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Poll
What's the most annoying noise?
Bluetooth combo housekey & mp3 player
Army of microwave ovens squatting next door
Too many walls, trees, & passing trsffic
Britney Spears
Ben Laurie on consume-thenet
99.99% of consume-thenet

Votes: 1488 | Comments: 5
Results | Other Polls

BT - playing a big impact on us all

vortex's Diary
By vortex, Section Diaries
Posted on Mon Mar 8th, 2004 at 16:29:28 GMT
Would you still operate a community wireless network if it cost you real unpredictable amount of money?

from a recent BBC website article:

The BT Broadband Basic service imposes a 1GB limit on how much customerscan download per month.The 1GB cap is the equivalent of 20,000 web pages, 200 MP3 music tracksor 100 large software programs.

As NTK said this week, "...anyone know what the other 640MB on the Photoshop CD is for?"

"This is plenty for half of all broadband users," said Duncan Ingram, Managing Director of BT Openworld.

I assume, at least for now, he means each user and not all 2M UK broadband subscribers combined, a pool which would leave them each with 550 bytes free per month ;-P The definition of "plenty" is an misinformed assumption, backed up by an absence of any evidence. Oh, and don't even attempt to convince me that churned router stats converted to management powerpoint slides are 'evidence'...

Embedded within this page is perhaps a hint of the real reasons for offering such a service ...

"It is pretty generous and makes quite a significant difference to our economies," he told BBC News Online.

The use of the word "pretty" is just plain wrong. The use of the word "generous" beggars belief. The use of a vague third person ("our") is deceitful, unless it means pretty generous to ecomonies of ("our") BT profiteering from leveraging the very low end broadband market into volume charging.

"We are confident it will play a big impact," said Mr Ingram.

At least most of Ingram's quotes made sense under close scutiny, but this can only mean that with further competition in the entire broadbandmarket, BT sees per packet pricing (volume charging) as pretty(attractive) generous to BT coffers. The next step of course, will be targetted to volume charging non-LLU ISPs who use BT's ADSL delivery network. Once this genie is out of the bottle, it will drag 90% of the entire broadband industry into a hamstrung volume charging model, because the on-selling ISPs will have little or no choice in passing on unpredictable BT costs to their customers.

Scare mongering? No. The precedent lies in easy view. Amongst other countries, Australia went through just such a coup in the mid-90s when US peers (C&W, etc), Telstra and Connect.com forced such a charging model.

The impact will be large. Instead of providing pipes for equitable and predictable cost, the more successful a customers usage of a product, the more they are charged. This model stifles online activities, endeavours, business initiatives and innovations. In an environment of increasing international outsourcing, so much for BT helping this country's move into the "smart" information economies.

(1 comment) Comments >>

Australian ISP uses WiFi & Powerline

vortex's Diary
By vortex, Section Diaries
Posted on Wed Jun 25th, 2003 at 10:08:13 GMT
Australia's SkyNet has a similar strategy to free2air in combining wireless with powerline for connectivity

(1 comment) Comments >>

the island of niue gets wireless

vortex's Diary
By vortex, Section Diaries
Posted on Wed Jun 25th, 2003 at 10:04:36 GMT
Niue claims to be the first wireless nation

(1 comment) Comments >>

Update

vortex's Diary
By vortex, Section Diaries
Posted on Wed Jul 17th, 2002 at 15:54:09 GMT
New stories coming soon to refresh your minds ...

- mobile ipaq and gps wearable stumbler
- ambienttv.net gateway story
- the crypt gateway story
- air shadow developements
- conference developements
- alternative antenna documentation

(1 comment) Comments >>

Dusty Poll ...

vortex's Diary
By vortex, Section Diaries
Posted on Mon Feb 11th, 2002 at 19:39:00 GMT
3 more votes for the number of the beast ...

And then a new one will go up! :-)

Comments >>

BBC reports on unethical network scans through wireless gateways?

vortex's Diary
By vortex, Section Diaries
Posted on Thu Dec 20th, 2001 at 01:26:52 GMT
The BBC posted a sensationalistic article about 'war pedalling' entitled 'Welcome to the era of drive-by hacking'

"BBC News Online was shown just how easy it was by two ethical hackers who prefer to be known as Codex and Kuji. We drove with the pair around London's financial district."

Well, where were you 6 months ago, guys? ;-)

"Any maliciously minded hacker could easily join these networks and piggy back on their fast net links, steal documents or subvert other machines on the systems to do their bidding." "None of the wireless networks we found used anything but their flawed, in-built security systems to protect against hack attacks.

Ouch, for their own sake, I hope the BBC don't mean that. If this is accurate (it may not be), this means the BBC accompanied two 'ethical hackers' while they not only mapped wireless gateways, but attempted to probe for security holes & vulnerabilities beyond the wireless gateway.

Probing a network in such a manner could be construed (especially by its owner) as a hostile act. Without prior consent of the owner of the network, it is at best unethical and at worst, even perhaps illegal.

If scanning, sniffing, and vulnerability probing was performed on networks as they 'drove by', they were accessing networks and computers without authority. They would be in possession of detailed roadmaps of weaknesses on networks and hosts perhaps deep within each network they passed.

warpeddlaz do not condone or engage such activities.

[Clarification: Just in case you haven't got this, warpeddlaz only detect beaconing and associations at the 802.11 level. No network IP traffic is sent or sniffed when performing war peddling. No IP networks are probed, monitored, or used. At all.]

I suspect the BBC should research exactly what the act of 'war driving/peddalling/walking' actually is, given the analogy of 'war dialing'. Despite the emotive word 'war', war dialing is merely the action of detecting what was at the end of a phone line (human, fax, modem, or menu system, or ...). By definition, this did not include any subsequent hostile network attack.

(1 comment) Comments >>

gpspoint

vortex's Diary
By vortex, Section Diaries
Posted on Mon Sep 10th, 2001 at 17:45:19 GMT
gpspoint is a very neatly written C++ utility for up/downloading waypoints, routes, and tracks from/to Garmin GPS units.

But apparently not from my Garmin III+ :-(

This would be a perfect utility to exchange data with netstumbler &/or equivalent perl scripts and then to place findings on a map ...

Just wrote to the author, hopefully he might have some suggestions ...

(1 comment) Comments >>

iptables & web redirecting

vortex's Diary
By vortex, Section Diaries
Posted on Thu Aug 16th, 2001 at 12:41:59 GMT
just a note i found on how to redirect anonymous surfers to a central web server.

"Yeah.... the linux 2.4+ kernels you can use iptables to do this in one line...

iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -s 10.0.0.0/24 -d 143.207.0.0/16 -p tcp --dport 80 -j DNAT --to 143.207.1.22

That would redirect anything from the 10.0.0.0 subnet on port 80 to the outside world 143.207.1.22 web server. :)"

(1 comment) Comments >>

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