Re:What's wrong with not being anonymous?
on
License to Surf
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· Score: 1
On the contrary, we have been using the term "RL" on FidoNet and Internet (Inet being news and mail) since the 80s to distuingish what we do on the net from what we do in our normal lives.
Don't worry, it's a classic mistake by a newbie to assume too much about someone you only know through net-postings...
What's wrong with not being anonymous?
on
License to Surf
·
· Score: 1
I'm usually not anonymous in Real Life, so why should I demand to be it on the Internet?
Sure, I can post snail mail anonymously (well, almost, they'll always be able to track me to the place where it was really posted - and then try to extract fingerprints) and I can buy stuff in stores with cash etc to retain my anonomity, however, most of the time that won't work. It's possible to track someone 99% of the time living our daily lifes, and I don't really see an uproar against that. Come on - I am a responsible adult and I accept responsibility for my actions.
I do that on the web too. I don't hack a website more than I deface a store's facade - and if the store has a camera that can find out who does, why shouldn't the same ability exist on the net?
My car has a license plate - everyone knows who's car goes down the road. When I surf, my packets have an IP that belongs to me. It should be just as illegal to spoof that IP as it should be to use false plates...
I think you get the picture. While I don't like to have _everything_ I do stored somewhere, I don't expect to have a right to anonymousity on the Internet that I don't have anywhere else.
(I've never made a single post as AC on/. either...)
Properly encoded VCDs are better quality than VHS - and don't suffer from degradation
Several VCD players hold 2 discs at the same time
Most (All?) Pioneer DVD players play CDRs, and all old dual-laser Sonys. Most cheap DVDs (Raite, Hoyo etc) also play CDRs - big market for that
Anyone with a bit of bandwidth can download VCDs - and if you're outside the US you can get screeners (the promotion VHS tapes sent out by the movie companies themselves) in VCD format before the movie hits the cinema. Most of them are also in dolby surround - such a VCD played on a good setup means you had rental-quality movies before they hit the cinema...
The movie industry should either be very afraid of the posibility to make your own DVDs at home, or they should be smart and do what they did with the new Arnold movie... premiered in a lot of countries within days.
Wrong. Macrovision needs _new_ VCRs for its protection to work - an old VCR doesn't give a d*mn about Macrovisions brightness trickery and will give you a good copy without the need for a "Macrovision buster"
Lots of us/.ers are software engineers and network administrators etc (please add your occupation here). Guess what would happen if we all would lay down work for a week or two (I mean, we can afford it... )
We'll be fired?
Maybe - but getting another job is as easy as 1-2-3...
Whenever they feel like it, they blow up some hospitals or embassies in other countries and then say they "had" to do it to protect the world from terrorists.
Guess what - the US of A is the biggest bully in the world, and you'd have to be an american not to see it.
I fail to see the relevance of your post, come again?
Yes Hitler wasn't very nice, and yes the US intervened in WWII since they didn't want a strong Hitler ruling Europa and then going after them (read up on what was found by Bletchley Park regarding that). That however doesn't change any of my points.. ?
The Swedish government indeed helped the nazis silently - but I think that's more relevant in another thread another time. Most Swedes don't even know about it. (Which is just as scary)
(and I won't post more regarding this, it'll be marked off-topic anyway.. )
What is it with you americans??? Do you really think you're the only nation in the world that can invent anything? Or for that matter, that all other countries just want to put weapons in space???
Here's a little reality check:
US space program was built by europeans
"Star Wars" was thought up by the US
Duh.
I welcome China to the small club of nations capably of contributing to space research. I'm sure they had help in doing so (like everyone else has had) and that they will use it mainly for peaceful purposes (like everyone else, although I head that the US have a lot of.. oh well).
(this is not flamebait, this is well needed insightfulness... It's scary to see so many americans here who haven't got a clue - isn't Slashdot supposed to be a community of _intelligent_ people?)
As an old Atari owner I really don't see where that came from:) Atari's were used by musicians and for DTP work, games were minor part of it. If you only played games, all your friends has Amigas and you got one too;)
Now regarding what killed the Atari... it tried to be both a serious machine for work _and_ for leisure, and failed both because it's only recently that PCs have managed that.
Alice wants to send a message to Bob (heard this one before?;)
Alice has a key of here own, let's make it 8 bit long: 11010011
Bob also has a key of his own: 01011100
Alice uses her key to encrypt a message (for simplicity, that's also 8 bit) to Bob: 11010011 XOR 01010101 = 10000110
Bob receives the message, encrypts it with his key and sends the result back to Alice: 01011100 XOR 10000110 = 11011010
Alice receives this message, encrypts it again with her own key (thereby actually removing her encryption) and sends the result to Bob once again: 11010011 XOR 11011010 = 00001001
Now, finally, Bob encrypts the message with his key, effectively removing the last encryption to get the plaintext: 01011100 XOR 00001001 = 01010101
Wow!!! We got the plaintext! And not a single time did we send anything else but encrypted plaintexts, impossible for Eve to extract anything from! And Alice and Bob didn't even have to exchange keys!
Or?
Well... the above is easily hacked. Moderate up the first person to answer with the crack;)
From my American perspective, China is the biggest threat to peace and stability. This is true in both electronic, conventional, and nuclear warfare.
That's interesting. From my Swedish perspective, the US is the big threat. Not only do the US act as an international police, intervening without UN support when they feel like it - they are also the most powerful nation when it comes to electronics, conventional and nuclear warfare.
... and if you don't follow US law, you'll have US lawyers telling you that the FBI will come after you... even if you live in another country!
I wrote a viruskiller on the good old Atari ST. Basically we just had the Ghost virus to deal with, but I made the viruskiller self-replicating in a better way than the virus itself could replicate so in the end I ended up with my killer "infecting" all my disks.
I hosted DeCSS.zip for 13 hours in total, from when I first heard there was a need for mirrors, until the first Slashdot article which made me see that this was exactly the kind of thing that wouldn't be looked lightheartedly upon.
5 days later, a New York lawyer mailed root at that server. I'm part of the root group, so I took care of answering his mails myself. Basically what they say is that anyone who's hosted DeCSS.zip has "offered to sell illegaly copied DVD movies" and "offered to give out information on how to bypass DVD copy protection" (quotations might not be 100%, but close to it... I still have the MS Word attachment they send somewhere).
When I answered that the server was in Sweden, and that US law luckily don't apply here, they didn't seem to understant what I was talking about... they did however understand that the link hadn't been up for days, so I hope they won't bother us anymore. (I asked if everything was settled, but they didn't bother to reply).
I hope someone else in Sweden will do the legal battle - copying what you own for your own backup purposes is 100% legal here. There might be a new law coming through 00/01/01 that tries to prevent decryption of encrypted information (targets pirating satellite and cabel channels) - if that's so then it might be used to make tools like DeCSS.zip illegal also.
BTW, someone should educate the lawyer firm in how to send Emails. They send empty mails, no subject, no body, with a MS Word document as attachment that contains the actual letter...
If you host DeCSS.zip, and they see the link, they _will_ come after you to. They _will_ target your provider, they _will_ ask for your real name and address. Just a little FYI...
The Matrox DVD rip was released as VCD the 18th of September. The official release date was the 21st.
The screener version of The Matrix was released as VCD on the 12th of May, however.
(screener = promotion tape sent out by the movie company to selected theaters)
A screener hasn't always got Dolby Surround sound, is cropped to 4:3 aspect ratio, and has irritating messages popping up now and then. DVD rips has surround, and are usually in the same aspect ratio format as on the DVD.
Usually macrovision doesn't scramble a display device (some projectors are susceptible though, and you might be able to see some artifacts in the top of the frame on some tvs)
True. I have a friend who bought a Sony dvp-715 DVD, and a projector (sorry, don't know which model). The picture had bright stripes all over it until he bought a region/macrovision patch kit for the DVD and got rid of Macrovision.
Now, aren't you supposed to be able to use the equipment you buy?
I also have a Sony dvp-715. However, my dealer only patched the region protection. He claims it's illegal (source of the patch, Denmark - I'm in Sweden) to remove macrovision. If that's true, and I ever find myself sitting with a striped picture from a projector, I'll be sure to raise h*ll with Sony regarding macrovision...
Regarding ripping DVDs.. it's very easy to rip the exact digital content - decrypted - using widely available software on your PC from a dvd-rom. It's not difficult at all re-encoding that to VCD-compatible mpg...
... or are you just afraid that the crimes you committed when your were teenagers are still possible to prosecute you for?;)
I've been hacking. Cracking. Phreaking - you name it. I'm quite positive that it's possible to portray the culture in a movie that even non-nerds will appreciate. (This was some time back though, I think you could do a lot more cool things then)
Wargames is *great* - as someone already wrote, it used a wardialer. Another cool thing was that flick about Steve Jobs and Bill Gates - they had a truckload of blueboxes. That's cool. (I still have a working box in a drawer sometwhere - and yes, it was used to place real calls;) Now - a bluebox is something you can explain and use in a movie.
In Sweden, you could place free calls from the public payphones using a neat trick with special numbers on the keypad and then a DTMF dialer - even my parents understood what that one did! Definitely something for a movie.
What else... calling cards? Although they're not that known in Europe, I would assume in the US everyone knows what happens when that AT&T fellow calls and asks for your "last four digits. We need to trace who's been using your phone, and to validate the trace we need those from you. I'm just a technician, I haven't got that information here. Please Sir, this is important or you might be billed for calls you haven't placed".
Hacking into mainframes... *thinking*... ok, the real behind-the-scenes stuff isn't worth trying to explain. Show a wardialer finding interesting numbers. Explaing how it's possible to find out PBX codes (or even brute force them if the system is stupid enough). Explain that the 3 most used passwords are [insert info here since I don't have recent info at hand] and try those. The boss almost always use one of those.. *grin* Display a website with "10 latest hacks for mainframe system X" - download the file - run the file - display a big fat ADMINISTRATOR prompt (no graphics!;) and then do whatever cool thing supposed to be done.
Ah. I almost felt like being back in the 80's while writing this.. I hope you didn't get bored;) And no.. I'm not trying to portray myself as a good hacker/phreaker - I'm sure lots of you posting here know/knew more than I ever did. I did do enough to know that a lot of things would be possible to show in movies, and that people understood what happened. (I placed a call to my parents, downstairs, from my own landline through a landline trunk in Japan.. then I trunked over satellite with military priority just to show off the difference.. *laughing*)
Umm. I want more movies like Wargames.. I still like that one. Especially overloading the neural network (I guess) with tic-tac-toe until the back-propagation algorithm (maybe) reaches a state where no new knowledge is gained.. etc.. or something.
(And for the ones who hate people playing around like I did when I was young: I learned things then that I use in my day time job today, things that people benefit from etc etc etc - I think you know the drill. All things have a bad and a good side to them, really.)
Speaking from personal experience...I'd much rather view something on a 4:3 device than on a 16:9 device. You can digest the information much faster when it is contained inside a square area. You don't have to scroll your eyes (or worse, your head) back and forth as much.
Actually, your standard Real Life view is a lot wider than it's high, so 16:9 is _better_ for digesting information than 4:3.
The only movies that truely look wrong on 4:3 are the really, really old ones that weren't planning on the television format. As a result, part of the key action is cut off or they have to digitally zoom the image and pan around.
You're way off here. Just as an example, when Casablanca and Gone with the wind were filmed the standard aspect ratio in the _cinemas_ was 4:3. Cinemascope etc were partly created so that movietheaters would be able to compete with the home television.
Today, filmmakers make extensive use of aspect ratios close to 2:1 (1.86:1, 2.35:1 etc) and the only way to experience these movies to their full extent is (at the moment) to get the movies on DVD and view them on a widescreen television...
Before you continue.. have you actually _tried out_ 16:9? Watched a standard 4:3 movie and then the 16:9 version? Or even larger aspect ratios?
It's you... I have a Sony 32" 100Hz, and I _love_ the absolutely flicker free picture. Also, that nasty 15KHz tone you can hear from normal TVs is totally gone..
Raite and Hoyo (sp?) both makes DVD players that plays not only DVD, but also VCD, SVCD, audio CD and MP3 CDs... and they're cheap. Don't know about Audio/Video quality, I'm a Sony fan myself...
Slashdot Mirror
Don't worry, it's a classic mistake by a newbie to assume too much about someone you only know through net-postings ...
Sure, I can post snail mail anonymously (well, almost, they'll always be able to track me to the place where it was really posted - and then try to extract fingerprints) and I can buy stuff in stores with cash etc to retain my anonomity, however, most of the time that won't work. It's possible to track someone 99% of the time living our daily lifes, and I don't really see an uproar against that. Come on - I am a responsible adult and I accept responsibility for my actions.
I do that on the web too. I don't hack a website more than I deface a store's facade - and if the store has a camera that can find out who does, why shouldn't the same ability exist on the net?
My car has a license plate - everyone knows who's car goes down the road. When I surf, my packets have an IP that belongs to me. It should be just as illegal to spoof that IP as it should be to use false plates ...
I think you get the picture. While I don't like to have _everything_ I do stored somewhere, I don't expect to have a right to anonymousity on the Internet that I don't have anywhere else.
(I've never made a single post as AC on /. either ...)
The movie industry should either be very afraid of the posibility to make your own DVDs at home, or they should be smart and do what they did with the new Arnold movie ... premiered in a lot of countries within days.
It's time to world-premiere all big releases.
We'll be fired?
Maybe - but getting another job is as easy as 1-2-3 ...
Whenever they feel like it, they blow up some hospitals or embassies in other countries and then say they "had" to do it to protect the world from terrorists.
Guess what - the US of A is the biggest bully in the world, and you'd have to be an american not to see it.
Yes Hitler wasn't very nice, and yes the US intervened in WWII since they didn't want a strong Hitler ruling Europa and then going after them (read up on what was found by Bletchley Park regarding that). That however doesn't change any of my points .. ?
The Swedish government indeed helped the nazis silently - but I think that's more relevant in another thread another time. Most Swedes don't even know about it. (Which is just as scary)
(and I won't post more regarding this, it'll be marked off-topic anyway .. )
Here's a little reality check:
Duh.
I welcome China to the small club of nations capably of contributing to space research. I'm sure they had help in doing so (like everyone else has had) and that they will use it mainly for peaceful purposes (like everyone else, although I head that the US have a lot of .. oh well).
(this is not flamebait, this is well needed insightfulness ... It's scary to see so many americans here who haven't got a clue - isn't Slashdot supposed to be a community of _intelligent_ people?)
As an old Atari owner I really don't see where that came from :) Atari's were used by musicians and for DTP work, games were minor part of it. If you only played games, all your friends has Amigas and you got one too ;)
Now regarding what killed the Atari ... it tried to be both a serious machine for work _and_ for leisure, and failed both because it's only recently that PCs have managed that.
Just think about it:
Alice wants to send a message to Bob (heard this one before? ;)
Alice has a key of here own, let's make it 8 bit long: 11010011
Bob also has a key of his own: 01011100
Alice uses her key to encrypt a message (for simplicity, that's also 8 bit) to Bob: 11010011 XOR 01010101 = 10000110
Bob receives the message, encrypts it with his key and sends the result back to Alice: 01011100 XOR 10000110 = 11011010
Alice receives this message, encrypts it again with her own key (thereby actually removing her encryption) and sends the result to Bob once again: 11010011 XOR 11011010 = 00001001
Now, finally, Bob encrypts the message with his key, effectively removing the last encryption to get the plaintext: 01011100 XOR 00001001 = 01010101
Wow!!! We got the plaintext! And not a single time did we send anything else but encrypted plaintexts, impossible for Eve to extract anything from! And Alice and Bob didn't even have to exchange keys!
Or?
Well ... the above is easily hacked. Moderate up the first person to answer with the crack ;)
That's interesting. From my Swedish perspective, the US is the big threat. Not only do the US act as an international police, intervening without UN support when they feel like it - they are also the most powerful nation when it comes to electronics, conventional and nuclear warfare.
Americans really need to get their act together.
PS: This _is_ insightful, not flamebait
I had serious problems getting rid of it!
Today I think before I code. I hope.
I hosted DeCSS.zip for 13 hours in total, from when I first heard there was a need for mirrors, until the first Slashdot article which made me see that this was exactly the kind of thing that wouldn't be looked lightheartedly upon.
5 days later, a New York lawyer mailed root at that server. I'm part of the root group, so I took care of answering his mails myself. Basically what they say is that anyone who's hosted DeCSS.zip has "offered to sell illegaly copied DVD movies" and "offered to give out information on how to bypass DVD copy protection" (quotations might not be 100%, but close to it ... I still have the MS Word attachment they send somewhere).
When I answered that the server was in Sweden, and that US law luckily don't apply here, they didn't seem to understant what I was talking about ... they did however understand that the link hadn't been up for days, so I hope they won't bother us anymore. (I asked if everything was settled, but they didn't bother to reply).
I hope someone else in Sweden will do the legal battle - copying what you own for your own backup purposes is 100% legal here. There might be a new law coming through 00/01/01 that tries to prevent decryption of encrypted information (targets pirating satellite and cabel channels) - if that's so then it might be used to make tools like DeCSS.zip illegal also.
BTW, someone should educate the lawyer firm in how to send Emails. They send empty mails, no subject, no body, with a MS Word document as attachment that contains the actual letter
If you host DeCSS.zip, and they see the link, they _will_ come after you to. They _will_ target your provider, they _will_ ask for your real name and address. Just a little FYI
Approx 4-5 dvd-rips made digitally from DVDs to VCDs are released each day.
Most new dvd-rips on the VCD scene are made digitally with dvd2mpeg. No capturing.
The screener version of The Matrix was released as VCD on the 12th of May, however.
(screener = promotion tape sent out by the movie company to selected theaters)
A screener hasn't always got Dolby Surround sound, is cropped to 4:3 aspect ratio, and has irritating messages popping up now and then. DVD rips has surround, and are usually in the same aspect ratio format as on the DVD.
True. I have a friend who bought a Sony dvp-715 DVD, and a projector (sorry, don't know which model). The picture had bright stripes all over it until he bought a region/macrovision patch kit for the DVD and got rid of Macrovision.
Now, aren't you supposed to be able to use the equipment you buy?
I also have a Sony dvp-715. However, my dealer only patched the region protection. He claims it's illegal (source of the patch, Denmark - I'm in Sweden) to remove macrovision. If that's true, and I ever find myself sitting with a striped picture from a projector, I'll be sure to raise h*ll with Sony regarding macrovision ...
Regarding ripping DVDs
I've been hacking. Cracking. Phreaking - you name it. I'm quite positive that it's possible to portray the culture in a movie that even non-nerds will appreciate. (This was some time back though, I think you could do a lot more cool things then)
Wargames is *great* - as someone already wrote, it used a wardialer. Another cool thing was that flick about Steve Jobs and Bill Gates - they had a truckload of blueboxes. That's cool. (I still have a working box in a drawer sometwhere - and yes, it was used to place real calls ;) Now - a bluebox is something you can explain and use in a movie.
In Sweden, you could place free calls from the public payphones using a neat trick with special numbers on the keypad and then a DTMF dialer - even my parents understood what that one did! Definitely something for a movie.
What else ... calling cards? Although they're not that known in Europe, I would assume in the US everyone knows what happens when that AT&T fellow calls and asks for your "last four digits. We need to trace who's been using your phone, and to validate the trace we need those from you. I'm just a technician, I haven't got that information here. Please Sir, this is important or you might be billed for calls you haven't placed".
Hacking into mainframes ... *thinking* ... ok, the real behind-the-scenes stuff isn't worth trying to explain. Show a wardialer finding interesting numbers. Explaing how it's possible to find out PBX codes (or even brute force them if the system is stupid enough). Explain that the 3 most used passwords are [insert info here since I don't have recent info at hand] and try those. The boss almost always use one of those .. *grin* ;) and then do whatever cool thing supposed to be done.
Display a website with "10 latest hacks for mainframe system X" - download the file - run the file - display a big fat ADMINISTRATOR prompt (no graphics!
Ah. I almost felt like being back in the 80's while writing this
Umm. I want more movies like Wargames .. I still like that one. Especially overloading the neural network (I guess) with tic-tac-toe until the back-propagation algorithm (maybe) reaches a state where no new knowledge is gained .. etc .. or something.
(And for the ones who hate people playing around like I did when I was young: I learned things then that I use in my day time job today, things that people benefit from etc etc etc - I think you know the drill. All things have a bad and a good side to them, really.)
Actually, your standard Real Life view is a lot wider than it's high, so 16:9 is _better_ for digesting information than 4:3.
The only movies that truely look wrong on 4:3 are the really, really old ones that weren't planning on the television format. As a result, part of the key action is cut off or they have to digitally zoom the image and pan around.
You're way off here. Just as an example, when Casablanca and Gone with the wind were filmed the standard aspect ratio in the _cinemas_ was 4:3. Cinemascope etc were partly created so that movietheaters would be able to compete with the home television.
Today, filmmakers make extensive use of aspect ratios close to 2:1 (1.86:1, 2.35:1 etc) and the only way to experience these movies to their full extent is (at the moment) to get the movies on DVD and view them on a widescreen television ...
Before you continue .. have you actually _tried out_ 16:9? Watched a standard 4:3 movie and then the 16:9 version? Or even larger aspect ratios?
It's you ... I have a Sony 32" 100Hz, and I _love_ the absolutely flicker free picture. Also, that nasty 15KHz tone you can hear from normal TVs is totally gone ..
Raite and Hoyo (sp?) both makes DVD players that plays not only DVD, but also VCD, SVCD, audio CD and MP3 CDs ... and they're cheap. Don't know about Audio/Video quality, I'm a Sony fan myself ...