a visitor with a non-UK phone will see much better coverage - even UK residents willing to pay extra can't get access to this coverage without using a foreign SIM card.
They aren't reselling mobile operator services or bandwidth - this is another way to access the mobile network, and will be sold by mobile operators and others, rather like a new handset. The charges will be whatever the operator charges - possibly a special package as data usage will be heavier than a phone, maybe like 3G dongle charges plus a bit to cover extra usage by several people in a house.
Enjoy your free WiFi - it won't last, most likely. Governments around the world are tightening the screws on copyright infringement, and open WiFi is in the cross-hairs - see one example here: http://www.openrightsgroup.org/blog/2010/the-death-of-open-wifi
This is part of 'graduated response', also known as 'three strikes', which is the copyright owners' term for various actions to discourage infringement short of lawsuits - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graduated_response or http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/tag/graduated-response/
I'm at a 20,000 employee company that is normally quite conservative in IT, and mostly skipped Vista, but they've already started the early stages of Windows 7 rollout - when my XP laptop's hard disk failed recently, the IT guys suggested I have a Win7 image as a replacement. This is noticeably faster on a Core 2 Duo 2.2 GHz with 2GB RAM - Win7 makes better use of memory, boots faster, suspends faster, etc. There are many small improvements - I do install the open source Classic Shell to get a more sane start menu (also lets you use the new Win7 menu search via shift-click), and the new Windows Explorer is a bit annoying, but not too bad after a while.
I've already set up Win7 on a home desktop and laptop, migrating from XP, and it's working pretty well. The only hassle is that Cygwin 1.7 has some bugs causing it to fail sometimes, but hopefully that will be fixed soon.
As well as Network Manager, I'd recommend umtsmon and wvdial for USB 3G modems - the former tracks your data usage, the latter is just a standard PPP dialler that can be put into scripts.
I'm written to my MP, and I suggest writing to David Cameron, since the Conservatives have a big say in the "wash-up" process now that this bill passed its second reading yesterday in just 90 minutes. Yay, democracy...
The UK government has bypassed the normal line by line debate in committees etc and there is a strong chance this bill will become law in the next few weeks, in closed meetings between party leaders as part of this "wash-up" process - already, the Conservatives have got a specific broadband tax (to fund fiber to the home) removed, in return for a concession on an unrelated bill. So it's quite possible to get specific clauses removed even now.
The proposed law will essentially enable the copyright holder to get warning letters sent to those who are believed to be illegally sharing files - these go to the broadband account holder, and if the incidents continue, they can be disconnected (or other unspecified "technical measures" may be taken). It doesn't matter if a family member or guest did the file sharing, or someone freeloading on your WiFi.
Oh yes, this also means the death of open WiFi hotspots, because the hotspot may well be disconnected when someone using it does illegal filesharing. So they either need to sign up users individually (imagine a cafe doing that), outsource to a paid hotspot service, or close their hotspot.
Another provision makes it possible to have websites blocked by ISPs if they are deemed to be breaching copyright - Youtube will be an interesting example.
See http://www.openrightsgroup.org/campaigns/disconnection/why-care for more details and what to do about this.
If you live in the UK, write to your MP or David Cameron now via 38degrees - it only takes a few minutes, just put in your postcode. I think it's pointless to write to government ministers as they will toe the party line.
For those who are not in the UK: Similar laws are being passed or planned in many other countries - search for "three strikes" or "graduated response" plus "broadband" and the name of your country.
Here's the rebuttal by the school also linked in comment here; http://www.angrymob.uponnothing.co.uk/home/70-newspaper-lies/1032-really-bad-journalism - this incident never happened.
You made sense up until the "not having to buy any more winter clothing" - it's actually *climate change* with local changes meaning colder, warmer, dryer or wetter weather in various places. Average increases can cover local decreases.
In related news: The UK government is rushing through a law on filesharing in the last week of parliamentary business before the general election. It's bypassing the normal line by line debate in committees etc and will become law shortly after next Tuesday April 6th on current plans.
The proposed law will essentially enable the copyright holder to get warning letters sent to those who are believed to be illegally sharing files - these go to the broadband account holder, and if the incidents continue, they can be disconnected (or other unspecified "technical measures" may be taken). It doesn't matter if a family member or guest did the file sharing, or someone freeloading on your WiFi.
See http://www.openrightsgroup.org/campaigns/disconnection/why-care for more details and what to do about this. There are only a few days left to try to stop or at least delay this.
If you live in the UK, write to your MP now - it only takes a few minutes via the link above, just put in your postcode.
If you have mod points, please consider modding this up so that more people will write to their MP (member of parliament), and if you agree, then blog/twitter/Facebook/etc about this issue. Similar laws are being passed or planned in many other countries.
The UK government is rushing through a law on filesharing in the last week of parliamentary business before the general election. It's bypassing the normal line by line debate in committees etc.
The proposed law, which will become law shortly after April 6th on current plans, will essentially enable the copyright holder to get warning letters sent to those who are believed to be illegally sharing files - these go to the broadband account holder, and if the incidents continue, they can be disconnected (or other unspecified "technical measures" may be taken). It doesn't matter if a family member or guest did the file sharing, or someone freeloading on your WiFi.
See http://www.openrightsgroup.org/campaigns/disconnection/why-care for more details and what to do about this.
The relevance to this story is that the UK students that Warner is recruiting might well uncover the "filesharing incidents" that would feed into this heavy handed enforcement mechanism.
This is a simple and good change - current systems use a mix of kilobytes and kibibytes with no real clarity on which they are using. Using the SI-based kilobytes everywhere will make life a lot simpler, and I'm sure there will be options to display in kibibytes if needed.
Sadly geeks are rather bad at adapting to this sort of thing, even though it's purely a software problem to show the units the way the user wants them.
It might be useful to extend the locale system (from internationalisation) so that the system will adopt the user's preference of KB or KiB.
Google uses a range of technologies but as far as I can tell it doesn't use Windows on its servers, partly because it needs the flexibility to do quite advanced things with Linux to gain performance. The big attraction of .NET is not the CLR but the .NET libraries, which still aren't replicated on Mono - so why would Google choose to use .NET and limit its options to a closed source OS owned by its biggest competitor?
Portal is working fine for me in Crossover Games (as are the Half-Life 2 series games) on Linux - using NVidia cards, 7900GS and now GTX260. I had to mess around a bit (using -novid -dxlevel 81 on command lines) initially on the 7900GS, but everything renders pretty well now. The only real omission is anti-aliasing (supposed to work with some hacks) and 5.1 sound (not supported by WINE except in a very recent update), but not having to reboot is a huge win.
Steam is "DRM done right" as far as that's possible - on PC, it lets you run your games on any PC quite legally. The only restriction is that when you log onto one PC, you are logged out of any other. So this 'Mac and PC' support is just an extension of that, though it's good to see.
When you compare to some of the ridiculous DRM schemes out there, Steam is really pretty good, and very convenient - makes it very easy to install games you've bought earlier on a new PC.
As the website explains, one of Comcast's 3 transition strategies is based on DS-Lite, which essentially means a big provider-based NAT that allows IPv4 only devices such as games consoles to connect via a new IPv4/IPv6 home router (dual stack) over v6 infrastructure to an end server that is v4 based.
For those who just need to switch between a proxy and direct connection - try QuickProxy, https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1557
You're right, and in fact in the UK, the BBC has created a Wii channel (downloadable app) for iPlayer, their TV streaming service: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8357777.stm
The real solution is to get on your feet, which the Wii remote and this controller both enable - it's really not tiring to hold the Wiimote for an hour or so because you are moving your whole body, as long as the arm / hand movements are somewhat varied. The problem with keyboard/mouse fatigue is the single static position that the body is in, combined with repetive arm/hand movements with little variation.
I really like being able to install extensions without restarting the browser - Firefox should have this, it can already do this for plugins bizarrely enough (even Netscape had this feature though it wasn't easy to invoke).
The middle click behaviour is annoying but the speed of Chrome is enough to make me use it more. All I need now is for Xmarks to come out of beta.
AdThwart is a much better ad blocking extension for Chrome than Adblock+. AdThwart uses the EasyList from Firefox's Adblock Plus, and it seems to block everything pretty well. It's totally unconfigurable but since EasyList works very well that's fine by me. AdThwart is at https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/cfhdojbkjhnklbpkdaibdccddilifddb
On Ubuntu Hardy, I find that this version works well: 4.0.267.0~svn20091208r34029-0ubuntu1~ucd1~hardy (from the Ubuntu Chromium PPA). Once you find a version that works well it's best to hold it in your package manager (e.g. "wajig hold" on Ubuntu or Debian) so that you don't get a daily update to a version that crashes on launch, as happened to me recently. Generally Chromium is very impressive for an alpha browser (I'm using the dev channel on Ubuntu via the PPA at https://launchpad.net/~chromium-daily/+archive/ppa ) - very fast, and leaves maximum screen area for content.
Chrome seems to install under \Documents and Settings by default - now I know why.
http://blogs.chron.com/techblog/archives/2006/09/free_public_wif.html. points out that any time you connect to a WiFi SSID, your laptop will then appear to be hosting an adhoc SSID of the same name.... weird but true, at least on XP, and explains why I see so many "Free Public WiFi" adhoc mode SSIDs almost anywhere, including on trains where I know there is no official WiFi hotspot. Most of these are probably not hackers trying to do a MITM attack, since this is something XP does automatically.
Does Windows 7 do the same thing?
How can items 4 to 7 be considered as 'problems'? They are mostly 'this has not improved' statements. Kernel mode setting (KMS) is a very new feature in the kernel, and a slight delay due to this is hardly a big issue considering Ubuntu now boots much faster than a few years ago.
Memory usage reporting in Linux is notoriously inaccurate, but perhaps something has changed there due to the various kernel changes. Fedora etc on the same kernel are likely to have the same behaviour.
I booted 9.10 from a USB key on a Core 2 Duo laptop in just 35 seconds, which is really amazing, and it had no problem detecting my hardware including built-in Intel WiFi.
I find Ubuntu really impressive - I run it on several PCs at home without any problems, and it takes almost no time to keep it up to date. Upgrading to a new release is more time consuming, but that's still less time than consumed by Windows.
Once something is working in Ubuntu, and assuming you don't upgrade (stick to LTS if you want stability), it simply keeps on working. By contrast, Hibernate in Windows has broken yet again - I applied a specific XP hotfix to get it to work initially, but something has now stopped this working in a different way. While XP doesn't crash very often, it frequently gets to a point where I have to reboot my laptop (same one mentioned above), which takes about 5 to 10 minutes just for the disk to stop thrashing and the system to become usable.
Running Ubuntu and XP on the same hardware made me realise how fast Linux is - Firefox launched in less than 2 seconds from the Live USB stick, compared to 30 to 60 seconds on XP.