Internet Freedom - Well done EU!

If you think that Internet brought revolution only to individuals (and maybe different businesses that market themselves over the Internet)  than you miss one important link, telecommunication companies. Before the Internet they were in charge of everything related to communication and they did whatever they wanted, in the supposed name of the customers. If they thought that something isn't good, then no matter what people wanted, they weren't getting it. And we shell not forget pricing, which generated huge revenues. But, after the tremendous success of the Internet, things drastically changed. For some of the underlying reasons you can read in my other post, but the key is that the control was given to users, not network (i.e. telecoms). Now, telecoms are what they should be: data carriers only.

All good, but the problem is that there are no huge profits in data transfer, at least not as it used to be and telecoms don't just sit and wait. And so, every now and then we hear of some brilliant idea coming from telecommunication industry by which they either try to bring back good old days, or they try to offer something that doesn't make sense. Just in case you didn't know, ATM was one such idea that, fortunately  was a big failure! Even more interesting is a comment on this blog post from a guy (or guys) that are trying to reimplement some protocols from mobile telephony. They criticize specifications produced by telecoms (and related industry) for introducing new things, not because they are necessary, but because they are patented and in that way allow manipulation!

But, these days there is one other "very interesting" idea. Probably not many people know that ITU is trying to introduce mechanisms in order to regulate the Internet. Fortunately, EU isn't approving that, along with US. I approve that wholeheartedly  and I can not describe how outraged I am when I think about telecoms and ITU!

But, it is probably enough to point who is proposing regulation and to be clear what real motives are. Also interesting are requirements by some countries that Google and other Internet providers would have to pay to them to be allowed to distribute content to their citizens. This is absurd, because who forces users to access Google?

And ITU is also something I really dislike, a lot! It is a bureaucratic institution that produces standards for telecommunications. It's a dinosaur of the past. If you, as a single person, want to propose something, or just take part in some activity, you first have to be member of some member state standardization body, which isn't free. Then, you have to be delegated as a representative to ITU, and only then you can take part in some activity. And now we come to the best part, specifications that were produced common purpose were quite pricey. Truth to be told, they are now distributing specifications free of charge, but if it weren't the Internet, we would still have to pay for them. Contrast that to IETF, where membership and participation is open to everyone who wants to participate. Also, all the specifications produced by IETF are available for free to anyone. Now, I'm not claiming that IETF is perfect, but I certainly do claim that IETF is much better than ITU.

And while I'm at ITU/IETF, it happened to me several years ago that I called our Ministry in order to ask for funding to visit IETF. Apparently, this particular Ministry was willing to do that, or so it was written on their Web pages. The only caveat was that it didn't include IETF for a simple reason it isn't so bureaucratic as ITU. To cut the story short, bureaucrat I talked with didn't understand what I was talking about, nor he was interested to find out. And it ended without a grant...

Segmentation fault in the header of a main function...

Well, I just compiled one program I got from the Internet and to my surprise it segfaulted immediately after the start. To protect innocent, I'll call the binary of this program gensigseg. This is what happened:

$ ./gensigseg
Segmentation fault (core dumped)

First, I thought that it accesses command line arguments without checking they are present. This application proved already to be very lousy written, and it wouldn't surprise me that this is the problem. So, I tried with a dummy parameters, all in hope that I'll get some kind of a help message. But, the same thing happened again and there was no help message. It was time to see where it exactly segfaulted:

$ ulimit -c unlimited
$ ./gensigseg
Segmentation fault (core dumped)
$ gdb ./gensigseg core
...
Core was generated by `./gensigseg'.
Program terminated with signal 11, Segmentation fault.
#0  0x0000000000407100 in main (argc=Cannot access memory at address 0x7fff40d80f8c
) at gensigsegmain.c:137
137    int main (int argc, const char *argv []) {

You can imagine my surprise when I saw that! Segmentation fault in the header of the function main itself! Well, that was weird. Googling for this didn't revealed anything useful. After all, how many times did you see that?!

So, after poking with assembly, different optimization options, etc. I finally realized that the problem was in stack. Namely,  when disassembling main function in gdb, it pointed exact assembly instruction that caused the segmentation fault, and it turned out to be the instruction that accessed stack after the stack's value was subtracted with some large value (this was allocation of space for local variables). Anyway, after increasing stack size from default 8M to 32M (using ulimit command) the command finally worked.

Instead of conclusion, let me say that this application is unbelievably lousy written. So much about those who wrote it. More interesting is that this application was written for ITU, and if ITU accepts such shit (I have to use that word!) that what it says about ITU itslef? I'll leave this question unansvered...