Ah - I see you've been rick-rolled.

They've pulled the beta off of their website. They received a letter from the lawyers representing the estate of Edison. The lawyers clients are claiming ownership of the ip rights to all pallotophone codecs and pallotophone encryption/decryption algorithms. Said counsel for Bubba Edison - Mr. G. R. White, "Mr. Edison is seeking to ride on his Great Grandfathers coat tails -we aim to help him since that's the right thing to do - and the fact that he's paying us lots of money". Mr. White was not immediately available for comment as he was participating in a feeding frenzy.

Mod parent up!

Linux has about a dozen different AV products, commercial as well as free. Wikipedia claims about 800 variants of Linux malware although it does not identify the percentage found in the wild.

Linux has it's roots from Unix which has been the genesis for such fun stuff as rootkits. Who can forget the Morris worm which brought down most Unix systems connected to the Internet in 1988. And now with the ability to install a malware hypervisor onto a machine, it doesn't even matter which OS you run -- no OS is safe.

I've always loved how at the end of a patent dispute, the company who's lost to the patent holder, agrees "to license the 'technology'. After the money is paid out, I wonder if there's really anything that gets passed back... Code samples? Flowcharts? Theory of operations? Punch cards? I would guess in most cases zip gets transferred - and not the compression algorithm...

Company1 - "Yeah, hi, this is Bob at company X - we recently licensed your technology that allows people to use a mouse to interact with a computation unit in a way that allows the computation unit to perform a useful task. We'd like to get the relevant documentation?"

Company2 - "Um, docs. Huh - never thought of that - I mean it's never come up... Wow, I guess you could read the patent application - that's the only docs we got. BTW, would you like to purchase rights to allow the mouse to instruct the computation unit to perform a useless task? We got a special going on this week for that..."

Sort of. EIGRP is a routing protocol used within an organization (Interior Gateway Protocol or IGP). BGP is the routing protocol used between organizations (Exterior Gateway Protocol or EGP). So you may be running EIGRP (or OSPF, RIP2, etc) within your company but speaking BGP to the other companies your connected to. Also, while there are several IGPs, for all practical purposes, there's only one EGP (BGP). It functions similarly to other routing protocols, using metrics to detmine the best routes to other networks. If it advertises a better route to reach a network, everyone is going to start sending traffic destined for that network to them.

This concludes our lesson for TLAs (Three Letter Acronyms).

It's my understanding that the high frequency traders need machines that are physically near to the market they're trading stocks on to minimize hops, lag, etc. and to chronologically beat everyone else who's trying to do the same. Everything is built to make transactions that can be executed almost immediately to take advantage of stocks going up or down before everyone else does thereby altering prices.

I'm going to guess that trying to play that game for servers overseas where lag can be measured in seconds won't work when your competition has servers located in the same building the market is in.

One thing you didn't mention in your post - how critical is the data? If you lost it what would happen: Nothing? Would you lose a few hours time recreating it? Would you go out of business? Would you get sued for breach of contract? Would Knees and Knuckles be paying your family a final visit? Knowing that would make a difference in how I would store the data.

As several posters have stated and you've noticed yourself - nothing beats a hard drive for cost/byte.

But then you need to determine what to do with that - do you keep it online at all times (power, space, cooling may become issues to consider).

How many copies of the data do you keep? Hard drives fail. Just because it's raid doesn't mean it's safe.

What's your bigger plan for dealing testing for failure of the backup media and determining when to retire them? Periodic testing has to be one of the most important parts of your plan. You build something test it once and later find out that your last 2 months of backups were worthless. Testing can help you avoid that.

Do you need to keep copies off-site? Having 2 copies in your data-center located in your basement is no good if it floods.

How much total storage do you need, need 6 months from now, 2 years, etc.? There's an interesting article from the online backup folks at backblaze.com. They put together 4U enclosures that store 67 Terabytes for about $8,000 USD. Complete instructions are on their site for how to do it (they don't sell them but use them for their business). However, it's not exactly portable. While not physically huge, it's gotta weigh a bit. Perhaps 2 at separate locations with a network connection between them to keep them mirrored?

There's a number of firms that offer various online backup solutions where your data is automatically uploaded to their datacenter automatically, however I suspect that you're going to exceed their usual offerings unless they have some "poweruser" or business option. For individuals, "$5/mo unlimited storage" seems to be the norm. However, their are 2 limiting factors to that "unlimited" - your/their available bandwidth. If it takes 2 months to push out your dataset - is that acceptable? Also, many firms delete your data 30 days after you delete it. So if you move those hds to your safety deposit box, does the backup co see them as deleted and then delete their copy? Comparing the cost of doing it yourself vs them may be attractive, esp if they have some appropriate business plan that's not much more then their individual plan.

Does the data need to be encrypted? If you loose those hds on the way to your offsite location will it be merely inconvenient or life altering when someone finds it and reads it?

Finally do you need to somehow need to index the data so you can find your backups?

Making backups is easy. Doing it right so you can actually get your data back takes a little more work.

Paul

So the "researcher" sends an email pretending to be B. Gates and the message got through? OMG! Seriously, where's the "phishing" part? Did he have them click on a link? What was the success rate of that? Linkedin is fairly safe - there's not a whole lot of sensitive information there (unless past work history is "sensitive) - it doesn't ask you for your SSN, address, credit card no, etc. Asking a victim to supply that info to join someones linkedin group would surely raise suspicion and alert people that it's a fake. There's no real meat to the article here. Either the reporter reporting on this story has missed an important part of the story (likely) or the researcher has just discovered that you can email anyone and pretend to be anyone.

All of the tools listed don't work by verifying the identity of the sender. If you fail to look/behave like a spammer/cracker/phisher, your email will get through unless you use a white list at which point 99% of people outside your list won't know how to get an email to you even though the rejection letter spells out the correct procedure. I wonder how many people actually tried to join Bill's linkedin account and of those what percentage thought it may actually *be* Bill. I'm gonna guess it's somewhere around zero.

Now excuse me, I have to get back to forwarding Bill's email I got to 20 people so have I have a chance at the million dollar prize.

Why does it strike me as more of a ploy to make sure you can't remove the label even if you wanted to?

I'll bet right now marketing is sitting around a conference table:
"This looks pretty good for a start, but we've done some market research that shows that consumers want the labeling on the inside as well. We need some type of penetrating laser that will label the edible parts inside. We need to be able to etch the outside of the banana skin as well as etch at least a logo on the edible part inside. Also, if we're doing citirus, we need to be able to etch each segment. We need to make sure our logo is seen from the moment you go into the store to the moment you put it in your mouth... Hmmm, I wonder if we can extend that to the moment we flush it down...

From what I know of cable co's, they periodically check the settings on their modems (we know they can change them when you upgrade/downgrade service, it follows they can also check the current settings). I know that's how they used to catch uncappers in the past. Kind of a "trust but verify" approach.

You can attach a DOCSIS device of your own, but unless their equipment allows it onto their tubes (provisions it), you're not going to get any service. You could of course try to clone someone's MAC address, but then you've crossed over into illegal/stealing service territory. A cable company is not going to allow end user equipment onto their network that they have no control over since their whole ISP business model is based on charging for bandwidth.

I did RTFA. His biggest misstep that brought attention to his actions was running a company that sold uncapped and hardware modded modems. He sold a couple to undercover feds. That was a Bad Idea. Selling hacked equipment that is designed to overcome preset bandwidth limits or provide unauthorized (free) service by cloning mac addresses of other authorized modems seems like "aiding and abetting". Running uncapped modems on Comcast's network would also seem like wire fraud (fraudulent activity involving electronic equipemnt) to me.

Comcast owns their network and sells you access based on bandwidth. More bandwidth costs more. If you find a way to circumvent their bandwidth limits, you are breaking your agreement with them (as well as violating the DMCA). Modding your own cable modem and running it on your own cable network is ok. Running it on someone elses is not.

Hacking to gain knowledge/enlightenment is one thing. Using that knowledge to steal service is uncool.

There is one more point that I seem to remember - AOL owning a cable lines. For a while, they owned some small cable co in Virginia (or at least partly owned it). At the time I thought that they were going to build that out since it was The Future. However, after the merger they decided it didn't fit their business model and they sold it all off to concentrate on dialup. I'm sure they genius who did that got a great bonus after that completed (From resume "Generated XX millions for company by finding and selling off negative-profit assets").

Now their plan is to sell advertising on their content. But they're very late to the game. Will be interesting to see what value is left.

At their peak they had tens of millions of subscribers - I remember a "20 million members" sign in one of their hallways. I wonder how many are left today.

What amazes me is that some ISP's according to ESPN have drank the cool-aid and are paying the extortion fee. I suppose it's good to try new revenue models, but I sure hope this doesn't catch on.

Reminds me a project I was working on years ago where we had a device that processed video signals thought a pc. Someone engineer brought up the issue of macrovision (or product stripped out macrovision as a side-effect). So someone (engineer) checked it out and found out that we would have to pay the macro-folks many $ to *not* strip the encoding. "Well that's a no-brainer, we're done!" all the engineers thought... until the lawyers got wind of it, paid the extortion fee, we made sure to implement macro-vision on the video out, and the product quickly flopped. I wonder if the ISP's lawyers are also somehow involved in this...

To me it would appear that someone submitted entries with an bogus title and accompanying description. Hacked? Hardly. What surprises me is that no one submitted Viagra programs with accompanying links in the description.

These aren't the droids you're looking for. Move along.