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I like the driving game in front of the windshield. Not everyone has the cash or the gumption to outfit his Macintosh with a Pathfinder; for the computationally experimental on a more modest budget, there is an easier way. wing_king writes: "A fellow named Troy Kellogg managed to hack an actual Atari 2600 console into the dashboard of his 1978 Volkswagen. The "AtariMobile" even has controller ports and a screen built right into the dash! The AtariMobile site has some pictures of the unit and some details on its construction. What a way to kill all that time sitting at stoplights."
Please tell me this is only for passengers and while parked, ok? I own one of these micro televisions, and it seems like playing on a screen that size while hunched over the stickshift might constitute more work than this labor-intensive project took in the first place. Wow.
Stir, reduce and simmer, stir in indignation: Aimster has removed the Pig Latin Encoder software from its site. And if that wasn't enough trivial encoding for you ...
If just over 500 bytes still wasn't small enough for your new MPAA-mocking tattoo, note that the famous Content Scramble System most famously De-flated with DeCSS has fallen anew.
PotatoNO writes: "Charles H. Hannum has created an even smaller DeCSS decoder than the perl script posted a few days ago. This one is written in C and takes 442 bytes, beating the perl script by 30 bytes. It's small and in C, so of course it's speedy. Hannum's program can decode in excess of 21.5MBps which is faster than the DVD spec allows for. That means it can actually be used for realtime playback."
Now hold on a goldarned minute there! William Evans, of Clark University's Dept. of Computer Science, took issue with the report Tuesday night in which drhpbaldy wrote: "At the latest ACM meeting, scientists and engineers threw mud at computer scientists for not contributing anything useful."
Wrote Evans in response:
"There seems to be some confusion as to what computer science is, and who computer scientists are. Programmers and other IT workers are not, for the most part, computer scientists--they're programmers and other IT workers. This is by no means disparaging, but simply a delineation based on definition.Computer scientists study the branch of mathematics dealing with computation.
In the terms of your story, it was perhaps 'computer scientists' throwing mud at 'programmers and other IT professionals.' In actuality, though, it was mud thrown at business executives, and the ages-old indictment of the larger culture of western corporate management."
What medal do you get for 11th? ;) Rathnor writes: "I've spent the last week or so in Vancouver, Canada in the lead up to the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest World finals. I'm a reserve in the University of NSW Team from Australia. Its been a great week with lots of cool things done for us from IBM and UPE.
The results are officially out and presented: The winners were: St Petersberg State University Second place: Virginia Tech the rest of the standings can be found here. (We made 11th)"
Now it's small enough to use as text wallpaper on your site the same colour as the background. HEY, every person who comes to your site will have DeCSS in their cache.
/. and watch them try to find out the visitor's list.
Now THAT'S distribution. But, would it be the person who went to your site problem? or only yours? I'd like to see MPAA sue everyone who visits -oh say-
DanH
Cavalry Pilot's Reference Page
Cav Pilot's Reference Page
UNIX - Not just for Vestal Virgins anymore
The reasons were listed in a C|Net News.com article on March 12 of this year. Here's the relevant link and the quoted text (it's the second from the last paragraph in the article):
So it looks like the hillarious Pig Latin encoder is no more, as well as their next generation technology. Ah, well.../tma
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I believe the DMCA state dates back to the claim that Napster supposedly (for, IMO, extremely farsical values of supposedly) couldn't attempt to circumvent Aimster's pig-latin scheme without violating the DMCA.
I'm an engineer, I had to learn a fair bit of physics and chemistry.
I have to apply that knowledge as an engineer, especially when I'm doing instrumentation. In my last job I did physics experiments for sensors employing the Kinotex technology. I did the experiments, wrote software for performing them, and wrote documents detailing my findings. I also used chemistry knowledge for some of it.
I am not a physicist, or a chemist, or a computer scientist. I did, however, use the principles of all of those sciences in developing an application.
Programmers and IT professionals are the same way. They apply the principles of computer science. Your average guy with a bachelor of CS is not a scientist, nor is your average guy with a bachelor of physics. I, too, am not a scientist. We apply the principles, but don't discover them, in general. We may sometimes discover principles, but that's not what we are hired to do.
It's not a TV screen, but a computer screen. Big difference.
Have you ever rented a car with one of those GPS devices? It's quite neat, and is not illegal.
Then again, those things probably reduce accidents.
Well, at least it didn't convert them all to Sony ATRAC!
sulli
RTFJ.
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I'm still on RoadRunner in Newfoundland. By default, they block web and ftp ports.
However, if you want to run a website, or ftp server, you can simply call them and ask. They announced it on their newsgroup when they started doing it.
I did immediately, and they capped my upload at 500k. It's a good solution, and the bandwidth has been much better since because the warez-d00dz were capped as well. I'm very happy with the arrangement.
Yes, but the point is: if the key and algorithm are easy to hand out, and the user has a strong incentive to do so, then it's not secure. So the point stands that CSS is crap.
sulli
RTFJ.
For coming 11th you get a silver medal. (The medals are done based on how many problems you solve, but the rankings take into account the time you take to do it, as well as any penalties for incorrect submission)
:)
I was part of the university of Sydney team (although I'm currently at McGill uni in Montreal as part of an exchange program) We got a bronze medal (4 problems solved) - our last one was submitted 10 minutes before the end of the comp, and we didn't know if it was right or not until the award ceremony.
It was lots of fun. I thought the most amusing bit was when someone came up with the idea of teaching the IBM face recognition software to recognise the face on the side of a pringles container. Mr Pringles is now a registered user on that IBM demo.
IBM had lots of cool demos of stuff that they are working on - they were the sponsors of the competition. Unfortunately they don't do that sort of R&D in Australia.
Oh, and is there something wrong with the fact that on the first night the USyd team played (American) Trivial Pursuit with the Berkeley team for relaxation?
No, but actually possessing that rod bent at that certain angle is a felony crime in all 50 American states.
My SO actually convicted a man a year ago for. . . possession of a screwdriver.
KFG
One thing that a couple of people who were there discussed was what sort of relationship there is between going well in these sort of competitions and being a good programmer.
The competitions require fast, quick hacks, not maintainable solutions. Cut and paste coding works fine.
For example, one of the problems (H, I think), gave you a network of comparators (two inputs, and two outputs which would return the inputs in sorted order), and asked you if it was a sorting network. (As well as how long the operation took to complete).
The rumor (which I heard from enough people to believe) was that the Stanford picked n random numbers 5000 times, and simulated the machine. If the simulation showed that the numbers came out sorted for each of these random choices, then their program stated that it was a sorting network. Now the probability that it was not was very very small - I believe their program worked on the first try. And its a clever hack. But its not the sort of thing you'd probably want to do for an open source project.
Apparently some people got credit for the competition, based on how well they did, and some have solved > 500 past problems (one of the European teams did that - I forget which one, and I heard that secondhand). The more complicated problems can take a lot of time, so thats a lot of effort.
One other thing is that you can take in any printouts/books/written notes which you want, so if you have them indexed properly then that can be a lot of help. One of the problems was very similar to one which one of the other people on the USyd team has done previously (although it wasn't one that we'd brought with us, unfortunately)
Also, does anyone who was at the competition know if any team attempted problem D (the trees in the forest problem)? I don't think anyone had before the scoreboard was disabled in the last hour. Was there a nice way to do that (Our team had done almost no computational geometry)?
You were lucky!
I and my 14 siblings were so poor we had to write our own TCP/IP stack doing all computations on our fingers and toes. And when our father wanted to compile Linux, we had to exhume our dead grandparents (may they rest in peace) to have enough fingers and toes for the computations! And because I was a slow counter, when dear old dad wanted to play Q3A, they had to kill me, and bring in the local smart kid to count using my fingers and toes!
[Please note: This and the preceeding posts are best read aloud in an over-the-top British accent]
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D. Fischer
ShoutingMan.com
If I have to buy an OS license I'll never use, I'd rather my money go to Palm, but of course I'd rather not waste my money that way at all.
If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.
So.... size matters?
Seriously though, just because something that decodes CSS can be a small, perhaps trivial, implementation isn't in and of itself an indication of the strength of the encryption scheme. CSS is key-based encryption, and guess what, keys are small. This is like saying: "Gee, all those dead-bolts on your door are pretty puny, all it takes is this tiny little key to open them all!".
Emacs is for experts. Pico is for beginners. VI is a disease.
It's up there, but in PDF and word2000(?) format.
Some of it is interesting, with some real world type problems. Although I could see some purists griping.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Anyone else surprised that U.S. colleges generally considered tops for programming are lagging here? Only 3 of the top 10 are U.S. That's a pretty sad showing.
I also noticed with some surprise that there are no Finnish schools in the top 10. Considering how involved the Finns are in Open Source and the like, it's interesting. Maybe they're all self-taught.
So Warsaw University kicked Stanford's and CalTech's butt! Not to mention UCBerkeley's. I guess it's Virginia Tech all the way! They managed to only get beaten by Russians.
Thalia
There is a difference btw. CS and SE, so I agree with you on that regard. But I'll explain why I think a SE should study CS while in school.
Programming is a skill one must teach oneself. You could listen to hundreds of hours of lectures, and read lots of books, but it requires doing it to learn. Much like driving - you cannot read a car's manual and expect to be able to drive. It requires practice, and experimentation (The first time I sat in the driver's seat I had absolutly no idea how much pressure to apply on the breaks).
No one can teach that, you must teach yourself. However, CS is something that is much easier learned through books and lectures. In fact, you would not expect someone to sit down and be able to invent it all from scratch (recursion theory, typing systems, data structures).
However there is a strong relationship - someone who understands CS will be a better programmer. Not to be snobbish, someone who doesn't understand any CS could _not_ be a programmer.
Once someone has learned CS, they could then study software engineering, which is why many universities now offer SE graduate programs. There is a lot to learn about SE, a lot of which can be learned from books, lectures, but it requires first knowing CS.
It's not illegal to possess that rod bent at a certain angle.
It is illegal to possess that rod bent at a certain angle _while committing a crime_.
It's a lot like with knives. Nothing illegal about holding one in your hand in your neighbors kitchen (generally), until you reach the point where you are attacking your neighbor with it.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
You've got it backwards... "hard" sciences are those that deal with the physical universe; they really only have value if they accurately describe that universe. No matter how esoteric, bizzare or unusual the theories are, they are fundamentally useless if they do not achieve this goal. How well they do so is the yardstick by which scientists measure the success of those theories. In the end, they are empirical sciences - someone fires up a particle accelerator, or spend a a couple of years in a mine waiting for a neutrino to muck up a tank of water, looking for evidence that their theories are correct.
Mathematics (and computer science, which shares a lot with mathematics) are "pure" sciences. A mathematician or a computer scientist has more in common with a linguist than a physicist or chemist. They study completely artificial constructs. There is no "zero" in the universe; it's an artifical thing, a human concept. You can sit in that damn mine for a million years, and never detect a zero.
Because mathematics is just so plain damn useful in describing the universe, we tend to forget that it's just a very specialized and highly formalized langauge with an extremely strict set of rules. Think about it - it may be difficult, but you can describe any mathematical concept in English, French, Spanish, or any other human language. What makes one form of notation (math) a science, and the other (written langauge) an art?
"Great men are not always wise: neither do the aged understand judgement." Job 32:9
Here at UC Berkeley, a wing of our CS department fits William Evan's definition -- the theory wing. Many of the rest of us are experimental computer scientists, and in fact designing hardware and software is a necessary part of doing our research -- we couldn't just prove theorems and write papers and make significant contributions, we gotta build things too, to show the ideas have merit in practice -- you can only measure something you can run.
Guys, do you realize that dudes running that website on his roadrunner connection?
1. its against their EULA to do that
2. slow upload, it was slashdotted before you even posted it.
I fell sorry for him, he'll probably get kicked off, or have one heck of a bill.
In Oregon it's considered distracted driving, regardless of TV, cell phone, map, hot coffee, nail polish etc. If involved in a fender bender or pulled over, the fines increase. I just don't understand how they get away with putting up TV video billboards at busy intersections. It should be illegal. We have enough active distractions already.
The truth shall set you free!
Isn't that kind of like saying people who actually perform physics experiments are not physicists? That only theoretical physicists are really physicists?
I have a degree in computer science... 90% of what I did at university and 90% of what I do now is bang out code.
Theory is important, I would even say the cornerstone, of everything we do, but there's more to it than that...
sig fault
What if a program could be written in few enough bytes - maybe even create a new language specifically for the task, how hard could it be? - and also make a web page that randomly generates code until it matches. You couldn't be busted for passing on circumvention technology, since the program would be randomly generated along with many other possibilities.
-- Nerds on toast in the new millenium
Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted.
Reason: Junk character post.
damm.
Streamripper
this is my sig.
The MPAA has been pretty successful in repressing the distribution of DeCSS, viewing it as a threat to movie industry copyright - and movie industry profits.
In what way have they been pretty successful? Short of "Hello World", it's probably the most widely distributed short piece of code on the entire net. And this new version just goes to show how amazingly ineffective they've been.
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Dyolf Knip
No. It is illegal if a * jury says it is.*
However, it is * possesion * of burglery tools that is illegal. USING them is a seperate crime.
The police may charge you with possesion of a burglery tool just for having the bent rod on your person.
In the case my SO sat on the accused had commited a crime. A crime during which he * stole * a screwdriver. The screwdriver was not used in the commision of the crime, it was part of the "take."
Even the prosocution stipulated that the screwdriver was NOT used criminally.
That man is now in jail for possession of a burglery tool.
One more time. *Possession* of a burglery tool is a crime by written code. You may be arrested for such possession if the police officer *believes* whatever object you possess is a burglery tool, and if a jury agrees with him, it IS a burglery tool, and you are a guilty.
KFG
In many states and the District of Columbia, it is illegal to possess lockpicks, even if you never use them. I guess you could say they are illegal circumvention devices.
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Give me liberty or give me something of equal or lesser value from your glossy 32-page catalog.
Luxury. I had to solder my VIC-20 to the front of my 3-speed. I carry around the car battery that powers it on my back. When the acid leaks, it hurts. But at least I have my email.
Carousel is a lie!
Nice idea, but I hope this guy doesn't get arrested for speeding or something. The police would see this. It's illegal for a driver to be able to see a TV screen in a car. Not even with the mirrors.
;-)
Nice idea tough, so next time I'm trying a stunt with my car, I can try it first in a game to see if it's possible.
"The answer to the Question of Life, the Universe and Everything is... 42"
What else, the text of beowulf.
Yuk, yuk, yuk.
It appears to me that this guy commited a burglary, but there wasn't enough evidence, or whatever, to convict him. So they picked a convenient crime to which almost everyone in america is guilty of, and use that to "nail him". That is wrong. It shouldn't be allowed to happen, and everybody who helped make it possible (the prosecuting lawyer, judge, jury, and potentially police officers) all acted in an unethical and unprofessional manner. IMO, This guy should be relesed and preferably, all those people should have to apologize to him.
If you can't get enough evidence to convict someone of burglary, they shouldn't be convicted. It is as simple as that. Anything else undermines the "innocent unless proven guilty" concept on which a large portion of our constitutional freedoms are based.
Next thing you know, people doing perfectly legal things that aren't approved of by big brother/big business will be convicted of these crimes, and we will be one step further to becoming a police state.
A lot of people will think I am overreacting, but I really believe this is bad. It happend in the 1950's, and it could happen again.
Underclocking is also very useful in embedded systems where power or heat are serious problems. If you are lucky, you can take a coppermine CPU, underclock it a lot, and put on a big passive heat sink, and still not over heat. This might be important if you are making a MP3 player for your stereo and you don't want fan noise.
I haven't tried this yet, so I don't actually know if you can do that, but it should be possible.
OK, it goes like this:
- All but one of the tables are used in applying your licensed PLAYER KEY (like the Xing key stolen by DeCSS) to each of the DISK KEYS. Unless the DVD-CCA have revoked your license, there will be a disk key that can be decrypted by your player key. This decrypted disk key can then decrypt the TITLE KEY which locks each particular file.
- One of the tables is used to reverse the order of bits in a byte, eg table[01100001] = 10000110. This is used in the scrambling.
These mini decoders take the title key as input, they only then do the descrambling, which is quite easy. They don't handle the hard part, which is getting the title key. The bit-reversing table is 'functionally regenerated'.Some of the tables used in the decoding process really required: one of them is a specific substitution cipher from the CSS specification. Those numbers are not generated by an algorithim, they are a list of 256 different substitutions specified by humans and cannot be expressed more efficiently than a full list of them in table form.
Does my bum look big in this?
There are no kracks until ALL DEVICE MASTER KEYS ARE DIVULGED!
A master key is simply any 40 bits that can decrypt a specific disc key. You can brute-force a master key for each disc key on the disc. You can buy every DVD on the planet and build a repository of player keys that work on them, if you wanted. So shut up.
Your firm grasp of the facts, subtle and intentional errors, incessant rambling and criticism of everyone who might look at your comment are hallmarks of trolling. Better luck next time.
Does my bum look big in this?
Are you sure with your facts? I mean 21.5 Mbps is damn lot for a _packed_ stream.. it's DeCSS:d _before_ its unmpegged..
Psi
fucktard is a tenderhearted description