4 years in solitary?
Likely for his own safety.
It's a pity there are no 3 strikes rules for federal charges. Ralsky is a career criminal with a fairly long rapsheet.
Posts by Alan Brown 1
8 publicly visible posts • joined 25 Sep 2009
Ralsky jailed for four years over stock fraud spam scam
New sensitive space gloves: NASA spends wad freely
GE tries to refocus image of holographic storage
Wednesday 30th September 2009 14:18 GMT
Blu-ray = too expensive
Have you priced up Blu-ray blanks recently?
400Gb isn't large enough for backups and Blu-ray's current 25-40 quid apiece for 50Gb blanks is too high for mass market acceptability (it's 5 times the price/Gb I can buy DVD-R media for. DVD-R only took off when it fell below CD-R in price/Mb)
Pliant pops out SASsy SSD
Tape users wait for news of LTO 7 and 8
Monday 28th September 2009 14:23 GMT 
Tape bandwidth
RAIT is already a reality in top end backup solutions. It solves bandwidth problems fairly nicely and will for quite a while.
The only annoying thing about the LTO roadmap is the forced read-only compatibility with 2 generations back and nothing at all 3 generations, even when technically possible to do so.
IMO SSD will completely eat the sub-1TB disk market in less than 3 years and eclipse capacities greater than 2Tb shortly afterwards - but nothing matches the _proven_ endurance factor of tapes for the moment. (We test samples of our backups regularly to ensure the tapes are readable, do you?)
Sales droids rave on about how disk makes tape redundant. and how the d2d backup systems can fit in our existing server rooms. I love to watch them backpedal when I ask the questions "What happens in a fire?" "What happens when someone types 'rm -rf /' ?" and "What happens when some script kiddie deliberately destroys your disk backups?" - I've seen all three cases occur and it's a lot harder to trash a set of backup tapes tucked away securely in a data safe
(Part of a decent data safe's specification is to survive a 10 metre drop mid-fire. Most disk drives would be mechanically damaged by such an event. Tapes don't care)
FCC ferrets around for spare spectrum
Monday 28th September 2009 11:14 GMT
Power reductions...
... already happen. That's been part of cellular design from the outset in order to maximise efficiency and minimise adjacent cell interference.
The average urban/suburban cell is only transmitting a few milliwatts and often you'll find that an active mobile in close proximity to a cell (such as one on top of a school) is transmitting with less than 1mW Tx power (Which kind of puts a spike in the chicken littles of the world. that 1mW next to a child's head gives a RF field several thousand times times stronger than being a few metres away from a 20W transmitter mast - but urban infill transmitter masts (especially in areas like schools) seldom if ever transmit with more than 1W aggregate because they're talking to mobiles usually only up to 300 metres away.
The problem is there is a minimum size you can go to for a cell and there's a maximum number of calls or data throughput each cell can handle in any given spectrum allocation. Urban cells are regularly running beyond saturation points in many areas.
BTW: The data figures seem about right, if not small to me. I'm seeing a lot of people complain about hitting data caps on mobile broadband connections before the month's even half gone.
IETF forges botnet clean-up standard
Friday 25th September 2009 14:40 GMT
The "don't cares"
Should be prosecuted.
Once warned that they're part of a botnet they're liable for damages if they don't take steps to fix the machine - or at the very least any liability cover they may have is voided.
Seriously though: The problem will pretty much solve itself if infected users face the full costs they end up inflicting on the outside world - contractual penalties in ISP agreements would be a good starting point.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
