Enforcing the subscription fee is a pretty easy problem to solve, assuming that each subscriber's radio has a unique serial number and that the channels of the satellite are encrypted with a modern encryption system (public key, and at least 128 bits).
There isn't enough bandwidth to send each subscriber an individually encrypted signal, of course. So, they encrypt the overall signal with their private key, and change this key fairly often. There is enough bandwidth to send individual public keys to each subscriber, though. These public keys are encrypted somehow with the serial number of the radio -- this is a second layer of encryption. The radio receiver, using its serial number and other stored information, decodes this. Returning to the first layer of encryption, it can now be decoded, because the radio now has the proper public key.
Suppose you don't pay? They simply remove your radio's serial number from the list of public keys that are transmitted. When they next change the private key, your radio never receives the new public key. The encrypted channels no longer decode correctly, and your radio goes dead.
Now the harder problems appear. What to do about cloned radios, where more than one unit shares the same serial number? What to do about hacked radios, "rogue clients" that share the decrypted public key with others, relieving them of the need to pay for it? How to hold subscribers accountable, when there is no reliable back channel? DirectTV has been wrestling with these problems for years. If digital radio catches on, expect to see Canadian stores selling cloning and reprogramming equipment... interesting times are ahead.
IMHO, Sorenson is to be commended for providing an easy download link.
Many popular movie trailers in the past have been buried behind JavaScript, Flash, or other ways of obfuscating the true download URL. With this trailer, all that's needed is one click. There's not even a need to wade through multiple pages, and it's available in multiple screen sizes and compression formats!
I remember having to use a packet sniffer and wget to download movie trailers in the past. Big hassle. Considering that I don't view movie trailers at work (computer has no sound card), it's great to download now and view later! Very flexible. It would be wonderful if more companies would follow the footsteps here.
Good that it's nearing release. I check almost every day for "A7N266" on Pricewatch. Still no hits so far, but hopefully it should be close.
My PII-450 is getting quite sleepy. I've been wanting to upgrade for some time, but have been holding out until the PC market stabilizes on a decent stable platform. There's just been too much change recently.
I'm looking forward to building a system with GeForce3, nVidia nForce, DDR 266 memory, and a 1.4GHz or better Athlon... there's never been a better time to upgrade, because with this economy, it's a buyer's market!
I worked at a company (Splash) that made Linux print servers. We supported both Ethernet and Token Ring.
Yes, we obeyed the GPL! Here is my Splash Open Source Page. Olicom (remember them?) made a patch to get DHCP clients working over Token Ring. I still have their patch to "dhcpcd", if you want it.
Wonderful! It is a good thing that these middlemen are going away.
Just give me a direct connection to the Internet, and pass IP packets between my computer and the backbone. Thank you. Don't make me go through a "value-added" middleman. I'm sure I speak for many when I say this.
With Excite@Home gone, AT&T Broadband (the cable company that actually owns the wires) should simply pass the IP packets straight through to the backbone, without foisting "exclusive content" on their users.
Pacific Bell does this with Prodigy for their "basic" connection. One of the main reasons why everyone pays extra for an "enhanced" connection is to avoid this! It would be a wonderful thing if AT&T would learn from this and just give people a direct connection, hassle-free.
Some really good CD drives can simply return raw sectors. There are 2352 bytes of data and 96 bytes of control information per sector. At this level, there are no differences between data and audio!
The CloneCD program is one of several that can make a good copy of a protected CD-ROM disc (usually for games and such). I'm sure the same techniques can be used for audio. To my knowledge, no audio ripper has this functionality yet.
The question is, how to find these techniques? All good CD copiers I've seen are closed source and usually only for Windows. The authors of them have clearly spent a lot of time reverse engineering the low level programming of various CD-ROM drives. Now someone needs to reverse engineer their reverse-engineering:-)
Super eurobeat from Avex and Konami unite in your DANCE!
I glanced at the patent, and it seems to me that it's mostly the same as Macrovision's scheme.
The only difference I could find is the flagging of the altered data by using the P channel. Macrovision's scheme doesn't mention this.
Cactus here seems that it would protect against accidental playback of the corrupted audio samples by this flag. A CD-ROM drive would read the P channel and see that the frame is "data" instead of "audio", and not attempt to play it back. The actual protection technique seems to be the same for both Cactus and Macrovision.
Both schemes work by finding sequences of sound samples that are in a straight line (such as a triangle wave or a gap of silence). You can then safely remove the middle portion of this line, as it is redundant. The CD player will "connect the dots" and exactly reproduce the straight line! The audio that you hear will be unchanged, even though many of its samples might be missing.
The removed samples are replaced with random or corrupted data, and the error correction codes of the CD are set to mark this data as bad (so it won't be accidentally played).
I'm surprised this hasn't been thought of before. What would be funny is if Macrovision and Cactus spent a lot of money fighting over who got the patent first, while the rest of us simply make a small patch to cdparanoia and continue ripping away:-)
Super eurobeat from Avex and Konami unite in your DANCE!
There is a lot of good stuff here. Some of the more useful and general-purpose patches -- such as
VLAN, TUX, and Software Suspend -- should get a chance to become mainstream. The various IPC and speed improvements should make it in, too.
There's currently a debate over which real-time scheduler is the best. Personally, I'd like to see it resolved in the same way as the other options with choices: let all of them be integrated into the mainstream, and let the user select which one to use, either at compile or boot time! I'd like to see an option in the kernel configuration, asking what real-time scheduler you wanted: MontaVista, RTLinux, RTSched, Linux-SRT, RTAI, DWCS, something else, or simply the default.
Linux needs a real-time scheduler today. Currently, things become choppy whenever it decides to service the system in some way, such as syncing the disk. Playing movies, audio/video recording, burning CD's, even playing games would benefit from real-time support. I hope that this can become mainstream in 2.6!
Super eurobeat from Avex and Konami unite in your DANCE!
I don't think Microsoft will mind this information being posted -- by itself, it is not enough to make a keygen.
Nowhere in the document does it say how to transform the activation code into the countercode that "registers" the program! This is what the registration process does on Microsoft's servers, and a keygen would need to duplicate this in order to come up with a valid countercode.
This would be almost impossible to reverse engineer, considering the algorithm for this isn't performed locally. The most likely attack will be on the registration validation itself: just fool Windows into thinking any random countercode is valid. This is what will probably be done.
The most that could be done with the information here is to make a program that spoofs the hardware information. It could somehow then force the Windows registration process to accept this spoofed information instead of actually querying your hardware for it. Then, you would be able to install Windows on an unlimited number of computers, by just re-entering the one registration countercode you got. Microsoft could detect this though, so you would probably need to copy someone else's Product ID. But then Microsoft would simply blacklist that PID after it's been used a few dozen times or so. The cycle continues. Maybe Microsoft could ask the author of CloneCD for ideas? (That program uses essentially the same idea, and it is still one of the most pirated programs on the net)
IMO, this paper has done a valuable service by describing where exactly each bit of information in the activation code comes from. It will make people feel a little bit more comfortable, knowing what is in each digit they are sending. Microsoft should have made this public knowledge to begin with.
Personally, I will never upgrade beyond Windows 98 Second Edition and Office 97. Microsoft is just getting too Orwellian with their latest products. When I'm not using Linux, I'll stick to the last known safe versions, thank you very much. I own a PII-450 (last Intel CPU made without Processor ID) for the same reason.
Now watch the entire PC industry crash, as people stop buying upgrades and new components, for fear of triggering Product Activation and breaking their Windows installation.... Watch desperate PC component vendors offer "WPA insurance" when you buy their products....
Super eurobeat from Avex and Konami unite in your DANCE!
I have my own domain, and have star-forwarding for my email, so I'm able to use a unique email address every time I have to fill out one of those damn web-forms.
Something good to say about PayPal: I have never got spam addressed to or containing the email address I gave to PayPal! So, I don't think they sell addresses, or at least they haven't sold mine....
Super eurobeat from Avex and Konami unite in your DANCE!
Here's mine. Been using it since around 1994 or so. I've copied it to pretty much every machine I've used since then.
I use tcsh! (Keep the flames to yourself, I still program in bash but prefer tcsh for interactive use)
set prompt="[%n@%m %l] {${shlvl} %h} %B%T%b (%?) %B%~%#%b "
This looks like this:
[krellan@mybox pts/9] {1 84} 11:52 (0) ~/mydir>
This tells me my username, the machine I am on, and the terminal I'm using (handy for write(1) or for distinguishing between multiple windows).
It also tells me the shell level (so I know if typing exit will log me off or simply leave a subshell), and the history number of this command. I also get the time of day and the exit code of the previous command. Finally, there's the directory (of course).
It looks complicated but I have a use for everything in it. It is fast, because no external programs are executed. The time and directory are in boldface, to stand out.
The only problem is that it takes up too much space if the directory is really long....
Super eurobeat from Avex and Konami unite in your DANCE!
I disagree with this. I have used the Linux boot process to identify an unknown system that a friend wanted Windows installed on, so that I'd know which Windows drivers to look for! I find one of the best ways to take hardware inventory of an unknown computer is to attempt to boot Linux on it. Even if the boot is unsuccessful, the console messages tell a lot about the hardware and what's in there!
I sincerely hope the drivers aren't edited down to prevent this logging. All of the text should be available to read with dmesg. What I hope is that a compromise can be reached: default to a pretty-boot process, but have a way for the knowledgeable user to still see the console (perhaps by pressing the ESC key).
Or, use the priority system of printk to prioritize each message, and have an optional boot parameter that would control how many messages get printed. It could be something like bootverbosity=8, given on the boot command line. This already exists, look at the argument to klogd -c!
Doing a kernel-wide purge of all informational messages is just the Wrong Thing, as these messages will then be lost and there will be no way to print them when they are needed to solve problems!
Super eurobeat from Avex and Konami unite in your DANCE!
These games have been making a mint -- even at a dollar per play, a price previously thought impossible to get people to pay for -- because they're fun. Something new and different! DDR makes you actually stand up and dance to the game. PPP is probably the first game that you play without touching it at all.
Try them. Midway's fault is for blindly pumping out generic fighting and driving games. Arcades are not dead -- yet -- the Bemani games are keeping them in business for now.
Super eurobeat from Avex and Konami unite in your DANCE!
Scrapping WAP in the USA? That's good news. Hopefully they'll do the same for HDTV soon.
My dream would be to have Japanese i-mode here for mobile phones, and the successful European COFDM standard for HDTV here. That's what people want, but with the politics here, unfortunately it will never happen...
Super eurobeat from Avex and Konami unite in your DANCE!
* 2001-05-09 19:38:06 USA lags behind in IPv6 deployment (articles,internet) (rejected)
I tried to post this same story a few weeks ago, about how the USA is falling behind in the deployment of IPv6. Basically, the reason for this is that the USA has got the lion's share of existing IPv4 addresses, so the incentive to convert has not been as high. So, we're letting ourselves lag behind, as usual. It will be sad when everyone else is speaking IPv6 and we're still stuck behind 10.x.x.x NAT's...
Super eurobeat from Avex and Konami unite in your DANCE!
Agreed. I wrote a simple Perl script to translate the output of "cdparanoia -vsQ" into a CDDB-acceptable email submission template, and discovered the same limitations.
In addition to the above, I would make one fundamental change: send complete track timing information, instead of simply making a hash of it.
An algorithm could be as follows: Send a series of 32-bit integers, each representing timing information (the offset, in frames, from the start of the leadin track). Send the timing of Track 1, followed by Track 2, and so on. Send the timing of the leadout after the final track, so the length of the final track won't be lost.
This would give exact timing information, eliminating the many hash collisions that exist in CDDB. For a 99-track CD, the total data would only be around 400 bytes or so -- small enough to fit in a single packet! And this would help render Gracenote's silly hashing patent irrelevant.
Super eurobeat from Avex and Konami unite in your DANCE!
Since the burst transmission used by this technology covers all frequencies, would it be possible to fit a filter to the transmitter, preventing it from using frequencies below 300 GHz?
This way, it wouldn't interfere with existing carrier transmissions on existing frequencies. Conventional continuous carrier-based transmission could then be used on all frequencies below 300 GHz (infrared). This new burst-based transmission could be used on frequencies above that, which are mostly unused by conventional transmitters. Then, there would be no interference....
Super eurobeat from Avex and Konami unite in your DANCE!
Make the installer put service onto an old computer running Windows with no USB ports. Have an Ethernet card installed, of course. Don't even mention Linux at all. Close the door to your server room:-)
That way, they'll have to provide you with Ethernet-compatible equipment! And because you're running Windows, the tech won't be able to pull a lame excuse on you about not being able to support your connection.
Super eurobeat from Avex and Konami unite in your DANCE!
Slashdot Mirror
True... South Korea and other countries enjoy much better and widely available broadband than the USA.
With the DMCA, the technical exodus from the USA has begun already. Look at several high-profile cases that we've read about here on Slashdot.
The lack of broadband here in the USA will be just another reason for technical people to leave. I would love to live in Europe....
Enforcing the subscription fee is a pretty easy problem to solve, assuming that each subscriber's radio has a unique serial number and that the channels of the satellite are encrypted with a modern encryption system (public key, and at least 128 bits).
There isn't enough bandwidth to send each subscriber an individually encrypted signal, of course. So, they encrypt the overall signal with their private key, and change this key fairly often. There is enough bandwidth to send individual public keys to each subscriber, though. These public keys are encrypted somehow with the serial number of the radio -- this is a second layer of encryption. The radio receiver, using its serial number and other stored information, decodes this. Returning to the first layer of encryption, it can now be decoded, because the radio now has the proper public key.
Suppose you don't pay? They simply remove your radio's serial number from the list of public keys that are transmitted. When they next change the private key, your radio never receives the new public key. The encrypted channels no longer decode correctly, and your radio goes dead.
Now the harder problems appear. What to do about cloned radios, where more than one unit shares the same serial number? What to do about hacked radios, "rogue clients" that share the decrypted public key with others, relieving them of the need to pay for it? How to hold subscribers accountable, when there is no reliable back channel? DirectTV has been wrestling with these problems for years. If digital radio catches on, expect to see Canadian stores selling cloning and reprogramming equipment... interesting times are ahead.
IMHO, Sorenson is to be commended for providing an easy download link.
Many popular movie trailers in the past have been buried behind JavaScript, Flash, or other ways of obfuscating the true download URL. With this trailer, all that's needed is one click. There's not even a need to wade through multiple pages, and it's available in multiple screen sizes and compression formats!
I remember having to use a packet sniffer and wget to download movie trailers in the past. Big hassle. Considering that I don't view movie trailers at work (computer has no sound card), it's great to download now and view later! Very flexible. It would be wonderful if more companies would follow the footsteps here.
Good that it's nearing release. I check almost every day for "A7N266" on Pricewatch. Still no hits so far, but hopefully it should be close.
My PII-450 is getting quite sleepy. I've been wanting to upgrade for some time, but have been holding out until the PC market stabilizes on a decent stable platform. There's just been too much change recently.
I'm looking forward to building a system with GeForce3, nVidia nForce, DDR 266 memory, and a 1.4GHz or better Athlon... there's never been a better time to upgrade, because with this economy, it's a buyer's market!
Linux Token Ring bringing down corporate nets?
How about this: Two Linux machines, each pingflooding the network as fast as they can. ping -f -b 255.255.255.255
Another computer on the same LAN, still was able to browse the Internet and communicate as if nothing was happening!
Try that with Ethernet...!
I worked at a company (Splash) that made Linux print servers. We supported both Ethernet and Token Ring.
Yes, we obeyed the GPL! Here is my Splash Open Source Page. Olicom (remember them?) made a patch to get DHCP clients working over Token Ring. I still have their patch to "dhcpcd", if you want it.
Wonderful! It is a good thing that these middlemen are going away.
Just give me a direct connection to the Internet, and pass IP packets between my computer and the backbone. Thank you. Don't make me go through a "value-added" middleman. I'm sure I speak for many when I say this.
With Excite@Home gone, AT&T Broadband (the cable company that actually owns the wires) should simply pass the IP packets straight through to the backbone, without foisting "exclusive content" on their users.
Pacific Bell does this with Prodigy for their "basic" connection. One of the main reasons why everyone pays extra for an "enhanced" connection is to avoid this! It would be a wonderful thing if AT&T would learn from this and just give people a direct connection, hassle-free.
Some really good CD drives can simply return raw sectors. There are 2352 bytes of data and 96 bytes of control information per sector. At this level, there are no differences between data and audio!
The CloneCD program is one of several that can make a good copy of a protected CD-ROM disc (usually for games and such). I'm sure the same techniques can be used for audio. To my knowledge, no audio ripper has this functionality yet.
The question is, how to find these techniques? All good CD copiers I've seen are closed source and usually only for Windows. The authors of them have clearly spent a lot of time reverse engineering the low level programming of various CD-ROM drives. Now someone needs to reverse engineer their reverse-engineering :-)
Super eurobeat from Avex and Konami unite in your DANCE!
I glanced at the patent, and it seems to me that it's mostly the same as Macrovision's scheme.
The only difference I could find is the flagging of the altered data by using the P channel. Macrovision's scheme doesn't mention this.
Cactus here seems that it would protect against accidental playback of the corrupted audio samples by this flag. A CD-ROM drive would read the P channel and see that the frame is "data" instead of "audio", and not attempt to play it back. The actual protection technique seems to be the same for both Cactus and Macrovision.
Both schemes work by finding sequences of sound samples that are in a straight line (such as a triangle wave or a gap of silence). You can then safely remove the middle portion of this line, as it is redundant. The CD player will "connect the dots" and exactly reproduce the straight line! The audio that you hear will be unchanged, even though many of its samples might be missing.
The removed samples are replaced with random or corrupted data, and the error correction codes of the CD are set to mark this data as bad (so it won't be accidentally played).
I'm surprised this hasn't been thought of before. What would be funny is if Macrovision and Cactus spent a lot of money fighting over who got the patent first, while the rest of us simply make a small patch to cdparanoia and continue ripping away :-)
Super eurobeat from Avex and Konami unite in your DANCE!
Can you please post a copy of the email you sent? I would like to send a similiar message to my family and friends as well.
Thank you!
Super eurobeat from Avex and Konami unite in your DANCE!
Don't know if anybody is still reading this topic on Slashdot, but it's happened.
http://www.tecchannel.de/betriebssysteme/746/index .html
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/20433.html
Super eurobeat from Avex and Konami unite in your DANCE!
There is a lot of good stuff here. Some of the more useful and general-purpose patches -- such as VLAN, TUX, and Software Suspend -- should get a chance to become mainstream. The various IPC and speed improvements should make it in, too.
There's currently a debate over which real-time scheduler is the best. Personally, I'd like to see it resolved in the same way as the other options with choices: let all of them be integrated into the mainstream, and let the user select which one to use, either at compile or boot time! I'd like to see an option in the kernel configuration, asking what real-time scheduler you wanted: MontaVista, RTLinux, RTSched, Linux-SRT, RTAI, DWCS, something else, or simply the default.
Linux needs a real-time scheduler today. Currently, things become choppy whenever it decides to service the system in some way, such as syncing the disk. Playing movies, audio/video recording, burning CD's, even playing games would benefit from real-time support. I hope that this can become mainstream in 2.6!
Super eurobeat from Avex and Konami unite in your DANCE!
I don't think Microsoft will mind this information being posted -- by itself, it is not enough to make a keygen.
Nowhere in the document does it say how to transform the activation code into the countercode that "registers" the program! This is what the registration process does on Microsoft's servers, and a keygen would need to duplicate this in order to come up with a valid countercode.
This would be almost impossible to reverse engineer, considering the algorithm for this isn't performed locally. The most likely attack will be on the registration validation itself: just fool Windows into thinking any random countercode is valid. This is what will probably be done.
The most that could be done with the information here is to make a program that spoofs the hardware information. It could somehow then force the Windows registration process to accept this spoofed information instead of actually querying your hardware for it. Then, you would be able to install Windows on an unlimited number of computers, by just re-entering the one registration countercode you got. Microsoft could detect this though, so you would probably need to copy someone else's Product ID. But then Microsoft would simply blacklist that PID after it's been used a few dozen times or so. The cycle continues. Maybe Microsoft could ask the author of CloneCD for ideas? (That program uses essentially the same idea, and it is still one of the most pirated programs on the net)
IMO, this paper has done a valuable service by describing where exactly each bit of information in the activation code comes from. It will make people feel a little bit more comfortable, knowing what is in each digit they are sending. Microsoft should have made this public knowledge to begin with.
Personally, I will never upgrade beyond Windows 98 Second Edition and Office 97. Microsoft is just getting too Orwellian with their latest products. When I'm not using Linux, I'll stick to the last known safe versions, thank you very much. I own a PII-450 (last Intel CPU made without Processor ID) for the same reason.
Now watch the entire PC industry crash, as people stop buying upgrades and new components, for fear of triggering Product Activation and breaking their Windows installation.... Watch desperate PC component vendors offer "WPA insurance" when you buy their products....
Super eurobeat from Avex and Konami unite in your DANCE!
I have my own domain, and have star-forwarding for my email, so I'm able to use a unique email address every time I have to fill out one of those damn web-forms.
Something good to say about PayPal: I have never got spam addressed to or containing the email address I gave to PayPal! So, I don't think they sell addresses, or at least they haven't sold mine....
Super eurobeat from Avex and Konami unite in your DANCE!
Here's mine. Been using it since around 1994 or so. I've copied it to pretty much every machine I've used since then.
I use tcsh! (Keep the flames to yourself, I still program in bash but prefer tcsh for interactive use)
set prompt="[%n@%m %l] {${shlvl} %h} %B%T%b (%?) %B%~%#%b "This looks like this:
[krellan@mybox pts/9] {1 84} 11:52 (0) ~/mydir>
This tells me my username, the machine I am on, and the terminal I'm using (handy for write(1) or for distinguishing between multiple windows).
It also tells me the shell level (so I know if typing exit will log me off or simply leave a subshell), and the history number of this command. I also get the time of day and the exit code of the previous command. Finally, there's the directory (of course).
It looks complicated but I have a use for everything in it. It is fast, because no external programs are executed. The time and directory are in boldface, to stand out.
The only problem is that it takes up too much space if the directory is really long....
Super eurobeat from Avex and Konami unite in your DANCE!
I disagree with this. I have used the Linux boot process to identify an unknown system that a friend wanted Windows installed on, so that I'd know which Windows drivers to look for! I find one of the best ways to take hardware inventory of an unknown computer is to attempt to boot Linux on it. Even if the boot is unsuccessful, the console messages tell a lot about the hardware and what's in there!
I sincerely hope the drivers aren't edited down to prevent this logging. All of the text should be available to read with dmesg. What I hope is that a compromise can be reached: default to a pretty-boot process, but have a way for the knowledgeable user to still see the console (perhaps by pressing the ESC key).
Or, use the priority system of printk to prioritize each message, and have an optional boot parameter that would control how many messages get printed. It could be something like bootverbosity=8, given on the boot command line. This already exists, look at the argument to klogd -c!
Doing a kernel-wide purge of all informational messages is just the Wrong Thing, as these messages will then be lost and there will be no way to print them when they are needed to solve problems!
Super eurobeat from Avex and Konami unite in your DANCE!
Have you been in an arcade lately?
The newest rage in the arcades are the BEMANI music games by Konami! Dance Dance Revolution, Beatmania, DanceManiax, Guitar Freaks, Para Para Paradise....
These games have been making a mint -- even at a dollar per play, a price previously thought impossible to get people to pay for -- because they're fun. Something new and different! DDR makes you actually stand up and dance to the game. PPP is probably the first game that you play without touching it at all.
Try them. Midway's fault is for blindly pumping out generic fighting and driving games. Arcades are not dead -- yet -- the Bemani games are keeping them in business for now.
Super eurobeat from Avex and Konami unite in your DANCE!
Scrapping WAP in the USA? That's good news. Hopefully they'll do the same for HDTV soon.
My dream would be to have Japanese i-mode here for mobile phones, and the successful European COFDM standard for HDTV here. That's what people want, but with the politics here, unfortunately it will never happen...
Super eurobeat from Avex and Konami unite in your DANCE!
Ahh...
* 2001-05-09 19:38:06 USA lags behind in IPv6 deployment (articles,internet) (rejected)
I tried to post this same story a few weeks ago, about how the USA is falling behind in the deployment of IPv6. Basically, the reason for this is that the USA has got the lion's share of existing IPv4 addresses, so the incentive to convert has not been as high. So, we're letting ourselves lag behind, as usual. It will be sad when everyone else is speaking IPv6 and we're still stuck behind 10.x.x.x NAT's...
Super eurobeat from Avex and Konami unite in your DANCE!
LinuxGram is changing from a free service to a subscription service, too. And on the same day -- June 1.
*sigh* I guess the free days of the Internet are coming to an end...
Super eurobeat from Avex and Konami unite in your DANCE!
Agreed. I wrote a simple Perl script to translate the output of "cdparanoia -vsQ" into a CDDB-acceptable email submission template, and discovered the same limitations.
In addition to the above, I would make one fundamental change: send complete track timing information, instead of simply making a hash of it.
An algorithm could be as follows: Send a series of 32-bit integers, each representing timing information (the offset, in frames, from the start of the leadin track). Send the timing of Track 1, followed by Track 2, and so on. Send the timing of the leadout after the final track, so the length of the final track won't be lost.
This would give exact timing information, eliminating the many hash collisions that exist in CDDB. For a 99-track CD, the total data would only be around 400 bytes or so -- small enough to fit in a single packet! And this would help render Gracenote's silly hashing patent irrelevant.
Super eurobeat from Avex and Konami unite in your DANCE!
An old computer of mine is already capable of solving problems without being turned on.
You see, there's this door in my house that won't stay closed... :-)
Super eurobeat from Avex and Konami unite in your DANCE!
Very good comments.
Since the burst transmission used by this technology covers all frequencies, would it be possible to fit a filter to the transmitter, preventing it from using frequencies below 300 GHz?
This way, it wouldn't interfere with existing carrier transmissions on existing frequencies. Conventional continuous carrier-based transmission could then be used on all frequencies below 300 GHz (infrared). This new burst-based transmission could be used on frequencies above that, which are mostly unused by conventional transmitters. Then, there would be no interference....
Super eurobeat from Avex and Konami unite in your DANCE!
A trick I had to use with Pacific Hell:
Make the installer put service onto an old computer running Windows with no USB ports. Have an Ethernet card installed, of course. Don't even mention Linux at all. Close the door to your server room :-)
That way, they'll have to provide you with Ethernet-compatible equipment! And because you're running Windows, the tech won't be able to pull a lame excuse on you about not being able to support your connection.
Super eurobeat from Avex and Konami unite in your DANCE!
These new RFC's are good, but to really solve the problem of spam and mail storage, a fundamental change in the protocol is needed.
Check out http://cr.yp.to/im2000.html
I'm impressed with this person's ideas for protocols. And his webpage has a neat domain name too :-)
Super eurobeat from Avex and Konami unite in your DANCE!