Slashdot Mirror

http://www.jesc.ac.cn/jesc_cn/...
http://www.researchinventy.com...
http://doc.utwente.nl/77454/1/...

If you'd like to hear this station, and don't own a shortwave radio, Software Defined Radio technology can help - The WebSDR at http://websdr.ewi.utwente.nl:8901/?tune=4625 will let you listen to this, or anything else that can be received at their site in the Netherlands.

Is this it?

http://websdr.ewi.utwente.nl:8901/?tune=4625

If so, then when the summary describes it as a "dull, monotonous tone", it isn't kidding!

For my money, RTL-SDR with an HF downconverter is a better bang for the buck, but less than 3 MHz of the spectrum is available at one time depending on the USB speed you choose (here's hoping for USB 3.0 RTL-SDR some day).

The Kiwi will do the entire 30 MHz if the screen shots on the Kickstarter site are correct, for 3x the price, or 4x the price if you want the $100 enclosure. Seriously, a $100 enclosure.

Then there's this custom job that can monitor and record the entire 30 MHz spectrum at once:
http://websdr.ewi.utwente.nl:8...

you can choose a bunch from here http://websdr.org/

but the best one is here http://websdr.ewi.utwente.nl:8...

oooh I 'm glad someone else here said that.

Now we're into serious nerd territory.

This seems to be about the UK, not the US, but I expect the US tech and systems are awfully similar:

http://wwwhome.cs.utwente.nl/~...

TL;DR your mains clock might be up to about 20 seconds out. More than that and the grid company will schedule in corrections.

Ah, the old analog vs digital discussion.

Vodafone injects the X-VF-ACR header: 'Vodafone Anonymous Customer Recognition'. It is unclear what this header exactly does; all headers that have been seen start with the string "204004DYNMVFNLACR", followed by 16 X's, and are followed by a BASE64-encoded 256-byte cyphertext, which we were unable to decrypt. It has been suggested that this string might contain the SIM-card identifier (IMSI) or other personal information, as was found in a research conducted by Mulliner in 2010 [14]. Vodafone did not respond to requests of explaining this header. Nevertheless, the presence of this header, certainly identifies customers of Vodafone as being customers of Vodafone.

I agree. Got to a WebSDR like http://websdr.ewi.utwente.nl:8901/ and automate the process. You can get a large amount of OTA signals to examine, in the correct ratios, styles and weightings. This requires you to decide whether or not the signal under test is CW or not but that's part of your algorithm anyway. n6gn

Vodafone makes tracking of users possible which does not require access to the user's equipment. The HTTP request is enriched with a piece of identifying information. This involves an HTTP header called X-VF-ACR: 'Vodafone Anonymous Customer Recognition.'

See also: http://referaat.cs.utwente.nl/conference/16/paper/7306/using-browser-properties-for-fingerprinting-purposes.pdf (pdf)

I've given this long and careful thought, and it has to be medical experiments for the lot of you.

Well, Tracje's thesis defence is next week; after that, it should appear online somewhere. I looked up the references in my copy, have a look:
Training students to steal: a practical assignment in computer security education (ACM, pdf also here or here).
Effectiveness of Physical, Social and Digital Mechanisms against Laptop Theft in Open Organizations (IEEE, pdf also here).

Social groups deter any kind of radical thought or behavior. That's the groupthink phenomenon. The larger the group, the stronger the effect. That's why creativity never thrives in large organizations, and that's the reason the most creative social construct is the single person who does not need to compromise his or her ideas for the harmony of the group.

I roll my eyes every time I hear an organization of thousands of people is proclaiming it fosters innovation (or diversity, but that's another story).

Well, what does wikipedia say about innovation?

Innovation differs from invention in that innovation refers to the use of a new idea or method, whereas invention refers more directly to the creation of the idea or method itself.

So, there you have it. Innovation is not radical. Innovation is not revolutionary. Innovation is not invention. Innovation is taking a bunch of other peoples inventions and gluing them together in ways that are interesting to a wide audience. Innovation is the factory work of the intellectual realm. If you want to be a good innovator, it's more important to understand ordinary folks than it is to understand the secret workings of the universe.

Big companies are innovative because they consume the small companies with the inventive ideas and order their hordes of worker bees to start sticking those ideas onto existing products.

Social groups deter any kind of radical thought or behavior. That's the groupthink phenomenon. The larger the group, the stronger the effect. That's why creativity never thrives in large organizations, and that's the reason the most creative social construct is the single person who does not need to compromise his or her ideas for the harmony of the group.

I roll my eyes every time I hear an organization of thousands of people is proclaiming it fosters innovation (or diversity, but that's another story).

Leadless packages most definitely can be soldered by hand (see the third photo from the bottom at http://wwwhome.cs.utwente.nl/~ptdeboer/ham/sdr/) but it's not much fun. You make the connections using short bits of very thin solid wire, using the heat from the iron to solder both ends at once.

is supercavitating sonoluminescence close enough?!!

Ah, but soon you could be using Haskell instead http://clash.ewi.utwente.nl/ClaSH/Index.html :p

I'm afraid it really is so. Here are some screenshots to prove it.
Downloading a big file
http://lux.student.utwente.nl/~pyotr/dump/hddspeed.png

Uploading a big file
http://lux.student.utwente.nl/~pyotr/dump/hddspeed-up.png

Destination disk is
ada0: ATA-8 SATA 2.x device
ada0: 300.000MB/s transfers (SATA 2.x, UDMA6, PIO 8192bytes)
ada0: Command Queueing enabled
ada0: 953869MB (1953525168 512 byte sectors: 16H 63S/T 16383C)

I can assure you FreeBSD does not do write behind caching (well it does, but only 1MB or so). Windows probably does.

I'm afraid it really is so. Here are some screenshots to prove it.
Downloading a big file
http://lux.student.utwente.nl/~pyotr/dump/hddspeed.png

Uploading a big file
http://lux.student.utwente.nl/~pyotr/dump/hddspeed-up.png

Destination disk is
ada0: ATA-8 SATA 2.x device
ada0: 300.000MB/s transfers (SATA 2.x, UDMA6, PIO 8192bytes)
ada0: Command Queueing enabled
ada0: 953869MB (1953525168 512 byte sectors: 16H 63S/T 16383C)

I can assure you FreeBSD does not do write behind caching (well it does, but only 1MB or so). Windows probably does.

The only way I can see that one wins on cost with this technology is if one has electronics that are so low-powered that they can be powered by an amorphous solar cell with an area equal to that of the circuitry itself. If you need a point of reference on the practicality of this requirement, I point you to your average solar-powered calculator, which has a solar cell area of several cm^2, and an active circuit area of probably less than 5 mm^2.

According to the press release from University of Twente, they will use amorphous silicon or CIGS layers deposited on top of the integrated circuit. A pretty average amorphous silicon solar cell will produce 6 mW/cm^2 in full sunlight, and about 0.5 mW/cm^2 indoors. A CIGS cell, especially on such a small scale, could probably come close to tripling those figures (one of the biggest problems in realizing high CIGS cell efficiencies in mass production is getting layers of uniform quality over large areas, an issue that would be dodged in this case).

The press release from Twente says the power requirement is "well below 1 mW"; if you assume the actual requirement is 0.1 mW and you use CIGS cells then you could probably still get enough power to run the circuit indoors on 6-7 mm^2 area. That doesn't seem out of line to me, but then I'm a solar cell designer, not an IC designer....

Chip provides its own power

Satellite dishes are smaller now because the original C band transponders were power limited compared to the current Ku band transponders. As well, antenna size is related to wavelength so equivalent antenna designs for a high frequency (Ku band) will be proportionately smaller than for a low frequency (C band).

So... sat-TV receiving dishes are smaller because both the satellite transmit power and frequency increased.

Digital Signal Processors (DSPs) can do a lot, but all receiver processing (analog or digital) depends on getting an analog signal from the antenna that has sufficient S/N and power. Think GIGO. It is the same with radio signals. With sat-TV DSPs are not the reason for the change to smaller antennas. It is almost entirely due to the change to higher power Ku-band transponders.

Various array antennas have been around for a long time. TFA doesn't give much detail and isn't even clear about what is being proposed but there is a better description here:

http://wwwhome.cs.utwente.nl/~burgwal/research.php

What is interesting about Burgwal's chip is that it could make a mass-produced array practical for a lot of purposes, including sat-TV receivers. That may not be the killer app for the chip tho since the dishes are cheap, efficient, and easy to set up.

Although, it would be nice to just stick a flat antenna device on a wall without any set up. A lot of installers would be out of work!

http://ringbreak.dnd.utwente.nl/~mrjb/misc/chickenandegg.html

You don't even need a shortwave radio to listen in anymore. There are dozens of shortwave radios hooked up to web servers located all over the world running WebSDR, allowing anyone with an Internet connection and little to no knowledge of radios to hear this kind of stuff.

In Germany, researchers into didactics (teaching) of computer science (Informatik) have done some work on this topic. I recently found it when I was looking into materials for the computer science course in the Netherlands (seeing if I could do better).

Based on 15 criteria, they ranked 27 languages, ranging from Scheme to Haskell, ADA to Ocaml. The worst language for teaching was, by far, APL (scored a 5, which is the worst), followed closely by Perl. The best language for teaching was Algol 60 (1,50). Second best Python (1,66), 3rd place Ruby (1,88) and scraping in at a 4th spot was Pascal (2,14).

So to summarize: better dust off your Algol 60 books and compilers :P

Failing that, Python and Ruby are nice as well for just teaching programming (although if you want to show the distinction between imperative and functional programming I'm not altogether sure that Ruby would be enough).

------
This was found in a (Dutch language) PDF: http://www.utwente.nl/elan/huidige_studenten/overig/OvO/OvO-inf/Eindverslag%20INF.pdf (see page 8 for the German criteria, and page 9 for the results). See the original research (*) here: http://subs.emis.de/LNI/Proceedings/Proceedings22/GI-Proceedings.22-12.pdf (German language document)

(*): [LH02] I. Linkweiler, L. Humbert. Ergebnisse der Untersuchung zur Eignung einer Programmiersprache fÂur die schnelle Softwareentwicklung â" kann der Informatikunterricht davon
profitieren?, Didaktik der Informatik, UniversitÃt Dortmund, 2002.

where's the 64-bit version of OO.org?

http://borft.student.utwente.nl/~adrian/torrentphp/torrent.php/OOo_3.0.0_LinuxX86-64_install_en-US.tar.gz.torrent
Found on the p2p download page: http://distribution.openoffice.org/p2p/
I can't see it on the normal download page, don't know why.

I haven't really had time to study it, but as far as I can tell from the original paper (available as PDF from http://eprints.eemcs.utwente.nl/10783/) this is a user-friendly mechanism for creating a session key for two parties who are in close proximity. The key isn't supposed to be permanent. The security is provided by the fact that the picture of the other party is obtained through a "side channel" (i.e., light rays and not the channel through which the actual data exchange takes place—e.g. bluetooth). The seed for the key is obtained via some sort of biometric analysis that's "fuzzy" enough so that the keys will match for both pairs of images on both devices. There's no real security advantage over simply exchanging a key verbally on the spot—it's just easier than remembering a key and entering it on the device.

I'm big on privacy...but I can't remember the last time I exchanged data with anyone via my PDA or cell phone...other than actually making a phone call, I mean. Are there people out there for whom this is a solution to an actual problem, or is it just an academic exercise?

that wasn't so hard:
http://wwwhome.cs.utwente.nl/~balazsi/

She's hot. http://wwwhome.cs.utwente.nl/~balazsi/

torrent magnet link for the Win32 English version, with JRE: magnet:?xt=urn:btih:IK2EAKZIEQ7VDH5CYDPYQ6MLL4FEUNLG Regular torrent link for Win32 English version with JRE: http://borft.student.utwente.nl/~adrian/torrentphp/torrent.php/OOo_3.0.0_Win32Intel_install_wJRE_en-US.exe.torrent Only 5 DLs, 51 seeds (including me) at the moment. The download was fairly quick.

They work fine.

Openoffice.org has been KO'd. Here's where you can snag a torrent file though:

http://borft.student.utwente.nl/~adrian/bt.php

RSS feed of torrents for all platforms:

http://borft.student.utwente.nl/~mike/oo/bt.rss

OpenOffice 3.0 was released on BitTorrent a few days ago, download link: OOo_3.0.0_Win32Intel_install_en-US.exe.torrent

The RSS torrent feed (via OpenOffice P2P Downloads) has different languages, OS versions to choose from.

OpenOffice 3.0 was released on BitTorrent a few days ago, download link: OOo_3.0.0_Win32Intel_install_en-US.exe.torrent

The RSS torrent feed (via OpenOffice P2P Downloads) has different languages, OS versions to choose from.

I've got a Rb oscillator (and Efratom FRS, easily found for less than $200), which I will guarantee is much more accurate than any mechanical timekeeper. Stability of +- 1e-10/yr., which is better than 3 ms the first year, 6, the second, etc.

There's nothing in the article to indicate what it uses as a timebase, except a comment about an "electric motor." AC line frequency, the same as my bedroom alarm clock? European line frequency can vary by seconds per day.

Exactly what was your "guarantee," because I think you owe me.

A system called Quarantainenet attempting to do the same detection and isolation has been up and running for 5+ years at the University of Twente in the Netherlands. It's even evolved into a separate company, which appears to cover several more universities and ISP's in the Netherlands with the system.

http://pardus-larus.student.utwente.nl/~pardus/projects/zim/

It has to be one of the most useful personal documentation, note taking tools in existence. It's basically a wiki for the desktop. All the information is stored in wiki style text files so even if you want to switch to something else, it's easy.

http://pardus-larus.student.utwente.nl/~pardus/pro jects/zim/index.shtml

I keep my knowledgebases in Wiki format.

http://pardus-larus.student.utwente.nl/~pardus/pro jects/zim/

For people who are interested in the (western) philosophies surrounding technology, there is an entire Master program dedicated to this stuff @ the University of Twente (Netherlands).

website

Hate to be an advertiser but it's new, unknown and I think a lot of beta bachelors would be interested.

Ah, you missed the crankshaft. No wonder it is very small

...called hd24tools. I have my reasons for wanting it closed- among other things to stay out of trouble with Alesis.

Go ahead and write closed-source- but be aware of the licenses of the libraries against which you link. FLTK is 100% liberal for any open or closed source use, be it commercial or not; mysql allows you to include it in commercial apps, as long as it is not the *only* database engine that your app supports. Libsndfile does not allow you to statically link to it in closed-source software, but requires you to provide the shared library. In my opinion that's a small price to pay, so that's how I distribute my software. Do check out the terms for each individual package that you use.

I suppose you have no trouble providing the source code of the GPL stuff that you use- but as long as you don't modify the GPL'd stuff you won't have to as the official source already *is* online. If you need to change the GPL'd stuff, put a fork online.

As for the bits that *you* write: Whatever license you put those bits under is your business. Give credit where credit is due- if you use zlib, no harm in thanking the authors. Don't take credit for stuff you didn't build.

My personal "gold standard" for docs is from the TCM project. This stands for "Toolkit for Conceptual Modeling", and includes diagram editors for UML, structured analysis, network diagrams, etc. You are expected to create custom editors for jobs not handled by the included tools.

Why is this a gold standard? Go to the project home page (currently http://wwwhome.cs.utwente.nl/~tcm), and look at the docs. First, they have both a user's guide and a developer's guide. The dev guide contains sections on system architecture (missing from almost ALL FOSS projects), source code organization, class hierarchy, and building.

So they tell you: 1) how the system is organized logically, and 2) how the source code is organized. Given this info, it's really easy to get in and work on the project.

On a more philosophical note: users can write user docs, programmers can write development docs. No user can write the dev docs, and programmers almost always suck at writing user docs. So figure out which one you are, and contribute in kind.

Perhaps you should try making everybody use mirrors?

Here's the list from the announcement:

    Europe:

        http://se.releases.ubuntu.com/7.04 (Sweden)
        http://es.releases.ubuntu.com/7.04 (Spain)
        http://nl.releases.ubuntu.com/7.04 (The Netherlands)
        http://ftp.snt.utwente.nl/pub/linux/ubuntu/7.04 (The Netherlands)
        http://ie.releases.ubuntu.com/7.04 (Ireland)
        http://it.releases.ubuntu.com/7.04 (Italy)
        http://pl.releases.ubuntu.com/7.04 (Poland)
        http://de.releases.ubuntu.com/7.04 (Germany)
        http://bg.releases.ubuntu.com/7.04 (Bulgaria)

    Australia:

        http://au.releases.ubuntu.com/7.04

    Africa:

        http://za.releases.ubuntu.com/7.04 (South Africa)

    Rest of the world:

        http://releases.ubuntu.com/7.04 (Great Britain)

They can copy the IIS code from here:
http://www.scintilla.utwente.nl/asdfhjkl

Many people here seem to make claims on RFID security without knowledge of the technology actually used. I have done some research on the subject so I think I can give some pointers. Details about the technology can be found at ICAO's web page and short presentation on the subject Jacobs/Wichers Schreur.

The communication between the password and the reader is encrypted using information in the Machine Readable Zone at the bottom of the passport. This is the basic way to authorize passport reading. The MRZ-information is generated from the information of the passport holder and random numbers. If bad numbering scheme is used, breaking the encryption is quite possible. If large enough random numbers are used, breaking the encryption with brute force is currently not practical.

The authentication is done using public key cryptography. Currently only Passive Authentication is mandatory, but Active Authentiacation is supported and it is mandatory when fingerprint information is contained in the passport. With only Passive Authentication cloning of MRZ-compromized passport is easy, but with Active Authentication it should be unfeasibly difficult.

Reading and cloning an European RFID passport which is using all available security measures (like the e-passports in Finland) is not as trivia as many people here seem to think. As long as there are no backdoors in the cryptography (e.g. for the intelligence agencies) I think the technology is quite sound. Not using all available cryptography is just bad choise by the goverment issuing the passports.

The scheme in TFA is nothing new and nothing revolutionary. If you have physical access to a passport with only Passive Authentication cloning is trivial, as pointed in TFA. This is actually how the technology was designed to work. Maybe the design is bad, but that is hardly big suprise, since the technology is compromize between many organizations and goverments. When someone clones a passport which has Active Authentication, then that is real news.

Mirrors:

http://ftp.snt.utwente.nl/pub/software/videolan/vl c/0.8.6/
http://videolan.kn.vutbr.cz/vlc/0.8.6/

• VideoLAN primary mirror - France - Download (HTTP)
• VIA Centrale Reseaux, École Centrale Paris - France - Download (HTTP)
• Twente University - Netherlands - Download (HTTP)
• IRCAM - France - Download (HTTP)
• Université de Strasbourg - France - Download (FTP)
• Cr@ns, ENS Cachan - France - Download (FTP)
• Providence University - Taiwan - Download (FTP)
• Endpoint Corporation - Sweden - Download (FTP)
• Optralan - USA - Download (HTTP)
• Brno University of Technology - Czech Republic - Download (HTTP)
• Brno University of Technology - Czech Republic - Download (FTP)
• Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Paraná - Brazil - Download (FTP)

Another mirror:

http://ftp.snt.utwente.nl/pub/software/videolan/vl c/0.8.6/