Slashdot Mirror
Slashback: AMD/ATI, Tokamak Fusion, Laptop Privacy
An inside look at the AMD/ATI merger. Spinnerbait writes "HotHardware spent some sit-down time with a few folks close to the AMD and ATI merger, asked some probing questions and received a few insightful answers in return. They dug in deep with AMD Execs, learned all there is to know currently and even got a hint of what the future might hold for the dynamic duo (no pun intended), now joined as one. A tighter coupling of the CPU and GPU is in our future perhaps?"
School admins back down on cell phone invasion policy. Reverberant writes "In a follow up to earlier coverage about school admins wanting access to students' cellphones, Framingham officials have decided to hold off on the policy for now because they need school committee approval. The head of the school policy committee has 'no interest in bringing it up.'"
New launch date for Scotty's ashes. wolfdvh writes "The BBC reports that Star Trek actor James Doohan, who played the engineer Scotty in the original TV series, will now have his remains blasted into space in October. The actor's ashes were supposed to be sent into orbit last year, but the flight was delayed as tests were carried out on the rocket."
Second test for China's Tokamak fusion device. Haxx writes "The first plasma discharge from China's experimental advanced superconducting research center dubbed 'artificial sun' is set to occur next month. The discharge, expected about Aug. 15, will be conducted at Science Island in Hefei, in east China's Anhui Province. The experiment will test the world's first Tokamak fusion device of this kind. The new device will be an upgrade of China`s first superconducting Tokamak device. The plasma discharge will draw international attention since some scientists are concerned with risks involved in such a process"
Forbe's missed the mark on IBM destruction of evidence. An anonymous reader writes "It turns out that Forbes.com was wrong and, based on analysis of Pacer no motion has been filed against IBM for destruction of evidence. Shortly following from a major collapse in SCO's share price, a recent article Slashdot reported Forbes.com's claim that a motion had been filed against IBM for destruction of evidence. In fact, Groklaw, the main site covering the SCO vs. IBM lawsuit, now reports that SCO has filed no motions of this type whatsoever in March."
Skype for Mac 1.5 released. Billy C writes "A few weeks after warez versions made the rounds on the Internet, the official Skype for Mac with video is here." While still only a preview version, brave users can now give it a shot.
Courts rule customs can rifle through your laptop. monstermagnet writes "On Monday, a unanimous three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals held that the files of a person's laptop may be searched at U.S. borders [PDF] without probable cause or even reasonable suspicion."
Cyrix already had a cpu/gpu/whatever else combo. It was the MediaGX
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
No mention of where the Linux drivers are going with the merger of ATI and AMD. Maybe they will get their act together and give us working drivers for the 200 express card.
Signature v3.0, now with 42% less memory usage.
But an hour later they were hungry for more power than they put into the system.
Being on the Enterprise myself, working in the engineroom, I understand the technical aspect of fusion reactions, I wish Scotty could have explained matter - antimatter to me.
Where ever you go Scotty, I hope it's GREEN.
Enterprise CVAN 65 that is...
On Monday, a unanimous three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals held that the files of a person's laptop may be searched at U.S. borders [PDF] without probable cause or even reasonable suspicion."
TrueCrypt for Windows or Linux. Check it out.
--saint
Way to go! USA! USA! USA! Our freedoms are the envy of the world!
the files of a person's laptop may be searched at U.S. borders without probable cause or even reasonable suspicion.
Elliotte Rusty Harold recently had a good blog post about probable cause. His point is that probable cause isn't just to protect the innocent from abuse; it's also to keep the police effective by forcing them to focus on people who have a high probability of actual wrongdoing. Without that constraint, they're free to go after anyone, and end up wasting their time & effort on wild goose chases.
I assume that there's no legal obligation for you to give US Customs your password. I also assume that they're under no obligation to let you into the country. If you're clearing customs while you're in the US, there's probably no obligation for them to return your laptop to you either.
I'm surprised by the stupid comments found on the page concerning China's Tokamak device. I'm eager for the day when scientists finally manage to create a working fusion reactor. Here's what asimov had to say back in 1975.
"In prison you just have to shut your eyes and take it. Here you have to shut your eyes and give it."
Just a thought.
It turns out that Forbes.com was wrong...
Forbes defaming linux? In an article written by Daniel Lyons? Who would have thunk it?
The guy has a well established reputation for being wrong that you can pretty trust anything he writes about linux to be exactly 180-degrees out of sync with reality.
Ordinarily I would want some of whatever he's been smoking, but it sure seems to make you mean and spiteful as a side-effect.
It's not Forbe's, it's Forbes.
[
Framingham officials have decided to hold off on the policy for now because they need school committee approval. The head of the school policy committee has 'no interest in bringing it up.'
He who controls the agenda, controls policy.
You can't vote on something if the head doesn't put it on the agenda.
/It's kindof a bastard/obstructionist move. Better than a filibuster.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
If you are wondering why the court decided to ignore the constitution, it's probably because they were Thinking of the Children. I quote:
Apart from the absurdity of valuing locking away a single paedophile over the basic rights granted to everybody by the constitution, what the hell is going on with the sentence? Fifteen years for looking at forty-odd photos that he deleted afterwards? Some of them were just thumbnails too! What the hell?
I'm not condoning paedophilia (and I think it's fucking stupid that I have to add disclaimers like this), but something is seriously fucked up if looking at a few pictures means you are such a threat to society that you need to be locked up for the best part of two decades. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that over-the-top punishment like this is a worse crime than looking at the pictures in the first place. The kids aren't even going to be aware that he committed this crime, and yet the state is forcibly taking away a huge chunk of his life. The harm of the punishment is clearly out of all proportion to the harm caused by the crime.
Apparently, the excuse they used was a precedent set by an older case:
Er, what? A border search is reasonable because it's a border search? Last time I checked, the constitution didn't say:
What the fuck happened to new stories? Or even comments about moderately old stories. This place is going to pot.
I'll be your candy shop of infinite deliciousity if you'll be my discotheque of endless rump-shaking.
Dude, this has been the norm in the UK and much of Europe for several years. They really don't like you bringing porn into their countries. Of course, there are ample supplies of domestic porn already there, so I'm not sure why you'd want to import it.
I've actually had a customs agent at Gatwick Airport (London, UK) ask me if I had any porn on my laptop. I told him no, if I wanted any I'd just get some local stuff as it seemed plentiful. Fortunately the British pride themselves on having a sense of humor. He offered suggestions on where to get it...
-Charles
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
He's been drinking Hateraide .
Maybe I should stop reading Urban Dictionary.
I have freaks! I did something right...
"Customs" can rifle through your anus without probable cause or even reasonable suspicion. Why anyone would suspect that laptops are somehow sacred and take it up with the courts mystifies me.
Lurking at the bottom of the gravity well, getting old
Here is a better link from a Chinese news source Super-heated fusion experiment to reach 100 million degrees
Evidently this isn't just aiming to achieve "break-even" but an actual "fusion burn" lasting 1000 seconds or approximately 16 minutes. I can't help but wonder that if they reach this goal whether it will massively accelerate the arrival of commercial fusion energy. The difference between break-even and burn is that break-even merely releases more energy than input, whereas burn requires self sustained reaction without additional input of energy.
Many people think controlled fusion is "undoable" so such a demonstration would go a long way towards getting rid of the "30 years away and always will be" assumption.
We only have to wait until Mid-August to find out.
Letter To Iran
I rather enjoy Slashback as a compendium of previous story updates and wish it had a once daily appearance (it had been far less than this in the past).
Backslash posts however seem to be bloated rehashes of comments. If there were no comment moderations it would be useful, but we do, so it isn't.
Letter To Iran
Sure sounds like protectionism to me. Don't want any of that damn cheap imported porn ruining the domestic industry....
Has it? I live in the UK and have travelled all over Europe, and I've never had anybody ask to see what's on my laptop.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
Apparently the engineers testing the rocket didn't take this sage advice:
LaForge: "Yeah, well I told the captain I'd have this analysis done in an hour."
Scott: "How long would it really take?"
LaForge: "An hour!"
Scott: "Oh, you didn't tell him how long it would *really* take, did you?"
LaForge: "Well of course I did."
Scott: "Oh, laddie, you've got a lot to learn if you want people to think of you as a miracle worker!"
At times like this I'm glad my country's leader is _only_ a lying, greedy bastard and not someone like you two.
It would be a beautiful thing if Google stepped in and offered an OS designed specifically for the hardware coming out of this advanced company. Maybe having google merge with AMD/ATI to create a company large enough that can combat Microsoft. I love Google. Is it obvious?
I wonder if they can read this post in China?
I mean, it has the word "freedom" in it. Shouldnt it be blocked?
nt
Are you going to open up documentation for the ati products like you have always done with amd products?
The plasma discharge will draw international attention since some scientists are concerned with risks involved in such a process. But Chinese researchers involved in the project say any radiation will cease once the test is completed.
So...I don't get it. They probably have a good guess as to how much radiation will be generated and everyone camps out at a safe distance.
What's everyone so worried about?
Please help metamoderate.
Now, there *are* situations where the most efficient way to transmit data is by shipping physical media around - but they all involve huge amounts of data or places with little infrastructure. It's hard to come up with a scenario where it makes sense to illegally transfer data from one city with an international airport to another by putting it on a hard drive in a consumer laptop and flying people around with it.
A professional pornographer isn't going to bother carrying the product around with them. They'll set up shop somewhere, pay for a decent network connection and a bunch of dvd blanks, and bring it in electronically and then manufacture it on site. Or they'll bring in ten thousand pressed dvd's in a cargo crate labeled "bananas."
Likewise, someone carrying *really* bad stuff isn't going to just leave it lying around in an unencrypted folder on a laptop. Hell, I wouldn't think of leaving my perfectly legal vanilla porn unencrypted on a laptop in my house, much less one I'd take across international borders.
In countries where anyone can ssh to anywhere in the world and pull in whatever they want, this is just silly. You might occasionally catch really stupid consumers of illegal material, but that's all.
On a tangent, if I were going to try to get some really bad data across the border into a place with no network, I'd probably stick it on encrypted flash drives, disassemble them as much as possible to remove cases and excess hardware, and then screw or cement the boards into place in the bodies of consumer electronics gear. Add an equal number of identical but unmodified drives loaded with holiday photos to use for reassembly parts, and buy the screwdrivers and soldering station at a shop when you arrive. The illegal material in my laptop, if I had any, would be on the pc board hot-glued to the underside of the mainboar - not on the hard drive. (If you really want to do it right, you design pc boards that fit into the cases perfectly and come with standoff and mounting hardware designed to fit the flash drive boards, so that it would pass even a casual inspection by a knowledgeable person. Hide any identifying bits under globs of black epoxy, or place them upside down. Extra points if you manage to route the connectors on the flash board to accessible headers and connect to the drives without even reassembling them.)
I think the AMD/ATI merger definitely needs a new name, and I'd like to propose a couple of suggestions.
First of all, whatever the new name is, I think it should be made by rearranging the letters.
One of my ideas is a name that I feel encompasses the struggle of computer enthusiasts to attain the best technology available: A... DAMIT!
My other idea would be for if they wanted to take a more personal approach to the computer market, and give there company a human name. IT Adam definitely is catchy... I'd remember it...
AMD/ATI, you're welcome to call me if you'd like to use one of those names. We can work out a contract... I won't ask for too much.
If they were smart enough to find the encrypted partition and demand the pass phrase, you give up the normal partition phrase and they never even know about the hidden partition. It can also run off a USB device. As usual this will snare hundreds of stupid people.
Not that I don't think it's totally retarded you have to go to those lengths to keep the government from spying on your laptop. Ah, what do you expect from Republicans?
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
This is just the latest climb down in the SCO peanut gallery as their media allies find other things to write about. Before this article Rob Enderle already moved from his SCO Should Win article to predicting that SCO's litigation, against IBM or anyone else, is all but done.
The story here isn't that SCO has come up with another lame excuse in another vain attempt to flog the dead horse of their court case back to life, but that even their most ardent supporters are starting to see what's going on.
===== Murphy's Law is recursive. =====
What happened to ITER? What happened to JET?
If we are lucky the chinese will blow a hole in that side of the planet and take the heat of the US.
"What's the use of a good quotation if you can't change it?" - Doctor Who
How "open" is AMD as far as providing specs, documentation, info and code goes? And what effect will the "openness" of AMD (if any) have on ATI?
(23:24:48) Uncle_C: you can spell daamit with ati and amd
(23:25:03) parasonic: hahahaha
(23:25:08) parasonic: where did you figure that one out?
(23:25:18) Uncle_C: i'm kinda drunk, i'm jsut loking at it adn thats what it said
I wonder about businesspeople crossing the border with laptops from work. What if the laptops contain private company information, or even client information. How about trade secrets?
Yes, in most cases agents wouldn't bother with this, but all it takes is once.
What I've done in the past is:
1. Purchase a 1 Gb flash drive. Stick a label on it so the size isn't advertised.
2. Partition it 512 Mb FAT-32 / 512 Mb Ext-2
3. Put innocuous stuff all on the FAT partition -- anything hidden gets encrypted and put on the Ext-2
Any one that sticks the flash drive into a Windows box will automount the first partitions. Nothing to see there -- move along. The Ext-2 won't show up unless they look at it with a partitioning tool.
I've never had anyone look twice. Of course, I've never been under close scrutiny, but it certainly passed casual inspection.
The 1 Gb PQI Intellistick is so small it easily fits between credit cards in my wallet without being seen. It doesn't trigger metal detectors, so I leave my wallet in my pocket when going thru those in airports. I don't let it get x-rayed and it just never shows up. The card costs like $45.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Admittedly the laws changed recently, but it used to be that it was totally OK to bring porn into the UK - as long as you could prove it was for your own use. Perhaps you just looked like the kind of guy who uses a LOT of porn?
does anybody know anything about UPI? (i dont) it's linked to as the source for the article on chinese fusion. i ask because there was an add for shirts labeling hillary clinton as a communist on the site. i dont care what your political affiliation is it should be obvious that she is not a communist. seeing this kind of advertising (what one should recognize as extremist advertising, regardless of left or right political alignment) does not speak well of the source.
I ignore Anonymous Coward posts. If you want to discuss something, that's awesome. Log in.
That comment alone makes me want to live in Canada...
That's a good idea.
I imagine if authorities seriously suspected that you had something nasty hidden away somewhere they'd discover the extra partition, but it's certainly likely to get past most people, like customs agents and thieves. Using something like partition-backed loop-aes on the second partition wouldn't hurt either, just in case someone does take a closer look at the drive.
If you want to really go all out, buy two drives from the same manufacturer with a factor of two difference in size and swap cases. If someone plugs in a drive that says "512 MB" in big letters on the cover and finds a 512 MB fat partition full of holiday photos, they're pretty likely to move on to something more interesting.
With open-source tool TrueCrypt you can have hidden partitions with plausible deniability.
http://www.truecrypt.org/
I have on rare occasions, and with very clueless customs people had them ask me to power up an odd looking device to show that it actually was a working device and not some sort of contraband container (at least I presume that was the logic).
;)
Apart from that I too have been all over Europe more times than I care to count and nobody ever looked at the data I was carrying (good luck anyway between the Unix laptop, encrypted stuff on the PDA and media player).
The worst problem I ever had with customs/security was back when I was shooting stuff for the TV when some really low-end droid at the security check took offense to my spare batteries for a broadcast betacam (this was over 10 years ago in Italy). Of course I didn't speak Italian and he didn't speak a work of English, French or German. Took a good 15 minutes to sort out. The day had been fairly bad up to then so I guess this was the perfect way to end it
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
wow. . . too much effort in my opinion.
I think it'd be easier and less painful to stuff it in a condom and put it in my ass!
disclaimer: I've been known to store numbers in my ass for which to dig out when quantities are required.
What happens if they look at the size of the disk - wouldn't it report being a 1gb?
Not that I could see anybody doing this - or even checking a usb disk at all.
I know this sounds extreme on my part but I would definitely be willing to go to jail rather than have somebody poking around through my files. I have absolutely nothing on my laptop that is illegal, I use it strictly for my development system. Nevertheless, that computer and the files within are private property and none of their damn business. If we put up with this it won't be long until we have to line up outside of our homes so they can search our desktops.
Now don't get me wrong, I am not an extremist by any means but I DO believe in our civil liberties, and our rights against illegal search and seizure are guaranteed by the Constitution!!! Sometimes I wonder if lawmakers have even read that particular document?!?!?
Routine is trumped by " reasonable" From the decision:
Instead, searches made at the border . . . are reasonable simply by virtue of the fact that they occur at the border. United States v. Flores-Montano, 541 U.S. 149, 152-53 (2004) (quoting United States v. Ramsey, 431 U.S. 606, 616 (1977)). Thus, the routine border search of Romms laptop was reasonable, regardless whether Romm obtained foreign contraband in Canada or was under official restraint.
Using this as a basis, it looks like customs can do anything they want and call it reasonable to anyone going in or out of the US. You are no longer secure in your private papers when you leave or enter the US.
So the state has granted itself new powers of search based and justifies it by humiliating a wanker. Surely, everyone hates kiddie porn. Even the defendant though he should be punished for such dirty stuff as this:
While staying in his hotel room in Las Vegas, Romm viewed child pornography and masturbated twice, while or shortly after viewing the child pornography; he claimed to have then deleted ....
Only twice? Are they sure it was not three times? He could have lied, you know. I can hardly believe I'm reading such crap in an official US publication, but I suppose that's what the weird and wacky world of pornography prosecution is all about. The upshot of it all is that a customs agent is now free to violate each and every one of us.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Be on the lookout for a crazed scientist with a bad haircut and four robotic limbs shortly after China's fusion test.
...it doesn't work well. Technically, it's supposed to be about a 9600 or so in performance, overall. I see about HALF that performance on this chip under Linux- under Windows, it seems to perform about the same level. No good reason for that or the lack of full and proper Sideport support in the driver either- in order to get this all to work even as poorly as it does, I've got to turn off the Sideport dedicated video memory and go all UMA operation. All of their drivers, for that matter, have similar issues.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Windows shows the size of the "drive", which is the size of the partition. You'd have you use the disk manager or a patitioning tool to see it.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
--
make install -not war
No, it would report the size of the partition being viewed. Without a partition tool, they wouldn't even know the other partition existed, let alone be able to view it.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
I've actually had a customs agent at Gatwick Airport (London, UK) ask me if I had any porn on my laptop...He offered suggestions on where to get it...
I dunno, it sounds to me like he was just asking to see your collection, in case there was anything there he wanted to copy for himself.
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
This will make some businises cautious about carying laptops with them while they travel.
[insert TrueCrypt response here]
Nathan Friedly
The 9th Circuit Court made a stupid decision. Now there's a surprise.
The most overturned court in the country, they are.
I guess it's time for me to check out TrueCrypt and see how it works, because I just can't figure out how such a thing could possibly work. And while that is of course non-conclusive, it leads me to believe that it probably doesn't work.
The problem, in my head, is that you can't have undetectable storage, while simultaneously limiting allocation so that the hidden storage won't be overwritten. It's either allocated, or it's not. No?
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
In other words, even if the judge had found that they needed probable cause, they had it. The judge rulled, however, that probable cause wasn't needed. I can understand that, to a point, since people crossing the border can be coming from places where there are no limits on access to really nasty contraband, and even if there are, the country I'm coming from may not be in a mood to tell the government of the country I'm moving into that I've got 10KG of plutonium in my suitcase.
It's well known that when you cross the border you're subject to random (or not-so-random) searches. In this case, I think it was a given that the search was going to be found reasonable, It was just a case of what reason they were going to find ble.
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
A-mericans have no single wacko religion. It is a melting pot of wacko religionS. But I have to admit those wacko whatevertheyares are reaping the seeds they sown. Yet another "middle east conflict", and for what exactly? Not even oil! Some wacko religion is right.
Could someone explain exactly how they plan to "rifle though your laptop"? I mean really, what do they plan to do? Look at all the pictures to make sure they are not childporn? Read all the docs to verity they are not terrorist/communist plots? Its hard to imagine a automated way to do this that would work on all laptops and all OSs... All this in their ample free time..
And what if the custom agent or investigator uses Linux? You'll probably have a nice surprise waiting for you.
I have slashback articles marked as don't show, so this isnt in the category "slashback". This isnt the first time its happened. No big deal just figure you guys might want to know :p