171–180 of 211 posts
This comment intrigued me so I did a tiny bit of research. It appears that X.400 uses S/MIME for encryption (see RFC-3854). Alternatively something called STANAG 4406 which provides some sort of centralized control of who sees what for military applications.
Neither seems to be "baked in from the start".
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ATM was superior in the context of a bill-by-the-byte telco-style network where oversubscribed links could be carefully planned. The "impedance mismatch" IP's of unreliable datagram delivery with ATM's guaranteed cell delivery created situations where ATM switches could effectively need unlimited buffer RAM to make their delivery guarantees even if the cells were containing IP datagrams that could just be discarded w…
It was designed by people who were trying to digitally emulate 1920s copper-wire circuits at a time when the entire world was moving to packet-switched digital data. I remember visiting a large telco at the time and having to tell them about this new thing called ADSL that was going to steamroller them if they weren't careful. "Nooo... no, that's not real, you can't do that over a phone line, not possible. And even i…
These days I think all of AT&T's flavors of DSL, including their IPTV-supporting VDSL, is considered 'legacy', but for the longest time their "IP-DSL" was the future, and for 15+ years they've been trying to shed this ATM-based DSL
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> It's the entire reason "internet" standards won over "telco" (in this case ITU) standards - the latter could only be deployed by big coordinated efforts, Anyone remember the promise of ATM networking in the 90's? It was telecom grade networking which used circuit switched networking that would handle voice, video and data down one pipe. Instead of carelessly flinging packets into the ether like an savage, you had a…
My college went all-in on ATM-over-fiber and wired all the dorm rooms with it. It was a PITA. Of course no computers came with ATM support and the cards cost $400+ each so the school had hundreds of cards that they would “lease” them out to students each year. There would be a huge “install depot” at the start of the year where students brought in their (desktop) computers and volunteers would open them up, install t…
What year was that? I could see a college/university network department dominated by old school telecom guys deciding to use ATM to connect buildings, but it's kind of insane to think anyone at any point in time thought it was reasonable to push to individual endpoints
>> SMTP "“didn’t win because it was ‘better,’” he argued, but “just because it was easier to implement." Yes - and this is actually really important! It's true of most of the important early internet technologies. It's the entire reason "internet" standards won over "telco" (in this case ITU) standards - the latter could only be deployed by big coordinated efforts, while internet standards let individual decentralize…
> Did any of the ITU standards win? Maybe X.500 - also known as LDAP, and widely deployed across enterprises in the form of Active Directory.
>> SMTP "“didn’t win because it was ‘better,’” he argued, but “just because it was easier to implement." Yes - and this is actually really important! It's true of most of the important early internet technologies. It's the entire reason "internet" standards won over "telco" (in this case ITU) standards - the latter could only be deployed by big coordinated efforts, while internet standards let individual decentralize…
The rivalry continues in the fibre era, with ITU's GPON and successors competing with IEEE EPON etc. ITU does seem to have lost out comprehensively at layer 3. They do some stuff like OAM which is only interesting at Telco scale, although in the mobile era bodies like ETSI are more relevant. The other difference from that era, and even the early internet era, is how much is no longer standardised at all, but decided…
ISPs and providers (fiber or not) that started out as cable companies (Comcast, Charter) are hitching to SCTE/CableLabs standards and equipment from their traditional vendors (Commscope, wherever Cisco's Scientific Atlanta business lines ended up)
In the US there is little need for interoperability since networks don't have to be unbundled or support any kind of competition, outside of cable networks have to allow a customer to bring their own CPE (and only for copper networks, when they move to fiber all bets are off)
The only benefit interoperability brings is pricing--if a vendor can sell their platform to many ISPs, they get an economy of scale. This doesn't mean standards win, even in the cable world in DOCSIS 4.0 there are two flavors, with Comcast being just about the only company that has picked one flavor, with the rest of the industry picking the other
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I saw a story once, which may well be completely made up, about why AT&T got out of the cell phone business. They had a research project, but reliability was an issue. They couldn't see a way to do better than 1 dropped call in 10,000. Their standard for POTS at the time was 1 in 2 billion. Seeing that the tech would never be good enough, they sold off the whole thing for cheap. Years later, they bought it back for w…
Seems a little sus. AT&T basically created the cellular mobile phone, and built up an analog, then digital system (D-AMPS/TDMA). AT&T sort of sold out the mobile business in 2004 to Cingular (BellSouth) because TDMA was a dead end. They then bought BellSouth back in 2006 and carried on with CDMA. Those old phones had a long range. It was hard to make small ones because the old AT&T towers were much farther apart, up…
It wasn't until phones shrank and service got cheaper, that consumer adoption took off. Businesses and early adopters will pay even if the product is inconvenient and costly to use, as long as the benefit exceeds the cost.
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Seems a little sus. AT&T basically created the cellular mobile phone, and built up an analog, then digital system (D-AMPS/TDMA). AT&T sort of sold out the mobile business in 2004 to Cingular (BellSouth) because TDMA was a dead end. They then bought BellSouth back in 2006 and carried on with CDMA. Those old phones had a long range. It was hard to make small ones because the old AT&T towers were much farther apart, up…
This is a minor detail, but the "AT&T" that bought BellSouth in 2006 was the AT&T formerly known as SBC which bought the husk of Ma Bell and rebranded itself, i.e. the AT&T we have today.
> C=no; ADMD=; PRMD=uninett; O=uninett; S=alvestrand; G=harald that would be very annoying way to write e-mail and no less prone to typosquatting (if anything, more) Both standards lacked hindsight we have today but x.400 would just be added complexity (as years of tacked-on extensions would build upon it) that makes non-error-prone parsing harder
Ah but the solution was an X.500 directory where you just look up the recipient! So you never type the e-mail address, you just look up "Joe Smith" to send them an e-mail. Like looking them up in the phone book. Ignore the fact that the directory may return multiple Joe Smiths at the same large organization, not return Joe Smyth you wanted to message, or that there's not even a hint of anonymity with such directories…
Its the same reason why fingerd isnt run.
And why the LDAP for an org isnt exposed.
You do not give information of all your users to the public/enemy. Its the cybersecurity "principle of least privilege" and need to know.