Slashdot Mirror

I'm not a lawyer in the US, this is not legal advice, you are a lawyer in the US, it's your call, I'm just shooting my mouth off here like half of Slashdot, but:

For one thing, all the things MediaSentry/SafeNet is logging and presenting in court as factual evidence can be spoofed by a third party or faked. It's hearsay that another machine on the internet has told them, and based on the research that I have seen, they are not actually downloading any material pieces of the files, but simply doing hash searches.

That leaves two distinct questions: The possibility of hash collisions (especially for MD5 and SHA1, as used in Gnutella and Bittorrent - it's unlikely but in practice can actually be demonstrated to be a possibility and is in point of fact guaranteed not to be unique, as they claim; particularly so for, say, the ol' KaZaA network, and eDonkey2000's MD4), and the insecurity of the networks against various attacks and injection techniques and MediaSentry/SafeNet's complete lack of security checks against this.

Were the court aware of the true nature of the networks concerned, and how easily an innocent third-party IP address might be implicated in file-sharing in MediaSentry/SafeNet's tools' view without their actual participation in any way, they might be inclined to chuck the evidence out as too unreliable, or require something more heavyweight to back it up. (As you know, they have nothing else.)

Would any private investigator would be required to act as an expert witness agent of the court (and thus to report in their depositions a factual, balanced, accurate opinion based on the available evidence, even if it works to their client's own detriment, who would then simply have to not present the expert witness evidence in court - that's what usually happens in the UK, but I understand US law may differ on this), or simply as an agent of their clients? If the former then this is likely the reason the RIAA is dropping the suits when the question of evidential disclosure comes along; because the evidence on which they are relying to identify IP addresses involved in copyright infringement is - according to my own research, and other recent research (see http://dmca.cs.washington.edu/uwcse_dmca_tr.pdf ) - blindly believing information provided by a third party who may or may not be spoofing with no real attempts to verify it.

Furthermore, the RIAA have themselves hired other agents to perform that exact kind of spoofing as well as others, in order to disrupt torrents, and the Gnutella (Limewire) network. The two parties - the spoofers and the investigators - are NOT talking to each other, so it is in this P2P researcher's opinion highly likely that given the volume of IP addresses targeted for warnings and lawsuits, at least some of the IP addresses targeted are highly likely to be falsely-injected ones.

Unfortunately, you won't get me into a US court to testify on this. This, too, is hearsay. :)

Fortunately, you could have a word with those U-Wash researchers above who might well be capable of submitting written evidence acting as witnesses given that there are, to my knowledge, no licenced expert witnesses with the required internal knowledge of the P2P networks to make an adequate determination of the validity of the evidence. (And yes, of course, that includes SafeNet. Hah!)

You found out what 10% of the brain does (the sensory/motor areas)? The other 90% must not be used for anything.

This old myth actually never had its origin in science, but was created and then spread through popular media. Please don't help it survive - it's time to let it die.

It's based on a different University of Washington project: http://phototour.cs.washington.edu/

Reminds me of the Washington Edu. project to fix video errors using high-res photos.
http://grail.cs.washington.edu/projects/videoenhancement/videoEnhancement.htm

For some reason I had really high expectations; something along the lines of loading all the photos and getting a 3D wire mesh back that could be used for anything. Not that this isn't nifty in its own special way.

But then, you also forgot to mention that global temperatures have dropped since 10 years ago.

I haven't been around too long. Is the steam-powered Turing machine old news here? http://www.cs.washington.edu/building/art/SPTM/

um? It's right there in the article: http://grail.cs.washington.edu/projects/videoenhancement/videoEnhancement_files/VirtualStudio.zip The only thing missing is the Structure from Motion code. The readme is interesting, it says that it takes about 5 minutes to process each single 800x600 frame. It still has its uses, but for masking I bet I could do that faster manually. http://grail.cs.washington.edu/projects/videoenhancement/videoEnhancement_files/README.txt

um? It's right there in the article: http://grail.cs.washington.edu/projects/videoenhancement/videoEnhancement_files/VirtualStudio.zip The only thing missing is the Structure from Motion code. The readme is interesting, it says that it takes about 5 minutes to process each single 800x600 frame. It still has its uses, but for masking I bet I could do that faster manually. http://grail.cs.washington.edu/projects/videoenhancement/videoEnhancement_files/README.txt

This is news for gamers who like to play games... no way the assholes here will read this news without comparing apples with bananas... or arguing about the quality of this title without referencing to John Carmacks beautiful hair...

http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/klee/misc/slashdot.html

Quit Slashdot today! Your life depends on it.

I wonder how far this could be taken in association with this type of work: http://grail.cs.washington.edu/projects/videoenhancement/videoEnhancement.htm

A "fake multiplatform" thing? Like Java?

I'm confused. When was Photo Tourism ever OSS?

Moreover, the Photo Tourism web site seems to suggest that it has been supported by Microsoft Research from the start.

... yes. Because the platform an app runs on determines its copyright status.

Safari runs on Windows and Linux! SAFARI IS OSS.

http://phototour.cs.washington.edu/ - what's that, a Microsoft logo on the official website. Oh, stolen? Perhaps you should try fact checking.

(You sir are the definition of a zealot).

If you read the paper you will see that it is the same researchers!

Photosynth started out as Photo Tourism on Linux. Guess that puts to rest the "fact" that Microsoft innovates and OSS steals.

well, okay, http://faculty.washington.edu/chudler/facts.html right at the top of the page, a pig has a 180 gram brain, while a sheep has a 140 gram brain, i realize pigs are omnivores, and sheep are herbivores, but then look at the jaguar, which has a 157 gram brain, despite being a predator...

evolution can happen by random chance, if it's beneficial the offspring pass it on better than those without the gene.

The technique is called ducking. Be sure to set the release to several seconds on the compressor or there is a chance that the compressor will "pump" or "breathe" the entertainment audio if there are any pauses in the conversation. It may, however be better for you to control your audio level manually, because the undesired audio will not lower in volume until your first word is spoken resulting in a definately audible distraction. You could get around that by using a compressor with a VCA control input connected to a phone line in use detector (eliminating the LED and routing those connections to the compressor's VCA control input) , but I suspect this is overkill. Just use the faders.

Size isn't everything:

adult human 1,300 - 1,400g
sperm whale 7,800g
fin whale 6,930g
elephant 4,783g
humpback whale 4,675g
gray whale 4,317g
killer whale 5,620g
bowhead whale 2,738g
pilot whale 2,670g
bottle-nosed dolphin 1,500 - 1,600g

Read & Learn, And Legalize Marijuana

Since the article is often pulled from websites, the first article you should read and burn into your mind is this, Google for the title and archive a copy for yourself:

"A break-in to end all break-ins"
"In 1971, stolen FBI files exposed the government's domestic spying program"

It's an amazing story, and in 2008, how much has this expanded into every corner of our lives? The majority of Americans are brainwashed sheep consumers with a limp wet noodle for a brain, thrashing around with their Wii and Paris Hilton media like a fat dinoasaur in a tar pit. Stay informed, we have no privacy, encryption is good but useless with acoustic monitoring, reflections in the eye and objects in your environment, etc.! If it's electronic, there's always a loophole. You shine brighter with each electronic device you use, in many ways. Don't trust Hushmail or any web based mail service to keep anything of yours secure or to provide any reasonable degree of security. Secure your computer room and rig your computer to shut down if you use encryption like Truecrypt or other when your environment is entered by someone other than you or those you permit and trust (you shouldn't trust anyone, everyone has a price)

Compromising Reflections or How to Read LCD Monitors Around the Corner
http://www.infsec.cs.uni-sb.de/~unruh/publications/reflections.pdf [uni-sb.de]

And more:

http://www.eff.org/wp/detecting-packet-injection
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anonymous_remailer
http://cryptome.org/tempest-law.htm
http://seclab.uiuc.edu/pubs/LeMayT06.pdf
http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~dfrankow/files/lam-etrics2006-security.pdf
http://cryptome.org/nsa-vaneck.htm
http://www.alobbs.com/macchanger
http://lifehacker.com/software/ssh/geek-to-live--encrypt-your-web-browsing-session-with-an-ssh-socks-proxy-237227.php
http://www.nononsenseselfdefense.com/five_stages.html
http://csrc.nist.gov/publications/nistpubs/800-92/SP800-92.pdf
http://csrc.nist.gov/itsec/guidance_WinXP_Home.html
http://csrc.nist.gov/publications/nistpubs/800-84/SP800-84.pdf
http://all.net/books/document/harvard.html
http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/library/l-keyc.html
http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/library/l-keyc2/
http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/library/l-keyc3/
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/emsec/optical-faq.html
http://www.cs.washington.edu/education/courses/csep590/06wi/
http://www.wiley.com/legacy/compbooks/mcnamara/links.html
http://lifeha

Since the article is often pulled from websites, the first article you should read and burn into your mind is this, Google for the title and archive a copy for yourself:

"A break-in to end all break-ins"
"In 1971, stolen FBI files exposed the government's domestic spying program"

It's an amazing story, and in 2008, how much has this expanded into every corner of our lives? The majority of Americans are brainwashed sheep consumers with a limp wet noodle for a brain, thrashing around with their Wii and Paris Hilton media like a fat dinoasaur in a tar pit. Stay informed, we have no privacy, encryption is good but useless with acoustic monitoring, reflections in the eye and objects in your environment, etc.! If it's electronic, there's always a loophole. You shine brighter with each electronic device you use, in many ways. Don't trust Hushmail or any web based mail service to keep anything of yours secure or to provide any reasonable degree of security. Secure your computer room and rig your computer to shut down if you use encryption like Truecrypt or other when your environment is entered by someone other than you or those you permit and trust (you shouldn't trust anyone, everyone has a price)

Compromising Reflections or How to Read LCD Monitors Around the Corner
http://www.infsec.cs.uni-sb.de/~unruh/publications/reflections.pdf

And more:

http://www.eff.org/wp/detecting-packet-injection
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anonymous_remailer
http://cryptome.org/tempest-law.htm
http://seclab.uiuc.edu/pubs/LeMayT06.pdf
http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~dfrankow/files/lam-etrics2006-security.pdf
http://cryptome.org/nsa-vaneck.htm
http://lifehacker.com/software/ssh/geek-to-live--encrypt-your-web-browsing-session-with-an-ssh-socks-proxy-237227.php
http://www.nononsenseselfdefense.com/five_stages.html
http://csrc.nist.gov/publications/nistpubs/800-92/SP800-92.pdf
http://csrc.nist.gov/itsec/guidance_WinXP_Home.html
http://csrc.nist.gov/publications/nistpubs/800-84/SP800-84.pdf
http://all.net/books/document/harvard.html
http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/library/l-keyc.html
http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/library/l-keyc2/
http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/library/l-keyc3/
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/emsec/optical-faq.html
http://www.cs.washington.edu/education/courses/csep590/06wi/
http://www.wiley.com/legacy/compbooks/mcnamara/links.html
http://lifehacker.com/software/home-server/geek-to-live--set-up-a-personal-home-ssh-server-205090.php

I am in full support of this vision. However (and unfortunately), I think the practical answer will resemble robotic trains more than robotic cars operating on the current network of roads. Plus, the main benefits of an improved transportation system will involve restructuring the way cities and communities are built when they are not sliced apart and divided by acres of roadways.

First of all, while there has been some limited success in building autonomous cars, but we can't even get autonomous airplanes accepted into our air transportation system even though planes have practically been able to fly themselves for decades. Hell, most cities can't even get people to accept conductor-less subway trains, and have to hire college students or bums to sit in the front cabin.

The robotic vehicle would have to be completely isolated and separated from unpredictable human traffic and other sources of interference, if only for liability issues.

The best first step in widespread use of robotic cars might just be on the interstate highway system, where they could construct a special lane designed only for robotic vehicles. So you could drive your car/truck onto an interstate, auto-merge into the robotic lane, set the autopilot for your destination exit, and take a nap or otherwise entertain yourself until an alarm wakes you up to exit.

For incursions into urban areas, you'd want something similar to the Personal Rapid Transit (PRT) systems everyone was investigating in the 70's. Take a look at the CabinTaxi system at: http://faculty.washington.edu/jbs/itrans/cabintaxi%20photos.htm . There are modern PRT systems finally being planned for deployment recently in Heathrow and Dubai... however, they seem to be limited to airport shuttles and aren't really large enough to meet the promise of a large distributed network with many stations.

Speaking of Dubai, the biggest obstacle will be financial, of course. The road and highway system is expensive, but a lot of the infrastructure is paid for by the user in purchase and maintenance of their own personal vehicles. While the city as a whole would find the entire system cheaper if the government would purchase and maintain a smaller number of shared vehicles, good luck convincing them to finance both the network and the vehicles if they can just build the network and have the users pay for their own vehicles. Of course, car sharing companies such as Flexcar / Zipcar offer something of a shared vehicle, they only have limited potential unless they'd allow one-way rentals... where you can pick up a Zipcar at one "station" and drop it off at another "station", where someone else could make use of it. You'd need some way of getting the cars back to empty stations, but that would realize benefits in terms of reducing the area of pavement needed for parking if everyone had their own personal vehicle.

However, I don't think advanced transportation is the magic bullet that will solve all of our problems... I think much greater benefits will be realized by redesigning cities to be denser, more human friendly, and carfree (check out http://carfree.com/ ), so people simply don't need to travel so far from a nice home to a nice place to work.

So yes, I'm an Arcology nut (check out my MSSE thesis on my homepage). I think the Dantzig / Saaty "Compact Cities" book from 1971 had the most comprehensive plan for constructing a city that I have seen in my research (you'll have to look it up in a good library, it's fairly rare).

In any case, I agree that this kind of development should be a national priority, since there is a *lot* of room for improvement. But since improving the place you live and how you get around are kinda mundane, "infrastructure" issues, I figure we'll see little to no advances in the Western world until China develops the technology and discipline and manages to dust us with their production efficiency, and maybe eventually a high standard of living (said only half-jokingly).

The link to the study is borked. Correct link: http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/yoshi/papers/Tor/PETS2008_37.pdf

Of course, this leaves out difference in conversion efficiency of gas v.s. electricity.

That is a pretty big glossing over of the realities, especially since the efficiency of a gasoline powered ICE is around 18% - not including additional losses in the transmission.

Last I heard, total efficiency at the wheel, on average, is closer to 8%-9%. I have no idea if that's correct but is sounds about right.

Of course, this leaves out difference in conversion efficiency of gas v.s. electricity.

That is a pretty big glossing over of the realities, especially since the efficiency of a gasoline powered ICE is around 18% - not including additional losses in the transmission.

I'm not sure if trn supports it (I couldn't figure it out in a few minutes of searching), but it looks like alpine (http://www.washington.edu/alpine/) does have SSL capabilities for news.

No, the RIAA (actually the companies they pay to do their enforcement) don't connect to peers directly to verify they're actually sending infringing content. They just retrieve the list of peers and send DMCA to all of them. Read the paper, there was an article here on it a while back.

Well a University of Washington physicist certainly thinks it's worth an experiment.

Yes, I read The Fabric of Cosmos. And that's what actually gave me the idea before I ever heard of John Cramer's planned experiment. Remember Greene's example of an experimental setup which specifically stated that if you measure the entangled stream, it would cause the interference pattern to disappear in the original stream. It seems obvious that this can be used for communication. As you said, measuring a single photon would not be enough - a pattern needs many "dots". But if you switch the device on long enough to measure 1000 photons, the pattern, or lack thereof, would be clear as day. If it takes you 1 second to analyze the pattern, but the device is on the stream more than 1 light second away: there's your FTL travel. And if the device measures the photons after you have seen their entangled partners hit the screen and analyzed the pattern, that's communication back in time.

More info on that experiment (or at least links to articles about it) can be found here.

Basically, as I see it, this experiment will either prove FTL communication to be possible, or it will disprove the uncertainty principle.

Now that 64-bit processors are so common, perhaps operating systems can spare some virtual address space for performance benefits.

The OPAL operating system was a University of Washington research project from the 1990s. OPAL uses a single address space for all processes. Unlike Windows 3.1, OPAL still has memory protection and every process (or "protection domain") has its own pages. The benefit of sharing a single address space is that you don't need to flush the cache (because the virtual-to-physical address mapping do not change when you context switch). Also, pointers can be shared between processes because their addresses are globally unique.

You should be able to watch what happens from webcams near the Nort Pole station. Now, if the North Pole does melt you you won't see much anymore from those cams, of cause.

... could give some insight: http://faculty.washington.edu/ajko/papers/Ko2008Dissertation.pdf

Hey, you've got the sundial, a bunch of equations chiseled into the walls, a Foulcault Pendulum, etc. We had Sieg Hall until 2003.

I think the infamous Steam-Powered Turing Machine mural deserves mention. It's not often that an awful mural painted by CS grad students - to avoid studying for finals, no less - is photographically reproduced for a building named after Paul Allen.

I don't know if it's available for your CS department's office, but since it was originally a piece of graffiti, I doubt they could cite copyright law if you wanted to make your own photographic reproduction.

Here at the University of Washington, our department chair has spent considerable effort curating our new building's art collection, and the results are spectacular! Instead of going for a CS theme, he chose to feature artists that have some sort of connection with the UW, which has lead to an impressive collection of artwork.

Here at the University of Washington, our department chair has spent considerable effort curating our new building's art collection, and the results are spectacular! Instead of going for a CS theme, he chose to feature artists that have some sort of connection with the UW, which has lead to an impressive collection of artwork.

Can anyone explain how more than 1 or two frames of lag are possible? I can't imagine that cheap webcams actually have enough memory to buffer more than the frame, but I doubt they even do that. All the webcams I have here use non-USB interfaces (Firewire or some CCIR-601/626 dialect) and are essentially lag-free, and they are up to 15 years old.
I've played around a bit with the demo Tools that come with ARToolkit, which is intended as a Toolkit for augmented reality, i.e. to insert 3D-Objects into real photos or videos. It can Identify the 3D-orientation of targets (i.e. black squares on white background with some more black-on-white patterns in the middle for identification and orientation) in real time at 30fps on my old 400MHz box. If one went and printed one target on each visible face of the "controller", one could probably use it as an input device.
There are a few ARToolkit demo videos on youtube, e.g. one using it to overlay 3D Monsters over a collectible card game or moving a dancing manga character around on a desk.

Apparently not

Photosynth was acquired from the University of Washington... The original was in Java and called photo tourism. http://phototour.cs.washington.edu/

Someone's already thought and implemented this:
Web Tripwires
But you're right, perhaps websites should start providing something of this nature.

The new version is under the Apache License V2 and is called Alpine. It was easier to start the new project with the new license with a name change. If you can get past any prejudices about text-based, menu-driven applications, it kicks butt.

1. UV lights (i.e. time outside) will clear it up almost better than the drugs do.
2. the rate of rise is MUCH higher than a genetic disease would allow. The fact that it hits ppl who have never had it in either family is ignored.

It's now almost certain that the world's ice shelves are melting

Funny, that's not what the actual facts show. We're at the highest ever recorded ice cover in the Southern Hemisphere right now:

http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/s_plot.html

which already more than balances out the Northern Hemisphere's recent decline,

http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/n_plot.html

and now that the PDO has entered a cool phase,

http://jisao.washington.edu/pdo/

it's as certain as anything to do with climate is that you're going to see that trend smartly reverse itself as well.

Soooooo ... only for some value of "certain" which equates to "certainly not" is that a defensible statement, methinks.

Does this not work in the Azureus-based BitTyrant or is it just me? I type in my query and hit search and nothing happens.

Basically, Earth's size, rotation rate, and stratification only support 1-2 jet streams, and there is a lot of variability. This variability, and the strong wave-radiative potential near the jet streams does not allow large-scale coherent structure to persist for "long" periods of time. Jupiter supports many jets having nearly fixed positions, which allows coherent material eddies to persist without disruption in the mixing layers between the jets.

Earth has similar eddies, on shorter timescales, in both the atmosphere and ocean. Examples include warm and cold rings in the ocean, and "cut-off" cyclones in the atmosphere. There are also less well-known vortices over the arctic that are apparent in analyses of the tropopause. Examples can be found here (try the loop feature to see the motion of vortices over the arctic):

http://www.atmos.washington.edu/~hakim/tropo/

I thought you had me there, but then I saw this change, which may have required users to update their rules! Heavens! :)

The following web site contains some scripts which do self-analysis/ checksum calculations to determinwe whether they have been interfered unlawfully with:

Corruption detection scripts

You may want to check out this site, which has tests on in-flight ad injection and tools that you can use to detect (aka tripwire) it.

http://vancouver.cs.washington.edu/

If anyone is using charter (or just suspicious of things), please visit our tripwire server:

http://vancouver.cs.washington.edu/, to (hopefully) detect in-flight page changes.

The purpose of the map is to demonstrate sexual networks. In the case of a virgin, there is no sexual network. The full article is available at http://faculty.washington.edu/stovel/chains.pdf, she does have maps and discussion that take time into account.