Slashdot Mirror

ftp://csociety-ftp.ecn.purdue.edu/pub/progeny/
deb ftp://csociety-ftp.ecn.purdue.edu/pub/progeny/ progeny main contrib non-free
and
ftp://emu.res.cmu.edu/progeny
deb ftp://emu.res.cmu.edu/progeny/ progeny main contrib non-free

Look under the images/current directory for rc1 ISO and read the RELNOTES.rc1 too!

The MPAA and the companies writing DVD software should freaking HIRE the people hacking on DeCSS. FerChrists sake, this implementation is less than 0.5k, is the goddamn fastest DeCSS decoding algorithm in existence, and is not even fully optimized yet(according to the above mentioned DeCSS gallery). If they were smart, they'd be hiring these guys, not suing them.

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"People who bite the hand that feeds them usually lick the boot that kicks them"

When I get tired of fighting the fight I sometimes look around at the others carrying the fight around me. Go check out The Gallery of CSS Descramblers. A gallery of many CSS decoders. The decoding algorithm is express in a variety of different means from C code to Haiku. The beauty is that its not just an expression of coding diversity but an effort to illustrate the communcative equivalence of code and speech by filling the region between natural language and code with examples.

So stop for a bit, watch the fight, then get back up and shine some light.

NEW YORK (AP) -- The Church of Scientology paid the Internal Revenue Service $12.5 million as part of a settlement of a long-standing dispute with the tax agency, The Wall Street Journal reported today.

Details of the 1993 settlement, which helped secure the tax-exempt status of the main Scientology church, previously had not been released.

The details included the church's agreement to drop thousands of lawsuits against the IRS and to stop assisting others in other lawsuits against the agency based on claims before the Oct. 1, 1993, settlement date, the Journal said.

The IRS canceled payroll taxes and penalties it had assessed against certain church entities and seven officials, and dropped audits of 13 Scientology organizations.

The 1993 agreement ended a struggle that began in 1967, when the IRS argued that the main Scientology church should lose its tax-exempt status because it was a for-profit business that enriched church officials.

1. Church of Scientology International v. Fishman and Geertz

2. Church of Scientology vs. the Net

3. Scientology Court Files

4. Scientology Cult Attacks XS4ALL

5. Scientology v. the Internet

(Found via Google and Yahoo!)

We (Waterloo) still don't have a wireless network.

Here's who does:

• Carnegie Mellon has Wireless Andrew all over campus
• Dartmouth has it
• Drexel has it (Information Resources and Technology, Library)
• Princeton (Firestone Library and Computing & Information Technology)
• Marquette
• Richard Ivey School of Business at University of Western Ontario

Grumble, grumble. So much for us being a high tech school.

Paul

We (Waterloo) still don't have a wireless network.

Here's who does:

• Carnegie Mellon has Wireless Andrew all over campus
• Dartmouth has it
• Drexel has it (Information Resources and Technology, Library)
• Princeton (Firestone Library and Computing & Information Technology)
• Marquette
• Richard Ivey School of Business at University of Western Ontario

Grumble, grumble. So much for us being a high tech school.

Paul

CMU has had a Campus-wide wireless network for a while now. The Wireless Andrew project was started in 1994, using 915 MHz technology, and was later upgraded to 2.4 GHz 802.11-based technology from Lucent/Orinoco.

All of the academic buildings have coverage. A large portion of the outdoor academic campus is also covered. (No coverage in the dorms, though.)

For more information, see:

http://www.cmu.edu/computing/wireless/

God does not play dice with the universe. Albert Einstein

Carnegie Mellon has had one for years. Can you get a Palm Pilot to connect to it? Nuh-uh.

Then you should try This (Automated Highwary System) and this (Navlab)

Then you should try This (Automated Highwary System) and this (Navlab)

The system has room for each of 6 billion people to have almost 2 million numbers. Not a problem.

Not all 16-digit numbers are valid -- actually, far from it. The LUHN-10 algorithm makes sure a CC number supplied by the client is valid before submitting it for authorization. All credit (and debit/ATM) card numbers must fit that algorithm.

Therefore, there aren't nearly as many numbers available as you might think.

--

Bare Faced Messiah OCRed version.

And so the great Scientology monolith smashes another dissenter.

Am I surprised?

Of course not. It seems that they use a vast proportion of their earnings (read: money ripped off from gullible/vulnerable people) to sue those who speak out against them.

Dave Touretzky (of the DeCSS descrambler gallery) has a lot of information available on these guys - somewhat more valuable, considering it's not in Swedish (what's with the link above, Michael? Please reply to this message, and tell me what percentage of the daily hits are from .se).

And I'd recommend reading Bare Faced Messiah by Russell Miller. Unfortunately, I can't find any online retailer still willing to sell this book - the link is to used copies of early, expensive editions.

Now there's an interesting addition to Dr. Touretsky's Gallery

Is it possible to implement DeCSS as in an Excel spreadsheet? Is anything possible in Excel?

--

The guy who's in charge of the Alice project, a Python based 3D/VR environment designed for beginners, has been working with Disney extensively. He mainly concentrates on interactive rides rather than movies, though.
___

> In the mid-seventies expansion of the department caused people's
> offices to be located ever further away from the main terminal room
> where the Coke machine stood. It got rather annoying to traipse down
> to the third floor only to find the machine empty - or worse, to shell
> out hard-earned cash to receive a recently loaded, still-warm Coke.
> One day a couple of people got together to devise a solution.
>
> They installed micro-switches in the Coke machine to sense how many
> bottles were present in each of its six columns of bottles. The
> switches were hooked up to CMUA, the PDP-10 that was then the main
> departmental computer. A server program was written to keep tabs on
> the Coke machine's state, including how long each bottle had been in
> the machine. When you ran the companion status inquiry program, you'd
> get a display that might look like this:
>
> EMPTY EMPTY 1h 3m
> COLD COLD 1h 4m
>
> This let you know that cold Coke could be had by pressing the
> lower-left or lower-center button, while the bottom bottles in the two
> right-hand columns had been loaded an hour or so beforehand, so were
> still warm. (I think the display changed to just "COLD" after the
> bottle had been there 3 hours.)
>
> The final piece of the puzzle was needed to let people check Coke
> status when they were logged in on some other machine than CMUA. CMUA's
> Finger server was modified to run the Coke status program whenever
> someone fingered the nonexistent user "coke". (For the uninitiated,
> Finger normally reports whether a specified user is logged in, and if
> so where.) Since Finger requests are part of standard ARPANET (now
> Internet) protocols, people could check the Coke machine from any CMU
> computer by saying "finger coke@cmua". In fact, you could discover the
> Coke machine's status from any machine anywhere on the Internet! Not
> that it would do you much good if you were a few thousand miles away...

Back in it's day, this was truly a clever hack. I mean, setting up a camera on the communal coffee pot rocks; you don't have to drag your butt halfway across the building just to find an empty coffee pot.

Reminds me of the (even older, I believe) CMU Coke Machine. As far back as 1982 they had a finger interface set up to check the status of the Coke machine on the 3rd floor of Wean hall. The machine could tell you not only which buttons currently had soda, but how relatively cold they were based on when sodas had been dispensed out of each column. Unfortunately it looks like they're in the process of moving the machine right now, but it certainly was convenient back in the day.

Back in it's day, this was truly a clever hack. I mean, setting up a camera on the communal coffee pot rocks; you don't have to drag your butt halfway across the building just to find an empty coffee pot.

Reminds me of the (even older, I believe) CMU Coke Machine. As far back as 1982 they had a finger interface set up to check the status of the Coke machine on the 3rd floor of Wean hall. The machine could tell you not only which buttons currently had soda, but how relatively cold they were based on when sodas had been dispensed out of each column. Unfortunately it looks like they're in the process of moving the machine right now, but it certainly was convenient back in the day.

The next thing you know, they'll be taking the Coke machine off the net!

Speech recognition, transcipting, and subtitling of audio-video content helps all of us, particularly the deaf, blind and sportsbar drinkers. Unfortunately speech recognition is not perfect. Good speech recognition could save the CIA a pile on FBIS. Searching text transcripts of a/v files, is only the start.

Internet2, a gigabit network for education and research (see PDF map), has a major future use as an audio-video storage library and distribution network. Video-napster? CMU's Internet2 Informedia Library project researchers are designing visual-video search software for faces, on-screen text, images and shapes. Computers finding on-screen people, text and similar programming... scary.

Check out this presentation with screen shots about Internet2, and its cool tools, uses and experiments. Slide 36 shows Facial Recognition and Optical Character Recognition (OCR) at work. It works so well, it finds text (bottom right) on the U.S. Capital's dome columns... whoops. Slide 37 "Similar Shapes/Content" shows examples of similar content of female news anchors, and soccer / football.

remove the nofreakinspam. to e-mail me.

Speech recognition, transcipting, and subtitling of audio-video content helps all of us, particularly the deaf, blind and sportsbar drinkers. Unfortunately speech recognition is not perfect. Good speech recognition could save the CIA a pile on FBIS. Searching text transcripts of a/v files, is only the start.

Internet2, a gigabit network for education and research (see PDF map), has a major future use as an audio-video storage library and distribution network. Video-napster? CMU's Internet2 Informedia Library project researchers are designing visual-video search software for faces, on-screen text, images and shapes. Computers finding on-screen people, text and similar programming... scary.

Check out this presentation with screen shots about Internet2, and its cool tools, uses and experiments. Slide 36 shows Facial Recognition and Optical Character Recognition (OCR) at work. It works so well, it finds text (bottom right) on the U.S. Capital's dome columns... whoops. Slide 37 "Similar Shapes/Content" shows examples of similar content of female news anchors, and soccer / football.

remove the nofreakinspam. to e-mail me.

Speech recognition, transcipting, and subtitling of audio-video content helps all of us, particularly the deaf, blind and sportsbar drinkers. Unfortunately speech recognition is not perfect. Good speech recognition could save the CIA a pile on FBIS. Searching text transcripts of a/v files, is only the start.

Internet2, a gigabit network for education and research (see PDF map), has a major future use as an audio-video storage library and distribution network. Video-napster? CMU's Internet2 Informedia Library project researchers are designing visual-video search software for faces, on-screen text, images and shapes. Computers finding on-screen people, text and similar programming... scary.

Check out this presentation with screen shots about Internet2, and its cool tools, uses and experiments. Slide 36 shows Facial Recognition and Optical Character Recognition (OCR) at work. It works so well, it finds text (bottom right) on the U.S. Capital's dome columns... whoops. Slide 37 "Similar Shapes/Content" shows examples of similar content of female news anchors, and soccer / football.

remove the nofreakinspam. to e-mail me.

Speech recognition, transcipting, and subtitling of audio-video content helps all of us, particularly the deaf, blind and sportsbar drinkers. Unfortunately speech recognition is not perfect. Good speech recognition could save the CIA a pile on FBIS. Searching text transcripts of a/v files, is only the start.

Internet2, a gigabit network for education and research (see PDF map), has a major future use as an audio-video storage library and distribution network. Video-napster? CMU's Internet2 Informedia Library project researchers are designing visual-video search software for faces, on-screen text, images and shapes. Computers finding on-screen people, text and similar programming... scary.

Check out this presentation with screen shots about Internet2, and its cool tools, uses and experiments. Slide 36 shows Facial Recognition and Optical Character Recognition (OCR) at work. It works so well, it finds text (bottom right) on the U.S. Capital's dome columns... whoops. Slide 37 "Similar Shapes/Content" shows examples of similar content of female news anchors, and soccer / football.

remove the nofreakinspam. to e-mail me.

According to Dr. I. Snivvel of Carnegie Mellon University, the selection of a database, and any software for that matter, should be based upon the CRUD (Conspiracies, Rich Republicans, Ulcers, Da Money) criteria.

Conspiracies: Needs no explanation. Just look at Microsoft and Sun. It has, in fact, been proven that the Windows NT/2000 kernels are built around PROMIS software.

Rich Republicans: Simply take a look at the software to see how many rich people it has helped create. A significant number of rich people can indicate that the software is widely adopted by business and government, which is usually de facto proof that the software must be crappy. A piece of software is only as smart as the dumbest person capable of using it.

Ulcers: How close will you come to a mental disorder or suicide while trying implement, customize, or develop with the software? Software that pretends to be easy to install and implement often is, but can be insidiously difficult to manipulate to the users desires. Take a look at the documentation for the software package -- Is it full of warm and fuzzy screen shots that explain how to right-click the mouse? Or is loaded with LISP references? Is LISP mentioned at all?

Da Money: This subject requires an alert wariness on the part of the individual acquiring the software. Software vendors will often try to obfuscate the crappiness of their software by charging large buckets of money for it. Their marketing personnel often exploit the behavioral principles revealed by North Korean researchers shortly after World War II: That people seem to think that they get something better because they pay more for it. The purchasers will readily adopt 'Sweet Lemon' rationalizations to explain their purchases. On the most occult purchasers realize that something free is always 100% cheaper than something you pay for.

This one seemed to get /.ed pretty damn fast, so here's a mirror.

Video cameras have become incredibly small over the past few years, not only that but also power usage has dropped dramatically! Here is a "videoBug" that is small and light enough to put on your flag/whip antenna. Super Circuits Video Bug.

Perhaps you could wire up a few of these with some switches on the handlebars to send them power and feed video input to the digitizer. HeadCam, RackCam, AxilCam, ... It would be cool if you could let someone toggle the camera input remotely!

If you have the budget and want to do high speed relay links via a support vehicle, then have a look at:

Radio Based Communications

At the high end are 115k spread spectrum RF modems from FreeWave. Upto 20 mile range, I believe they were used on an Everest expedition. One of them has adjustable range so you can operate it legally in restricted areas without a license. They also have repeaters ... Of course the more range/bandwidth the more current used to transmit, so pick your comms accordingly! Doing streaming video through a cellular modem might yeild very poor frame rates and/or low res, but then again you have to think of your target audience. Do you wan't to serve people with high speed connections as well as people on dialup? With a high speed link you could do both and also perhaps do higher quality one image at a time pages for people on slow links.

Off the shelf computer notebooks/pads chew up batteries pretty quickly. Of course they also offer off the shelf video encoding solutions. Apple's powerbooks might give you the greatest run time(dual battery) and also with the ability to encode the video, they also have firewire which would let you hook up some lightweight digital video cameras! Hmm, image stablization would be kinda nice too! Apple Power Book. This would put you in the "pannier" solution space though!.

If you want to get exotic on the power supply then check out some of the recent breakthroughs in gel pack based power supplies, they get at least twice the KWhr/Kg ratio over Lithium-Ion.

It seems a little like supersonductors... you just have to keep trying new materials.

There is a good article about BuckyBalls from First Science here as well

It seems a little like supersonductors... you just have to keep trying new materials.

There is a good article about BuckyBalls from First Science here as well.

If you can't run this program on your box of choice, here's a shot of the startup screen. Note the "Because it's there" motto. Is this the product of a responsible company? JPEG Image 540x313 pixels

Their website appears to be totally hosed, plus I couldn't even get their AutoInstaller to work. I managed to download the setup files from the site, so I zipped them up; you may download them here:

http://reptilian.res.cmu.edu/ShareSniffer.zip

Apparently, the software won't run if it can't contact their website, but here it is anyway. Enjoy!

As video has become a central way to entertain, inform and influence the public, "the people," not just government and big media companies, must be given the power to create decent video presentations..

If you can't run one of the more popular commercial non-linear editors (Avid/Final Cut Pro/etc) I offer the following list of Linux alternatives.

(And before you mod me offtopic, note that Trinity uses Gstreamer. So there.)

NON-LINEAR SYSTEMS

Broadcast 2000 -- One of the more developed linux editors. Works with a variety of hardware. I personally haven't used it, but there is at least one company out there selling pre-packaged versions of this.

Trinity -- Another Linux solution - still very early in development. Uses Gstreamer though

MainActor -- I think this is a commercial Linux product, about $100.

And for fun...

AUDIO EDITING SYSTEMS

ProTools FREE - This is a commercial product, but this free, non demoware version, limited to 8-tracks, does not require dedicated hardware. It does require Mac or Windows, though I have no idea if it will run under WINE.

ProTUX - Although the web site denies it, this is basically an open source ProTools.

Audacity - A cross-platform open source audio editor.

I'm sure there are more, but these are the ones I know about.

W
-------------------

Heh heh, funny (seriously). Because I live in Holland (Netherlands, not Michigan) it's hard for me to distinguish between commonly known cliches and actual creativity, but I had a good laugh when I saw a guy here, protesting with a sign saying:
"Legalize (Maple leaf here) Canada!"

My sig is late for work again

This is a networked file system, but OpenAFS has excellent support for ACLs. I am personally using it at Carnegie Mellon and its used at a host of other places like MIT. And its not a patch but simply a module you compile for the kernel. I got it running on my linux system in 15 minutes. Also has excellent support for security (see Kerberos).

God does not play dice with the universe. Albert Einstein

God does not play dice with the universe. Albert Einstein

God does not play dice with the universe. Albert Einstein

• Navigating Mobile Robots: Systems and Technologies
• "Where am I? Systems and Methods for Mobile Robot Positioning" (more recent than above)
• U of Florida's LawnNibbler
• Robotics Companies list
• "Can't Anyone Make a Decent Robot?"

• Navigating Mobile Robots: Systems and Technologies
• "Where am I? Systems and Methods for Mobile Robot Positioning" (more recent than above)
• http://www.robotbooks.com/lawn-mower-robot.htm"> U of Florida's LawnNibbler
• Robotics Companies list
• "Can't Anyone Make a Decent Robot?"

This already exists for text and image formats. Check out http://tom.cs.cmu.edu/intro.html at CMU. You basically give it a file or a url to a file and specify the result filetype you want back. I use this all the time for converting word documents into pdf files when I'm on a solaris box.

Check this out. It does all sorts of formats (even lists MPEG and quicktime). I've only really used it to convert .doc files to .ps files so I don't know how well the rest work, but at least that conversion works great :)

At NYIT in the late 70's and early 80's, we had the first big CG production facility. Alex Schure, who ran the place, had gone to the University of Utah in the mid 70's, just as their funding was running out for computer graphics research. Alex brought Ed Catmull and his team from Utah out to NYIT to make CG movies.

Well, we worked developing tools for a few years, and Lance Williams wrote a script for a movie called The Works. Then we tried to make this movie; thinking along the lines of 'we have a story, we have some tools, we have some computers, let's make a movie!'. Well, it turns out that you need more than that; and between all of us we had exactly zero years of movie making experience; so we ended up basically spinning our wheels for the next couple of years.

On of those spinning wheels was Dick Lundin. He thought that the best approach to making the movie would be to do a few fully-realized scenes from the film. He took the models that were lying around, made some more, and wrote a bunch of dynamics-based tools for secondary motion, and made a couple of short films -- more or less scenes from The Works.

Unfortunately, we couldn't find a way to make the rest of the movie at the high level set by Dick Lundin's sequences; and the movie foundered in '82 and '83 -- slowly each of us realizing that it wouldn't happen.

Ed Catmull, of course, went on to found the Computer Division at Lucasfilm, and then split off to become Pixar, and the rest is history. Lance Williams is now at Disney's Secret Lab. The lab at NYIT eventually collapsed around 1989.

Alex was very protective of the work done at NYIT, and any video that remains from those days was spirited away in the middle of the night. Somebody went by the lab as it was closing and found all of the old 2" video-tapes stuffed into a dumpster -- but those tapes are all on an obsolete video format so they're probably not readable.

It was a great place, no question. Paul Heckbert keeps the best archive of NYIT stuff. if your curiousity hasn't been satisfied.

thad

For example, you can have a surfer follow instructions such as "enter the first letter of each word in this sentence and we will let you through to our Humans only web site". The answer is easy for humans and hard for computers because language understanding is a hard problem.

Note that the answer must contain sufficiently many bits of information so that it is hard to get it right by trying out all answers.

Work like this is being done at Carnegie Mellon University, but I cannot find any links to it right now. Maybe if a couple of hundred of you harrass this person he might agree to write a little slashdot article about it.

Actually, if the poster was serious, I doubt he was supporting VB, but rather something like SML/NJ. The proponents of this language insist that their programs can be made unhackable because they can be mathematically proven to be secure.

Of course, I don't think this is the way to go - mostly because current SML implementations are damn slow, and I'm a C bigot. ;->
--------------------------

Easy to use, well integrated with other system tools. Very stable, both tools you can trust.

Just check the features !!

Actually, the Cyrus IMAP Server is open source and takes a similar approach. It's been deployed and in use at Carnegie Mellon for quite some time, and I believe that the older version of the engine has the bases for a number of commercial web servers out there, including the iPlanet mail server.

Maildir has nice parallelism for POP/SMTP-only access, but is a poor choice for IMAP.

The Cyrus mailbox format used by the Cyrus IMAP server is the best open-source format for IMAP or mixed IMAP/POP/SMTP access.

Cyrus http://asg.web.cmu.edu/cyrus/ seems to use a hybrid approach. Messages are stored in individual files, but the envelope information is stored in dbm format. So opening up a mailbox and listing messages is very fast. So is searching unless you want to do a full body search on all emails. Give it a try. It supports IMAP, POP, and LMTP.

The Eye View system is an early version of a system designed to create full 3-D models of live action. The idea is if you film a scene from enough different angles you can create a 3-D model and play it back from any virtual camera position you want.

I thought Eye View was pretty neat. Yes the it was jumpy, yes it was grainy but it did do a good job of showing what was going on about half the time they used it. The article I read about said that if they only used it 3 times they would be happy, well they used it a lot more than 3 times.

The full 3-D system is being developed at Carnegie Mellon University and Zaxel Systems

Now the half time show sucked rocks. It was a 10 minute concert not a half time show. Maybe DCI should do a half time.