Agreed and public servants should have better things to do than ping around personal e-mails all day. While with a proper security model the attachment aspect shouldn't matter for security, in practice it will. Also if you know what the Australian public sector is like I'd be concerned about my tax being used to pay for $50K for "counselling" and "support" to someone after being exposed to a naked pair of breasts in the workplace.
Well I'd like to say we don't have an insane copyright system but check the case of Landmark copyright case: DtMS v Telstra where Telstra sued a company for compiling names and phone numbers on a CD. Pretty sure a list list of facts is covered a little better by the US copyright legislation?
Sure but you don't need to own that equipment yourself, and smallish runs of PCBs can come in under $100 loaded with components (obviously depending on complexity) in which case you don't really need any equipment at all. Sure in practice you'll probably drop a few grand on test and prototyping gear to test the hardware first, but that's not much different in cost to a decent software development rig.
When all the design files are available there are plenty of small manufacturers that will do all the hardware stuff start to finish. Sure they'll charge setup fees, but I've had that done for around $1K (minus components) so for simpler projects you only need 10 friends / colleauges / customers / club members and it all starts to become cost effective. Not versus consumer products, but against niche products like say a vehicle telemetry system where your local racing club might not want to pay for a system that's aimed at Formula I teams.
You might want to double-check your calculation. A minute of longitude at the equator is equal to 1 nautical mile or 1852 meters. For a rought calc if you assumed there were 100 minutes in a degree instead of 60 you'd still have two decimals left making it around 18 meters of precisions. Rule of thumb is 4 decimals equates to around 10 meters.
I agree this smells of a developer that thinks they've come up with a great innovation that won't work in practice. I've used accelerometers in vehicle / equipment monitoring applications and unless the mechanical bonding is solid and/or known the results are practically useless. Especially with a phone where having it in your pocket while you adjust sitting position and any other number of things will possibly have a similar acceleration profile to hitting a pot hole.
They'd probably be better having a way to report things from a menu, then you could cover things like traffic lights out and other general traffic hazzards. Anyone that cared enough to run the app probably wouldn't mind pulling over in a safe spot, adjusting back the position from their current position and submitting a report. You could assign a "karma" to each user account to help prioritize and sift out asshats, and it would also remove any privacy concerns.
I remember seeing something on similar FBI files, which IIRC was over 5 years ago. They had bloodied palm and fingerprints left on a sheet. The problem wasn't so much a lack of evidence but that the pattern of the material intefered with the prints to an extent where a jury couldn't be expected to be able to identify it as a match. They used image processing to essentially subtract the patterning from an unstained area of the material to end up with a relatively clean image.
It was a reasonably interesting episode and for that kind of show and went into quite a bit of detail in the process, because they had to convince the jury how the process worked so they knew it hadn't just been "fiddled with" to suit the prosecution.
Main problem I'd see with this from a practical point of view is reduced battery life. If your phone was spending a good deal of time acting as a repeater the standby time would be similar to current talk times.
Reform of a field of sports for an entire nation is dependent on the whim of a random individual somewhere.
This coming to light could be a good thing, maybe something a lot of the general public actually give a shit about like sport will highlight how ludicrous the system is to a wider audience.
I've never taken a serious interest in astronomy but on a few drunken star-gazing nights I've seen a few fast moving lights. I'd always put them down to "shooting stars" without giving it much more thought. While they were UFOs to me in the sense I couldn't identify them I recently discovered the site http://www.heavens-above.com/ that has excellent satellite pass predictions.
I set up a tripod a few weeks ago and took a photo of the ISS as it passed over at a good azimuth and altitude. It really suprised me how bright it was both in the image and to the naked eye. Now I often look at the site and wander out the back for a look at appropriate times. Depending on the background terrain and path it's taking I can see how a lot of man-made satellites could be mistaken for something extraterrestrial.
While NZ of course have an airforce I'd doubt there's a lot of cutting-edge new tech being developed there, but their clear skies and southern location would make it a good location for viewing those sort of passes. Much like here in Tasmania that's only a little further north.
Maybe if the government wants traffic analysis performed for free (well, a small possible prize) they should be a little more permissive with street level GIS data. For those in the US the equivalent of the United States TIGER/Line data that anyone can download for free costs about $10K - 200K in Australia depending on usage last time I checked. It's handled by an unlisted public company called the PSMA that various state and other government departments have stakes in but they're every bit as greedy as a private or publicly listed company.
The OpenStreetMap project is a godsend, but let's face it doesn't have the spatial integrity of proper survey data and can be lacking up-to-date (or any) routing information in many locations.
Three meg of flash memory and 128MHz clock speed doesn't sound like a lot in terms of computing power
Guess that depends on your point of view, a car travelling 360Km/Hr is travelling 100m/s, so in a millisecond travels 10cm or about 4 inches. Assuming one instruction per clock cycle you can do a lot of useful stuff with 128,000 instructions, or put another way probably about one million for every revolution of the wheel
3MB of FLASH is huge as well when you aren't loading a lot of crap like multimedia, not that it would run Linux but I just took a look at the last kernel I built for an embedded platform and it came in under 2MB with quite a generous set of modules loaded.
Judging from the TFA this Timothy Pilgrim sounds like a reasonable guy.
Using the phrase "privacy boss" is probably a bit strong though for the head of an organisation that only regulates existing legislation. They only advise the government on new policy, which of course they can ignore. Data retention will obviously save children and stop the terrorists so I suspect that will be the case here.
I don't like the idea much anyway of wine names tied to region names, the grape varietie(s) are more informative and universal. And for novelty wines there are plenty of other names us Aussies can use like "Alice Springs Leg Opener".
Anyway back to my beer...
While GPS technology has come a long way and the low SNR performance of newer GPS modules is amazing operation indoors remains patchy at best. My single level weatherboard house is not so bad normally, but even there I get some inability to acquire indoors depending on satellite geometry at the time. I think with long-term monitoring they'd have to be some threshold where they simply treated no acquisition of a signal as a normal event. I guess they could install re-radiating antennas inside a prisoner's home but in some locations they would have to treat loss of position as a normal event. For anyone slightly tech-savvy at that point they could shield the antenna and have a certain amount of time to go elsewhere.
While far from trivial there is also the possibility of using a GPS pseudolite to give a false location. Last time I looked GPS signal simulators for use in developing and testing new GPS systems cost in the order of $50K but that was quite a few years ago. Minus the considerable development effort I don't see while something like an FPGA / microcontroller combo linked to a low-power transmitter couldn't do the same for a few hundred in hardware costs.
Unlawful export, I would understand. That would probably violate some or other US law, if there were components, exported from the US used in those products.
But unlawful monitoring? What would the logic behind this be?
Well it makes no sense, but then again laws against devices to circumvent DCMA / copy protection devices make no sense either.
It would be nice to think it works both ways, but I suspect that will not be the case...
I bet they used Linux to do this... is it even possible to do something like this in windows?
Well Windows server platforms do happen to have a functional DNS and web server. Sure they might be a bit bloated bit this would have been trivial under either O/S.
Being an Australian I can tell you most Australians are apathetic to this issue and there likely won't be a huge turn-out. There probably won't be anything but fleeting mass media coverage, and that means politicians will ignore it and side with the "think of the children" majority who have no idea of the underlying implications.
If there was an upcoming election the issue *might* hit the media if the opposition declared a policy of no filtering and hightlighted all the negative aspects. But given the previous liberal government floated around similar ideas I wouldn't hold my breath on that, I think the position of both the major political parties is unfortunately much the same.
Recently I starting doing a bit of web development after being out of the loop for a while. I was working on a project and it was convenient to have the XHTML / JS running on my development machine while doing a few AJAX calls to my development server. After it failed at first I found I could add Access-Control-Allow-Origin: * to the HTTP header to allow cross-site access.
It made we wonder if you wanted to exploit cross-site vulnerabilities couldn't you setup a proxy in the middle that returned information from the original site but added that to the header? Anyway just got me wondering and maybe someone more knowledgeable could comment on it.
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Agreed and public servants should have better things to do than ping around personal e-mails all day. While with a proper security model the attachment aspect shouldn't matter for security, in practice it will. Also if you know what the Australian public sector is like I'd be concerned about my tax being used to pay for $50K for "counselling" and "support" to someone after being exposed to a naked pair of breasts in the workplace.
Well I'd like to say we don't have an insane copyright system but check the case of Landmark copyright case: DtMS v Telstra where Telstra sued a company for compiling names and phone numbers on a CD. Pretty sure a list list of facts is covered a little better by the US copyright legislation?
Sure but you don't need to own that equipment yourself, and smallish runs of PCBs can come in under $100 loaded with components (obviously depending on complexity) in which case you don't really need any equipment at all. Sure in practice you'll probably drop a few grand on test and prototyping gear to test the hardware first, but that's not much different in cost to a decent software development rig.
When all the design files are available there are plenty of small manufacturers that will do all the hardware stuff start to finish. Sure they'll charge setup fees, but I've had that done for around $1K (minus components) so for simpler projects you only need 10 friends / colleauges / customers / club members and it all starts to become cost effective. Not versus consumer products, but against niche products like say a vehicle telemetry system where your local racing club might not want to pay for a system that's aimed at Formula I teams.
LOL. 4 digit precision... within 450 meters..
You might want to double-check your calculation. A minute of longitude at the equator is equal to 1 nautical mile or 1852 meters. For a rought calc if you assumed there were 100 minutes in a degree instead of 60 you'd still have two decimals left making it around 18 meters of precisions. Rule of thumb is 4 decimals equates to around 10 meters.
I agree this smells of a developer that thinks they've come up with a great innovation that won't work in practice. I've used accelerometers in vehicle / equipment monitoring applications and unless the mechanical bonding is solid and/or known the results are practically useless. Especially with a phone where having it in your pocket while you adjust sitting position and any other number of things will possibly have a similar acceleration profile to hitting a pot hole.
They'd probably be better having a way to report things from a menu, then you could cover things like traffic lights out and other general traffic hazzards. Anyone that cared enough to run the app probably wouldn't mind pulling over in a safe spot, adjusting back the position from their current position and submitting a report. You could assign a "karma" to each user account to help prioritize and sift out asshats, and it would also remove any privacy concerns.
I remember seeing something on similar FBI files, which IIRC was over 5 years ago. They had bloodied palm and fingerprints left on a sheet. The problem wasn't so much a lack of evidence but that the pattern of the material intefered with the prints to an extent where a jury couldn't be expected to be able to identify it as a match. They used image processing to essentially subtract the patterning from an unstained area of the material to end up with a relatively clean image.
It was a reasonably interesting episode and for that kind of show and went into quite a bit of detail in the process, because they had to convince the jury how the process worked so they knew it hadn't just been "fiddled with" to suit the prosecution.
Main problem I'd see with this from a practical point of view is reduced battery life. If your phone was spending a good deal of time acting as a repeater the standby time would be similar to current talk times.
The production model will use a beer battery.
If you want a few "travellers" for the trip though I'd recommend using something different to Fosters.
Just in time for the Periodic Table to be changed, making this outdated!
A new kind of hair loss?
We do not fully understand what these differences are, but we know some of them.
Men have a penis and women have a vagina, I remember reading that somewhere.
Reform of a field of sports for an entire nation is dependent on the whim of a random individual somewhere.
This coming to light could be a good thing, maybe something a lot of the general public actually give a shit about like sport will highlight how ludicrous the system is to a wider audience.
I've never taken a serious interest in astronomy but on a few drunken star-gazing nights I've seen a few fast moving lights. I'd always put them down to "shooting stars" without giving it much more thought. While they were UFOs to me in the sense I couldn't identify them I recently discovered the site http://www.heavens-above.com/ that has excellent satellite pass predictions.
I set up a tripod a few weeks ago and took a photo of the ISS as it passed over at a good azimuth and altitude. It really suprised me how bright it was both in the image and to the naked eye. Now I often look at the site and wander out the back for a look at appropriate times. Depending on the background terrain and path it's taking I can see how a lot of man-made satellites could be mistaken for something extraterrestrial.
While NZ of course have an airforce I'd doubt there's a lot of cutting-edge new tech being developed there, but their clear skies and southern location would make it a good location for viewing those sort of passes. Much like here in Tasmania that's only a little further north.
Upload to Wikileaks, is there an app for that?
Maybe if the government wants traffic analysis performed for free (well, a small possible prize) they should be a little more permissive with street level GIS data. For those in the US the equivalent of the United States TIGER/Line data that anyone can download for free costs about $10K - 200K in Australia depending on usage last time I checked. It's handled by an unlisted public company called the PSMA that various state and other government departments have stakes in but they're every bit as greedy as a private or publicly listed company.
The OpenStreetMap project is a godsend, but let's face it doesn't have the spatial integrity of proper survey data and can be lacking up-to-date (or any) routing information in many locations.
I seem to recall Xilinx offering a FPGA with an embedded PowerPC core 8-ish years ago. Or maybe it was four cores, I heard it from a co-worker.
Summary does say 'the first configurable Intel Atom-based processor'.
But yeah Xilinx have had PowerPC on FPGAs for a while and they are still current products. Altera has offerings with an embedded CPU as well
Three meg of flash memory and 128MHz clock speed doesn't sound like a lot in terms of computing power
Guess that depends on your point of view, a car travelling 360Km/Hr is travelling 100m/s, so in a millisecond travels 10cm or about 4 inches. Assuming one instruction per clock cycle you can do a lot of useful stuff with 128,000 instructions, or put another way probably about one million for every revolution of the wheel
3MB of FLASH is huge as well when you aren't loading a lot of crap like multimedia, not that it would run Linux but I just took a look at the last kernel I built for an embedded platform and it came in under 2MB with quite a generous set of modules loaded.
Judging from the TFA this Timothy Pilgrim sounds like a reasonable guy.
Using the phrase "privacy boss" is probably a bit strong though for the head of an organisation that only regulates existing legislation. They only advise the government on new policy, which of course they can ignore. Data retention will obviously save children and stop the terrorists so I suspect that will be the case here.
I don't like the idea much anyway of wine names tied to region names, the grape varietie(s) are more informative and universal. And for novelty wines there are plenty of other names us Aussies can use like "Alice Springs Leg Opener".
Anyway back to my beer...
While GPS technology has come a long way and the low SNR performance of newer GPS modules is amazing operation indoors remains patchy at best. My single level weatherboard house is not so bad normally, but even there I get some inability to acquire indoors depending on satellite geometry at the time. I think with long-term monitoring they'd have to be some threshold where they simply treated no acquisition of a signal as a normal event. I guess they could install re-radiating antennas inside a prisoner's home but in some locations they would have to treat loss of position as a normal event. For anyone slightly tech-savvy at that point they could shield the antenna and have a certain amount of time to go elsewhere.
While far from trivial there is also the possibility of using a GPS pseudolite to give a false location. Last time I looked GPS signal simulators for use in developing and testing new GPS systems cost in the order of $50K but that was quite a few years ago. Minus the considerable development effort I don't see while something like an FPGA / microcontroller combo linked to a low-power transmitter couldn't do the same for a few hundred in hardware costs.
Unlawful export, I would understand. That would probably violate some or other US law, if there were components, exported from the US used in those products. But unlawful monitoring? What would the logic behind this be?
Well it makes no sense, but then again laws against devices to circumvent DCMA / copy protection devices make no sense either. It would be nice to think it works both ways, but I suspect that will not be the case...
Looks like pretty cool tech. Guessing from the promo video they will make a killing in Second Life. TFA doesn't say how much in Linden Dollars though?
I bet they used Linux to do this... is it even possible to do something like this in windows?
Well Windows server platforms do happen to have a functional DNS and web server. Sure they might be a bit bloated bit this would have been trivial under either O/S.
Don't make us come over there and liberate the shit out of you.
In this case, I for one will welcome our new Predator UAV overlords
Being an Australian I can tell you most Australians are apathetic to this issue and there likely won't be a huge turn-out. There probably won't be anything but fleeting mass media coverage, and that means politicians will ignore it and side with the "think of the children" majority who have no idea of the underlying implications.
If there was an upcoming election the issue *might* hit the media if the opposition declared a policy of no filtering and hightlighted all the negative aspects. But given the previous liberal government floated around similar ideas I wouldn't hold my breath on that, I think the position of both the major political parties is unfortunately much the same.
Recently I starting doing a bit of web development after being out of the loop for a while. I was working on a project and it was convenient to have the XHTML / JS running on my development machine while doing a few AJAX calls to my development server. After it failed at first I found I could add Access-Control-Allow-Origin: * to the HTTP header to allow cross-site access.
It made we wonder if you wanted to exploit cross-site vulnerabilities couldn't you setup a proxy in the middle that returned information from the original site but added that to the header? Anyway just got me wondering and maybe someone more knowledgeable could comment on it.