Typically bruteforcing refers to exhaustively searching a reduced dictionary... bruteforcing 62^8 (alphanumeric, mixed case, a reasonable metric for a 'decent' password) might be easier with a GPU investment, bruteforcing 256^32 (let's assume a 256bit keyspace) is not.

VoIP systems can be compromised/abused? I intercept calls at work ("... for quality assurance and monitoring purposes ..."); if that system was compromised someone could certainly demonstrate call interception on a two-bit Asterisk/Polycom setup too.

Unless you're at a tiny company (single digits) where the "IT guy" is the "CTO", he almost certainly doesn't set the budget, he just makes do with what he has.

As someone who got saddled with desktop support in addition to real work, please: if your hardware is inadequate and preventing you from doing your job, bitch to your boss, NOT your IT guy. I sympathize, but I can't do anything about it and it's getting more than a little tired.

Are you European by chance? Habitable and inhabited aren't the same thing, there are a great many developed countries with isolated areas, Russia, the USA and Canada spring immediately to mind...

I mean yeah, Windsor and Detroit will have no problem, but what about Toronto to Alert? New York to Barrow? Moscow to Uelen?

If you're just talking about absolute routing between a country in general, and another country in general, then sure.... but if you're talking about reasonably complete coverage, not so much.

The other problem is that any sort of large scale, long-distance mesh network is going to make freenet look zippy. ... maybe if they make the mesh medium-agnostic, IP over shortwave or something, routing shortcuts...

And you live... where? I agree with most of your comment but in significant chunks of North America and Europe the economy (and by extension the job market) is still in the toilet. While most companies have stopped letting people go, they're sure as shit not hiring en masse again. You personally may not have trouble finding work but there are still huge numbers of people who do.

That doesn't mean the OP should sit there and take it, just that most people find it prudent to look for a fire escape before jumping out of a burning building...

My last ISP would have leases expire every two or three weeks. My current ISP has DHCP leases expire weekly. You could certainly link traffic within the lease, but you would have no way of knowing when the lease expired, or whether I'm the same person who had the lease the last time around.

That's not perfect, but it's much better privacy than a prefix that *never changes*.

That's the other thing. I'm making a couple of assumptions here. One is that an ISP will assign each customer a /64 (as per recommendations), and that we've seen the last of NAT. I'm also assuming that the /64 prefix will be statically assigned, since other than privacy you don't gain anything from dynamically assigning them. Finally, I'm assuming that your client makes use of the privacy extensions, I'm completely ignoring the last 64 bits of the address... so the privacy enhancements don't apply. You shouldn't be able to identify individual machines, but you'll definitely be able to identify the network they're on, and that network id won't change.

So yeah, it would effectively be the same as having a static IPv4 address, except you'd have no choice.

You have a loony definition of "privacy"

Ad hominem attacks don't advance your case (and that's obviously false or I would have posted as AC...), and your analogies don't hold water.

I don't give out my unlisted number, I forward a voip number to it so I can change providers without the hassle of porting... but there's also nobody other than the telco (and the NSA ;)) aggregating the details of who I call, and they're not reselling it. Clearly they're doing nothing useful with it or they wouldn't have tried to sell me a LD plan to go with those 0 minutes of long distance I use...

Similarly, while Fedex/UPS/USPS/[your delivery company of choice] could probably build a profile of me based on the size/weight of packages they deliver and where they're delivered from... they don't.

On the other hand Google* is unbashedly all about profiling people. That's their bread and butter. It's silly to think that they wouldn't take advantage of a situation like I described in the GP post.

Hey, maybe you're on facebook, linkedin, flickr, or the trillion-and-one other social networking sites. If there's enough of your personal info out there already, then maybe being trackable despite noscript/adblock/taco/betterprivacy is fine with you as well.

It's not fine with me. I like to choose what information I give out about myself. I know that changing my IP address doesn't give me anonymity in any substantial sense (my ISP probably has proxy logs, certainly DHCP logs, if I was doing something nefarious it wouldn't be hard to connect the dots), but for now they're not who I'm worried about.

I realize Slashdot is large and diverse, and that it's silly to talk about the views express on it as if they were consistent, but people get up in arms at the idea of an internet-accessible ID for a computer. A static /64 for a residence might as well be the same thing.

* I don't mean to keep harping on them, they're just a convenient example.

With IPv6, your network will have its own 48 to 64-bit prefix. Once you remember that prefix, you can choose your suffixes to be as simple as you'd like.

Yeah, see this is the other problem that I haven't seen anybody talk about yet. IPv6 is a potential privacy nightmare. From an ISP's perspective, there's no reason to assign addresses automatically anymore, just assign every client a /64 and move on. (End users can of course feel free to run DHCPv6 internally, whatever floats your boat) If that's true you can be trivially tracked by building a database of IP blocks assigned to ISPs and the size of the prefixes they give their clients. No cookies, no flash lsos, no logins, and no risk of you being a pesky consumer and unplugging your modem until you get a new IP.

Obviously it's not just the sites you visit either, it's anything they might load. I see Slashdot uses doubleclick, hi Google!

I dunno, it's a worrying thought.

</tinfoil> ;)

I meant "I've always called it 'scuzzy'..." of course...

The rest of us? I've always called it SCSI but if you thought "sexy" was a rebranding (or Apple's idea) Larry Boucher would like a word with you...

I don't disagree that he has been an amazing manager at HP, helping to turn things around after the mess that was Carly Fiorina.

You might not, plenty of people disagree. I realize this is just coming from a blog, but the guy has his name (or someone's anyway) on it, and he spent almost 30 years at HP.

He raped HP employees (figuratively, without violating the sexual conduct code at HP) by eliminating the sixty-five year concept of profit sharing, preferring to move to obscene bonuses for himself and his five top minions -- a mere $113 million payout for them in a year he chopped everyone else's pay by 5% plus profit-sharing. These were raises for some of the five people by as much as 400% -- a tidy uptick.

...

The Voice of the Workplace, HP's thirty-five year historic 'measure' of employee feelings (done every five years) showed in April an astonishing finding -- more than two-thirds of HP's employees would quit tomorrow if they had an equivalent job offer. Not a raise, not a promotion, simply an alternative.

He might have turned the economics of the company around, but that doesn't mean he wasn't driving it into the ground. He sounds like a sociopath and a world-class shithead.

I didn't expect him to know the terminology. I was just boggled by the writing.

Some of the writing is godawful:

I'd not played a shooter that looks like Doom. I'd not one that presented each of its figures as a stack of pixels rendered at the fever-dream intersection of real and colorful, relevant abstract. Be it dirt, blood, hair or the barrel of a gun, everything I saw was a block. Each block was a tile of a nightmare mosaic.

... the part that immediately follows is interesting though. There are some good bits.

... and they do. Except the point of the freeze is to focus on fixing problems so they can push out a solid, stable release.

What's the point of slipping a freeze date? (There's mailing list traffic from a while ago now saying that they were pushing back the freeze, so yeah, they slipped -- even if it's just from an internal date.)

Looks like I'm safe...