My professor works for a privacy center at my school and one of the things he has looked into was a tivo. In my security class he explained to us how he went about figuring out what kind of information the tivo uploaded to it's servers. The thing calls home in the early morning and usualy transfers about 5 megs of data. He ended up setting up around $500 worth of equipment to get this stuff to work. The tivo was setup so that it's outgoing phone system was hooked up to his laptop, in one modem, and in another modem his laptop was hooked up to the phone jack. With a couple more peices of equipment and some simple programming he did a man-in-the-middle attack with the connection. When the tivo dialed it's home server the laptop listened to the number and then built a PPP connection to the server using the other modem. As the traffic flowed through each of the connections it was logged in a file. Afterwards, with a few unix tools, we converted the PPP data into tcp output, then the TCP output into raw data with time logs.
As it turns out the tivo really does send *anonymous* data. In their privacy statement they say that they seperate your "personally identifiable data" from the "anonymous" data. The logs just showed when you changed the channel and when you started and stopped recording. The system also checked for updates for it's system, and downloaded a channel listing. However, it did tell the server it's serial number, and the ISP it used to login to the server was a local one. So if they REALLY needed to i bet they could track you down and match your records to your viewing habits. But really people, they are telling the truth they don't track you.
I don't know if anybody else has checked it out, but I just logged on and I only saw about 6k people on napster. So I fired up gnapster's OpenNap browser, I went around to a few servers... stopping at the MusicCity network, it has 30k users on it! And the number's grown about 1000 since i got on 20 minutes ago that's crazy... everybody must have gone there I wonder if the RIAA will be able to get ISP's to shutdown OpenNap. Supposidly ISP's aren't liable for the traffic on their servers... but who knows with the courts lately.
Damn Robotech was a sweet cartoon. I was totally into the roleplaying game and tried my hardest to get all the episodes i could. 3rd gen was my fav.. those cyclone's were badass I would totally buy all of the series if they came out on DVD
Fanning: "What Happen!?"
Napster-controlman: "Some one set us up the bomb court ruling! We get signal!"
RIAA: "How are you gentlemen!!? All your server base are belong to us!"
Fanning: "What!!"
RIAA: "You are on the way to destruction"
RIAA: "You have no chance to survive, make your time!"
Fanning: "NOOOOOOO!!!!"
- gotta love it
Hi my name is micheal, and I am flame bait!
Comon, seirosly, look at the headline. However, headline aside this was actually a pretty cool article. What I think is silly is that people think they can be this RIGHT about something. As much as I would like to throw this in the face of a bible thumper and say "here look, proof !" I agree, you cannot "disprove it," because something of this nature is not inherently proveable. But you can use Occam's Razor where appropriate. And this is a great place to use it. For those of you who don't know, Occam's Razor says, "all things being equal, the simplest theory wins" Which theory requires the least amount of "adding things" to it to explain your solution. God created the earth, and made everything have "DNA" and appear very much LIKE they evolved and all came from a singular life form. Or that it happened naturally over a exremely long period of time. It's somewhat subjective, but a good way to think about things. I can't wait to see the flames for this topic, "and god said the flames shall be high and numerous and those who are flame-bait shall be struck down"
- Dave
This kind of reminds me of a political election. Where towards the end it's really close and so they candidates start calling each other names. "I'm for the American way! and my opponent is not! plus he eats moldy cheese!" I mean comon, anybody who even has half a clue can see through this kind of FUD. I just think it's kind of funny that microsoft is resorting to this. ''There is always something enamoring about thinking you can get something for free.''... I knew something had been bothering me for the past two years! Thanks for cluing me in Jim!
gimme a freakin break
Carl-
I have fought a battle at my college over Linux being on the network. I told the UTS( Univeristy Technology Services ) that I was a big advocate of Linux and was starting up a Linux User Group on campus. But first I wanted their approval. They swiftly told me that, "You can absolutly not encourage the use of Linux on OUR network, and you should be lucky that we don't ban it on campus." I was completely uphauled by this, and so promptly turned around and tried to get as many people interested as I could in Linux. And eventually started my own LUG. Do they have a right to tell me what OS I can use on their network? They of course support windows, and allow Mac's, but flat out tell me I can't have linux on their network. Do you have any suggestions on what rights I as a user have?
See I think this is pretty cool. And it gives me a reason to try X 4.0.2, it's interesting to see KDE and Gnome go head to head in features. Especially with this AAT ( which is really pretty BTW ). Personally... i like GNOME but KDE has some cool features. To me, the more competition between these two interfaces is good because it benefits us with constant improvement. Fun to see another chapter.
The idea is that eventually wine will actually become more stable than windows. Which really does not require a whole lot really. I mean I can already play half-life just fine, in software render mode under wine... which is pretty cool, because even some of my other much older games run under wine and not under windows! Mechwarrior 2 for example... one of the best games ever, and it won't run under anything except for windows 95... 98, Me, and all versions of NT won't run it. I wish the wine team the best of luck, and this new development with direct 3d is VERY promising
It was given a gracefull funeral. I went... infact i skipped my econ class to go.. heh. They had a funeral with speeches by the programmers and project leaders... and then they buried one in the lawn at the infininte circle. *sniffle* twas a sad sad day
Well I was suprised, and yes they do change someone else's distro and change it. But so does Mandrake, LinuxPPC, SuSe, and alot of other distros. I was very impressed with storm, not only was it easy to install and configure, but it merged well with deb's ( since it was based on debian ). It was what turned me on to how cool debian was, infact i was planning on wiping this RH 6.2 box, and installing storm. And the firewall management tool was a really cool product. At the place i worked over the summer they needed a replacement for their old NetBSD firewall on a p120 that was crashing constantly. So I setup a nice little linux box, with ipchains. But the staff wanted to be able to change things easily after I was gone. And since most of them were the "windows only" crowd.. they couldn't navigate a shell if their life depended on it. So i went out and spent $99 on the Stormix firewall and installed it. Now they had a great way to configure firewall rules without me, and from what I heard last they machine hadn't crashed once, with an uptime of 2 months. I really think that Stormix was a *great* distro, it really saddens me to see it go under ( i know it's still a possibility, but it's not looking good ) Hopefully some of their tools will not die and will live on in the community. Stormix, you will be missed.
Well I can definatly say that is suprised me a bit. The fact that they are going to be non-profit would seem to me to be a little strange. I currently run LinuxPPC 2000 on my iBook rev2, it runs pretty well. I mean there are a few problems.. if you put it to sleep it never wakes up. Getting X4 installed was a pain, sound doesn't work very well. But really.. other than that I like using linux on my iBook more than my x86. I think the Linux on PPC architechture is alot easier to use in some senses, than on the intel plat form, but definatly behind in the same functionality that the intel platform has ( under linux ). I can only hope that LinuxPPC going non-profit will help to advance the state of the PPC port under linux. It makes me wonder though... what made them do it ? Linux on the PPC is definatly a *small* market, too much competition from yellowdog? regardless i'm excited, i'm up for donating to them!
Wow, i just rean the evas_test and this is VERY pretty. It'll be interesting to see how they pull this off... it's definatly apparent that there is almost no optimized code, my P2 350 with a TNT2 varied between 770fps to 3fps on the demo depending on what was on the screen. I had switched to sawfish a while back because E was so slow... maybe this will be my reason for switching back to E.
I have never been more proud to have lived my entire life in the city Apple calls World Headquarters I was considering buying and iBook and putting LinuxPPC on it... however with the severe beta stage of the kernel and support for things I need i.e. ethernet, modem... I don't think it'll happen. But this OS X.... wow... BSD Core, damn schweet GUI, definatly going to run that on my iBook now if only they could put a little more power in that cool package Dave
Slashdot Mirror
So i JUST got an e-mail from my professor, and he wrote up his experiences with the TiVo check it out right here check it out.
My professor works for a privacy center at my school and one of the things he has looked into was a tivo. In my security class he explained to us how he went about figuring out what kind of information the tivo uploaded to it's servers. The thing calls home in the early morning and usualy transfers about 5 megs of data. He ended up setting up around $500 worth of equipment to get this stuff to work. The tivo was setup so that it's outgoing phone system was hooked up to his laptop, in one modem, and in another modem his laptop was hooked up to the phone jack. With a couple more peices of equipment and some simple programming he did a man-in-the-middle attack with the connection. When the tivo dialed it's home server the laptop listened to the number and then built a PPP connection to the server using the other modem. As the traffic flowed through each of the connections it was logged in a file. Afterwards, with a few unix tools, we converted the PPP data into tcp output, then the TCP output into raw data with time logs. As it turns out the tivo really does send *anonymous* data. In their privacy statement they say that they seperate your "personally identifiable data" from the "anonymous" data. The logs just showed when you changed the channel and when you started and stopped recording. The system also checked for updates for it's system, and downloaded a channel listing. However, it did tell the server it's serial number, and the ISP it used to login to the server was a local one. So if they REALLY needed to i bet they could track you down and match your records to your viewing habits. But really people, they are telling the truth they don't track you.
I don't know if anybody else has checked it out, but I just logged on and I only saw about 6k people on napster. So I fired up gnapster's OpenNap browser, I went around to a few servers... stopping at the MusicCity network, it has 30k users on it! And the number's grown about 1000 since i got on 20 minutes ago that's crazy... everybody must have gone there I wonder if the RIAA will be able to get ISP's to shutdown OpenNap. Supposidly ISP's aren't liable for the traffic on their servers... but who knows with the courts lately.
Damn Robotech was a sweet cartoon. I was totally into the roleplaying game and tried my hardest to get all the episodes i could. 3rd gen was my fav.. those cyclone's were badass I would totally buy all of the series if they came out on DVD
Fanning: "What Happen!?" Napster-controlman: "Some one set us up the bomb court ruling! We get signal!" RIAA: "How are you gentlemen!!? All your server base are belong to us!" Fanning: "What!!" RIAA: "You are on the way to destruction" RIAA: "You have no chance to survive, make your time!" Fanning: "NOOOOOOO!!!!" - gotta love it
Hi my name is micheal, and I am flame bait! Comon, seirosly, look at the headline. However, headline aside this was actually a pretty cool article. What I think is silly is that people think they can be this RIGHT about something. As much as I would like to throw this in the face of a bible thumper and say "here look, proof !" I agree, you cannot "disprove it," because something of this nature is not inherently proveable. But you can use Occam's Razor where appropriate. And this is a great place to use it. For those of you who don't know, Occam's Razor says, "all things being equal, the simplest theory wins" Which theory requires the least amount of "adding things" to it to explain your solution. God created the earth, and made everything have "DNA" and appear very much LIKE they evolved and all came from a singular life form. Or that it happened naturally over a exremely long period of time. It's somewhat subjective, but a good way to think about things. I can't wait to see the flames for this topic, "and god said the flames shall be high and numerous and those who are flame-bait shall be struck down" - Dave
This kind of reminds me of a political election. Where towards the end it's really close and so they candidates start calling each other names. "I'm for the American way! and my opponent is not! plus he eats moldy cheese!" I mean comon, anybody who even has half a clue can see through this kind of FUD. I just think it's kind of funny that microsoft is resorting to this. ''There is always something enamoring about thinking you can get something for free.'' ... I knew something had been bothering me for the past two years! Thanks for cluing me in Jim!
gimme a freakin break
Carl- I have fought a battle at my college over Linux being on the network. I told the UTS( Univeristy Technology Services ) that I was a big advocate of Linux and was starting up a Linux User Group on campus. But first I wanted their approval. They swiftly told me that, "You can absolutly not encourage the use of Linux on OUR network, and you should be lucky that we don't ban it on campus." I was completely uphauled by this, and so promptly turned around and tried to get as many people interested as I could in Linux. And eventually started my own LUG. Do they have a right to tell me what OS I can use on their network? They of course support windows, and allow Mac's, but flat out tell me I can't have linux on their network. Do you have any suggestions on what rights I as a user have?
See I think this is pretty cool. And it gives me a reason to try X 4.0.2, it's interesting to see KDE and Gnome go head to head in features. Especially with this AAT ( which is really pretty BTW ). Personally... i like GNOME but KDE has some cool features. To me, the more competition between these two interfaces is good because it benefits us with constant improvement. Fun to see another chapter.
The idea is that eventually wine will actually become more stable than windows. Which really does not require a whole lot really. I mean I can already play half-life just fine, in software render mode under wine... which is pretty cool, because even some of my other much older games run under wine and not under windows! Mechwarrior 2 for example... one of the best games ever, and it won't run under anything except for windows 95... 98, Me, and all versions of NT won't run it. I wish the wine team the best of luck, and this new development with direct 3d is VERY promising
It was given a gracefull funeral. I went... infact i skipped my econ class to go.. heh. They had a funeral with speeches by the programmers and project leaders... and then they buried one in the lawn at the infininte circle. *sniffle* twas a sad sad day
Well I was suprised, and yes they do change someone else's distro and change it. But so does Mandrake, LinuxPPC, SuSe, and alot of other distros. I was very impressed with storm, not only was it easy to install and configure, but it merged well with deb's ( since it was based on debian ). It was what turned me on to how cool debian was, infact i was planning on wiping this RH 6.2 box, and installing storm. And the firewall management tool was a really cool product. At the place i worked over the summer they needed a replacement for their old NetBSD firewall on a p120 that was crashing constantly. So I setup a nice little linux box, with ipchains. But the staff wanted to be able to change things easily after I was gone. And since most of them were the "windows only" crowd.. they couldn't navigate a shell if their life depended on it. So i went out and spent $99 on the Stormix firewall and installed it. Now they had a great way to configure firewall rules without me, and from what I heard last they machine hadn't crashed once, with an uptime of 2 months. I really think that Stormix was a *great* distro, it really saddens me to see it go under ( i know it's still a possibility, but it's not looking good ) Hopefully some of their tools will not die and will live on in the community. Stormix, you will be missed.
Well I can definatly say that is suprised me a bit. The fact that they are going to be non-profit would seem to me to be a little strange. I currently run LinuxPPC 2000 on my iBook rev2, it runs pretty well. I mean there are a few problems.. if you put it to sleep it never wakes up. Getting X4 installed was a pain, sound doesn't work very well. But really.. other than that I like using linux on my iBook more than my x86. I think the Linux on PPC architechture is alot easier to use in some senses, than on the intel plat form, but definatly behind in the same functionality that the intel platform has ( under linux ). I can only hope that LinuxPPC going non-profit will help to advance the state of the PPC port under linux. It makes me wonder though... what made them do it ? Linux on the PPC is definatly a *small* market, too much competition from yellowdog? regardless i'm excited, i'm up for donating to them!
Wow, i just rean the evas_test and this is VERY pretty. It'll be interesting to see how they pull this off... it's definatly apparent that there is almost no optimized code, my P2 350 with a TNT2 varied between 770fps to 3fps on the demo depending on what was on the screen. I had switched to sawfish a while back because E was so slow... maybe this will be my reason for switching back to E.
I have never been more proud to have lived my entire life in the city Apple calls World Headquarters I was considering buying and iBook and putting LinuxPPC on it... however with the severe beta stage of the kernel and support for things I need i.e. ethernet, modem... I don't think it'll happen. But this OS X.... wow... BSD Core, damn schweet GUI, definatly going to run that on my iBook now if only they could put a little more power in that cool package Dave