- Complains about the SureType keyboard, it gets words wrong and is tough with names.
- Menus for a lot of what should be simple stuff.
- Takes a two-key combination to unlock. (ok, let me bust in here, a single-key unlock isn;t a keyboard lock function. It isn't. It's just not useful, cause it doesn't lock the keyboard against an accidental keypress. In other words, a single-key unlock doesn't work. Ok, dumass author? Thank me later.
- Something about memory usage and watching how many programs you run.
Before I go any further, I own a BlackBerry 7105t, and all of the above complaints plague my Berry. And I betcha Pogue kinda tolerated that model.
No, the 7105t doesn't run Windows, and I bet Pogue thinks this is one of the few phones that suffers from memory leaks. Well, since the latest OS upgrade, mine will eat memory when loading web pages such as from Infoworld and a few other common sites that have to run ads before they show you content. How nice. If I choose the right link, I get one put through Skweezer, which helps. Some sites end with an hourglass that persists even after I close the browser. How nice.
Pogue is complaining about some of the better and common features of BlackBerries.
Nice try, but you are wrong, you ink-stained wretch. The Shadow will probably lose points for Windows shortcomings, but SureType, menus, and a two-key unlock are not significant problems.
I'm guessing he didn't get a free one to swag out to someone he wanted to impress.
Well, I do that. On my BlackBerry 7105t. Which is an old phone now in marketing terms.
Heck, I went out and got Google Maps, and an SSH client. People look at me like I'm clever when I drill down and tell them their house is the third light down, not the second. My co-workers aren't in awe any more when I reboot my web server, they are in awe when I can run a macro and suck up the latest patches. And keep them up to date on World Series score. And this is just a BlackBerry.
As soon as I begin wishing for a camera, I remember though, having all your devices in one leads to the inevitable 'all your devices are broken to you' scenario . I like being able to replace my phone, and then replace my camera, and not having to replace both.
ack.
Oh yea, and I open Word docs just fine. Even Excel and PDFs. Take THAT, Windows Mobile!
..seriously, I've been fixing my stuff and others' since I was 9. Cash registers, toasters, guns, cameras, sheesh, I dunno, it's probably the Yankee in me. I used to save stuff. never know when a power cord would come in handy. Or the strain relief from one. I bought a finished Heathkit color TV and solved the various adjustment and bad solder problems. Cheap TV. And my first three CD players, last two stereo systems, and my Minidisc recorder.
My first 'real' job outside the Air Force was fixing office calculators, dictating machines, typewriters, mimeographs/duplicators, sorters, folders, you name it. I moved up the food chain a bit to IBM stuff like Selectrics, Mag Cards, Electronics, OS/6, and DisplayWriters. And those damned 6:5 things. I finally bought a turbo XT and learned to fix computers.
Now I amaze my wife with little and big things I fix. All except for the digital camera she sat on. But I know which of the 3 little plastic fingers she broke, and if I had them, I could indeed fix it. lately, I've been on a jag fixing anything but iPods, especially those Toshiba Gigabeats. Damn, those are easy to fix.
Yeah, I hate throwing something out just cause it's got a weak battery, or laptops with broken screen hinges, stuff that fails intermittantly just cause of a connection. With a decent selection of soldering irons, good epoxy, small screwdrivers, and patience, you can fix a lot. Sometimes, the hammer works best...
We do need to be less of a throwaway society. But the way consumer electronics are made today, the economics of repair parts is terrible. I dread buying an HDTV, knowing that I probably won't be able to fix much in it. And it won't last 20+years, like that old Heathkit. But hey, the picture makes it all worthwhile, right?
"Within the company, it's considered a job perk, and employees check this data for fun."
And,
"Well, Facebook's privacy policy doesn't explicitly reserve or waive employees' right to check out your profile for any reason. Of course, the practice still reeks of skunkery --"
The linked article goes on, with some anecdotal incidents that make for fun and disturbing reading.
Just about says it all. Use Facebook, pretty much forfeit any privacy. The Facebook employees seem to not only have the power, but consider it high camp to enjoy your data.
Harrr. My Facebook-lovin friends are gonna pretty much feel violated by this. What was that phrase? Oh yeah...
I've been thinking of how I'm going to build my ammo box pc. I should just buy one of these and take the parts. I can always use the case for a doorstop.
A mini-ITX board is an easy fit, the PS I bet is tiny-ish, and I got a monitor. Heck, I bet it will take a stick or more of whatever RAM i got around, and 2GB makes it what I want.
Easier than calling Newegg.
Thanks, Wal-Mart. Making my life better. ITX parts on the shelf, sweeeeeeet...
Alongside the stories of graduates blaming their Facebook pages for not being hired. Oh, not really. They blame the company for being too narrow-minded and basing the hiring decision on their Facebook pages, when they don't think such decisions should be based in any way on such 'recreational' pursuits or 'personal' information.
My current employee required a background check and credit check. They interviewed my employers over the last 15 years. They did not ask if I had a Facebook page. But I was told that they did search for one. I have no idea why.
The consensus here is that my employer takes their image and clients' trust seriously. Something about judging character.
Just fine. I am, in fact. Facebook is supremely unimportant to me, and to most everyone I know. In fact, even the people I know who think they are 'active' on Facebook will admit that it's annoying, intrusive, and they use it less and less.
Facebook is growing, I bet, mostly due to new converts coming on faster than the jaded leave.
This will change. Buy your stock in facebook as damned soon as you can, cause it will go down in a flash. Or get bought by M$, and then it's too late.
Just don't try to patent the multi-meme-karma-whoring method. I'll claim prior art and embarass your lawyers. No, wait, you really can't embarass a patent lawyer. No, that's not right, you can't embarass any lawyer. Anyways, I'll do something.
Not easy. Sadly, looking for the traffic checking in after infestation is a possibility... a remote one now that encryption and such has been implemented.
And we can't have much success detecting the encrypted payloads.
So we gotta give up?
My secondary point was that ISPs should be researching how to stop serious threats, and less time stifling users who actually *use* the service. But honestly, that's the real job of the software vendors. Microsoft, for instance.
Darn. I wuz wrong.
Well written...
It is not our task, as Christians, to understand and explain HOW God has created all this. It is enough to accept that He has. And He will permit or deny our knowledge as He sees fit.
More than quibbling over how God created everything, we should be in awe that not only did He make such a magnificent universe, but that He has made in so that we can, indeed, explore it. A minor change here or there, so that our atmosphere were more opaque, and we might be fairly unaware that there was anything at all 'out there'.
It has always caught me that, in Genesis 1:16, it is written 'He also made the stars'. that's all. The billions of stars merit five words.
I have less concern for how, than I do for why. It does not profit me to challenge so much scientific evidence of how this was all made. I'm much more interested in the purpose.
for the losers to drop their prices at the clearance sales that would follow a judgement against, or... buy some cheap flash drives now? Since Sandisk might be able to get a judgement to have inventory thrown in the fire.
Wouldn't malware cease to be much of a problem *if* we had secureable hosts?
I mean, at some point, if the malware didn't succeed, it wouldn't be written.
OTOH, if we had some way to enforce cleaning up hosts that spewed malware, that would get rid of it also.
Comcast, you listening? How about filtering Storm and a few, just a few, of the well-known trojans and worms that infest the Internet? Starting with your own subscribers, residential AND commercial.
If spam and malware are bandwidth threats, maybe THAT will be enough to get some action?
I'll test this on my home machine before I run it on my production box, but then it can run 24x7.
Let the little pus-heads register everything. And then cancel. And then register. And then cancel. Repeat.
I may have to put some delay in the script to make it behave, but if some of us ran this 24x7x365, Would this make squatting too expensive for anyone? And, most importantly, would it cause troubles we can only imagine (or not)???
I am really sorry. I just couldn't help myself, what with this post being about near total pwnage and all.
It's just a matter of time, really before all our passwords are cluster-pwned by our GPU-slinging post-Soviet overlords, and we're belong to them. With my credit card maxed by their unlocking my combinations, I won't be waiting for my luggage to come down first, believe me...
Better?
And sadly, it appears I an now one of the 'others'. Do that again, I will not, no...
I owned a Palm Pilot 1000 (I think, the one with extra memory) that promptly became one of the first to be repaired. Broken screen. They did not survive a 3-foot drop onto tile.
I wore it out. It worked, and Grafitti was just wonderful.
Then I got a Palm III. And a modem. Having HandMail was a blessing. I was much more self-sufficient.
Finally, I got a Vx to replace my tired III... Sleek and wonderful, another modem of course, slick apps, and yes shirtpocket capable.
But I always had a Day-Timer, and used both. Having a Palm saved me from weekly (or more frequent) printings of a dynamic phonebook in Filemaker Pro. And cutting pages to fit...
I'm hoping things at Palm get back to the lean and mean days of old, where the product seemed to be king, and where good decisions were made.
"According to some sources, Comcast is likely using Sandvine [sandvine.com] equipment near their headends to accomplish this feat. And I don't think you understand the nature of RFCs."
I'm referring to Comcast's 'messin' with the Bitorrent conversation - Injecting RSTs is at least bad form, and at the worst it's not RFC-compliant in TCP, UDP, and I wonder what else. My point was that forging RSTs can't be compliant. And I know that RFCs are more or less a gentleman's agreement. Even now. It's just that much more important.
"You could be thinking of how ISPs sometimes will shut down connections to networks who, through mis-configuration or maliciousness, cause trouble. This still happens, but it was more common when the Internet was a mostly a small, close-knit community of operators. As a practice, it works best when the mis-behaving network is either a paying customer or a peer network who highly values your traffic. If the misbehaving network is someone you pay for connectivity, or a peer whose traffic *you* highly value, it's not as wise or effective."
Exactly! My mail servers were once blocked by MCI because I fritzed a setting and they spewed pretty hard. Once again, they got blocked because someone forged delivery failures from.co.kr, aimed at all of yahoo.co.kr. very embarassing. It sent 3-4 million messages on a Saturday morning before MCI stopped it and called me. Ugh. And my router once flapped so hard it seemed to be a malicious effort to cause harm. No, it was a bad memory stick. Back then, being stupid would get you kicked off. Especially if you were a tiny ISP, not a blip on anyone's balance sheet. Heck, MCI only talked to me 'cause my biggest client used them for dial lines.
Today, I doubt a Comcast would get kicked off for doing bad things, cause they aren't so stupid. We don't type &'s so blithely any more, do we? It's not likely that we could pressure any providers to ban or penalize any provider, just because of the immense revenue at stake. If only we could...
"Comcast is a big enough consumer ISP that they would be hard to bully into behaving a different way. For example, Amazon and Google get their service from ISPs A & B respectively. Let's say that ISPs A & B decide Comcast is behaving badly. So ISPs A & B stop exchanging traffic with Comcast. What happens next? Amazon and Google call them and say, "WTF are you doing?! Those are our customers you're cutting us off from!! Get us back in touch with them NOW or we're gone." See the problem?"
Sadly, yes. Then again, I'd be peeved too. But the reverse, a service provider using Bitorrrent losing business due to Comcast's policies? Will one of them sue, and force the issue? Then we can have the discussion of responsibility and honesty in ToS and advertising? Too much to hope for.
We do agree, I guess, that comcast is trying to control network usage, probably to control costs. Targeting a high-bandwidth service is wrong, I know you agree, and in fact I suspect we both agree that Comcast is substantially misrepresenting their service. I'll bet a small cup of bad coffee that they advertise file download speeds compared to dialup and even DSL, and then turn right around and penalize users who actually *use* that bandwidth for what they said it was good for...
As a service provider, I know you also know that bandwidth costs. In the end, ya gotta decide if you can make a profit in the business. If not, get out. Comcast seems to not believe they are able to make a profit with Bitorrent left unfettered. Too bad. Lots of other systems seem to be. I check in with my buds in Maine, and Time-Warner doesn't seem to be doing anything to Bitorrent traffic. I'll be testing my Cox connection this weekend dumping some DVD ISOs.
Sooner or later, Comcast is going to lose for this, I think. If only some users could mash up a wifi mesh and pool their $s for a decent uplink.
Of course, then they might find out about the real costs of bandwidth... It would be a grand experiment tho. Huh?
In case you were wondering how important print really is, consider:
- Many of the 'print' media are still the source for other media outlets. Reuters, AP, et al.
- Print is coming to the Internet in a big way. Yes, it's been here for a while, but now they are getting serious.
- And print is still relevant even to/.'rs, cause you are reading it NOW. This is print. Video and audio, a.k.a. Television and Radio, are different.
Preventing conglomerates from owning all three of the major media types in a market is not a bad thing. Imagine the joy of finding out that the radio report you just heard is merely the soundtrack of the video report everyone else is screaming about, which is merely a regurgitation of the print report nobody read in the first place except the blaggers and wackos.
And you were hoping for the least bit of variety, depth, or integrity in U.S. journalism? Keep reducing the sources, the actual 'creators' of stories, and we will get less of everything.
Especially the truth.
I'm in favor of more restriction, in a way that serves the public interest. Especially in the broadcast media, where they use a public resource, the airways, to disseminate their product. At least in 'print', there isn't much restriction on buying presses, paper, ink, and/or a server.
... if Comcast is essentially attempting to disable Bitorrent, are they by any chance either violating or subverting one or more RFCs? Substitute the proper term for 'violating', that was the strongest word I could come up with quickly.
I recall that in the Early Days of the Internet, not abiding by the RFCs would get you in hot water. Especially screwing up with SMTP would do it, but even bad behaviour due to your incompetence would get your T-1 unclocked, and it would take a few calls to the powers that be to assure them that you found someone who knew what they were doing and that problem wouldn't occur again. At least not for a while.
My point is, perhaps it's time for the other Internet providers to consider requiring Comcast to not mess with traffic in this way, or sanction Comcast.
Sanctions could be as graduated as throttling at the NAPs, degrading Comcast traffic, even disconnects.
Some providers have a stake in this. If the legal Bitorrent users (WoW for instance) get a crossed hair over this, why would they not ask their providers to pressure Comcast into stopping this?
Ultimately, this may be Comcast clinging to their ToS and 'server' restrictions, and that would mean Comcast users won't be sharing out Bitorrent files. Bummer.
Another wrinkle, I wonder if Comcast sends forged RSTs to Comcast users sharing with *other* Comcast users. Intranetwork traffic shouldn't 'cost' so much for Comcast.
My theory is simple - Imagine if ISPs started throttling or denying traffic from Akamai, because of the volume... What a mess. And while Bitorrent is used for all sorts of purposes, so is SMTP. So if they think the illegal use of Bitorrent is sufficient excuse for them to deny it, why don't they throttle/deny SMTP, since simple spam is bad enough, but the emails of worms/trojans/scams also are objectionable. even arguably illegal. And certainly harmful, to users and the Internet. Maybe even Comcast.
Of course, that's not the point. Comcast is trying to avoid costs due to the volume of Bitorrent traffic that leaves them paying for NAP ports, lines to other ISPs, and routers/switches to manage all this.
In other words, they are trying to control costs by controlling usage.
One of the reasons I got out of the business pre-2000. Couldn't make a profit with my business model. Network costs were too high.
Well, another option is to surcharge high-volume users. Or charge more to afford to provide the service ostensibly advertised.
It's not often I can be happy to have Cox Cable. My Qwest DSL before just sucked, but the traffic got through.
Good luck. My bet is the best avenue is a class-action over either false advertising or Magnuson-Moss.
My understanding (and we grilled our supervisor on this one - he was good) is that flashing the drive would REQUIRE the password. But even if it didn't, the data is encrypted. If the password is on the drive firmware, flashing it would lose the password and woops, no data.
This is the hardware encryption scheme - supposedly, even if you put the drive in another Thinkpad, that chip has a different hardware key and even the right password won't decrypt. So it encrypts data onto the drive.
Yes, you could send it out to be extracted. Then go about breaking the key. We didn't get much guidance on the password, but mine was 8 characters and included upper/lower and symbols. It would be nontrivial to extract the drive and decrypt.
On the Thinkpad I used, the FDE password was not just an ATA password. the drive it self was encrypted with this, and not having it meant the drive was unreadable on any system.
I may have mislead you. It isn't a BIOS password, it's a pre-boot password. No password, no boot. It just cycles through another POST and askes for the password after the retries wear out.
If it were just an ATA password, what good would that do?
Slashdot Mirror
Many of Pogue's complaints are interesting:
- Complains about the SureType keyboard, it gets words wrong and is tough with names.
- Menus for a lot of what should be simple stuff.
- Takes a two-key combination to unlock. (ok, let me bust in here, a single-key unlock isn;t a keyboard lock function. It isn't. It's just not useful, cause it doesn't lock the keyboard against an accidental keypress. In other words, a single-key unlock doesn't work. Ok, dumass author? Thank me later.
- Something about memory usage and watching how many programs you run.
Before I go any further, I own a BlackBerry 7105t, and all of the above complaints plague my Berry. And I betcha Pogue kinda tolerated that model.
No, the 7105t doesn't run Windows, and I bet Pogue thinks this is one of the few phones that suffers from memory leaks. Well, since the latest OS upgrade, mine will eat memory when loading web pages such as from Infoworld and a few other common sites that have to run ads before they show you content. How nice. If I choose the right link, I get one put through Skweezer, which helps. Some sites end with an hourglass that persists even after I close the browser. How nice.
Pogue is complaining about some of the better and common features of BlackBerries.
Nice try, but you are wrong, you ink-stained wretch. The Shadow will probably lose points for Windows shortcomings, but SureType, menus, and a two-key unlock are not significant problems.
I'm guessing he didn't get a free one to swag out to someone he wanted to impress.
rick
LCD most common failure; backlight. Moderately to insanely difficult to repair.
Next most common; electronic module failure. Parts availability.
Third, I hear, bad pixels. Repair unlikely. I can't see slamming a 42" screen to move the debris.
Plasmas are worse.
I'm not very hopeful that I will fix my HD. My old RCA XL100 was bad enough. The Heathkit was a breeze.
Well, I do that. On my BlackBerry 7105t. Which is an old phone now in marketing terms.
Heck, I went out and got Google Maps, and an SSH client. People look at me like I'm clever when I drill down and tell them their house is the third light down, not the second. My co-workers aren't in awe any more when I reboot my web server, they are in awe when I can run a macro and suck up the latest patches. And keep them up to date on World Series score. And this is just a BlackBerry.
As soon as I begin wishing for a camera, I remember though, having all your devices in one leads to the inevitable 'all your devices are broken to you' scenario . I like being able to replace my phone, and then replace my camera, and not having to replace both.
ack.
Oh yea, and I open Word docs just fine. Even Excel and PDFs. Take THAT, Windows Mobile!
..seriously, I've been fixing my stuff and others' since I was 9. Cash registers, toasters, guns, cameras, sheesh, I dunno, it's probably the Yankee in me. I used to save stuff. never know when a power cord would come in handy. Or the strain relief from one. I bought a finished Heathkit color TV and solved the various adjustment and bad solder problems. Cheap TV. And my first three CD players, last two stereo systems, and my Minidisc recorder.
My first 'real' job outside the Air Force was fixing office calculators, dictating machines, typewriters, mimeographs/duplicators, sorters, folders, you name it. I moved up the food chain a bit to IBM stuff like Selectrics, Mag Cards, Electronics, OS/6, and DisplayWriters. And those damned 6:5 things. I finally bought a turbo XT and learned to fix computers.
Now I amaze my wife with little and big things I fix. All except for the digital camera she sat on. But I know which of the 3 little plastic fingers she broke, and if I had them, I could indeed fix it. lately, I've been on a jag fixing anything but iPods, especially those Toshiba Gigabeats. Damn, those are easy to fix.
Yeah, I hate throwing something out just cause it's got a weak battery, or laptops with broken screen hinges, stuff that fails intermittantly just cause of a connection. With a decent selection of soldering irons, good epoxy, small screwdrivers, and patience, you can fix a lot. Sometimes, the hammer works best...
We do need to be less of a throwaway society. But the way consumer electronics are made today, the economics of repair parts is terrible. I dread buying an HDTV, knowing that I probably won't be able to fix much in it. And it won't last 20+years, like that old Heathkit. But hey, the picture makes it all worthwhile, right?
*sniff*
Oh yeah.
Schauden Freude.
Dan but that Kucnich is one wild and crazy guy. Watch for HR333, coming to a committee far from you!
PS - It's not hard to embarrass the Congressional Democratic leadership. Just vote for their bills.
rick
"Within the company, it's considered a job perk, and employees check this data for fun."
And,
"Well, Facebook's privacy policy doesn't explicitly reserve or waive employees' right to check out your profile for any reason. Of course, the practice still reeks of skunkery --"
The linked article goes on, with some anecdotal incidents that make for fun and disturbing reading.
Just about says it all. Use Facebook, pretty much forfeit any privacy. The Facebook employees seem to not only have the power, but consider it high camp to enjoy your data.
Harrr. My Facebook-lovin friends are gonna pretty much feel violated by this. What was that phrase? Oh yeah...
Revelling in the agony of others.
I've been thinking of how I'm going to build my ammo box pc. I should just buy one of these and take the parts. I can always use the case for a doorstop.
A mini-ITX board is an easy fit, the PS I bet is tiny-ish, and I got a monitor. Heck, I bet it will take a stick or more of whatever RAM i got around, and 2GB makes it what I want.
Easier than calling Newegg.
Thanks, Wal-Mart. Making my life better. ITX parts on the shelf, sweeeeeeet...
Alongside the stories of graduates blaming their Facebook pages for not being hired. Oh, not really. They blame the company for being too narrow-minded and basing the hiring decision on their Facebook pages, when they don't think such decisions should be based in any way on such 'recreational' pursuits or 'personal' information.
/. I'm in trouble.
My current employee required a background check and credit check. They interviewed my employers over the last 15 years. They did not ask if I had a Facebook page. But I was told that they did search for one. I have no idea why.
The consensus here is that my employer takes their image and clients' trust seriously. Something about judging character.
If they find out I'm posting on
Good guess.
I'm wondering how the favorite app of college students is so darned important that it wil affect 'all of us'.
Especially when those college students will bail on Facebook when it costs them a job.
How will I ever get along without Facebook?
Just fine. I am, in fact. Facebook is supremely unimportant to me, and to most everyone I know. In fact, even the people I know who think they are 'active' on Facebook will admit that it's annoying, intrusive, and they use it less and less.
Facebook is growing, I bet, mostly due to new converts coming on faster than the jaded leave.
This will change. Buy your stock in facebook as damned soon as you can, cause it will go down in a flash. Or get bought by M$, and then it's too late.
Ugh.
Just don't try to patent the multi-meme-karma-whoring method. I'll claim prior art and embarass your lawyers. No, wait, you really can't embarass a patent lawyer. No, that's not right, you can't embarass any lawyer. Anyways, I'll do something.
Not easy. Sadly, looking for the traffic checking in after infestation is a possibility... a remote one now that encryption and such has been implemented. And we can't have much success detecting the encrypted payloads. So we gotta give up? My secondary point was that ISPs should be researching how to stop serious threats, and less time stifling users who actually *use* the service. But honestly, that's the real job of the software vendors. Microsoft, for instance. Darn. I wuz wrong.
Well written... It is not our task, as Christians, to understand and explain HOW God has created all this. It is enough to accept that He has. And He will permit or deny our knowledge as He sees fit. More than quibbling over how God created everything, we should be in awe that not only did He make such a magnificent universe, but that He has made in so that we can, indeed, explore it. A minor change here or there, so that our atmosphere were more opaque, and we might be fairly unaware that there was anything at all 'out there'. It has always caught me that, in Genesis 1:16, it is written 'He also made the stars'. that's all. The billions of stars merit five words. I have less concern for how, than I do for why. It does not profit me to challenge so much scientific evidence of how this was all made. I'm much more interested in the purpose.
If the lion eats you, then God has left you to die that way. You will be with Him, and His purpose is served in His way.
If the lion lies down and just looks at you, God had chosen to save you, as is His privilege.
It's His, not yours. Either way, if you accept Christ, you win. The lion is merely a tool. If that.
for the losers to drop their prices at the clearance sales that would follow a judgement against, or... buy some cheap flash drives now? Since Sandisk might be able to get a judgement to have inventory thrown in the fire.
Whatchathink?
Wouldn't malware cease to be much of a problem *if* we had secureable hosts?
I mean, at some point, if the malware didn't succeed, it wouldn't be written.
OTOH, if we had some way to enforce cleaning up hosts that spewed malware, that would get rid of it also.
Comcast, you listening? How about filtering Storm and a few, just a few, of the well-known trojans and worms that infest the Internet? Starting with your own subscribers, residential AND commercial.
If spam and malware are bandwidth threats, maybe THAT will be enough to get some action?
I'll test this on my home machine before I run it on my production box, but then it can run 24x7.
Let the little pus-heads register everything. And then cancel. And then register. And then cancel. Repeat.
I may have to put some delay in the script to make it behave, but if some of us ran this 24x7x365, Would this make squatting too expensive for anyone? And, most importantly, would it cause troubles we can only imagine (or not)???
Oh my. I've trampled someone's Karma.
I am really sorry. I just couldn't help myself, what with this post being about near total pwnage and all.
It's just a matter of time, really before all our passwords are cluster-pwned by our GPU-slinging post-Soviet overlords, and we're belong to them. With my credit card maxed by their unlocking my combinations, I won't be waiting for my luggage to come down first, believe me...
Better?
And sadly, it appears I an now one of the 'others'. Do that again, I will not, no...
All your passwords are belong to your GPU....
In Soviet Russia, GPU cracks YOU!
I, for one, do NOT welcome our new password-cracking GPU overlords...
Imagine a Beowulf... oh crap, I gotta go change all my passwords... Just a sec...
What, I gotta use how many different Unicode languages?
I owned a Palm Pilot 1000 (I think, the one with extra memory) that promptly became one of the first to be repaired. Broken screen. They did not survive a 3-foot drop onto tile.
I wore it out. It worked, and Grafitti was just wonderful.
Then I got a Palm III. And a modem. Having HandMail was a blessing. I was much more self-sufficient.
Finally, I got a Vx to replace my tired III... Sleek and wonderful, another modem of course, slick apps, and yes shirtpocket capable.
But I always had a Day-Timer, and used both. Having a Palm saved me from weekly (or more frequent) printings of a dynamic phonebook in Filemaker Pro. And cutting pages to fit...
I'm hoping things at Palm get back to the lean and mean days of old, where the product seemed to be king, and where good decisions were made.
Until then, Windows Mobile. Ugh.
You wrote,
.co.kr, aimed at all of yahoo.co.kr. very embarassing. It sent 3-4 million messages on a Saturday morning before MCI stopped it and called me. Ugh. And my router once flapped so hard it seemed to be a malicious effort to cause harm. No, it was a bad memory stick. Back then, being stupid would get you kicked off. Especially if you were a tiny ISP, not a blip on anyone's balance sheet. Heck, MCI only talked to me 'cause my biggest client used them for dial lines.
"According to some sources, Comcast is likely using Sandvine [sandvine.com] equipment near their headends to accomplish this feat. And I don't think you understand the nature of RFCs."
I'm referring to Comcast's 'messin' with the Bitorrent conversation - Injecting RSTs is at least bad form, and at the worst it's not RFC-compliant in TCP, UDP, and I wonder what else. My point was that forging RSTs can't be compliant. And I know that RFCs are more or less a gentleman's agreement. Even now. It's just that much more important.
"You could be thinking of how ISPs sometimes will shut down connections to networks who, through mis-configuration or maliciousness, cause trouble. This still happens, but it was more common when the Internet was a mostly a small, close-knit community of operators. As a practice, it works best when the mis-behaving network is either a paying customer or a peer network who highly values your traffic. If the misbehaving network is someone you pay for connectivity, or a peer whose traffic *you* highly value, it's not as wise or effective."
Exactly! My mail servers were once blocked by MCI because I fritzed a setting and they spewed pretty hard. Once again, they got blocked because someone forged delivery failures from
Today, I doubt a Comcast would get kicked off for doing bad things, cause they aren't so stupid. We don't type &'s so blithely any more, do we? It's not likely that we could pressure any providers to ban or penalize any provider, just because of the immense revenue at stake. If only we could...
"Comcast is a big enough consumer ISP that they would be hard to bully into behaving a different way. For example, Amazon and Google get their service from ISPs A & B respectively. Let's say that ISPs A & B decide Comcast is behaving badly. So ISPs A & B stop exchanging traffic with Comcast. What happens next? Amazon and Google call them and say, "WTF are you doing?! Those are our customers you're cutting us off from!! Get us back in touch with them NOW or we're gone." See the problem?"
Sadly, yes. Then again, I'd be peeved too. But the reverse, a service provider using Bitorrrent losing business due to Comcast's policies? Will one of them sue, and force the issue? Then we can have the discussion of responsibility and honesty in ToS and advertising? Too much to hope for.
We do agree, I guess, that comcast is trying to control network usage, probably to control costs. Targeting a high-bandwidth service is wrong, I know you agree, and in fact I suspect we both agree that Comcast is substantially misrepresenting their service. I'll bet a small cup of bad coffee that they advertise file download speeds compared to dialup and even DSL, and then turn right around and penalize users who actually *use* that bandwidth for what they said it was good for...
As a service provider, I know you also know that bandwidth costs. In the end, ya gotta decide if you can make a profit in the business. If not, get out. Comcast seems to not believe they are able to make a profit with Bitorrent left unfettered. Too bad. Lots of other systems seem to be. I check in with my buds in Maine, and Time-Warner doesn't seem to be doing anything to Bitorrent traffic. I'll be testing my Cox connection this weekend dumping some DVD ISOs.
Sooner or later, Comcast is going to lose for this, I think. If only some users could mash up a wifi mesh and pool their $s for a decent uplink.
Of course, then they might find out about the real costs of bandwidth... It would be a grand experiment tho. Huh?
In case you were wondering how important print really is, consider:
/.'rs, cause you are reading it NOW. This is print. Video and audio, a.k.a. Television and Radio, are different.
- Many of the 'print' media are still the source for other media outlets. Reuters, AP, et al.
- Print is coming to the Internet in a big way. Yes, it's been here for a while, but now they are getting serious.
- And print is still relevant even to
Preventing conglomerates from owning all three of the major media types in a market is not a bad thing. Imagine the joy of finding out that the radio report you just heard is merely the soundtrack of the video report everyone else is screaming about, which is merely a regurgitation of the print report nobody read in the first place except the blaggers and wackos.
And you were hoping for the least bit of variety, depth, or integrity in U.S. journalism? Keep reducing the sources, the actual 'creators' of stories, and we will get less of everything.
Especially the truth.
I'm in favor of more restriction, in a way that serves the public interest. Especially in the broadcast media, where they use a public resource, the airways, to disseminate their product. At least in 'print', there isn't much restriction on buying presses, paper, ink, and/or a server.
... if Comcast is essentially attempting to disable Bitorrent, are they by any chance either violating or subverting one or more RFCs? Substitute the proper term for 'violating', that was the strongest word I could come up with quickly.
I recall that in the Early Days of the Internet, not abiding by the RFCs would get you in hot water. Especially screwing up with SMTP would do it, but even bad behaviour due to your incompetence would get your T-1 unclocked, and it would take a few calls to the powers that be to assure them that you found someone who knew what they were doing and that problem wouldn't occur again. At least not for a while.
My point is, perhaps it's time for the other Internet providers to consider requiring Comcast to not mess with traffic in this way, or sanction Comcast.
Sanctions could be as graduated as throttling at the NAPs, degrading Comcast traffic, even disconnects.
Some providers have a stake in this. If the legal Bitorrent users (WoW for instance) get a crossed hair over this, why would they not ask their providers to pressure Comcast into stopping this?
Ultimately, this may be Comcast clinging to their ToS and 'server' restrictions, and that would mean Comcast users won't be sharing out Bitorrent files. Bummer.
Another wrinkle, I wonder if Comcast sends forged RSTs to Comcast users sharing with *other* Comcast users. Intranetwork traffic shouldn't 'cost' so much for Comcast.
My theory is simple - Imagine if ISPs started throttling or denying traffic from Akamai, because of the volume... What a mess. And while Bitorrent is used for all sorts of purposes, so is SMTP. So if they think the illegal use of Bitorrent is sufficient excuse for them to deny it, why don't they throttle/deny SMTP, since simple spam is bad enough, but the emails of worms/trojans/scams also are objectionable. even arguably illegal. And certainly harmful, to users and the Internet. Maybe even Comcast.
Of course, that's not the point. Comcast is trying to avoid costs due to the volume of Bitorrent traffic that leaves them paying for NAP ports, lines to other ISPs, and routers/switches to manage all this.
In other words, they are trying to control costs by controlling usage.
One of the reasons I got out of the business pre-2000. Couldn't make a profit with my business model. Network costs were too high.
Well, another option is to surcharge high-volume users. Or charge more to afford to provide the service ostensibly advertised.
It's not often I can be happy to have Cox Cable. My Qwest DSL before just sucked, but the traffic got through.
Good luck. My bet is the best avenue is a class-action over either false advertising or Magnuson-Moss.
My understanding (and we grilled our supervisor on this one - he was good) is that flashing the drive would REQUIRE the password. But even if it didn't, the data is encrypted. If the password is on the drive firmware, flashing it would lose the password and woops, no data.
This is the hardware encryption scheme - supposedly, even if you put the drive in another Thinkpad, that chip has a different hardware key and even the right password won't decrypt. So it encrypts data onto the drive.
Yes, you could send it out to be extracted. Then go about breaking the key. We didn't get much guidance on the password, but mine was 8 characters and included upper/lower and symbols. It would be nontrivial to extract the drive and decrypt.
On the Thinkpad I used, the FDE password was not just an ATA password. the drive it self was encrypted with this, and not having it meant the drive was unreadable on any system.
I may have mislead you. It isn't a BIOS password, it's a pre-boot password. No password, no boot. It just cycles through another POST and askes for the password after the retries wear out.
If it were just an ATA password, what good would that do?