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Comment Re:At least the French didn't murder anyone this t (Score 1) 196

Bla bla bla ... the French ... bla bla Slashdot ... bla bla surrender ... bla bla bla unrelated. Pffff

The fact is that two execs from a powerful public utility got jail sentence. So it is not "unlike the rainbow warrior case" but it is rather very good sign on how justice worked in France for this particular cases regardless of the past and despite the fact the French govt would have more interest in supporting nuclear business.

Submission + - IP location taken seriously by telecom regulators (ofcom.org.uk)

neutrino38 writes: "Locating IP calls is becoming an increasingly important subject.

- More and more persons and companies are equiped with VoIP access
Service provider as us may be interested or required to provide video call access to emergency services.

- The transport of location information is already well described and standardized by IETF and the ECRIT commitee and is using XML format (how verbose!) called LO-PIDF. Its handling in SIP protocol is decribed in the following draft: location conveyance.

Finally, telecom authority are starting to take notice and OfCom, the British regulator has produced a fairly comprehensive report about this. Good reading."

Comment Re:Minitel again (Score 1) 191

Ah ah!

  this alternative history of the Internet is sooooo american that it becomes exotic. I especially like the idea that the FCC would mandate the French minitel to fix bob. Eh eh ! Microsoft protocol fixed by a French (socialist) govenment mandated cheese carrying protocol. Bob must be VERY BAD.

Joke aside, although it is a good thing that Minitel has been superseeded by the Internet in France, it WAS a success and brought millions of people online way before the Internet was widespread. It also enabled a generation of French telecommunication engineer to have a market outside the telecommunication adminsitration (France Telecom was still public at that time). I do not share at all the view of some of my compatriotes that it slew down the rollout of Internet in France.

Finally, it haf this kiosk feature that would enable users to be charged of service usage on their phone bill without hassle. Apple store and iTune replicate this in a much shinier and user friendly way but which one is more 'neutral'? A market operated by a single company or by a public administration?

The answer would probably different on both sides of the atlantic.

Comment Re:Similar case in France (Score -1, Redundant) 457

Here, we had a guy who mounted a camera on his motorbike and recorded his feats. He got controlled by the policeman and the had the good idea to size the device and review the recorded video.

[fr] http://www.lejdd.fr/Societe/Faits-divers/Actualite/Un-motard-filme-ses-infractions-205788/

The found 65 counts of infraction to road regulations including a HUGE speed excess and the guy had the "good" idea to record the speed indicator to prove it to his friends. Bad idea. The material was not posted on the Internet rather extracted directly from the camera. I was very difficult to deny it did not happen in real life in this case.

Comment Re:Similar case in France (Score -1, Redundant) 457

Here, we had a guy who mounted a camera on his motorbike and recorded his feats. He got controlled by the policeman and the had the good idea to size the device and review the recorded video.

[fr] http://www.lejdd.fr/Societe/Faits-divers/Actualite/Un-motard-filme-ses-infractions-205788/

The found 65 counts of infraction to road regulations including a HUGE speed excess and the guy had the "good" idea to record the speed indicator to prove it to his friends. Bad idea. The material was not posted on the Internet rather extracted directly from the camera. I was very difficult to deny it did not happen in real life in this case.

Comment Re:Similar case in France (Score 1) 457

Here we had a guy on a motorbike that mounted a camera and recorded his feats.

[fr] http://www.lejdd.fr/Societe/Faits-divers/Actualite/Un-motard-filme-ses-infractions-205788/

The policemen had the good idea to seize the device and review the recorded video and just found 65 counts of infraction to the road regulations.
One of them was a HUGE speed excess and the guy even recorded the speed indicator just to "prove" it to his friends. Bad idea ...
Of course the difference is that this material was not posted on the Internet. The video was directly extracted from the camera mounted on the bike. So the driver could not really deny that it did not happen in real life.

Comment Re:No details on the attack (Score 1) 119

All this article is pretty unclear about the attack method described.

All it says is that they supposedly find ways to tap in APIs that associate GSM phone numbers with names. I am not sure that such API are standardized.

Then they say that IF you have direct access to SS7 network and you are able to query the HLR, you are able to track down people (because you are able to get the attachement MSC and possibily the Cell ID using the MAP protocol).

This IF is a big IF. They did not demonstre haw you may break in to the SS7 network from outside of it.

Guys, you have to understand that SS7 network are not exactly working like a IP network. Most of the time, routing is statick and a peer to peer trust relationship must be established between your host and the network before you can eventhing of querying an HLR like this. So this "attack" supposes that the attacked network would basically allow you in.

Unless, they come up with something very new, this is pretty weak. The attack on GSM encryption for conversation was much more significant.

Comment Re:H.264 -- use codecs embedded in OS (Score 1) 473

Hello,

I wonder why using H.264 is such a big fuss in Opera and Firefox.

- modern operating systems have embedded H.264 codecs in it (through Direct Show API on Windows and through Quicktime on Mackintosh).
- more and more video GPU are embedding an H.264 decoder nowadays.

So apart from the "philosofic" approach, one could take advantage of these available H.264 decoders to perform video playback and decoding without having to pay any fee or breaking any licence. What remains to be agreed upon in the container file format. MP4 / 3GPP are covered by patents. I can support MPEG-LA for licencing codecs but I never understood anybody patenting a file format. Where is the innovation in a file format?

I my view, everybody should have H.264 as baseline for video (this does not exclude the support for Theora) and agree on a patent free file format or at least advocate the gvt to have these format freed from their patents.

Comment Re:Google is already offering a free DNS service (Score 1) 271

So all this can be seen as a new way to "organise the Internet information" according to them.

In other word inviding again your privacy silently.

If this was to be implemented, one could associate the IP sub network with a web site names without any need to use a search engine. Great for profiling. If performance was the issue, a better set of regional DNS caches would be more relevant here.

I cannot help but suspect some hidden motives here.

Comment Re: SIP? a single RFC? LOL! (Score 2, Informative) 220

Hahahahaha !

SIP a single RFC? Can you imagine the number of SIP related RFCs and associated drafts? SIP WAS simple, it is now a mess. Even if we restrict to RFC 3261, if you can asnwer the following questions you are already a MASTER in SIP:

- what is the difference between request URI and the "To" header? Are they redundant?
- what is the difference between the "Contact" header, the "P-Asserted-Identity" header and the "From" header?
- what is the loose routign mechanism and what is the relationship with the "Via" headers?
- what is the need for "from tags" and 'to tags".

If we go a bit further:

- Why is SIP/SIMPLE do we need to introduce an "etag" and why not resuing the callid ?
- etc.

We are a company that is based on SIP and very in favor of this protocol mostly form market reasons but one should not be blind: this protocol has its problems like any other. At the beginning, it was sooo "simple" that it could not even support "announced transfer" or line supervision which is a must for corporate telephony then the real people jumped in and added what it takes to make it usable and added complexity.

Even the big telco that are hated so much in this forum jumped in and created the IMS standards based on SIP (under the ETSI Umbrella = European ...). They took it to the next level of complexity but they NEEDED IT because they are the guys who enable you and me to call from A to B without even thinking about how this is done (since more that 100 years).

If you imagine one second that you can only read ONE RFC to start working on the real SIP world, you are VERY WRONG (see RFC 3581, RFC2327, RFC 3264, RFC 3550 + all the RFC dedicated to packetization, SIP/SIMPLE, MESSAGING, ....)

Now if you compare SIP with H.323, I agree that initially, one can see a lot of advantages.
- H323 has a stupid protocol layering
- slow dialog establishment, etc?
and although they have improved this, this is still not perfect but they have advandages as well:

- camera control and double video streams are a reality in H.323 world wher in SIP it is still on paper only and badly documented.
- screen and application sharing are a reality on H.323 world. They are non existant in SIP
- H.323 has defined a clean standard for NAT traversal where SIP has a set of "best practices" spread in various RFC (keepalive, rport, symetric RTP, etc.).

if you cannot read the ITU standards that is basically because:
- most of them need to be bought
- they have a strong culture of separating the function and the encoding, which renders them difficult to grasp for field hackers
- ITU protocols are often based on ASN.1 BER encoding and therefore are compact an binaries and cannot be test with a simple TELNET connection, which seems to trouble a lot of Internet gurus.

Emmanuel
http://www.ives.fr/

Microsoft

Submission + - Side By Side assemblies: DLL Hell 2.0 (dotnetmonster.com)

neutrino38 writes: This is an alert for all developers using Microsoft Visual Studio 2005.

At the beginning of January, Microsoft issued a security fix for Visual Studio 2005 forcing the use of news dynamic libraries (DLLs) by all application compiled with this IDE. Basically, the application compiled with Visual Studio 2005 will not work anymore on ordinary (non dev) PC unless the newer DLL are to be installed. And we found out that happened on fully updated PCs. I posted a detailed article here: http://www.ives.fr/index.php/blog/post/19 for those needing more technical details.

For those who are not familiar with the Microsoft world, native microsoft applications written in C++ rely on dynamic libraries. Two of them are famous or infamous: MSVCRT.DLL and MFCxx.dll. Because of the evolution and other security fix, multiple version of these DLL were often present in the system causing application instability. Where Linux resorted to some simple suffix notation on the dynamic libraries, Microsoft created a new beast in 2001: the Side By Side assemblies http://articles.techrepublic.com.com/5100-10878_11-5032712.html. These are basically DLLs with a comanion XML files that identify them. The XML file contains a digital signature and when the system binds these DLL dynamically to an application, it checks the match and check that the signature of the DLL matches the DLL itself.

When everythings runs well, this is pretty transparent. But when issues arises, it becomes excruciatingly difficult to troubleshoot and fix. DLL hell is not over.

Submission + - Minature Stonehenge Discovered In Wiltshire (bbc.co.uk) 1

CmdrGravy writes: Archaeologists claim to have found a "minature stonehenge" nearby the larger and better known one. The archaeologists claim that hewn into the living rock is the legacy of an ancient race of druids. Dr Tufnell the principal archaeologist responsible for the find went on to say
"Mini Stonehenge! 'Tis a magic place where the moon doth rise with a dragon's face. Mini Stonehenge! Where the virgins lie and the prayers of devils fill the midnight sky"
No one seems quite sure what he meant by that but futher details will be published in full, soon.

Comment Re: Technology matters (Score 1) 259

I disagree with the previous posts. In that case, technology matters.

A good city wide network should

- handle proper user density
- have a good coverage
- handle multi-media application such as audio / video over IP
- terminal should have a good battery life and reasonable costs

Please note that

- Wifi is certainly not designed to handle user density unless the number of access point is high. Until 802.11n, all users share the same radio channel in a pseudo random way. No frequency allocation,
- the above characteristics makes current wifi standard unfit for true bidirectionnal application such as video over IP as we do not have a true two way simultaneous communications. Even with 802.n, the number of available frequency is so few that only a few people would really be able to beneficiate the proper quality. This does not match the need of high density areas.
- it is a known fact that Wifi has not been designed with battery life in mind. A lot of wifi equipped terminal makers are struggling with this issue.

When comparing the other potential tehcnologies : 802.20e (Wimax) and 4G / LTE, there is no much choice

- 4G / LTE has the expected characteristics but is so complex that it is out of reach of medium sized organisation.
- only Wimax stand a chance.

Then you have to deal with safty regulation on radio protection.

Yes, technology does matter in that case.

http://www.ives.fr/

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