The cell site's lat/long is public information. :) http://www.sitefinder.ofcom.org.uk/ (UK) http://emf2.bundesnetzagentur.de/ (Germany)

The cell site used for the call is needed so that when there is a disagreement, as in "I wasn't in that city, there's no way I could have made that call", they can provide all of the information needed to resolve the problem, such as showing that you were registered in another city entirely at that time.

Additionally, it seems they've got legislated data retention rules, but they have typically been based around the existing retention policies the carriers have in order to avoid having to pay the carriers (like the US govt pays carriers for legal intercept).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications_data_retention

In other words, cell towers aren't secret, and if you don't want to have your data retained, talk to the government, not the carriers.

I replied too quickly.

1) They keep 6 months because that's how long you have to object to the bill.
2) Billing isn't keeping the lat/long of the phone, it's keeping the lat/long of the cell site, otherwise, it wouldn't be a blob with a direction on the map, it would be a point with a radius. It's the cell site's lat+long and which antenna (direction) is seeing the phone.

The 6 months is because that's the length of time you have to object to the bill.

The key part they are removing is error detection and correction. They are creating chips which have an ~8% chance of producing an incorrect result. Supposedly hearing aids will accept a 10% error rate, so it is a good trade off.

These aren't "redundant" parts, they're parts which prevent errors from happening. It's just that in some applications they don't care about errors.

It's like looking at the various floating point bugs and going, "meh, close enough". Sucks for a spreadsheet, but if all you care about is integers 0-10, you probably aren't going to notice.

Here's the actual press release:
http://www.media.rice.edu/media/NewsBot.asp?MODE=VIEW&ID=15497&SnID=154992879

"Inexact Hardware" seems to be the new term. Since they mention hearing aids, it seems to be that it's bringing the fuzziness of analog back into the digital world.

Except that pure aggregations of facts don't have legal protection in the US. They do in other locations, but not the US. Otherwise, there would be a lot of fights over sports scores, tv schedules and phone books, like we have in the UK, NZ and Australia.

Actually, SMSCs are typically priced per SMS.

Actually, you are charged for the entire call, that's why most calls have a "X for the first minute, Y for each additional minute, with a minimum of 60s, and billed in 6s increments".

The charge for call setup and teardown is included in the first minute charge.

I agree with you there are better things than charging a penny. We can already see what happens when you do with SMS and VoIP.

For example, people are hacking VoIP lines and then making fraudulent calls to numbers with large termination rates. The guy at the other end gets his cut and disappears.

People are also attacking smartphones and doing similar things - signing up for premium SMS services, etc.

However, we already do have financial systems which are prepared to handle billions of one penny transactions every day - the phone network does this already. It's expensive, but it does already happen.

Magazines are very, very random access. When I read a magazine, I rarely start at the ToC. I'll flip through the magazine, stopping at a picture that interests me, a title that interests me, or something else. Heck, I tend to look at the advertisements before I look at the ToC!

So, while I love my iPad, it definitely doesn't suit the way I like to read magazines.

It doesn't say anything about the ability of the players.

Now, assuming that the player populations are of equal size, with equal numbers of hours played...

It might be construed to say that PC players are more team focused, willing to do things other than shoot the enemy.

Of course, it is just as possible that someone's programmed a bot on the PC version and the _bot_ is doing the running around, or that the PC players play 10 hours vs the console gamer's 1, or some other difference between the platforms.

However, history teaches us that judges don't like innovative solutions to the problem.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longitude_prize
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Harrison

You can't rely on ingress filtering, because the links are aggregated. To stop the attack, the originating ISP would have to perform egress filtering.

They would still perform ingress filtering to catch the low hanging fruit, but that won't stop the attack.

It most certainly isn't a "natural monopoly".

Here in Wellington, New Zealand, I've got 2 physical broadband cables (DSL and cable) to my house (one at 20mbps, one at 15mbps), 3 separate mobile networks (2 with "broadband" 2mbps+), and plans for a third, fiber connection (100mbps+). I've even got power companies pulling fiber down the street to build a parallel FTTN network so that they can compete on the backhaul business. That's in a middle class suburb. Downtown, there's already a fiber provider in addition to all of the other groups - including the bidding for a second fiber network.

There is most certainly not a natural monopoly. We're not at the point where all bits are the same, and there is competitive advantage to be had by stringing your own wire.

Unlike "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo". That "novel" (since it was really just one long advertisement) was full of product placements, including an advertisement for a Swedish word processing package - complete with URL and price.

At least this way, when I'm blasted with advertisements, I won't have paid for the experience.

As experience teaches us, the first thing that people who need to share do is "chmod -R a+rwx ."

So, any security which requires signing of code to run will become looser and looser over time as problems are encountered. That bug is causing problems in production and it takes a week to validate and sign it? Loosen the validation to get it to 15mins, or turn it off completely.