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Comment Re:Libertarian take on cybersquatting? (Score 1) 232

Cybersqatting might or might not be "wrong", but "wrong" doesn't have anything to do with either private rules or government laws.

I'm not even clear where the government gets involved in this at all, for good or for ill.

Domain registrars accept money to list someone as the owner of a domain name. ICANN coordinates this action, approving registrars and setting some ground rules for how registration works. Most ISPs and site operators configure their networks to resolve non-local names only via ICANN approved channels. These entities are often all private sector corporations acting in voluntary cooperation with no particular government powers.

One of the rules ICANN set up is that you can't register a famous person's name and use the site to run a website about them without the person's permission. They require registrars to follow that rule or they won't approve them. If a registrar allows the registration anyway, there's a dispute process where the person can demand that the rule breaking registration be de-listed and then re-registerd as owned by the person.

Human rights and government and property interests don't come into it, it's a bunch of administrative policy used to coordinate voluntary action. It might work well or it might not. If you don't like the rules you don't have to use ICANN-rule-following DNS servers.

Comment Re:Too slow? (Score 5, Informative) 143

The proper name for these "Slow functions" is Key Derivation Function. They've been around a long time and are what OSes use to protect login credentials and what encrypted archive formats like RAR use.

Some examples are crypt (obsolete, vulnerable) PBKDF-2 (repeated application of salt-and-hash), bcrypt (repeated rounds of a special extra-slow variant of blowfish), and scrypt (an attempt to defeat GPU and custom hardware attacks by requiring lots of low-latency RAM).

Single-round salted hash is only a "better than plaintext" hack solution, it's never been the correct way to store passwords.

Comment Re:Not sure if you can post anonymously early or n (Score 1) 405

OK, I get it now. I was assuming we were talking about using /dev/shm to store bulk data in system ram, not constructing an SSD out of SDRAM instead of flash.

What do you use for an interface on something like that? Seems like SATA/SAS like most of the PCIe flash devices I can find would be a bottleneck.

Comment Re:SSDs: a hardware solution to a software problem (Score 1) 405

Windows is pretty aggressive about tracking the reads executables always perform during process launch and prefetching them. It works pretty well. It also tries to preload data into ram with a bunch of weird user-prediction heuristics that sometimes work well and sometimes just make your system flush it's read cache for no reason to read strange things off your disk.

Agreed about the database libraries though, synchronous-only is no way to perform anything dominated by latency like that.

Comment Re:Not sure if you can post anonymously early or n (Score 1) 405

I'm mostly going by what dell tells me I need to provision in a power supply (roughly 500 more watts needed by adding 1TB of LV RDIMM to an R910) and Google searches for wall-power consumption, which seem to be in the ballpark of 5-10W (average, not peak) added per DIMM. We're talking a few hundred more watts to power and cool.

I'm not sure how to square that with the tech doc you posted, is that actually the sort of chip you could build into LRDIMMs and attach 1,000 of to a system?

If the system can sleep most but not all of the RAM without sleeping the computer this would draw a lot less power but it does not look like this is a configuration that current computers actually do.

Comment Re:Not sure if you can post anonymously early or n (Score 2) 405

And the actual question still stands- is the memory/storage paradigm just traditional at this point, or is it still useful?

It's still useful. The random access latency on an SSD is still about 1000x slower than RAM, but SSDs can store data without consuming power.

Keeping a terabyte or two of current RAM technology active requires substantial power supply and cooling, whereas these amounts of SSD or more can be kept and used in mobile or residential situations.

Comment Re:But the cost? (Score 2) 356

Affordable SSDs are a year away but you have your time axis backwards.

Price-point sized SSDs are more like $0.90/GB right now. The expensive intel 520s are $1.25/GB at 240 and 480 GB sizes.

500GB for $200 isn't here yet but prices have been steadily crashing towards it for years.

Comment Re:How many atom bombs does the UN have? (Score 3, Insightful) 326

Behold mercantilism 2.0.

There's nothing 2.0 about it. The west in general and the US in specific have used their military power to force access to markets for hundreds of years and never stopped. It is the central pillar of US foreign policy and the primary function of the US military. The routine nature of it is what makes it such a credible threat.

I'm sure the rest of the world doesn't like it, but they don't seem willing to actually do anything about it. Why would this be any different? Are you going to get in a shooting war with the US to protect your people from YouTube and bad reality TV?

At least exporting information at gunpoint instead of drugs has positive side-effects for free speech on the Internet.

Comment Re:How many atom bombs does the UN have? (Score 3, Insightful) 326

The short answer is, if Russia, China and the EU agree on a system, all they have to do is prevent our packets from passing through AS's on their sovereign territory. The UN is just the place where they come to the agreement, it's not the UN's idea and it's not up to the UN to enforce it.

The US can always withdraw from the ITU, but if these policies genuinely reflect the interests and will of other nation-states, and they remain united, I don't see how the US gets out from under them.

In addition to wanting to regulate the internet, the ITU already regulates comminication satellite orbits. If the US wanted to play hardball on this matter, it would indicate that withdrawing from the ITU means that the US will declare a "right to international communication" and allow any company to launch US-flagged satellites into any empty orbit to serve any region with international communication without regard to local laws.

Satellites are a very practical way to circumvent local censorship and are already heavily used for that purpose.

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