Re: Domain names are all pointless
Domain names are not pointless for Dynamic DNS.
68 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Jul 2016
This is by no means a stupid idea.
It is yet another precedent of the political class establishing more control over the Internet. Why would they wish to do so? Well some important institutions, like the BBC have already woken up to the Internet as being an existential threat, but also, the political class, in coordination with the established media, have until comparatively recently been able to control narratives, and act as a proxy for public opinion, and they now see their ability to do this slipping away as more and more of the population are talking to each other in forums that are beyond their control.
So more control of, and monitoring of activity on the Internet, and maybe the ability to know when and where to shut it down, must be a step in the right direction as far as the political and power class see it.
PRS access - the high precision encrypted channel, which is presumably what the angst is all about, is apparently under consideration for the US and Norway, and the EU has apparently made provisions for non EU nations to be permitted access,
https://spacenews.com/u-s-norwegian-paths-to-encrypted-galileo-service-open-in-2016/
http://insidegnss.com/delay-continues-for-effort-to-add-galileo-signal-to-u-s-military-receivers/
Agreed. Anyone can make an SBC with any number of cores and loads of RAM. It takes a special kind of designer to come up with something economical of power, making an SBC suitable for an IOT type use case, filling the gap between embedded microcontroller boards and office capable computers.
I'm already somewhat annoyed by the use of 5v on a micro USB port, given the limitations of the port itself for carrying current, which thanks to Ohm's law, has to be greater than if a higher voltage had been used, and makes the system more vulnerable to reduced power thanks to the high resistance leads and connectors that are to be found too often on the typical cheap Chinese power supplies people will be using.
I really wish the designers had gone with a coaxial barrel connector for power all along, which would have allowed the user to specify and solder their own cables.
For this reason, I like the Latte Panda's use of a barrel connector and 12v.
If major browsers have a feature, then it's an entry point for newcomers and novices to the web. If major browsers don't carry RSS, how are people going to get to know of its existence?
I have just got back into RSS after a long time away, and now I hear about this. It's very disheartening. This is an empowering, disintermediating technology, that puts the user in control, and at the centre of the world of their interests. However I can see that this would mean that there it would be of limited interest for the modern, business-oriented world wide web in which the user signs up to a Faustian pact in which they trade convenience for their digital souls. This abandonment of RSS comes at a time when the need for this kind of disintermediation is more needed than ever before.
Anyway - I will use Live Links till they disappear, and I have Newsboat waiting to take over in my bash shell.
For the many not the few.
Shouldn't this mean that he is against regressive taxes?
Like the BBC licence fee?
And increasing the cost of ISP subscriptions so that even people who never use the BBC, and don't want to fund it, still have to? Meaning that even the option of not paying a licence fee is no longer possible for anyone?
Not so much worried about the deadly aspect, but the EMC (Electromagnetic Compatibility) issues. What is this going to do to radio receivers, or other devices not designed for the brave new world of wireless power, which might have bits of circuitry unwittingly acting as antennas for these frequencies, and what frequencies and field strengths do these systems operate at?
Incidentally, there is already some mains power getting into the ether. Anyone who possesses an oscilloscope knows a quick test if it's working is to touch the tip of the probe and see the 50 or 60 Hz mains sine wave your body is picking up from the unshielded mains cables.
It might look that way from a distance, but when you look closer you'll see that generally internet connections are star shaped networks, with an ISP having all their customers connecting to them, and only a small number of routes out. Likewise, most links between cities and countries all come together in peering exchange points, and of course submarine cables tend to follow similar routes, and land at the same places.
For these words of mine to reach you, most of the way they'll be travelling over corporate owned networks and systems, only the last few meters are somewhat 'free'.
At the hardware layer, yes, but at the interpersonal layer, which is what the legacy media and the large commercial enterprises are concerned with, we can communicate directly without having to go through their intermediation, and that is a loss of power to governments, media, corporations, and the politico-media bubble, and the corporate state.
But the hardware layer, and much of the application layer, are controlled by business entities, and the corporate state can now use legislation to control those. If we let them succeed, they can get all communication back under their control. That is bad for us, and freedom and democracy, and ultimately, bad for everybody.
We are not talking about some idealistic utopia, we are talking about something we already have, which, if we are complacent, we are in danger of losing.
Internet is simply a delivery/distribution medium. The same laws as for printed material, bill board ads, TV, Radio content, and Mail Order must apply, as appropriate to content and/or service.
No - it's not simply anything at all.
The Internet and World Wide Web are not like the other media you are talking about, which are centralised, and rely on a lot of concentration of capital and/or power for someone to use, hence making them centralised, star networks - it's a decentralised, mesh based network, allowing many-to-many communication, and the big powers don't like that, because they have cottoned on, maybe too late, to the realisation that the very medium itself, has a natural tendency to shift the centre of gravity away from power and money, to the individual citizen, where it truly belongs, in an actual democracy.
However, power and money, and the legacy media,having realised this, will naturally perceive that as an existential threat to their power and money, and influence, and so can be expected to use legislation to try to make the Internet look like any other centralised distribution system that has existed to date.
El Vark: oh, Pine, how we miss thee
For those still pining for Pine, there's always Alpine...
This story doesn't make sense.
If the two cables were intertwined so that both would be disconnected if just one was pulled, how come his own server didn't switch off as well, the first time he tried to disconnect?
And I presume the "blinkenlichts" were just power LEDs? You would surely shut down the server before disconnecting the power?
Given that twin panel file managers (Midnight Commander style, or Directory Opus for Amiganuts) had already proved their worth for many years prior to the release of this, Windows File Manager looked (to me) like an unnecessary step backwards for the GUI when it came out.
OK - you've sort of got two panels with the directory listing on the left, but its use for drag and drop feels clunky, particularly if you accidentally click a directory in the wrong way and end up with the clicked-on directory ending up displayed in the main panel on the right.
Now, who is going to bake a twin-panel file manager by default in a modern OS? You can get the option in some Linux desktop environments but it's usually by means of a hot-key for power users.
"Since the UK are voluntarily withdrawing from this project, why would they get the money back they've already spent?"
The UK is not voluntarily withdrawing from the project.We're withdrawing voluntarily from the EU. Kicking us out of this is just pressure to keep the rest of the EU project going with all our other funding of it.
The upside is that we will be able to use the GPS system withouth having to fund any more a project which is to go 50% over budget.
With the masses earning no wages, the whole thing collapses. This has already started to happen. The rich don't seem to realise that being rich in terms of possession of money, does not mean riches in terms of actual wealth. A better distribution of money in the form of wages (the healthiest way of getting liquidity into the economy) aided the massive advances of the Post War era.
Just putting my paranoid X-Files hat on, but...
Has anyone considered the outrageous and extremely unlikely hypothesis that maybe those in power want to be the ones with the drone technology and not us, and that if any of us can obtain anything with any serious capability, they might just want to be able to keep tabs on us?
After all, they seemed so reluctant to give us CB radio when it was popular. The Internet got under their radar, but maybe they might not want to let that kind of thing happen again.
All of the above, which I have written, is obviously an outrageous paranoid fantasy, presented for your amusement before being rightfully dismissed, and I am sure our government always act in our interests, like a concerned parent.
Adam 1: Ok agree that the inevitable crash will be pretty spectacular. I don't think the cost of production rises because there are less left. It rises because there are more people mining.
I may have got this wrong, but I am under the impression that it is not a matter of supply and demand - I think that it becomes harder because of the maths of probability: the chances of mining a new coin gets less and less the more are mined, and so it becomes computationally harder to get a guaranteed income stream. For this reason I think it is still worth having a go mining, even with a poxy level of processor power, as you may still luck out.
Am I right?
Most people here seem to be focusing on the allegation itself. There are more interesting questions arising our of this.
1. Why was this not dealt with at the time?
2. Why now?
How is it that someone has kept and held this information for all this time, and why have they chosen to do it now?
You can make any huge amount of money seem small by dividing it into smaller and smaller packets and looking at that.
40p - what is that - per person per hour? Per day?
The money the BBC gets from the licence is £3.7 billion per year.
Now think of that going on cookery programs, dancing programs, and the media/political bubble's views on practically everything, particularly the rightness of collecting the licence fee.
With £3.7 billion per year they could take on Hollywood....
Just Enough: The BBC is also broadcast over the air. How do you build subscription charges onto that?
Satellite broadcasts come "over the air," as a digitally modulated RF signal - they are subscription based, why cannot terrestrial broadcasts do the same? TCP/IP comes "over the air" as 3G and 4G. The future appears to be digital streaming of one form or another.
Iorisarvendu: The Beeb gets £3.7Bn from the License fee. At present only those who have TV broadcast receiving equipment pay it. If you pay for it out of General Taxation, then every Tax Payer will be contributing, regardless of whether they watch TV or not. I thought this was what people were complaining about.
If it came from income tax, it would be related to ability to pay, rather than being exactly the same for a mansion owned by a Baron, with a household of servants and dependants, as it is for a single mum in a bedsit in a council flat in Sunderland.
Anonymous: The BBC has always been a foreign policy instrument
The BBC World Service used to be, before the days of David Camoron, payed for by the Foreign Office. By sleight of hand it was shoved into the Licence Fee, thus transferring yet more general taxation into a regressive tax.
Dr. Mouse:
"I haven't been to the doctors in years, why should I pay for the NHS?
I haven't had any issues with crime, why should I pay for the police?
I haven't had a fire, why should I pay for the fire service?
I haven't had any foreign countries try to attack me, why should I pay for the armed forces?"
How does something that preserves life, or defends it, like the NHS, the fire service, or the military, equate to an entertainment service? And why should we be forced to pay for information we aren't necessarily interested in, or agree with?
If you think this hand-picked entertainment and information is so essential that we all have to pay for it, why don't we all pay for all the other information and entertainment out there? And why is this payment necessary for us to see all the other stuff that this tax doesn't pay for, and for which we have to pay extra?
The whole idea of the TV licence is a nonsense, but it represents a large pot of money (£3.7 billion per year, not 40p a day) that the establishment of this country appears to be so addicted to, that they continually support it within the Westminster bubble.
It sounds like the fatal decision might have been to use Exchange servers for mail - whose brainchild was that?
The document format issue is a red-herring because Office and LibreOffice can both use Open Document Format.
Bearing in mind that MicroSoft themselves won't trust their precious Office365 cloud services, or Azure, to run on their own server OS.
I am on GiffGaff, which piggybacks on O2. I am on 3G (old phone) and I have good reception indoors, but I heard that O2 is on the lower frequency 900 MHz band which should get better penetration through walls..
It might be a good idea to analyse the frequencies used by each service provider...
veti: Policing is hard. Most mistakes are honest ones. Sure there will be exceptions, and they'll get all the attention - but to mistake the exceptions for the rule is one of the basic fallacies.
It's for the exceptions that the cameras would provide a safeguard. If a public servant does not wish to be accountable, maybe they should not be in the job in the first place.
An unarmed Australian woman was shot and killed by a Minneapolis police officer from the passenger seat of his squad car, and strangely neither the dashboard camera or body mounted cameras were switched on at the time.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jul/18/justine-damond-shooting-australians-last-moments-heard-over-us-police-radio
Their use will have to be automatically monitored and officers with non-functioning cameras automatically recalled from duty to have them fixed, if these cameras are to be fit for purpose in safeguarding the rights of the public.
Absolutely - with GiffGaff here - I have never had a contract on a mobile phone, though I have on broadband.
Contracts achieve two things for businesses.
The first is anti-competitive - for the time that you are locked in, you cannot switch, so market forces cannot operate for that time. If most people are on contracts most of the time, then the market is mostly suspended. This is particularly bad in the energy market where the government claims we are expected to switch to bring prices down, but many of us end up entering into agreements that prevent us from doing so. In the energy markets, customers who enter into fixed term contracts also unwittingly become speculators in energy price futures, which unsurprisingly, the smoke-and-mirrors energy retailers are much better at.
The second is securitisation. The moment you are in a contract, you have entered into a debt obligation which can be sold on instantly, for an instant upfront profit for the telco / energy provider etc.
Contracts are the gift that keeps giving as far as businesses are concerned, and it is a pity that most of us do not realise this and refuse to enter into them. If we did, we could have a proper competitive market.
Hans 1: If you don't like immigration, fine, but stand to it and go back to West Africa!
Because as we all know, the problems that we now face with a world population of 7.6 billion, and diametrically opposed cultures with vast numbers of adherents, are exactly the same as those that faced Early Man on the savannas of Africa 100 000 years ago.
Our favourite Nurse Ratched doesn't want to do anything as innocuous as close down TV stations, but jail people for up to 15 years for persistently viewing "far right propaganda," whatever that means. Since UKIP, or people who simply oppose current levels of mass immigration, have been called "far right," this can mean views we want to suppress.
Amber Rudd: I want to make sure those who view despicable terrorist content online, including jihadi websites, far-right propaganda and bomb-making instructions, face the full force of the law,” said Rudd. “There is currently a gap in the law around material [that] is viewed or streamed from the internet without being permanently downloaded.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/oct/03/amber-rudd-viewers-of-online-terrorist-material-face-15-years-in-jail
Unlike the Americans, we don't have a written constitution or a first amendment to protect us.
Mephistro: And it'd be trivial for the USA to deploy sound analysers able to identify sonic attacks. Hell, they could probably do it with an app for smartphones and tablets!
Maybe not for smartphones and tablets since they will be equipped with microphones designed to work in the normal range of human hearing. However, yes, I think even a hobbyist could rig up devices for monitoring AF and RF at a wide range of frequencies.
The problem I have with Virgin is that they want to sell me their media, but they don't want to do the only thing I want from them, get high speed fibre optic services to my house. I know that they have a box just 50 yards from my house. I saw some Virgin techs at work on this box, so I asked them if there is Virgin fibre there. They said "yes." I asked them if it could be connected to my property. They said "yes," but every time I contacted Virgin, it was "computer says no."
Form my personal experience, therefore, I am not surprised to hear that they are having to downsize.
I've just been reading William Gibson's Neuromancer, and was struck by one sentence: "Travel was a meat thing." A dismissive view of physical travel versus digital communications. Why are we spending billions on HS2 to facilitate business travel when we could revolutionise our economy for a fraction of this cost by delivering high speed fibre to every home?
Given that, after the unfortunate result when he turned on his satellite phone, Bin Laden relied only on couriers and sneakernet to convey messages, and T.E Lawrence managed to conduct an entire insurgency campaign in the Middle East using nothing more for communication than messages carried by camel, could the "Five Eyes" prove to us what plots could have been averted using the decryption of strongly encrypted messages, what plots were coordinated using strong encryption, and what terrorist actions could not be coordinated by other means, i.e messengers and sneakernet? Bearing in mind that once an operation is under way, communications won't even need to be encrypted, and you'll have a pretty good idea the operation is happening, anyway?
The clock ticking while the boffins try to decipher the message to discover the location of the bomb, while the grinning terrorist sits there in his cell, keeping stumm, is just too much of a Hollywood movie plot scenario.
It is wildly simplistic to say that terrorists' sole aim is to kill. It is much closer to the truth to say that their sole aim is to appear on television.
This is not the Baader Meinhof gang - the extreme Islamists believe that if they die waging Jihad against the infidel, then they will go straight to paradise. They aren't doing it just for publicity, or to spark a reaction - they are also operating from the simple Stoical philosophy that if they are killing us, they are doing the right thing.