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noda132 said:

.mp3 stands for MPEG-3...

Uh, no. It's short for MPEG1 Layer 3. Honest! Truly!

:-)

A similar idea has already been implemented. Some
Canadian researchers used an existing 8000km fiber
optic network as a storage device. Basicly, the network
is configured as a loop and the
data to be stored is simply sent onto the network.
Packets of data are placed onto the network and can be
pulled from it as they pass a node on the network.
It's kind of like a cross between a token ring network
and a mercury delay line. You can find a few more
details from this link.

A modchip is usually a PIC or ASIC programmed/designed to be used as a hardware "patch" for mass-produced hardware.

what it does,

The original Sony Playstation popularised them; they were used to defeat the copy protection used on Playstation games whereby extra sectors were included on the CD that were unreadable by non-Playstation CD drives. The modchip intercepted the protection check and spoofed the Playstation BIOS into believing a copied disc with missing protection sectors was legitimate.

and how are you supposed to install it (do you need to make your own pcb for a daughtercard, do you need to unsolder something and then solder this in place), etc.?

It (potentially) varies from modchip to modchip, but these things are designed to be installed by (almost) Joe or Josephine Public, so typically it's just a case of soldering some wires from pins on the modchip to specific points on an unmodified motherboard. Sometimes these are the legs of ICs (fiddly), sometimes actual tracks (fairly fiddly) but in this case, it's "vias" - the small circular solder pads that link different layers of a PCB (many PCBs are 4+ layers these days, both for reasons of size and to improve their radio emission and acceptance characteristics).

For the record, I have never owned a console or a console game (nor obviously pirated any) but I am interested to know what hack value consoles have in general and in this case Xbox.

The potential here is an easy way to bypass Microsoft's "only boot purchased game DVDs" protection and use modified Xbox consoles to boot copied DVDs or even home-made discs, such as Linux or *BSD.

--

One problem with all of this is separating fact from hype when it comes to nanotechnology.

The money may come in, but the market has to correct sometime.

I predict a "nanotechnology" version of the web economy bullshit generator in the not-so-near future!

Dot-con business plans were hard enough to understand; I can only imagine how bad these nanotech ones are read...

Definition of trolling: The practice of trying to lure other Internet users into sending responses to carefully-designed incorrect statements or similar "bait." In a real example, a Usenet newsgroup contributor mentioned the discovery of an ancient African carving containing a list of prime numbers. The contributor further listed some of the prime numbers found and included some numbers that, in fact, are not prime numbers. Other contributors then sent serious replies, correcting the list of prime numbers cited.

Definition of trolling: The practice of trying to lure other Internet users into sending responses to carefully-designed incorrect statements or similar "bait." In a real example, a Usenet newsgroup contributor mentioned the discovery of an ancient African carving containing a list of prime numbers. The contributor further listed some of the prime numbers found and included some numbers that, in fact, are not prime numbers. Other contributors then sent serious replies, correcting the list of prime numbers cited.

The fact that the USA PATRIOT Act gives law enforcement all kinds of new powers is old news. Take a look at the editorial I wrote for SearchSecurity last December.

Not having a real dictionary on me this is from

here since it was handy:

"Granularity is the relative size, scale, level of detail, or depth of penetration that characterizes an object or activity"

Quick bit of math...

A T1 line runs at ~1.544Mb/sec and is capable of carrying 24 voice lines. 1.544MB/sec divided by 24 gives ~66Kb/sec per line. Add 20% in for overhead and you get ~79Kb/sec.

But that's just a rough guess. Personally, I like this answer better.

Read this:

Some sources define a megabit to mean 1,048,576 (that is, 220 ) bits. Although the bit is a unit of the binary number system, bits in data communications are discrete signal pulses and have historically been counted using the decimal number system. For example, 28.8 kilobits per second (Kbps ) is 28,800 bits per second. Because of computer architecture and memory address boundaries, bytes are always some multiple or exponent of two. See kilobyte, etc.

So what's that mean? An ISDN 64Kbps B channel is, in fact, 64000 bits per second. A typical 115.2Kbps maximum rate on a PC's serial port is 115200 bits per second.

Hard drives are also measured using SI definitions. The power-of-2 definitions come from memory. Memory devices often inherently have power-of-two sizes, since the n address bits going into a memory provide 2^n addressable cells. Hard drives have no inherent reason to be a power-of-2 size so SI units make much more sense.

MacPerl is not an Apple product. Also, I believe your definition of "vaporware" is incorrect:

Vaporware is software or hardware that is either (1) announced or mentioned publicly in order to influence customers to defer
buying competitors' products or (2) late being delivered for whatever reason. Most computer companies have from time to time
delivered vaporware, either by calculation or unintentionally.

Unless I am completely daft (please note if so), then we're talking about a general progression in processing power, a certain configuration of which (e.g., compiling a piece of software) can serve as a preliminary benchmark against other systems (considering it's a task many are familiar with and can carry such a "wow" factor). It's not some strange optimization that only affect kernel compiles; it's about memory optimization (read the definition of the NUMA tech.).

It's van Eck Phreaking, check whatis or google.

daniel

Kuhn did not invent this technique, I read about this being doable in Popular Science in the mid-to-late 80's. It's called 'van Eck phreaking' after Wim van Eck, its discoverer. As I recall from that long-ago article, he sat in an equipped van parked outside a building, tuned in on a CRT that was inside the building, and read the contents of that screen right off his. I think I was about 12 or 13 at the time, and this was the coolest thing I had ever heard of-- in fact, it made such an impression on me that "kinda like van Eck" was the first thought that crossed my mind when I read the posting on here.

Here's some info about the van Eck phreaking method.

~Philly

This article is beginning to look like something I'd see on memepool.

Yes, you must beware of Van Eck Phreaking

QVGA/CGA 320x240
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official list from where, Zurk?
this one is from here.

I had an office inside a Faraday cage at a former employer.

Nicely bound books that open flat and have a bit of margin-room for notes. The cover needn't be elaborate or thick or anything, heck a nice bit of plastic would do just as well. Headings that make sense and are at the top of each page. Even better Chapter / Subject / Topic on each page top.

Along with this I'd like a decent web site, something that contains the full text of the book with corrections & updates highlighted on a changes-page as well as in the body. Personally I don't see these as competing with the bound version of the book but if need be have some sort of coupon or registration system but put that web site up.

I'd also really like it if there were some sort of Wiki or other notes system attachable to the various parts of the online book where other readers can put their own notes and share them, pointers to other resources, updates etc. This would require some sort of administration I realize but would immensely add to the value of the book, presumably be a good sales medium for related products.

Along with this a Bayesian logic "Help Engine" would be most appreciated. Half of the time I know that whatever is in the book, I just can't find it. A "wizerd" guiding me to the right spot drawing on the index and glossary would be most appreciated.

Finally, and this seems terribly trivial to me but it is so rarely done: I'd like to be able to type in the page number of my bound book (in URL)and jump right to it in the online version, check for updates etc. I know I can drill down to it from the online index but page numbers are useful markers and can be trivially used as pointers in the online version.

Oh, and having worked with any nuber of non-native anglophones over the years a button for machine-translating a page on the website into whatever else is availiable would also help many of those folks. It may not be the best quality translation but sometimes it's enough to kick the mental gear far enough it all makes sense. Going to a 3rd-party service for the translation is a hassle, building in a translate link would be useful.

I wasn't whining. You'll notice that this was at the end of my post: :-)

While most individuals with the faintest resemblance to knowledge about the Internet would recogzine what this means, my experience from when I worked an ISP help desk tells me that there are many newbies on the Internet who recently purchased a 'puter and still require the proper education. That symbol is what we call an "emoticon". That means that it expresses emotions that cannot otherwise be expressed via ASCII text (more on what ASCII means in the next lesson). The particular set of characters I used represent a "smiley", indicating humor or "no big deal". For more explanation, please visit: http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/0,,sid9_gc i212057,00.html

A wide area network (WAN) is a geographically dispersed telecommunications network. The term distinguishes a broader telecommunication structure from a local area network ( ). A wide area network may be privately owned or rented, but the term usually connotes the inclusion of public (shared user) networks. An intermediate form of network in terms of geography is a metropolitan area network (MAN).

according to whatis

I've always considered the distinction to be when private LANs are interlinked over some 3rd network. At my company, we have "WAN" links between our network and our client's networks. That may be incorrect terminology, but that is what the network people call it. We lease private lines from AT&T and there are firewalls on each end where our network interconnect.

Fun stuff. Trivial, but fun.

I'm surprised APL hasn't been mentioned. I wrote a few lines of APL a hundred years ago, and it's certainly not as popular as it used to be, but it was designed as a mathematical programming language. A couple of resources, obtained with Google, using this search rule. http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/0,,sid9_gc i213454,00.html http://www.engin.umd.umich.edu/CIS/course.des/cis4 00/apl/apl.html

http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/0,,sid9_gc i211686,00.html for more info as it relates to IT, and a bit of history.

they cannot continue like this indefinately...unless you would like them to raise normal registration fees to support it.

If that's what it takes to keep the system above-board, yes. My problem is that I have a typosquatter [definition] who has registered a lookalike domain name, with "Domain for sale" on the top line of his whois registry. I'm waiting him out, and plan to register the domain when he finally gets tired of spending money on it (no, my domain is not a trademark, and I can't afford to sue). The last thing I want to do is put up a billboard at NetSol telling him what I'm thinking.

As I write this, an electron gun is spewing streams of electrons directly at my face. Yet I don't feel the slightest urge to duck. Nor do I hear little clicking sounds as the electrons impact on my monitor screen. I don't expect any of the things that happen when matter is about, because electrons aren't matter. They're a constituent of matter.

The anti-electrons used in PET scans are the same, only more so. Nothing remarkable about having them around, but they're extremely transient entities. So accumulating them in large quantities is a lot harder than this article, in the gee-wiz style NASA PR bozos are so fond of, suggests.

Neils, I don't have her, though you might want to contact Schrodinger. Not sure if she's still alive. Yours truly, Werner Werner, Thank you for the advice. It appears the cat is both dead and alive. Regards, Neils

I wonder if this will reduce EF emmisions, and in turn reduce the possibility of van Eck phreaking?

Just a thought for the incredibally security paranoid ;-)

--
Patrick Cable II

EGP is something of a dinosaur. Check out RFC 827 for more info. More recent routing protocols (OSPF, BGP, RIP, etc.) use either UDP or TCP as a tranport protocol, but EGP rolls its own.

The good news is, since it's not TCP and it's not UDP, many firewalls may already block it.

According to RFC 1700 EGP uses port 0x8... Time to go - gotta edit that ruleset :-)

EGP is something of a dinosaur. Check out RFC 827 for more info. More recent routing protocols (OSPF, BGP, RIP, etc.) use either UDP or TCP as a tranport protocol, but EGP rolls its own.

The good news is, since it's not TCP and it's not UDP, many firewalls may already block it.

According to RFC 1700 EGP uses port 0x8... Time to go - gotta edit that ruleset :-)

Try here for information on egp. Bookmark the site it'll answer any technical acronym question.

Why don't you try catching up with the late 20th century by using an anchor tag for your link?

Unlike your pointless pedantry over GMT vs. UTC, the lack of an anchor tag poses a significant inconvenience to people actually interested in following the link in your post.

"Ergo, skip the GMT and start using UTC."

Idiot. UTC is GMT.

Read this.

mod parent down

I find it interesting that the first mention in the article is about the Patriot Act. This Act is a major attack on our rights. For more information on how it affects the FBI's use of Carnivore, please see The Patriot Act and Carnivore: Reasons for concern? an editorial I wrote for the SearchSecurity.com website.

http://whatis.techtarget.com/wsearchResults/1,2902 14,sid9,00.html?query=hurd

Those pesky fat zero's are what's clogging up the communications, compared to those sleek 1's that just fit down the wires so easily.

In fact, T1 test equipment has the test patterns all 1s and all 0s. Guess which transmits faster...

Maybe you should learn what MAC address do beofre you utter complete bullshit.

If you go be his suggestion.. You will block just about everyone who comes to your site, cus.. most of them will prolly have the same MAC address of your Router..(unless you have mutli routers.. in which case it might take a few times before you ban all the Routers MAC address.)

A better soluction is to use E-Mail verifcation like other mentioned, however, with one modification, do not allow people to use a FreeMail e-mail aadress. Require them to not use *@hotmail, *@yahoo.. etc... and if you find a user is a problem maker, you can ban his e-mail domain to make him never come back.

I can't help but wonder... how much time until "slashdot effect" becomes a mainstream word?

It already is.

Yup, XP was codenamed "Windows Whistler". Captain Crunch, anyone? :)

ummm if you mean to degrade with that last sentence, you might want to find out what "script kiddie" means first.

From search Networking.com's page

In wireless LAN (WLAN) technology, 802.11 refers to a family of specifications developed by a working group of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). There are three specifications in the family: 802.11, 802.11a, and 802.11b. All three specify the use of CSMA/CA (carrier sense multiple access with collision avoidance) as the path-sharing protocol.

Simply put, it's a group of networking protocols.

Indeed, upon further research, we're already way beyond 80 Gbps on a single fiber. DWDM (dense wave division multiplexing) can increase the capacity of a single fiber to 1.6 Tbps, and soon to 3.2 Tbps with 80 wavelengths at OC-768 according to this press release from NEC. As the press release states, a 3.2 Tbps data rate is the equivalent of transmitting 1600 feature-length films every second.

Humm, first generation unix partitioning from IBM, or 5th generation partitioning from Sun

IBM has been doing LPARs and Virtual Machines a long, long time on mainframes. According to this article, IBM started studying logical partitioning in 1976. I think Sun qualifies as the newcomer if you are just talking about partitioning technology.

See Linux on the IBM ESA/390 Mainframe Architecture for info on running Linux on S/390 LPARs

as in liquid crystal Display Display?

This might not seem important, but if you (read: /.) want to be taken seriously by the (printing) press, you might want to have your acronyms straight...

The author wrote a page with an add, and a filter app modifies the page and removes the add picture, without a permission from the author. But modification is one of the exclusive rights of the copyright owner.

Please read up on copyright law. It does not prohibit me from doing whatever I want to my own local copy, as long as it does not violate copyright.

transcoding on the other hand, is a different story, but since I'm not "redistrubuting modified content", that's not a problem.

As far as that goes, does the record company have any obligation to you to produce a CD which is compatible with your player of choice? Even if you sue them, the worst thing that can probably happen is that they'll be forced to acknowledge in the liner notes that the CD is not red book standard

... is of course the S l a s h d o t E f f e c t.

Sooo... congresscritters are thinking of passing a nasty ole law? Rob could just threaten to post a story like "An anonymous coward writes: Streaming video of Natalie Portmans hot grit's posted to the US Congress Web site. "([sic] - TacoLexicon in force. my real grammar is better.)

Congress would naturally cave in and meet all our demands. Well, maybe not RMS's...

HP ever since has been shouting at the top of its voice that there will be complete binary compatibility between PA-RISC and IA-64 using technology such as Aries. They have to in order to retain any customers. Binary compatibility is simply non-negotiable.

Thus HP gave away its two crown jewels, processor architecture and compiler technology, to Intel for precisely one reason--binary compatibility with what was perceived to be the potential industry-standard processor of the future. It would be to say the least rather strange for HP to walk away from this to embrace either Linux or Tru64. To do this would be to admit that HP gave away its crown jewels to Intel for nothing. (Which is actually the case since anyone from IBM to Dell etc. will be allowed to be resellers for IA-64.)

My question for those who would have HP abandon HU-UX--what's left? What exactly would HP have left as crown jewels that would distinguish its Unix offerings from the competition?

I've said this before, it was the decision to not fab the next generation of PA-RISC that decided everything for HP and nothing else. Once HP surrendered any hope of competing against Intel there was nowhere to go for increasing higher margin sales. Who exactly was going to embrace HP's future offerings when more than five years ago it was common knowledge they were transitioning to a new processor fabbed by Intel? That was the reason HP had no answer to Sun during the boom of the 1990s. Instead HP was stuck with trying to sell NT workstations and then a completely desperate move to go into selling home PCs in a bid to raise cash by any means possible. Sun on the other hand, relatively free from having to worry about what either Intel or Microsoft thought, was able to create a software business from scratch with Java. By keeping control of Java, Sun was able to leverage IBM into helping it storm into corporate business software. And all this could be done without sacrificing Solaris for Linux or any other such preposterous nonsolution.

I think HP's executives simply made a series of shocking miscalculations. In this analysis there is only mention of X86 and Power PC. There is nothing said about Sun which doesn't fab their own chips, they have instead a 13+ year partnership with Texas Instruments. Last I saw Texas Instruments' market cap was larger than either HP or Compaq, considered separately. I think it was also a miscalculation that Intel would be the only place to go for a foundry, what about IBM? (I have to wonder with the Asian nations pouring so many resources into semiconductors whether we aren't entering a rather long period of plenty of surplus manufacturing capacity. The only obstacle I see is the US government's intervention in not wanting to potentially see technology shipped abroad. At least this applies to China which the US wants to keep one or two generations behind in wafer fabrication technology.)

Lastly for those who want HP to standardize on Linux...uh, standardize on what? What exactly do you think will be the winner in say filesystems? ReiserFS, Ext3, JFS, XFS? And at least three of of those four alternatives are technology controlled by other companies. How about KDE vs. Gnome, RPM vs other packaging alternatives, PostgreSQL vs MySQL? Notice that IBM has good in-house solutions they will offer for many of these basic questions, what does HP have? I think it's going to be a hard sell to argue that the complexity of HP-UX will be easier than having to potentially support all of these alternatives.

I just find it shocking that a company the size of HP/Compaq will not think it can find the funds to either fab its own chips or pay someone other than Intel to do so. At that size IBM is able to do everything from hardware to software as well as fund a massive R&D patent-producing machine. Wny is it so hard to understand that in a world where IP is king, you better own your own stuff?

Kindly do a Google search on terms such as "Itanium PA-RISC binary compatibility" and/or "HP-UX". The entire point from HP's perspective of working with Intel was/is to guarantee that the Itanium would have binary compatibility with PA-RISC and HP-UX. Any hint of incompatibility, any hint of the alliance breaking, and HP would cease to exist in five years. The company could not survive if it could not guarantee an indefinite upgrade path for its existing customer base. Itanium has been part of that promised path for over five years now.

I have similar doubts about HP being able to keep many of its major customers if it tried to sell them on converting the entire product line over to Linux regardless of how many capabilities Linux acquires. Mandating switching to Linux from HP-UX to "save costs" would be of benefit only to HP not to the customers. Alienating major customers for reasons internal to one's company seems to me one of the fastest ways to run one's company into the ground.

The easiest answer I can think of is "keyboard buffers", like you'll find in applications like Z-Term - a serial console for the Macintosh that supports X, Y and Z-term file transfers.

Disabling the Nagle algorithm in telnet clients is fairly common because the character you see on the screen is usually echoed to you by the server. Having to wait 200ms for the characters to appear on your screen in clumps would be very distracting.

Having a keyboard buffer means that you will no longer use the built-in scroll-back buffer of shells such as bash or zsh. If the keyboard buffer is implemented well, it should provide you with similar functionality. In a GUI environment, you have the added advantage of copy/paste. Ideally, all keyboard interaction would be handled by a local shell (CLI or GUI), with data only sent over the network when Enter is pressed.

A big advantage of keyboard buffers is that keystroke timing over the network becomes impossible (unless, of course, you're running the terminal application under the X11 Windows System over a network). Attackers would have to resort to measuring the length of your command lines or passwords, to try to guess what you're typing (great! we know that the root password on that host is 7 characters long!).

As far as typing analysis in general is concerned, there's a mention in The Code Book by Simon Singh. He talks about traffic analysis during World War II. The French Resistance was apparently able to track Panzer divisions by the location of their radio transmissions. They could uniquely identify the Panzer division by the "fist" (tapping characteristics) of the morse-code operator, even though they couldn't decrypt the actual message.

Using a keyboard buffer helps overcome congestion (in a friendlier way than the Nagle algorithm does), avoids people identifying you through biometrics, and especially prevents hostiles using biometrics to find out what you're typing in your SSH session.

Nagle Algorithm References:

• SearchNetworking Article (explicitly states why interactive sessions will disable Nagling)
• IBM RS-6000 Support describes the rules used by the Nagle algorithm to decide which data gets delayed by up to 200ms
• RFC 896 - Congestion Control in IP/TCP Internetworks

Traffic Analysis references:

• Traffic Analysis and Cover Traffic, a posting to Cypherpunks mailing list
• The Code Book (it's dead trees, follow the link to find ISBN to buy or borrow)