Vex Star » Europe http://www.vexstar.com Computers and Programming Tue, 21 Jun 2011 01:52:16 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.2 en hourly 1 Comcast Ordered to Stop BitTorrent Traffic Interference http://www.vexstar.com/comcast-ordered-to-stop-bittorrent-traffic-interference/ http://www.vexstar.com/comcast-ordered-to-stop-bittorrent-traffic-interference/#comments Tue, 02 Dec 2008 17:41:53 +0000 admin http://www.vexstar.com/comcast-ordered-to-stop-bittorrent-traffic-interference/ ISPs have been throttling BitTorrent traffic for years now, but only recently has this turned into a political issue. In a huge victory for BitTorrent users, the FCC has now announced that it will order Comcast to stop interfering with BitTorrent traffic.

Almost a year ago we first reported that Comcast was actively disconnecting BitTorrent seeds. Now, after numerous debates and false promises from Comcast, the FCC has ruled that Comcast’s BitTorrent interference is unacceptable, and orders the company to stop doing so.

Kevin Martin, FCC chairman told AP that Comcast’s BitTorrent throttling is “arbitrary”, and that the company had violated the principles of the Federal Communications Commission. Martin said that Comcast slows down BitTorrent users independent of the amount of traffic they use, and that the company failed to communicate their network management practices to their consumers.

Indeed, a recent study by the Max Planck Institute showed that the company had misinformed the FCC and their users. Comcast has always argued that BitTorrent upstream traffic was only blocked during periods of heavy network traffic, this turns out to be a lie, as the study showed that they blocked BitTorrent upstream traffic 24/7.

The FCC has announced that it will take appropriate action against Comcast, and the ISP will be ordered to stop interfering with BitTorrent traffic. Comcast has said before that it will invest in its network capacity and stop slowing down the traffic of their users, but these were all false promises.

Marvin Ammori, general counsel of Free Press who filed the complaint with the FCC is delighted with this outcome, and said in a response: “Nine months ago, Comcast was exposed for blocking free choice on the Internet. At every turn, Comcast has denied blocking, lied to the public and tried to avoid being held accountable. We have presented an open and shut case that Comcast broke the law.”

“The FCC now appears ready to take action on behalf of consumers. This is an historic test for whether the law will protect the open Internet. If the commission decisively rules against Comcast, it will be a remarkable victory for organized people over organized money,” Ammori added.

It is to be expected that – if the pipes are really congested – Comcast and other ISPs will have to step away from the all-you-can-eat plans they have been offering for years, now that people are actually using bandwidth they signed up for.
Hot damn, now I don’t have to be worried when I move and Comcast is the only ISP available in the area.

i wouldn’t be so quick to say that. if you are really using bittorrent and have high bandwidth requirements, you’re probably going to be paying more for your internet access.

honestly, i don’t know why they just haven’t done this for years. if 90% of the bandwidth is being used by 5% of the users, make them pay more for the extra bandwidth and then use that money to increase the available bandwidth.
My ass the pipes are clogged. There’s more dark fiber in the USA than lit fiber.
I prefer a socialist internet. I pay the same as everyone else, and use it as I need to. I don’t want to have to pay more one month, less the next month, just because I had more Windows updates than normal.
in other news


Written by J.J. King on July 10, 2008
During their annual summit meeting in Japan, the G8 members agreed to get the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) ready for implementation by the end of the year. The agreement, pushed by multimillion dollar companies, will open the doors to a digital police state, much to the pleasure of the MPAA and RIAA.

This May we already posted about the leaked ACTA proposal, and it now seems that the final agreement will be ready sooner than we had hoped. Fresh out of the G8 meetings ‘Declaration on the World Economy‘, passages under the heading ‘Protection of Intellectual Property Rights’ suggest member states want the international anti-piracy agreement ready for implementation sooner than some expected, as it reads:

We encourage the acceleration of negotiations to establish a new international legal framework, ACTA, and seek to complete the negotiation by the end of this year.

This date is consistent (surprise, surprise) with that which the US Trade Representative has set as its own timetable for ACTA. Together with some insider information that was obtained by TorrentFreak, this doesn’t sound promising.

How will ACTA affect P2P users?
So what does this mean for P2P users? The honest answer is that it’s hard to be sure. The degree of secrecy surrounding the ACTA negotiations is astonishing, blocking attempts at a variety of levels to develop a counter-strategy. The process is deliberately avoiding both the World Trade Organisation (WTO) and World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO), which now have enough member countries suspicious of the “anti-piracy maximalist” agenda to make ACTA’s progress impossible.

At a recent EU meeting following the June ACTA negotiations in Geneva, a packed room of “stakeholders” — that is, industry representatives — were desperately trying to get information on what had made it into the June draft of ACTA while revealing as little as possible, publicly, about what they themselves wanted in it. The Commission — on first-name terms with these industry reps, showing only too well how well regarded they are in this policy-forming process — has basically indicated that no-one will see the text of ACTA until it’s ready to sign.

Also at this EU meeting, it was made absolutely explicit that ACTA is in large part about updating legal frameworks to take account of P2P and developments on the Internet. The previous regime to deal with IP and piracy, TRIPS was 12 years old, officials said, and the Internet had ‘not existed in the same way’ when TRIPS was drafted. In this respect, the hints we have about what might make it into ACTA from a list of suggestions the RIAA obtained by Knowledge Ecology International (which has been double checked for veracity) are very important. More than any other lobby, of course, the RIAA is dealing with issues specifically related to the Net. This gives some pointers of where ACTA could go if the anti-piracy and IP lobbies get their way.

Getting your iPod though customs…
RIAA’s proposals for ACTA go well beyond U.S. law on the enforcement of copyrights online. As earlier reported, they want ‘competent authorities’ to be able to take action at borders over pirated copies without the need for a complaint from a rights holder. An official at the EU meeting ridiculed the ‘iPod search’ stories about ACTA, pointing to the EU’s own border measures — but given U.S. border agents are already retaining and searching large amounts of laptops at borders, this is another burden for travelers who are already harassed by ridiculous “security” measures in the Homeland and beyond. Those dismissing such ideas as ‘merely’ the wish list of the rabid anti-piracy lobbies take note: although there has only been one draft of ACTA made so far (and no one outside the secretive gang involved has been able to see it), reliable sources say there is text relating to the border measures provisions. So at least one of the RIAA’s wishes seems, in some form, to have already made it in.

The RIAA’s wish list for online enforcement of its ‘rights’ is also of great concern, not least because it implies that they would get access to private data from ISPs in order to be able to see what we’ve been sharing. As the year goes on, it’s becoming clear that the P2P / IP debate is merging with the surveillance and privacy debate in ways that I think many people hadn’t forseen. We need to understand fast that enforcement of copyright is one of the main levers being used to drive a wedge into our data privacy at the international level.

RIAA and MPAA want to police the Internet
In general, what the RIAA want is ‘harmonization’ (read: extension of US law over the whole world) of the tricky Grokster ‘inducement’ provisions that make providers of software liable if they can be seen as inducing infringing behavior in users. As I know personally from discussions with the RIAA about projects like VODO, interpretations of what constitutes contributory liability are very broad in the States. What the industry wants to do is chill the rapid innovation that led to products like Napster and BitTorrent by rendering entrepreneurs uncertain about the legal status of their activities. The fact that BitTorrent is the most efficient media reproduction and distribution system in history, used by hundreds of thousands of producers to distribute their own work outside the clutches of the corporate media cabals is, of course, not part of the picture here. This is precisely about media conglomerates’ desire to hang on to the tatters of their empire.

The RIAA’s ACTA would also continue the trend towards ISPs and search engines to weed out infringing users. RIAA expects ISPs to filter infringing materials and police offending P2Pers, cutting off their access if necessary. Again this points to mass surveillance of internet use that, in the light of the wiretapping controversy alread raging in the States, is utterly unacceptable in Europe or anywhere else.

How We Can Slam On The Brakes
So what can be done, and what hope do we have over ACTA? Well, firstly, there are internal contradictions in the process that might make its progress less than smooth. The inclusion of the ‘3 strikes’ rule for kicking P2P users from their ISP contract is a case in point — the European Parliament is actually very suspicious of the 3 strikes rule and the UK government is reportedly desperately looking for alternatives to this political hot potato, which only months ago was portrayed as a fait accompli. This raises the possibility of a showdown between ACTA and the European Parliament.

Secondly, the European Commission has no mandate to implement criminal sanctions on copyright matters – this is down to the individual member states who will be very wary about antagonizing their electorates. Since these criminal sanctions are seen by players like the RIAA as a key ‘virtue’ of ACTA – without which it would be a ‘dodo’ – the shakiness of the legal base for inclusion of criminal sanctions is a big issue.

Thirdly and relatedly, the secrecy around ACTA is a potential pitfall. A mandate should have been obtained from the Commission to negotiate the Treaty, but if it exists it has been declared too secret, or at least ‘confidential’ to bring out. Since this document would very likely have to include a rationale for allowing the Commission to negotiate beyond its power on criminal sanctions, it may be rather suspect. European TorrentFreak readers should immediately write to your MEP in your Member State and ask them to request a copy of the mandate, so that we can get a copy of it online and look at how the EU justifies negotiating an ACTA that includes criminal measures. Since the US wants ACTA to be signed before Bush leaves office, a derailing tactic like this has a good chance of working.

ACT against ACTA before it’s too late…

cliffs: the RIAA can diaf

well, no. i’m figuring there would be a bandwidth cap, though i guess there could be a monthly usage cap too. pay X for 250down/150 up… Y for 500down/250up. Z for 1Mb down/500kbup. you know. instead of throttling speeds, force people to pay for the speed they want.

that’s the way it should work. fuck all you can eat because if there is an asshole that is running BitTorrent on my shared cable line and is fucking up my connection, then he should be paying more to pay for upgrades so my service isn’t degraded.

Start a movement, I’ll join.

No need. It’s already that way. They’re trying to change it to not be that way anymore.

well, no. i’m figuring there would be a bandwidth cap, though i guess there could be a monthly usage cap too. pay X for 250down/150 up… Y for 500down/250up. Z for 1Mb down/500kbup. you know. instead of throttling speeds, force people to pay for the speed they want.

that’s the way it should work. fuck all you can eat because if there is an asshole that is running BitTorrent on my shared cable line and is fucking up my connection, then he should be paying more to pay for upgrades so my service isn’t degraded.

If there’s a bandwidth cap, there is by definition a usage cap. If you can’t download more than 1Mb/s, then you can’t download more than 2.5Tb/mo. The problem isn’t the asshole next door running BitTorrent, the problem is the assholes at the cable company who sell your neighbors more than their fair share of the cable’s maximum capacity.

i agree that the cable company is full of assholes, but i hate when people run their torrent client 24/7 knowing that they are on a shared link and not caring that they are fucking up everyone else’s connectivity.

oh, and a bandwidth cap only constitutes a usage cap if you are maxing your connection non-stop. if you are, you shouldn’t be paying the same as me. it doesn’t matter the size of the pipe, the assholes i’m talking about will max it out no matter what the limit is simply because they can. so, have them pay twice as much as me and use that to fund a bigger pipe.

over-selling is essentially a REQUIREMENT in order to provide the burstable speeds that we demand for a price we’re willing to pay.

There’s a reason that business products cost more for the same bandwidth — because the business statistically use it more fully than their residential counter-parts.

Look at webhosting…. Dreamhost gives me 8,656 GB of bandwidth per month…. but if I even came close to using that they’d shut me down. It’s all smoke and mirrors to make you feel good.

If people would just stop being asshats and stop with the piracy then everything would be better for everyone. Costs would go down, and speeds would go up.

Torrents are not inherently bad, but if you remove piracy from torrent usage it basically goes the way of gopher.

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]]> http://www.vexstar.com/comcast-ordered-to-stop-bittorrent-traffic-interference/feed/ 0 Wanna get my A+ cert – Find me a good book! http://www.vexstar.com/wanna-get-my-a-cert-find-me-a-good-book/ http://www.vexstar.com/wanna-get-my-a-cert-find-me-a-good-book/#comments Tue, 23 Sep 2008 01:32:42 +0000 admin http://www.vexstar.com/wanna-get-my-a-cert-find-me-a-good-book/ I was thinking of just getting the VERY top seller (the one by Michael Meyers), but then I figured maybe one wiht a more recent publish date (like the one by J. Brooks towards the bottom of the page)?

Help? Thanks.
I’ve used study guides from fravo.com for a few certs and they are amazing…

They also guarantee you pass on your first try or they will give you your money back.
A+ for dummies was actually a pretty good book for someone wanting to pass the test

Is A+ recognized in Europe? (Ireland specifically)

Twould be good if I could get a cert to my name..
A+ isn’t really recognized anywhere as being anything worthwhile.

it is if a job you apply for requires it, Dell requires it for their technicians. It’s a bottom rung cert so ya you arent landing 100K a year jobs with it but it’s a good basic indicator for anyone getting started.

its absolutely worthless, except for that it’s a basic level requirement, where if you don’t have it, then you obviously can’t do anything with computers.

It’s more of a formalized assurance of ‘I do know a little bit about computers’
I figure it’ll help my get jobs while I’m in school studying for my comp engineering degree. I just want the cert to have it, I know some employers care for it and some don’t. It really depends on who you talk to. I didn’t want this to be a debate thread as I’m sure even some of the people who think its worthless have it. You can’t get some jobs without some sort of certifications or somet experience, and this is a good cert to start with, wouldn’t you agree?
If he has no experience or skills, there’s nothing wrong with an A+ cert to get his foot in the door at an entry-level position. Why do you fucks have to troll every thread about this shit?

Help him or leave him be.

I would agree, as many places require it as a prerequisite of working there, as I more or less hinted at with my ‘formalized assurance’ statement

I can guarantee you a place isn’t going to turn you down for not having your A+ if you’ve got part of your mcse or your ccna or something.

Likely not, however, especially retail tech stores, have signs boasting ‘All our technicians are A+ certified’

and they could not allow you to be a tech until you were. That said, if you have your higher level certs, it’s pretty sad if you’re working at a retail tech store. If you were, they’d likely hire you, then pay to have you A+ certified so that you could be a tech.

That said, it’s neither here nor there for this discussion. A+ is the first step for most aspiring computer technicians, because it’s the most basic of the certifications.
The Windows XP [soon Vista, I guess] part of the mcse/mcsa is just as easy to get as the A+, and a lot more relevant.

yep, the 70-620 exam is easy as hell
So would you say A+ for dummies >= the top seller on that page & others listed?

would it be important to look for something that is published in 08? or late 07? i figure they’d possibly include more up-to-date info. what would you all say?

cmsurfer, thanks for the recommendation, but i just have a think for paper books > online. although that guarantee is kinda cool

cmsurfer, thanks for the recommendation, but i just have a think for paper books > online. although that guarantee is kinda cool

You buy online and then download the guides to your PC. It comes with a built-in test engine where you can simulate the test or just practice questions and they offer explanations on all answers… It also comes with all the questions in a .pdf you could print out if you wanted.

Definitely get something current. I’m not sure how often, but they do update the tests to stay current. I would imagine Vista questions are included now…

I’d just go to a Barnes and Noble and look around to see what they have. Take a close look… Some books offer a discount on the test voucher.

When I took my tests I think they were $125… I think it’s $250/test now??
If the HR dept. is scanning through a boatload of resumes and they’re tossing ones that don’t say A+, because that’s one of the requirements, then you’re screwed and may not even get an interview where you can prove your knowledge to someone beyond HR. It’s cheap insurance.
exam works program. you will pass the exam in 1 week. I studied for 1 week and passed with there exam software if you want it hit me up via pm

If he has no experience or skills, there’s nothing wrong with an A+ cert to get his foot in the door at an entry-level position. Why do you fucks have to troll every thread about this shit?

Help him or leave him be.

Truth.

I got my A+. I took a class. The only thing that might be considered ‘hard’ with the A+ is that you have to have a bit of knowledge about things that are kind of obsolete – like knowing IRQ assignments and such.

If I had a room full of components that were not assembled and a W2K disk could you put all those pieces together into a working PC and get the OS installed on it without my help?

If the answer is ‘YES’ then just get a book and take the damned test already.
If the answer is ‘No’ then an A+ class is a terrific introduction into such things.
so now the question would be what should I do with my a+ Im going on a interview next week for a call center but was wondering where I could get a more hands on job even if it pays crap.

A+ is all you need for most retail stores (to be a tech)

your next step would be more certifications really

I use exam works because it uses the same format and has the exact same answers and all the choices and all of the possible questions in one package.

I was thinking of just getting the VERY top seller (the one by Michael Meyers), but then I figured maybe one wiht a more recent publish date (like the one by J. Brooks towards the bottom of the page)?

Help? Thanks.

A+ is the shit, got me $85k a year at Google with no experience and zero college.

Yeah, uh, using a braindump is against every TOS there is when it comes to certifications. If they find out that you used one, they’ll revoke your cert and ban you from taking a test by them again.

Can’t see that happening unless you walked into the study center with the braindump printed out.

Sure, but how the fuck would they find out if you didn’t tell them or anyone else? Only dumbasses pay for braindumps so there is no way to trace it back to you.
They’re adding in facial recognition cameras and doing analysis on the pictures/how you took your test.

Cisco is footing the bill for the Pearson VUE centers. If you’re using Prometric for vendors that allow it, though, you’ll be fine.

They’re adding in facial recognition cameras and doing analysis on the pictures/how you took your test.

Cisco is footing the bill for the Pearson VUE centers. If you’re using Prometric for vendors that allow it, though, you’ll be fine.

Is that some kind of joke? They just arbitrarily decide based a video playback of the test if they think you used a braindump?

edit:

What the fuck. If you don’t fit their performance metrics they will press charges for cheating? This reeks of aids and fail.

Is that some kind of joke? They just arbitrarily decide based a video playback of the test if they think you used a braindump?

edit:

What the fuck. If you don’t fit their performance metrics they will press charges for cheating? This reeks of aids and fail.

you fail at reading comprehension. If you don’t fit their performance metrics, they give you a free rewrite to demonstrate you did know the material.

The people who get charged are the ones writing as proxies and stealing questions
I own the "exam cram" one. I havent really read it yet, but its thick and has a lot of nice info

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