I think it's how Subway likes to do their product placement, because Community did this too, including naming an actual character Subway in the show.. http://community-sitcom.wikia....

In my experience, if you pay Shaw for a static IP for home home or office connection, you still get a dynamic IP (in the eyes of IANA) that just doesn't change like the old one did.

Except when it does anyway.

I'm just trying to understand what possible reasons someone would otherwise be so upset that someone else did this. It didn't hurt anyone except those who choose to get involved. And the "early adoption" period was more than an entire YEAR, and there was lots of noise about Bitcoin during that year, it wasn't some big secret private project, and the early adopters were not trying to keep it from being adopted and hoard coins for themselves but were instead trying to make sure as many people knew about it as quickly as possible (in other words they were eager to give up their advantage, for the growth of the network, as shown by the staggering growth of Bitcoin during this time). They did not know that Bitcoin was going to be as big as it has been. There have been lots of failed crypto-currencies that have came before this and the original developer was not even (as far as I can tell) actively involved in the community using the Bitcoin network, so I don't believe their interests were in pumping and dumping. Nobody could have predicted it was going to be as successful as it was.

Imagine you took a huge risk and invested a ton of time into a project that had little to no chance of doing anything but using your GPU and CPU 24/7. What if in the end you woke up one morning and those coins you were mining at 300-500 a day were suddenly worth $30 a piece? Say you had several thousand because you started up the client and forgot about it and left it running on a server for several weeks, like some of my friends did. Would you hang on to all of them, or would you sell some? What answer did you choose and why?

Does that make you a dishonest person, or a criminal in any way? Furthermore, what business is it of yours if someone else chose to mine Bitcoin and this happened to them? Why does this make you anti-Bitcoin, that it happened to them?

The link someone posted earlier explaining how the technology worked from Wikipedia, and using it as evidence that it was a scam for the early adopters, was completely pulling that argument out of thin air because the description linked was a technical description and not any evidence of any wrong-doing or ill intentions by the early adopters of the technology. Because there is none.

Further, anyone who wants to discuss or understand this currency instead of foaming at the mouth should really just start by reading the white paper the original author published. It's clear that rather than a scam Bitcoin was started with at the very least educational intentions, and at the very most liberating intentions for people to conduct transactions with privacy. Sure, if such a technology exists at all that allows for international trading to take place, then people are going to do bad things with it, but it is not the technology's fault, nor were the developers of Bitcoin ever anything but fully transparent about the project, its goals, its source code, its licensing, the ideal use of the currency, etc. Again, "Bitcoin doesn't kill people, people kill people". Bitcoin is a very clever and novel idea and was not a ponzi scheme, as there can not be a ponzi scheme without a central controller, and was not a pump and dump, as can be evidenced by the continued existence and ongoing value of Bitcoins. The prices are set by market forces. If agricultural crop prices are determined by supply and demand (thus indirectly affected by weather patterns and climate), does that make the weather a pump-and-dump scam for the farmer?

People do bad things with cash, people use Bitcoins instead of cash. WHAT? BITCOIN DIDN'T MAKE THE BAD PEOPLE GOOD? BAD BITCOIN!

Why do you have such an emotional response to something that should really not matter to you, if you are not involved or were not involved with it?

I'm not trolling... but you're seriously over-reacting to the existence of Bitcoin unless it did something bad to you. You're acting like there are no legal or legitimate uses for Bitcoin or users of Bitcoin, which is completely false.

I think people should be allowed to engage in peer-to-peer trading of digital goods and services without a third party getting involved and so I think Bitcoin is an excellent option. It's too bad that everyone feels negatively towards Bitcoin. I think it may just be play money but so is every currency in the world that is government-issued, is the problem just that Bitcoin is not backed by military force or financial inertia? I just don't get why all the haters when it comes to this topic on Slashdot because it is perfectly legitimate to have a Bitcoin story on this website.

Can you imagine how negative you should be feeling about actual cash? Considering how many drug dealers, pimps, human traffickers, and violent terrorists deal with USD it should obviously be painted in the same light, no? We should make it illegal! I know, maybe we can come up with some kind of digital replacement for cash! Oh wait...

They aren't ads, people aren't making money off the Bitcoin stories except for slashdot.org for posting them (and serving actual ads beside them).

Bitcoin is a real thing. It is a distributed online crypto-currency. It is indeed news for nerds and stuff that matters. You can filter out/ignore the Bitcoin stories if it hurts your feelings that you didn't get in on the ground floor when you had the chance.

Wow, there sure are a lot of anti-Bitcoin trolls who don't understand the technology or the idea of how currency can work out on the slashdoternets today.

That's why you would want to use encryption.

It's not practical for VoIP providers to offer encryption most of the time, because their connections to the real POTS/PSTN is still just regular, wiretappable PRI/T1s at some point along the line. They have to interconnect with the real phone network at some point to be useful, and all calls therefore are still tappable.

However, you could just use Zphone with ZRTP (or run your own PBX using FreeSWITCH to accomplish what you are looking for from a VoIP provider).

Don't you see how that's painfully unsustainable? There's either going to be a time when we don't need as much stuff, or a time when there is not enough raw resources left to make stuff.

I feel comfortable with "no ability to access cell network = not a cell phone".

++1 Yup, FreeSWITCH is great. Asterisk is powerful but leaks memory at high loads and in my real world experience doesn't handle 100+ calls well on a pure SIP setup on average hardware. I really enjoy the completely different way FreeSWITCH handles things. It feels more UNIX-y and hardened out of the box.

The biggest problem out there causing SIP toll fraud is people's extension passwords being set to things like "1234" in trixbox/asterisk/freepbx etc. It is "user error" but also "user ignorance" because these frontends and pbx software packages do not really bother telling their users to use secure extension passwords. In a perfect world extension passwords would be autogenerated to be very strong, but in FreePBX for example the extension password is called a 'secret' but since it is not called a password, I have had users set up Asterisk boxes with 1234 as the 'secret' who don't realize that actually means they are opening up UDP 5060 for connections to users who supply 1234 as their password. Hello, 50000+ calls to China/UK international DIDs! Goodbye, bank account :(

I do consulting for a VoIP PSTN gateway company and we are seeing a large amount of bruce force SIP registration attacks against our IPs all the time. We have implemented some DDOS protection to stop the abuse of our precious CPU cycles but the problem continues. It is more user related than Asterisk related. trixbox/freepbx/and the other frontends out there need to do more to make security their focus, rather than "omg look at the flash operator panel" and "look at the shiny bar graph showing live calls". Unfortunately the users of these frontends are not looking for that, so the shiniest frontend wins....

My current setup includes FreeSWITCH running on FreeBSD with the very nice FusionPBX frontend, which is based on the FreeSWITCH pfSense Firewall module. With these tools, a properly secured apache, and properly configured IP ACLs in place, I am seeing zero toll fraud on the system.