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Most media reports today quote the British military as saying that this kind of "taking over" of a satellite just can't be done. Just like the girl who "invented" a new form of cryptography, the facts in this case are missing once more. If you were the "crackers" in this case, answer these questions for us.

1) Where is the high-powered uplink facility?

2) How did you "break into" an air gap-protected uplink facility?

3) How did you afford your own high-powered uplink facility?

4) With your fancy new high-powered uplink facility, how did you break the encryption and the access codes required to repurpose the satellite? How did you find the coordinates of is current location?

5) Do you really think the British military is this stupid?

6) Have you been watching Superman and James Bond films too many times?

7) Do your friends call you "Captain Midnight?"

We're waiting.

Kris

Kriston J. Rehberg
http://kriston.net/

Tetris clones have been legally challenged for years. In the very late 80's and early 90's, when the Tetris clones first appeared, the Fred Fish Amiga archives was served with a "Cease and desist" letter to remove all Tetris clones from the archive. A similar thing happened to the Tengen version of Tetris for Nintendo in which Nintendo sued Tengen (an Atari subsidiary) because Nintendo paid Elog for the Tetris license while Tengen didn't. Nintendo won that case, as well as another case against Tengen that accused them of cracking the Nintendo lockout chip.

How can this be news? This story is as old as the hills.

Kris

Kriston J. Rehberg
http://kriston.net/

I recently purchased a quantity of 233 MHz MediaGX machines from a local dealer. These are complete machines around $400 each and come with 32 MB of RAM, a 2.5 gigabyte hard drive, a real internal modem (not a Winmodem!), and Windows 98. All I had to do was add a $40 ne2000 compatible ethernet card and I now have a group of fairly fast servers that aren't too shabby at regular programming.

So far, the MediaGX's around my house run Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, and Windows 98. Ironically, Windows NT won't install on these machines but it will run a pre-existing installation if restored from tape. Still, since I have no current need for NT, the Unixes on these boxes run just fine.

Kris

Kriston J. Rehberg
http://kriston.net/

The new Hewlett-Packard Kayak PC's are using DMI. DMI has many interesting features to allow for management of a Win32 system in a big office. One of the more interesting features of this system is the serial number reporting mechanism. There is a "Serial Number" and an "Asset Number," both of which are stored in non-volatile memory. The "Serial Number" is set at the factory and apparently cannot be changed. These serial number data are available through calls to the DMI agent on the system or via a suitable DMI-aware application.

Kriston J. Rehberg
http://kriston.net/

There was a Microsoft developer forum there for a long time. Even when MSN came out, the Microsoft developer forum remained on CompuServe for quite a long time afterwards until microsoft.com got their act together.

Kris

Kriston J. Rehberg
http://kriston.net/

I am rather relieved to see Intel proposing an ID number system. Recently, I purchased a "300 MHz" Pentium II system that turned out to be a 233 MHz machine clocked up to 300 MHz on the motherboard. The only way I could know for sure was to visually inspect the chip for non-obvious serial number tampering and to run the ECC checker program. Even then, it was a coincidence that 300 MHz chips always have ECC cache, so you can't check if your 330 or 350 MHz box is really an overclocked 300 MHz machine.

With chip ID coding, now you can be sure of the chip you're using. I stopped purchasing Intel CPU's for this reason. Cyrix and AMD have extremely stringent, tamper-proof markings. Intel only has silk-screened letters on a soft plastic cartridge. I think Intel is moving in the right direction, even if some people here think it's for the wrong reasons (product tracking, et. al).

I don't like buying junk.

Kriston J. Rehberg
http://kriston.net/

This month's Next Generation magazine has a piece on the internals of the Sega Dreamcast game system available now in Japan and soon in the USA. It uses a liquid cooling system with distilled water that transfers heat from the SH4 CPU and the Hitachi graphics chip over to the outside world. It uses a thermistor to shut down the system if things get out of hand. I haven't found any details about whether the system uses convection or an actual pump to move the water.

Kriston J. Rehberg
http://kriston.net/