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Comment 31 Day Pass (Score 1) 468

You don't mind choosing between a couple of extra bus fares and eating lunch, do you?

I don't know about Toronto's public transit, but even in Fort Wayne's underprovisioned system (60 minute headway and no service at all at night, on Saturday evenings, or on Sundays or major holidays), riders can buy a pass for unmetered rides within a four and a half week period.

Comment Re:TiVo costs money (Score 1) 85

But do well-known companies still make VCRs with a digital OTA tuner and affordable blank tapes? I thought new VCRs sold nowadays were either A. limited to line-in recording, which means you have to sit there and change the channel between one timer program and the next, or B. not actually VCRs but VCPs (video cassette players

Comment If receiver pays (Score 1) 243

You make a good point. I guess my misconception was that sender pays for long haul transit and the endpoint pays for the last mile. But if receiver pays, even for long haul, then you can DDoS someone's billing by flooding his connection with packets. And if receiver pays, even for long haul, then why does Comcast slow down Netflix? All Comcast's customers are already paying.

Comment StartSSL, DANE, Perspectives (Score 1) 70

TL;DR: Install Perspectives if you want to use an unknown CA.

The whole concept of a certifying authority is fundamentally broken.

Broken by StartSSL, which provides personal use certificates without charge.

Sites should be able to use unsigned keys for basic encryption.

They can. They just have to find some out-of-band way to get their keys onto visitors' machines in order to circumvent a MITM-from-day-one attack. This could involve DANE, which puts keys and certificates in DNSSEC. Or it could involve the Perspectives extension for Firefox, which verifies a site's certificate through diverse Internet routes between the site and notary servers whose certificates are delivered in a browser extension package signed by the browser vendor.

Just like with PGP.

I have my own problems with PGP's assumption of transitive trust. Just because you can vouch for someone's identity doesn't mean you can vouch for that person's ability to correctly vouch for others' identities.

Comment Re:Internet Protocol is stateless (Score 1) 243

If you feel so strongly that I am lying to myself, then please explain what is incorrect in the following three statements: TCP is a connection-oriented protocol in the Internet Protocol Suite. TCP connections have two halves, one in each direction. Traffic is billed based on who sends more data down each half of the connection.

Comment Lack of SNI prior to April 2014 (Score 1) 70

The monetary barrier hasn't been on the very itself for at least a couple years. It's been in the fact that older TLS stacks (such as those that shipped with Windows XP and Android 2.x) couldn't handle Server Name Indication (more than one certificate per IP address), along with the disappointingly slow uptake of IPv6. So until April of this year, when XP security patches ended, each site owner needed to pay its hosting service for a separate IPv4 address.

Comment Internet Protocol is stateless (Score 1) 243

You are correct that TCP is stateful. But the fact that TCP is stateful is irrelevant. ISPs are Internet Service Providers, and Internet Protocol is stateless. From the point of view of an ISP's infrastructure, TCP is just an application that runs on Internet Protocol. Otherwise, it'd be possible to manipulate billing through the equivalent of switching between FTP's PORT and PASV commands, which change only who sends the SYN.

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