unixnoob
Say the PGID I get for sh is 321. If I do
kill [signal] 321
If it would not kill them, then couldn't we modify kill(1) to be able to call kill() with a negative integer as you describe?
Sorry for the noob questions. I am still learning and making mistakes.
That is exactly the type of conceptual roadblock I was alluding to in my comment.
But if you look at what people, not just nerds, want to do over the internet a significant portion (perhaps even the majority) of it is the same old stuff they did in 1970's. Send person-to-person messages and make person-to-person telephone calls.
The new dimension is of course person-to-person video, and we now have more ubiquitous bandwidth to make this happen that we didn't have in the 1990's.
Whether you see possibilities or just impediments depends on how you define the problem.
If you define the problem as achieving some sort of perfectly anonymous communication, an anonyous interchange of bits, then you are outside of the problem I'm discussing. It may be a fascinating problem, but it is not one that interests me.
I'm talking about doing those same old things we were doing in the 1970's, with the same degree of privacy we had (absence of advertisements and senseless statistical analysis of every word we say for commercial purposes), using the internet.
Millions of people manage to call their friends and family despite the issues of "discovery phase" and "trust". Millions of people have a connetion to a telephone network despite the potential of "spam" (cold calling? telemarketing?)
Again, if you redefine the problem your own way++ you can argue endlessly against any sort of simple proposal, e.g. one that aims to make something we've all been doing since the 1970's easy, for everyone, not just nerds: connecting, directly, to people you know.+++ Facebook seems to revolve around the idea of communicating with people ("friends") you know in real life, not online acquaintences you have never met. Is that the reason it's popular? I don't know. And I don't really care. Even if there was no such thing as a "social network" (buzzword), I see a utility in being able to stay in contact with people I know in real life. I fail to see Facebook, which is roughly the real world equivalent of a megaphone, as being necessary to do that. Why do I have to route all by bits through Facebook's website? The answer is: I don't. And NAT traversal is the solution.
++ We need a way to have anonymous communication with strangers. As other commenters have said, that problem is for the cypherpunks.
+++ And I'm pretty sure this is how the very early internet was, before firewall mania and NAT. People had met the others they were connecting to in real life. Or, at least, they had their real life contact information and could pick up the phone and call them, or send them a letter.
I'm not thinking about peer-to-peer from an anonymous file sharing perspective. I'm thinking in much broader terms. But I know anonymous file sharing is what many projects have focused on.
You are right that many puported "peer-to-peer" solutions are not true p2p. Look hard and you'll usually find a middleman somewhere in the scheme. Of course as we all know many users are not really interested in how something works, just so long as it works. How many people really look hard at the scheme being used?
As for IPv6, I think it brings a lot of complexity. And where there is complexity, there will be problems. Working with IPv4 is complex enough as it is. I like IPv4 because it's more widely found. Not everyone will have access to IPv6.
People commenting about this in lists and forums and blogs make the issue more complex than it is because they have all sorts of assumptions about how it has to work. But as Rob Pike says when you assume you put plum paste on your ass. "Discovery phase." This is nerd stuff.
Put all the nerd stuff aside for a moment. When you want to telephone someone, how to you handle the "discovery phase"? You look up the telephone number and place the call. Everyone does this the world over. Second, how many people do you actually telephone in your entire lifetime? Hundreds? Thousands? (Are you a telemarketer?) Third, how many of them are people you see face-to-face at some point? People do not normally call lots of anonymous people.
A telephone network. (Actually a system of regional networks.) Everyone has a number. You get their number and you make the call. But how? According to nerds on the web, this should be a complex problem with no easy solution. But millions of people, non-technical people, make telephone calls everyday.
To think the web equivalent of a telephone directory is an unsolvable problem is ridiculous. And to think that every person needs a directory with billions of names is similarly silly. They will only need a small subset.
Moreover, with modern storage capacities, you could store a billion names and numbers on a small device no problem. Searching billion row databases is quite fast, if you use the right software. But you will never even need to go that far.
AFAIK people do not change their telephone numbers very frequently. Certainly not on a whim. If they do change it, then they have to let others know. Somehow they manage this., even if they are non-tecnical. Of course if you keep changing your number you'll be harder to contact. This ic common sense. But why would you do that? Why would you need to keep changing your number? Get a number and stick to it.
If you think stuff like MobileIP is the solution to roaming then you need to keep looking at what's possible. There are simpler and more reliable ways to do it.
How many people do you call in a lifetime? Think about it.
What makes it all possible is NAT traversal. That is the fundamental problem being solved which takes us back to peer-to-peer and the orginal model of the internet. The rest is all just pre-configuration and UI.
DNS is really only optional for email, at least functionally. But I think a lot of people assume there can be no email without domain names.
For networks with strangers, it's an entirely different ballgame. I have little interest in that can of worms. Way too complicated. That's for the geniuses who can create stuff like Freenet.
I guess I could look at the WASTE code, but I doubt I would find it simpler than the approach I've settled on. As I say, we all have our preferences. I like things very simple.
It seemed more like a chat client than something I could run any application over. It was more an application for doing certain defined things accessible in menus (the ones you mentioned) instead of being a generic means to create peer-to-peer networks.
Can it be captured in a small, simple application?
I think his point is that two nodes should be able to open and then connect on any port they choose, not just TCP 80. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
Are we saying that a user should not even be _allowed_ to have an application listen on any port except a known few?
Isn't the more important issue whether an application/process is actually listening on a port? I mean you can send me all the nasty bits you want but unless I'm prepared to receive them, what difference does it make? And I thought the whole premise here is that the only people on this social network are ones you know. They shouldn't be deliberately sending you nasty bits anyway.
I am a unixnoob. Please go easy on me for my ignorance.
pgrphack sh -c "processes"
Again, sorry for the noob question. I'm still learning and making mistakes.