Slashback: Safety, Transmissions, Breakage

Slashback has updates tonight on nuclear-safe hosting facilities, the temporary return of Metricom's Ricochet service, and a possible problem with Apple's newest upgrade for anyone using Xfree86 under Mac OS X.

A soft spot on the Apple?MacXGuy writes: "I recently obtained by free 10.1 upgrade from the Apple Store in the Mall of America. After installing it on my Titanium PB-G4 XFree4.1 (http://www.mrcla.com/XonX/) no longer works. (I'm definitely not installing it on my Dual 800 G4 until a workaround is found.)"

Since most of the stuff I've heard about the 10.1 upgrade has been positive to the point of suspicion, I wonder if anyone else has experienced similar upgrade quibbles with it.

Another good reason for a complex infrastructure. PhantomHarlock writes "New York City officials requested and got what's left of Metricom to re-activate the wireless network in the area surrounding the World Trade Center. Rescue and cleanup crews are using the network to coordinate and access death certificates filed online. Only one rooftop transmitter had been destroyed, the other four are still intact."

Even when you're right, you're wrong -- as the fine print clearly shows. An anonymous reader points to column in InfoWorld about interpreting the overlapping, contradictory and sometimes funny EULAs that accompany Microsoft products. Microsoft certainly isn't alone in that regard either -- ever read a EULA you thought was totally fair, unambiguous, and satisfying? Mr. Anonymous writes: "This was amply illustrated last week after I mentioned here that the EULA (end-user license agreement) for FrontPage 2002 contains a term prohibiting use of the software in connection with a site that disparages Microsoft or its online services. I love it."

The only place to hunker is a well-connected bunker. severn2j writes: "It seems that AL Digital's nuclear bunker (posted on /. a few weeks ago), has paid off for them in light of the attacks on the U.S. So much so that they've got another one."

And for all your fair-use needs ... An Anonymous Coward writes "Maybe lyrics.ch is going down now, but most of its content and even more is available from LyricsDot which is not going to close."

Good to hear. Amateur song transcription really isn't such a bad thing, except when you consider most of the songs.

WTF?

[ekrout]

Anyone else still having trouble believing that sentence above is talking about New York City, USA in the year 2001? --> PhantomHarlock writes "New York City officials requested and got what's left of Metricom to re-activate the wireless network in the area surrounding the World Trade Center. Rescue and cleanup crews are using the network to coordinate and access death certificates filed online. Only one rooftop transmitter had been destroyed, the other four are still intact."

EULA Question

[jiheison]

Has any M$ EULA ever been tested in court? Or is it just a legal stick that they use to menace people into compliance. Being that they never receive any physical proof that you "accepted" anything, it seems unlikely that they could use it against users.

Sure, it covers them from being sued for faulty software. But is it really a threat to users who "missuse" their products?

Redundancy in the net/points of failure

[NotSurprised]

The article about nuclear bunker hosting got me thinking. We all know that back in the early days of the Net, when it was run by the US military/govt, it WAS designed to survive a nuclear attack, especially in terms of topology/redundancy.

But since the commercialization of the Internet, has this objective been swept aside for the pursuit of mere growth? How vulrenable as single points of failure are places like MAE-East, MAE-West, etc where the major backbones peer together?

Now, since the Net is mission-critical for a lot of businesses, might we need to ensure that it is survivable against such attacks, such as from terrorism?

Could anyone really say the Internet is still robust to the failure of a few nodes? Any real study been done the graph-structure of the net?

Uhh

[alexburke]

LyricsDot which is not going to close

If there's one thing the Slashdot crowd has figured out, it's to not count one's chickens before they've hatched.

As soon as the Harry Fox Agency [nmpa.org] gets wind of this, I'm sure they'll go after this new variant with just as much zeal.

However, since it appears as though the site truly IS hosted in Russia (rather than having a North American-based site with a .RU address), it just might stick around for a while after all!

[ 8 ]

RIPE whois query for www.lyricsdot.ru (195.34.224.76):

inetnum: 195.34.224.0 - 195.34.224.255
netname: AOR2-1-NET
descr: Lipetsk regional network
country: RU
admin-c: AOR2-RIPE
tech-c: AOR2-RIPE
rev-srv: ns1.lipetsk.ru
rev-srv: ns2.lipetsk.ru
rev-srv: ns.vrn.ru
status: ASSIGNED PA
mnt-by: AOR2-MNT-RIPE
changed: [e-mail] 19980321
source: RIPE

route: 195.34.224.0/19
descr: Lipetsk Regional Public Network
origin: AS8570
mnt-by: AOR2-MNT-RIPE
changed: [e-mail] 19971207
source: RIPE

person: Alexander I Ostankov
address: JSC "Lipetskelectrosvyaz"
address: Lipetsk regional NIC
address: 5, Plekhanova str.
address: SU-398000 Lipetsk, Russia
phone: [phone]
phone: [phone]
fax-no: [phone]
e-mail: [e-mail]
nic-hdl: AOR2-RIPE
mnt-by: AOR2-MNT-RIPE
changed: [e-mail] 19981223
source: RIPE

What do you expect?

[megaduck]

I'm not really suprised by 10.1 breaking X. In order to get the speed increases that I've been hearing about, they probably had to retouch darn near everything all the way down to the kernel level. That includes the BSD layer, so I wouldn't be surprised if anything written at that level has problems. Even Apple's own dev tools that came with 10.0 are broken.

While losing X is irritating, I have a hard time getting angry at Apple. OS X was a real dog, and they absolutely needed to get performance up to snuff. Besides which, I'm sure that this glitch will be corrected shortly. Until then, you can get by with Aqua. It's not that bad. :)

Complex infrastructures aren't always that good

[gburgyan]

That's one of the inefficiencies of a complex, competitive environment. If everyone wants to set up their own wireless network, for instance, there's going to be a lot of overlap in the low-level stuff. This is not anti-capitalistic, it's just that some bit of standardization is a good thing - take a look at the IBM PC ISA and TCP/IP. While certain amounts are good (a Windows worm hasn't yet also struck Linux for instance) but too much really is a waste.

The same could have been done with the wireless freenets [slashdot.org] that was mentioned a few articles ago.

Redudancy is good. Too much redundancy is bad.

Uhhh...

[bIOHZRd]

Go ahead and score this as insightful O' modera-tors....

The Bunker offers the ultimate in protection from a myriad of attacks including; crackers, terrorist attack, electro-magnetic pulse, HERF weapons, electronic eavesdropping and solar flares.

That seems kind of confusing to me that it offers protection against electronic eavesdropping, as doesn't the building need to connect to the "outside world" somehow? As long as a single line filled with data is coming out of the building, it isn't protected fully. Now if they could secure the lines all the way to uhh, the end user's house...THEN it would be superior.

"The Bunkers" Threats..

[crazney]

In the news story linked above, one of the "upcomming threats" that someone mentioned was this:

'It is not just terrorists that companies should be worried about. The biggest threat is anti-capitalists. They aren't going to go away. They've seen the hysteria and how capitalists go weak at the knees.

WTF is that about? I consider myself an anti-capitalist (living in a capitalist world, damnit) and so do some of my friends.. but why on earth would be want to break in and destroy computers or launch nukes on them? For gods sake we are geeks!

Much of that redundancy went out the window...

[Ungrounded Lightning]

The article about nuclear bunker hosting got me thinking. We all know that back in the early days of the Net, when it was run by the US military/govt, it WAS designed to survive a nuclear attack, especially in terms of topology/redundancy.

But since the commercialization of the Internet, has this objective been swept aside for the pursuit of mere growth? How vulrenable as single points of failure are places like MAE-East, MAE-West, etc where the major backbones peer together?

Much of that redundancy went out the window due to two factors:

The move from a generalized net (most sites talk to a random minimum of two others, the routers figure out the shortest route) to a backbone-plus-ISPs with lots of fixed routing and most sites as singly-connected leaves.

If you lose (all) your connection(s) to your ISP, or your ISP loses any single-point-of-failure or all N of a set of n-points-of-failure between you and the backbone, you're cut off. Running an ethernet cable to a neighbor's LAN that's still connected via another ISP will not get you the packets that were trying to reach your IP address.

Your ISP's connection with the rest of the backbone might have some nice self-healing characteristics. So the net-of-ISPs might still have that kind of survivability. But your packets are at the mercy of your ISP's survival and internals. (And if you're paying home rather than business rates I bet your ISP didn't spend many bux to make things redundant on their way to you.)

With the explosion of hosts the full routing tables are now WAY too big to be held in every router on the net. So we can't go back to the old style even if we wanted to - or at least not without a LOT of engineering.

Yes--The Perforce EULA is Excellent

[sudog]

It's clear, unambiguous, and I'm happy to say very fair.

An EULA that I thought was fair.

[AdrianG]

In the mid 80's, I remeber using Turbo-C/Borland-C, and the licence agreement (called a "No Nonsense Licence Agreement") said something about using the software "like a book". You could make all the copies you wanted, loan it to friends, install it on as many different systems as you wanted, as long as you made sure that only one copy was in use at a time.

Does any one else remember that?? I don't have a copy of it any more.

Adrian

Re:An EULA that I thought was fair.

[dwlemon]

"This software is protected by copyright law and international copyright treaty. Therefore, you must treat this software just like a book, except that you may copy it onto a computer to be used and you may make archive copies of teh software for the sole purpose of backing up our software and protecting your investment from loss.

By saying "just like a book," Borland means, for example, that this software may be used by any number of people, and may be freely moved from one computer or location to another, so long as there is no possibility of it being used by more than one person at a time. Just as a book can't be read by two different people in two different places at the same time, neither can the software be available for use by two different people in two different places at the same time without Borland's permission (unless, of course, Borland's copyright has been violated)."

emphasis in original text, typos added by me

Re:10.1 breaks things

[hysterion]

anybody having troubles with 10.1 breaking things - this [stepwise.com] has a whole bunch of handy pointers

Found this part interesting:

Apple has removed [wget] in 10.1 as yet another GPL'd tool that can be replaced with a non-GPL alternative.

This seems to be the reason they also avoided bash. Is the plan to ultimately remove everything GNU? Grepping 10.0.x manpages [google.com] reveals a few that seem potentially there:

diff
dpkg
emacs
enscript
etags
gawk
gnutar
grep
groff
gunzip
gzip
less
patch
sort

(Just asking! Please correct rather than flame the inevitable errors/omissions.)

PC Gamer / Computer Gaming World

[|<amikaze]

I dont recall which one it was, but a few years ago, I was glancing at the CD, and I noticed the following comment on the package: "By inserting this disc into your CD-Rom drive, you agree to the terms of the license agreement. To view this agreement, please see the file LICENSE.TXT on the CD-Rom"

Heh, catch 22.