The Internet

P2P Filesharing vs. The Web 222

Posted by michael from the inculcating-values dept.
The Importance of writes "The recent RIAA lawsuits have raised many questions and issues, but the focus has been on P2P filesharing. Before there was P2P, though, there was filesharing via webservers. There doesn't seem to be much complaint about the RIAA shutting down people who upload MP3s to their homepage. Why do many people seem to treat http filesharing different than P2P filesharing? LawMeme has one answer."
The Internet

Noticed Welchie/Nachi in Your Bandwidth Bill, Yet? 94

Posted by Cliff from the those-pesky-extra-packets-you-didn't-ask-for dept.
Pinkboard Panther asks: "I have recently received my bill for Internet usage for last month and discovered it is 4 times higher than expected. Since there had been no increase in usage of the sites I run I had to search elsewhere for the exorbitant increase. Eventually I tracked it down to my firewall being bombarded with 20,000 ICMP Echo requests a minute from many different IP addresses. This adds up to $A10 per hour or $A240 a day. I still need to battle with my ISP over whether I should be paying for this. It seems that the Welchie/Nachi worm sends out pings to find what machines are out there before it moves onto deeper probes. I can't believe that I am the only site out there which is being attacked in this way. There must be lots of other sites out there who are affected this way. Maybe they just haven't received their bills, yet?"
Businesses

What Do You Do at Work? 154

Posted by Cliff from the reading-slashdot-doesn't-count dept.
mabhatter654 asks: "With all the talk of 'inefficent' and 'uncooperative' American workers, what do most Slashdot readers actually DO at work? Currently, I'm one of those 'IT' workers at a small manufacturer. Yes, I'm called the 'SysAdmin' but that changes monthly. I'm responsible for the companies network, AS/400, website, PC troubleshooting, phones, etc. But...I also get pushed into other things like ISO compliance, Quality issues, as well as babysitting the shop floor/nite QC on 'off' shifts on a regular basis. Of course, the 'SysAdmin' work suffers...when you spend more than half of your day on other tasks. But that does make me part of the inefficent IT problem that bosses like to talk so much about now days. I'm curious how many other Slashdot readers 'multitask' in non-IT rolls while officially still in that capacity. I'm looking for your 'title', company size, and both IT/non-IT tasks you perform. Also, Does 'multitasking' add more or less value to your position at the company. i.e. the IT tasks that don't ever happen versus helping management in another department? Oh yeah, how about those hours too! How much overtime do you put in and how much of that is due to the other work?"
Upgrades

Have Keyboards Gone Crazy? 208

Posted by Cliff from the do-you-really-need-more-than-101 dept.
Ethelthefrog asks: "My office keyboard recently failed and I am attempting to choose a replacement. Unfortunately, Logitech, who make keyboards with an action I really like, seem to have gone crazy. They have trademarked their worst features: Zero Degree Tilt(tm) means I have to reach uncomfortably far for the number keys and their horrific 'Enhanced Function Keys' means I now need to engage a shift-lock type function just to get at F1-F12. Are there any geek-friendly keyboards out there that combine decent action with just the keys I need to hack and no more?"
Operating Systems

User Space Driver for USB Storage Devices? 59

Posted by Cliff from the spreading-the-word dept.
Zarf asks: "With Linux, if you don't like something, fix it yourself. So when I couldn't get my USB pen-drive to work and none of the canned solutions were satifactory... I took it upon myself to fix Linux. I've posted my solution in my Slashdot user's journal. But it seems to me that there must be a better way to promote my solution. Where should I post my fix so it can help the most people?"
Privacy

Where is the Replacement for the JAP Anon-Proxy? 28

Posted by Cliff from the for-anonymous-cowards-everywhere dept.
An anonymous reader asks: "Now that it has been a month since the University of Dresden's Java Anonymous Proxy was back-doored via court order, what is the status of forked projects? Have any universities or individuals in countries with more respect for freedom taken the initiative to provide a truly anonymous alternative? Could a Freenet/P2P type system, with plausible deniability, be developed from the remnants of the JAP program? I would be willing to operate a mix if I could restrict the bandwidth usage and use a SOCKS proxy for my P2P apps. Could a phoenix rise from the ashes of JAP which delivered a 1-2 punch to censorship and media conglomerate entrapment?"
The Internet

When Does Website Monitoring Go Too Far? 259

Posted by Cliff from the your-right-to-monitor-ends-at-my-reset-switch dept.
jafiwam asks: "Recently, the IT department of the company I work for and a 3rd party monitoring and security firm got into a pissing match about how much monitoring is too much. They either got a hold of a customer list from a former employee or walked our IP space to find our web hosting customers. They then proceeded to sell them monitoring services for things such as server up-time, defacement detection, email up-time and DNS testing. While I welcome anything that lets our customers use the internet effectively, their set of monitoring servers filled an entire 18 gig partition full of web server logs (causing the server to crash on a weekend) and choked an email server with 40k some messages that could not be delivered, and they failed to properly brief the hosting customers about what would happen to their log analysis software when faced with 99% traffic from a small set of IPs. These things caused down-time, lost productivity and a damaged reputation. What is appropriate for monitoring a web site and email server? Who should be allowed to monitor? Where should the give and take lie in this situation? I am interested in finding out what admin-on-the-street has to say about this."
Graphics

Wireless Camera for Baby Monitoring? 47

Posted by Cliff from the when-you-can't-be-there-in-person dept.
cwinterb asks: "A friend of mine and his wife are expecting their first born. My friend is a commercial airline pilot flying all over Europe and frequently spends two or three nights away from home. He already has ADSL (256Kbps up/512 down) and 802.11b in the house, via a Draytek Vigor 2600We (draytek.co.uk). What he wants is a wireless webcam, with a built in server, so that as long as he can get web access he can see his wife and child. Streaming video would be nice but bandwidth and cost rule it out. A good quality static image that updates a few times a minute would be ideal. Audio is not required. A camera that works well in fairly low light conditions would also be a bonus."
Education

Programming for the Single-Handed 67

Posted by Cliff from the one-handed-jack-arrrr dept.
NullProg writes "Yesterday I was diagnosed with wrist-drop, and now my right arm/hand is in traction for a spell. It may or may not be related to me sitting behind a keyboard for the last twenty years. How have other programmers dealt with the loss of a hand or even multiple fingers? I moved my mouse to the left of the keyboard and can still type faster than my wife using one hand, but upper case keys are giving me problems. Has anyone experience with the smaller keyboards from Happy Hacking? Do they help one handed people? What editors did you find the most keystroke friendly. Gvim is bearable, is there a better one I can use for single key operations? What other tips do you have for someone in my situation?"
Businesses

Are You On Time To Work? 328

Posted by Cliff from the punctuality-is-for-machines dept.
gravitie asks: "I'm a developer in my local area. I'm on what is supposed to be 'flex time', so I can work the hours that my boss and I see fit for me to fullfil the number of hours I'm required to get a week. Besides this I must clock in at 7:30 AM every day I am at work. If I clock in at 7:31 I am late, no questions asked. If I am late 3 times in one quarter I get a verbal warning. Next time I get a written warning, then it just goes down hill from there (docked pay, etc..). Is this standard in todays business world? Should 1 minute late really be considered 'late'?"
Data Storage

SAN, NAS, Cost and Benefits? 44

Posted by Cliff from the testing-the-waters-before-diving-in-headfirst dept.
luetin asks: "Our company is at the point where our storage and backup infrastructure is ok, but not for much longer. We are looking into SAN, NAS, and variations thereof. We are a small IT department, with two sysadmins and two programmers. Right now we have stored/circulating about 2TB of data, and that's going to increase steadily in coming years. Does Slashdot have experience setting up SANs? Tales of costs and benefits of SANs versus a gaggle of NAS? Can SAN be implemented by reasonably seasoned IT people, or is it too dark an art?"
United States

IT Training in the Military? 344

Posted by Cliff from the sgt.-byte-and-cpl.-processor dept.
firehzd1 asks: "Yesterday's article about the new Czar of Security for the Department of Homeland Security raises a very important question, especially lately. What type of opportunities are there for IT work in the military/government. It seems every article I read is bashing the govt/military for terrible IT decisions/systems but I never hear the other side of the story. How bout we hear from those in the field that can give us a idea of what it is like behind the other side of the heavily armed gate?"
Spam

Does SPAM Peak on Wednesday? 54

Posted by Cliff from the imagine-that dept.
danlor asks: "After installing a pretty good spam filter here at work, we noticed an interesting weekly trend in overall spam intercepts. They peak on Wednesday and trough o n Sunday. It is an almost perfect bell curve. We have gone over this quite a few times here, but cannot come to consensus on why this would be. Could Spammers really be God fearing? Why would Spammers have a 'hump' day?" Has anyone else noticed this trend?
Hardware

Automated Wireless File Transfers? 39

Posted by Cliff from the making-complicated-tasks-easy dept.
Maskirovka asks: "I'm in the process of designing a helicopter mounted compact flash reader/transmitter package to upload photos to a fileserver upon landing, probably using 802.11g. It needs to be idiot proof (ie, plug a flashcard into it, and it'll upload automatically as soon as it gets in range of the basestation), and should weigh less than 5 pounds so as not to affect the aircraft weight and balance. It could probably be built around a Via EPIA board using a PCI WiFi card and riser, but that almost seems overkill for the one specific task. Is there a more efficient way to do this with off the shelf hardware?"
Editorial

Dealing w/ Outside Interests in Your Projects? 48

Posted by Cliff from the reality-intrudes dept.
Anthony Boyd asks: "Last weekend, I built a web site that is a poor-man's version of Classmates. Except that it is custom-built just for my high-school, with no ads or fees. I got a fine response from the people that knew about it, and was busy reconnecting with lost friends... until [last week], when my school's alumni association called and gave me an earful of comments such as, 'that's a rogue site' and 'it may not be legal!' Turns out, they hoped to build something similar, as a platform to entice donations. So, I'm stuck. Before I do anything, I'd like to ask Slashdot: have the projects you built for 'just for fun' been overrun by outside interests? If so, what did you do, and what would you have done differently?"
The Internet

Has P2P Become a Passing Fad? 393

Posted by Cliff from the legislation's-true-effect-on-innovation dept.
plasticmillion asks: "As the RIAA launches increasingly rabid attacks against P2P networks and users, pundits continue to debate the future of P2P. On the one hand, some argue that P2P is just a clever way to escape detection from copyright owners, like in this recent Slashdot story. Others, like Clay Shirky, make a strong case that processing is destined to move to the 'edges' of the network. I'm curious to know what Slashdot readers think: is P2P the start of a major new trend that is just getting started, or is it a passing fad that will fade once legal client/server systems for media distribution finally take hold? If the former, which of the supposed advantages of P2P over client/server systems are really significant?"
Businesses

Preparing for Isabel? 67

Posted by Cliff from the testing-your-disaster-plans dept.
Bonker asks: "Hurricane Isabel has been categorized as a Class 4 hurricane by the the National Hurricane Center. It's expected to grind somewhere into the U.S. East Coast sometime this evening. The Carolinas, Virginias, and even Maryland are in states of high tension. If you live in an area threatened by Isabel, what are you doing to protect your own or your company's data and computer hardware from Isabel?"
Education

Should Software Engineers Seek CCNA's? 40

Posted by Cliff from the good-fallback-or-knowledge-dilution dept.
kernel2 asks: "I'm in the software engineering profession and some of my friends are about to enroll on a CCNA (Cisco Certified Network Administrator) course and are egging me on to join as well. I'm trying to decide whether I should do the course or not. On the one hand it might help me understand networking (especially in bigger corps) better and that is something I love (networking). It might also help me diversify and improve my chances of landing a job in these strained and difficult times (and that's primarily why my friends are doing it). But wouldn't it look odd on my CV? I mean why would someone highly interested in software (with a Software Engineering degree) do CCNA?"
Operating Systems

Logging Unexpected Shutdowns/Crashes w/ Linux? 86

Posted by Cliff from the finding-evidence-of-the-problem dept.
sweede asks: "I have a dedicated server that seems to reboot more often than it should. In Windows 2000/XP (maybe NT4.0?), if your computer or server crashes it will leave an event message in the Event Viewer for you to review on what went wrong. Is it possible to do something similar in Linux? Where a power outage or an unexpected kernel panic will leave a message in /var/log/event (or whatever) Searching Google for 'kernel trapping' doesn't give me a whole lot of info on the subject."
Programming

What Else Is There Besides OpenLDAP? 28

Posted by Cliff from the attempting-to-simplify-it-all dept.
The Stunted Leech asks: "I am trying to develop an LDAP interface to an existing customer database and would like to implement a simple LDAP listener that could be queried from e-mail clients. Before everyone suggests importing the data to OpenLDAP or developing a back-end for it, let me just say that it isn't very feasible: I'm the only person assigned to the project, and my company doesn't have the time or hardware resources to maintain an LDAP server. So I'm looking for very simple implementations of LDAP servers, preferably in a scripting language like Perl or Python (we use Perl for CGIs and wxPython for GUI front-ends). I've come across a couple of Java-based ones, but they seemed overly complex - all I need to do is retrieve a contact's e-mail or phone number from our database. Pointers to any sort of simple LDAP servers are welcome, even if they do little more than return the same result to all queries."

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