Tinware

“ Discarded, lost, or destroyed data is said to have `gone to the bit bucket'. On Unix, often used for /dev/null. Sometimes amplified as `the Great Bit Bucket in the Sky'. 2. The place where all lost mail and news messages eventually go. The selection is performed according to Finagle's Law; important mail is much more likely to end up in the bit bucket than junk mail, which has an almost 100% probability of getting delivered. Routing to the bit bucket is automatically performed by mail-transfer agents, news systems, and the lower layers of the network. ”

“ Before buying, insist if possible that the sales rep set up his hardware and show you the “compatibility” he’s been claiming.
How Easy Is the Network to Install? A WEB-type network might be a nightmare for the lazy and sloppy. It requires hooking printed circuit boards up to the right leads of chips in the Kaypro. And you must also solder the telephone-style sockets into which your computer’s network cord plugs. [79]
But a good data-processing department shouldn’t have any problems, according to The WEB’s makers.
What about small businesses without data-processing people? ”

“ We are used to thinking of computer systems as having "software" and "hardware", but it is closer to the truth to say that complicated systems like the Internet have many levels—in the case of the Internet as many as seven—ranging from "very software" to "very hardware". Each level has its own set of rules, called its protocol. The TCP/IP protocol belongs to two of the middle levels. ”

“ In other words, you could have the same conversation over IM as you do over SMTP. With the right tweaks, the whole mail-server business could take place inside of a chat. Or a web-session. Or anything else.
This is called "tunneling." You put the SMTP inside a chat "tunnel." You could then put the chat back into an SMTP tunnel if you wanted to be really weird, tunneling the tunnel in another tunnel.
In fact, every Internet protocol is susceptible to this process. It's cool, because it means that if you're on a network with only Web access, you can tunnel your mail over it. ”

“ Telnet ——— A program on the Internet that allows logins to another computer to run software there. Telnet allows a user at one site to interact with a remote system at another site as if the user's terminal was connected directly to the remote computer. With telnet, you can browse menus, read text files, use gopher services, and search online databases. Sometimes, you can join live, interactive games and chat with other callers. Usually, you cannot download files or list file directories. Telnet is not available to users who have email only access to the Internet. ”

“ When PBX and voice switching and all the pieces of intellect necessary to run a telephone system can be run on commodity white box hardware at no cost, and bandwidth can be bought in bulk by buyers with deep enough pockets to buy as much backbone time as they want, the telecommunications operators of the world are in a terrible jam. ”

“ You can even tunnel Xnet -- which itself is a tunnel for dozens of protocols -- over it.
Domain Name Service is an interesting and ancient Internet protocol, dating back to 1983. It's the way that your computer converts a computer's name -- like pirateparty.org.se -- to the IP number that computers actually use to talk to each other over the net, like 204.11.50.136. It generally works like magic, even though it's got millions of moving parts -- every ISP runs a DNS server, as do most governments and lots of private operators. ”

“ Other networks, like FidoNet, depend mainly on dial-up using regular voice-grade telephone service. Each BBS dial regularly to other computers in the network to send or receive mail and files. They may do it once per day, twice per day or whatever. Then someone got the idea of interconnecting networks. FidoNet was connected to the UUCP network, which was connected to the Internet, which in turn was connected to the Bergen By Byte BBS in Norway, CompuServe, SciLink, MCI Mail, and various local area networks. Today, the online world is a global web of networks. The world is 'cabled'. ”

“ Contact your regional network first to see what services might be available to you. A list of regional nets can be obtained from the NSF Network Service Center (address below) , or check with a local college or university's academic computing center. A university may be able to give you a guest account on its system for educational purposes.
Access to electronic mail alone is roughly $20 a month at this writing. Additional capabilities, including telnet and ftp, cost more, and it will cost $2,000 or more per year if you want to operate your own host system. ”

“ Use internal to the carrier's facility of companding techniques, bandwidth compression techniques, circuit switching, message or packet switching, error control techniques, etc. that facilitate economical, reliable movement of information does not alter the nature of the basic service. In the provision of a basic transmission service, memory or storage within the network is used only to facilitate the transmission of the information from the origination to its destination, and the carrier's basic transmission network is not used as an information storage system. ”

“ GOPHERS Even with tools like Hytelnet and archie, telnet and ftp can still be frustrating. There are all those telnet and ftp addresses to remember. Telnet services often have their own unique commands. And, oh, those weird directory and file names! But now that the Net has become a rich repository of information, people are developing ways to make it far easier to find and retrieve information and files. Gophers and Wide-Area Information Servers (WAISs) are two services that could ultimately make the Internet as easy to navigate as commercial networks such as CompuServe or Prodigy. ”

“ Telnet is the main Internet protocol for creating a connection with a remote machine. It gives the user the opportunity to be on one computer system and do work on another, which may be across the street or thousands of miles away. Where modems are limited, in the majority, by the quality of telephone lines and a single connection, telnet provides a connection that's error-free and nearly always faster than the latest conventional modems. ”

“ When you get a worm or a virus, your computer sends a message to a chat channel on IRC -- the Internet Relay Chat. That message tells the botmaster -- the guy who deployed the worm -- that the computers are there ready to do his bidding. Botnets are supremely powerful, since they can comprise thousands, even hundreds of thousands of computers, scattered all over the Internet, connected to juicy high-speed connections and running on fast home PCs. Those PCs normally function on behalf of their owners, but when the botmaster calls them, they rise like zombies to do his bidding. ”

“ Control NIC, and you owned a virtual pass-key into any computer on the Internet which `trusted' another. And most machines trust at least one other system.
Whenever one computer connects to another across the Net, both machines go through a special meet-and-greet process. The receiving computer looks over the first machine and asks itself a few questions. What's the name of the incoming machine? Is that name allowed to connect to me? In what ways am I programmed to `trust' that machine—to wave my normal security for connections from that system? ”

“ EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT WANTS ISPs TO SPY The European Parliament last Friday passed the Lawful Interception of Communications council resolution on new technologies — known as Enfopol — which requires Internet service providers and telephone companies to provide law-enforcement agencies with full-time, real-time access to Internet transmissions, even those traversing along multiple networks. In addition, wireless communications providers are required to provide geographical location information on cell phone users, along with decoding of messages, if encryption is provided as part of the service. ”

“ So one night I was out here diving and I really was trying to remember who’d played the Sundance Kid in Butch Cassidy, and I knew that if I only had a net connection I could google it. I had a stumbler, an app that logged all the open WiFi access points that I came into range of, and a GPS attachment that I’d dived that could interface with the software that mapped the APs on a map of Toronto, so I could just belt the machine in there on the passenger seat and go driving around until I had a list of all the wireless Internet that I could see from the street. ”

“ The programming available for viewing is stored outside the customer’s home at Cablevision’s head-end. Both utilize a “session resource manager,” such as the eSRM used by the RS-DVR, to set up a temporary pathway to deliver programming in encrypted form to the customer for playback; decryption information is transmitted in both systems to the customer’s set-top box. (Hartson Report ¶ 120) . The number of available pathways for programming delivery in both systems is limited; if there are none available, the customer gets an error message or busy signal. ”

“ People will tell you "No one can own the Internet!"— but the fact is that while you may own your computer, you do not "Own the Internet" any more than owning my own telephones or PBX exchanges means I own telephone networks that belong to The Telephone Companies. The corporations that own the physical wires and cabling, they are the ones who own the Internet, and right now that system is being sold to The Telephone Companies, and your "rights" to the Information Superhighway are being sold with them. ”

“ There are entire living communities in cyberspace today; chattering, gossiping, planning, conferring and scheming, leaving one another voice-mail and electronic mail, giving one another big weightless chunks of valuable data, both legitimate and illegitimate. They busily pass one another computer software and the occasional festering computer virus. ”

“ Software Tool & Die offers The World, a public access Unix system: The basic rates are $2 per hour and a $5 monthly account fee. Services offered by The World include internet electronic mail, USENET news, ClariNet -UPI, AP, and satellite news services, real-time chat, Unix Software, Archie, the Online Book Initiative (a publicly accessible repository for freely redistributable collections of textual information, a net-worker's library.) AlterNet Access - Users have access to AlterNet via ftp/telnet. The World can also be accessed over the Compuserve Packet Network. ”

“ You may have a connection to a "host" computer that is directly connected to the net. If you can use a modem to connect your home PC to the mainframe at the office and the mainframe is on the net, then you can get an Internet connection that way. But what if your office doesn't have a mainframe on the net? You can still subscribe to a service that makes a host computer available to the public. This is presently the cheapest and most common method for public access to the net. ”

“ And if you are using a public-access UUCP or Usenet site, you will not have access to telnet. The main reason for this is cost. Connecting to the Internet can easily cost $1,000 or more for a leased, high-speed phone line. Some databases and file libraries can be queried by e-mail, however; we'll show you how to do that later on. In the meantime, the rest of this chapter assumes you are connected to a site with at least partial Internet access. Most telnet sites are fairly easy to use and have online help systems. Most also work best (and in some cases, only) with VT100 emulation. ”

“ Idle threat or no, this message caught the ITU's attention. One year later, in June of 1991, after endless messages back and forth to Tony, I had received a fax from the Secretary-General asking me to post all ITU standards on the Internet on an "experimental" basis. I promptly booked a plane ticket to Geneva for August to pry the data out of the cold, clammy hands of the bureaucracy. Next thing I knew, I was in Geneva, ready to go to work. ”

“ The scientists are enthusiastic. They talk of robustness and dumb networks with smart terminals. They talk of TCP/IP and HTML and decentralized systems that run on open protocols, so that anyone can connect to this network and use it any way they want to. You, of course, know nothing about the truly astounding outburst of creativity and communication that would actually flower on such a system, that would flower precisely because it is so open and no one country or company controls it or the protocols that run it. ”

“ Private branch-exchange phone systems in large corporations can be penetrated; phreaks dial-up a local company, enter its internal phone-system, hack it, then use the company's own PBX system to dial back out over the public network, causing the company to be stuck with the resulting long-distance bill. ”

“ Computer technology is increasingly removing technical limitations as to the types of enhanced services that may be offered. Yet, a classification scheme which would categorize enhanced services as either communications or data processing inherently limits the types of services that an unregulated entity may offer. The reason for this is clear. Providers of data processing and other computer services acquire the necessary transmission facilities from communications common carriers pursuant to tariff, and resell this transmission capability as part of their enhanced offering. ”