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User: WaffleMonster

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  1. Re:Peering Agreement on Time Warner Defends Comcast In Level 3 Dispute · · Score: 1

    Nope. You've got the gist of it.
    Comcast and Level3 had a settlement free peering agreement based on a roughly 1:1 traffic exchange. Level3 now wants to send 5:1 more traffic to Comcast, meaning their settlement free peering agreement is no longer valid. Comcast is just trying to negotiate a new peering agreement

    None of this passes the smell test. Just by public statements most of it is factually incorrect.

    "Until Level 3 fomented this dispute, Comcast and Level 3 exchanged Internet traffic as part of a commercial interconnection agreement"

    "Although the parties exchanged traffic at a ratio of about 2:1, with Comcast terminating more of Level 3's traffic, this was well within the industry's established bounds for "roughly balanced" traffic"

    The source for these statements is comcasts own web site:
    http://blog.comcast.com/2010/11/comcasts-letter-to-fcc-on-level-3.html

    Comcast does *NOT* have an SFI with L3, it is a COMMERCIAL agreement Comcast is a transit customer of L3. The "balance" admitted by Comcast is 2:1 .. "roughly balanced" ... It is clear the term balanced does not mean equally balanced. The 1:1 ratio is not being asserted by either side.

    There is no last mile ISPs on earth whos users do not download a heck of a lot more traffic than they upload. It is common knowledge the "balance" is not an even ratio of bits but rather a **COST BASED** estimate of equal value of those bits.

    The SFI peering language on comcasts own web site makes it clear the relationship is cost driven:

    "Applicant must maintain a traffic scale between its network and Comcast that enables a general balance of inbound versus outbound traffic. The end-to-end costs of carrying traffic between networks shall be similar to justify SFI"
    http://www.comcast.com/peering

    An equal amount of *value* determines the balance which informs the actual ratio of rx to tx.

    This begs the question what is a fair price L3 should have to pay for the honor of giving comcasts own customers the bits they requested and incidently PAY comcast to provide them?

    This seems to me about as absurd as asking UPS to pay you for the honor of delivering packages to your doorstep.

    And to bring up Cogent vs L3 as if they are the same thing just shows that you don't get it. Comcast is a last mile ISP, most of the bits going to it are consumed directly by Comcast subscribers. Cogent and L3 are both Tier-1 providers those bits are mostly intermediate TRANSIT.

  2. Re:Good for them - not a lot of choice on Google, Microsoft Cheat On Slow-Start — Should You? · · Score: 1

    But every rule has its exception. Here you are dealing with TCP. It's so broken, so backwards, so conservative ...
    "the gods thus spake in 1989, and their prophet Van Jacobsen likewise sayeth"

    There are other protocols such as SCTP intended to address shortcommings of TCP... Yet after all these years nobody seems to care that they even exist. If TCP were as bad as your remarks suggest I would have expected more takers on the alternatives?

    You comment TCP is so broken and backwards yet I don't know and you don't mention whats wrong with it?

    Even browsers do crazy things on this principle. We'll open 2 (or 4, or whatever, depending on how clever you are) connections to the same web server.
    Why??? The pipe(s) remain the same. Ah... but but any individual connection can remain compliant. The aggregate ... not so

    TCP is a head of line blocking protocol supporting only one active stream per session.

    By establishing multiple connections some can still transmit data while other TCP sessions might be idle waiting for acks. It makes a noticable difference in environments with high latency links..not so much anymore for broadband users.

    Today the bigger reasons for it are just shortcomings in HTTP and browser technology stacks. If you sent everything in a single stream there is an ordering dependancy that significantly effects load time. For example if you send a large image before sending a style sheet the page loading now needs to wait for the style sheet. You could use more intelligence and huersitics to prioritize but the ideal dependancies are not always easy to resolve, deterministic or knowable a priori. Sending everything at once is low hanging fruit that for the most part works.

    The aggregate ... not so, but TCP
    doesn't constrain aggregates so one can remain in the church

    Whats the point of even trying? You can't constrain aggregates WRT other applications, computers, access devices..etc so why pretend it makes any difference if it were possible on the TCP session level? In my view the only approach is for the session to be aware of the environment and live as cooperativly as reasonable within its constraints.

    In the absence of this, companies like Google and Microsoft have little choice but to drive us forward using their own judgment

    I'm concerned with the possibility of judgements slanted by each corporations narrow world views. I prefer open SDOs whos members are comprised of all stake holders take us forward.

  3. Re:No. on Can Apps Really Damage a Cellular Network? · · Score: 1

    In most cellular networks your phone needs to request and be granted a channel/timeslot/whatever thru which data will flow.

    It has nothing to do with higher level protocols... What people are referring to is the overhead of turning access to the network itself on and off repeatedly. It is like reaching over and continually unplugging your modem.. If everyone on an ISPs network did that at the same time it is very likely to overwhelm the ISPs backend authentication systems.

  4. Feeding patent trolls... on Microsoft To Pay $200M In Patent Dispute · · Score: 1

    Before you condemn Microsoft for stealing someones IP you might want to look at both the companies current web site and the patents they are claiming to have been violated (689759, 6502135, 7188180)

    How do you get away with including Windows XP in a suite when it was released BEFORE the earliest patent date?

    The company even claims to hold the patent on "secure DNS"... Feeding trolls does not help society or advance technology even when it hurts a technology company you hate.

  5. Re:Hard Drive Encryption? on Laptops Searched and Confiscated at U.S. Border · · Score: 1

    Thats what a duress password is for :)

  6. Re:Other options on LDAP Authentication in Linux · · Score: 1
    The Netscape directory server (NDS) became the iplanet directory server which then became the Sun directory something or other after sun axed the partnership taking NMS and NDS with it.

    Sun also had their own directory and mail server (SIMS) both really sucked. Their LDAP server was based almost entirly on the unmodified University of Michigan codebase and was as slow and unrealiable as a directory server could possibly get. It wasn't long until it was abandonded in favor of stealing netscapes messaging and directory server which are both excellent products.

    Now somehow redhat managed to get their grubby little hands on the same directory server.. I don't know exactly what miracle happened there but it put a big grin on my face when I heard the news.. NDS rocks.. everyone should use it.

  7. Re:Are you surprised? on Phishers Defeat Citibank's 2-Factor Authentication · · Score: 1

    You know what gets me more than anything about online banking is the number of insitutions that provide input boxes for login/password directly from their insecure (http) home pages. Whats even scarier than that is I told my bank about the dangers of such nonsense and their staff couldn't understand why it wasn't a good idea or what my problem was with it. They told me that the data is being submitted to a 'secure' site. Tell that to your customers when someone decided to operate a rouge hotspot downtown redirecting your 'secure' login from a spoofed home page to their own bank account without any way for you to know what has happened until its too late or does the same using DNS or BGP attacks. IMHO It's much more a cultural issue than a technological one and it pisses me off that institutions who should know better don't get it or don't care. I think token cards have a history of being more noise (MITM and duplication vectors) than useful and zero knowledge authentication systems such as SRP rock and IMHO would provide more meaningful and useful security. A SRP http authentication mechanizim that was also cryographically bound the SSL session itself would do so much more for security than silly little cards. which means very little when someone operates a free hotspot downtown

  8. Re:Slashdot through the looking glass? on 20 Things You Won't Like About Vista · · Score: 1

    Most problems people have with their computers coming out of sleep mode are configuration problems. Many times it's a nic with wake-on-lan enabled or a wake event set in the OS/bios that for example wakes on a change of battery level that can be easily reconfigured. The only problem I've had with hibernate was on my 2 year old thinkpad T41.. every once in a while it would fail and I'd have to reboot to get it back. I finally found a new set of video drivers (ATI 9600) and havn't had a problem since. I believe that most suspend/hibernate problems are actually linked to driver bugs/poor driver quality with some brand x device you may have in your PC. With Intel hardware theres a lot more hardware choices compared to MAC and people tend to have different experiences with suspend/hibernate as a result. IMHO everyone should be hibernating their notebooks if off for any period of time (such as leaving work for the day) instead of using suspend or some "hybrid" mode as constantly topping off L-Ion batteries is a very good way to shorten their life for no good reason especially concidering some notebooks have brain dead charging logic.

  9. Re:Hypocritical on China Passes Internet Copyright Legislation · · Score: 1

    In China to have your works copied is concidered an honor -- there is a different mindset that needs to be recognized. With all of the legal squabbling in the US with patents and copyrights and organizations using the law to both unjustly enrich themselves and protect their flawed technologies I don't think we should be "exporting" our flawed ideas until at least we get our own problems straightened out.

  10. Quantum crypto VS zero knowledge agreement on Code for Unbreakable Quantum Encryption · · Score: 1

    So maybe I'm stupid but heres an obvious question.

    What is the advantage of quantum cryptography over zero knowledge protocols such as SRP?

    There absoultely needs to be some prior 'out of band' knowledge established between 'Bob' and 'Alice' to prevent MITM by a 'Malice' tapping both classical and quantum channels and operating it's own proxy beam splitter...

    so it seems to me that the quantum advantage is reduced to a prior knowledge requirement which makes it a weakest link canceling any advantage of the quantum channel alltogeather. It's just harder to do, not impossible.