That's what I also wanted to know--what's the ringer equivalence of the ATA-186? If it's 3 or higher, you should be able to hook up your entire home phoneline to the ATA-186 and service all your phones (provided they're all/mostly electronic and have a low RE).
SS transmissions still use discrete frequencies at any one point in time as they hop around the spectrum. Since SETI monitors wide portions of the spectrum simultaneously, you would actually be able to observe the hopping in real time as the different frequency bands become active with non-random signals. No matter what method of SS transmission you use, as soon as you send non-random data, this will be detectable at any frequency point of the used spectrum. Unless of course your objective is to not be observed and you hide your data in white noise (using steganographic techniques).
Re:Overheard at cadsoft.de...
on
PVR For Linux
·
· Score: 2
> C'mon, that's a seperable prefix verb if I ever saw one!
Not in German, since slash and dot by themselves have no German meaning. Even in English, a site doesn't get dotted in a slash sort of way, it gets slashdotted.
Re:Overheard at cadsoft.de...
on
PVR For Linux
·
· Score: 2
> Mein Gott! Unsere Site ist Slashdotted!! gewesen!
That's ok, it's just an indication of what HE does with P2P. If the only thing you do with apple pie is you-know-what, you might indeed find it hard to believe that some people actually just eat it.
> When I left Germany six years ago, there were still automated photoradar systems
I believe the original poster meant radar detectors as in "detectors of radar", those little black boxes on your dash that beep when they detect radar frequencies.
> Hell, we still can't use radar retectors in some states
Hold your horses, cowboy. Just because you (might!) be allowed to intercept WEP traffic doesn't mean you can use radar detectors in Germany. In fact, you can't! You'll get a good spanking for that--in most of Europe, AAMOF.
No, it's "dataprotection" and "datasecurity". Once you grasp (say, in the second or third class of German 101) that those apparently endlessly long German words are actually compound nouns composed of multiple simpler nouns--rather than atomic words that you can look up in a dictionary--their apparent length ceases to be all that amusing.
> the regulations came about to prevent a local market from losing advertising revenue to a > remote market
So what this amounts to is a federally mandated right to a captive advertising audience. The traffic analogy to this would be that I'm only allowed to drive my car on major roads and highways that expose me to billboard advertising. Using smaller side roads without billboards would mean that the billboard advertisers are losing me as an ad target and should thus be illegal.
Re:Needed: affordable self-cleaning public toilets
on
Best High-Tech Toilet?
·
· Score: 2
They have (had?) lots of those in Paris. When I visited one time in 1987, one of my cousins got stuck in one when the cleaning cycle started--I guess he opened the door and closed it again without exiting and the occupancy sensor malfunctioned. In any case, we outside had a much bigger laugh than he did inside.
> He said his dad bought the card to go with a laptop, which would definitely put it in the $100 - $150 range.
Not at all: $55 on sale, even regularly it was only $70. Of course, you can over-spend on anything if you choose the right brands (e.g. Belkin cables at most retailers: $40 for a 1394 cable? No problem!).
$115? I sure hope the camera was included in that. Generic 1394 cards can be had for under $30 (check NewEgg), and they're certainly not worth any more than that. They all use one of a couple of chipsets. Adding 1394 support to a PC is essentially a no-cost matter.
The i-Buddie is a joke, primarily considering the target prices. If its main selling point is that it does away with "expensive" batteries by requiring mains power, and uses cheaper desktop components, where exactly is the savings? The mentioned prices are as high as regular notebooks with true portability.
> I can only imagine dificulties of explaining this to average police officer, let along Joe Average.;)
What's there to explain (unless I'm misunderstanding your question)? The police officer sticks your ID card in one reader slot, his ID badge in the other, and asks you to put your thumb on a fingerprint reader. The system grabs his credentials from his ID card, the encrypted fingerprint from your card, the unencrypted fingerprint from your thumb, and submits all three to a remote system via a secure transaction for verification. The response is a match/no match (or a confidence level or whatever), or an exception if the officer's credentials are invalid. All the officer has to understand is how to stick two cards into two slots and how to motivate you to stick your thumb on the reader.
This is just one possible scenario. The point is that all the extra technology involved doesn't necessarily have to unduly complicate procedures for the participants. It's a matter of coming up with a standardized infrastructure and a set of laws (criminalizing persistent storage of private keys by verifiers, for example) governing its use. It also doesn't mean that personal privacy has to be reduced. In fact, such technology could have the potential to enhance personal privacy and anonymity, since information that normally would be collected by humans (e.g. law enforcement officers) on pieces of paper or even just using their memory, and could thus easily be abused, is now beeing transferred between devices with the capacity to securely discard no longer needed information.
I believe he's talking just about the mobo, which can actually be had for even less (e.g. $115.95). Getting the complete barebones system for $150 would indeed be a steal.
> there is little physical difficulty aside from obtaining the necessary private keys
Well, you're making it sound like a walk in the park. That's the whole crux of the matter: you can't get to the data if you can't break the keys. And breaking the keys has conveniently been designed to be hard. Besides, there are other possibilities to foil surreptitious attacks on a card: upon x numbers of unsuccessful attempts to decrypt card information, it could self-destruct in some fashion (burn some critical fuses, erase the entire flash, etc). Some decent heuristics could be designed and refined over time to detect attacks on the card.
> When you say the government will hold your private key, well, I'm not convinced that's much > better than wearing it on a t-shirt.
The government wouldn't have to hold your private keys at all (of course, the fact that they DO want to hold them is another matter). Pertinent information on the card would be encrypted with the public key of the legal authority in question: fingerprints with the fingerprinting public key of the DOJ, account information with the public key of your bank, etc. Plus, you could have successive rings of increasing authority: fingerprints might be accessible to any police station, while your criminal record might require more restrictive private keys which not every station would have access to.
Of course, law enforcement could then simply be cavalier with their private key governing fingerprint access, allowing third parties to become privy to it through negligence. This could be discouraged by introducing a system of checks and balances or disincentives, such as maybe requiring them to use that same key to encrypt some of their own sensitive data. Plus, there would be a procedural system in place to cope with compromised keys: once a key has been deemed compromised, citizens would have to have their cards updated with new keys (maybe at a local post office, police station, etc). There are plenty of such procedures in place today already (yearly license plate renewal, driver's license renewal etc).
Let's face it, advancing technology is a give-and-take thing: while providing many advantages that the "old ways" didn't, more often than not it complicates life even more. It's just a matter of accepting this and working hard(er) at the solutions.
> What "safeguards" could you possibly put into place here? If data is available via the card, > it's available.
I suggest you inform yourself more about PKI technologies. If your argument is that PKI is insecure, fine, that's another story. But you seem to be simply implying that there's no (theoretical) way to protect information on a card conditionally, which is plain wrong. The fingerprint could be signed with a private key that only a certain government agency holds, and access to which requires search-warrant-type authorization by law inforcement. Furthermore, this access could be on a one-time basis, using some mechanism that ensures that law enforcement cannot store this key for future unauthorized use.
Of course, all these musing merely indicate technical possibilities. In order to be legally, ethically and morally viable, they will require a whole slew of new laws and regulations to dictate their proper use. Yes, governments have proved time and again that they can (and do) screw up such things, but in the end there's no way around it. New technology does happen, and it does get adopted, so the sooner we embrace that fact and start thinking about its ramifications (legal and otherwise), the better. Historical analogies abound, just look at the wiretapping laws. Can you still illegally wiretap? Sure, but the disincentives are strong enough that it's hardly a severe problem.
I've glanced at the article, and it seems like a lot of hot air: lots and LOTS of background and diagrams on LED technology, but relatively little detail on how LEDs could betray the data stream in current, modern equipment. Most current data transmissions around a PC occur in heavily encoded form (usually amplitude AND phase modulation). So there is no cable (other than the serial port cable) that you could just splice an LED into and simply read the data stream out. You would have to inject the LED somewhere into the device electronics where the data stream bits are flowing in decoded, truly serial fashion. Why bother, if from a firmware perspective it's much easier to toggle an LED control bit on at the start of a logical data group (packet or whatever), and off when you're done processing it?
Re:I STILL don't see the point of HDTV (yet)
on
I STILL Want My HDTV
·
· Score: 2
There are a number of projectors available for under $2000, and while not HD, they should be fine for DVDs and DirecTV. I have seriously been considering a projector instead of an RPTV, but I've got a few questions:
1. How trouble-free are they in general? Considering an LCD projector is pretty solid state, are they fairly rugged? I've been considering putting it to dual-use as a presentation projector for my wife. She does occasional workshops and would love to be able to do PPT presentations from her notebook. In that case spending 2 grand might be more palatable to her.
2. Can you get by with a cheapo slide screen or such, or do you really need an expensive home theater screen? Reading avsforum and hometheaterspot you'd think you do, but then "experts" tend to get carried away with purism.
3. In real life, how much life can I expect from a bulb for mainly weekend viewing of 2-4 DVDs? Can you get 2-3 years out of it? In that case, $400 might not be so bad for a bulb. I can do the math (2000 hours divided by # of movies etc), but I suspect there might be other factors involved.
4. How good do DVDs actually look on a $2000 projector? Are there any hidden costs to be aware of? Such as separate scalers etc?
Re:I STILL don't see the point of HDTV (yet)
on
I STILL Want My HDTV
·
· Score: 2
> Personally, I don't like the RPTV's that much. They're usually darker, and I don't think they > view as well at angles.
I used to think the same way. I especially hate the burst of brightness in the center of the screen that shifts along as you move your head up and down. But HD sets do look much better than older analog RPTVs, plus in reality, once you sit down and watch, you're not moving around much anymore, and the shifting brightness isn't really an issue. Moving side-to-side isn't a problem with most sets.
> But if you're going to go over about 36-40 inches, that's pretty much the only thing short > of flat panel.
That's the thing. Once you decide that you'd like a more panoramic TV, rear (and front) projection is the only affordable option. Plasma is way too expensive, has lower pixel counts, and from what I hear, has serious burn-in issues. I've considered front projection, but I hear that ambient lighting can seriously affect the picture (and my wife loves to multi-task while watching), plus the cost of replacement lamps scares me. OTOH, front projectors are MUCH more portable.
Re:I STILL don't see the point of HDTV (yet)
on
I STILL Want My HDTV
·
· Score: 2
> If you're in the market for a higher-end set, it does make sense to consider HDTV instead
That's what I've been through just recently. I was set on getting a 36" inch analog TV. When my wife and I walked into BB and looked at the $1100 flat Toshiba set, it looked very nice. But then she saw the equivalent HD set next to it and was blown away by the sharpness (despite hardly being adjusted). So now she wanted a HD set. Well, the Toshiba model was $1899, plus it is 4:3, plus it weighs a ton, plus 36" isn't all that big for that money. Once you spend close to $2000, you might as well consider RPTVs, which will have considerably larger screens for the same money, be 16:9, and weigh comparatively less (or at least be on castors). So now I'm looking at a 55" Sharp set for $1999. The thing is, once you start considering trade-offs and value for money, it's easy to walk up the price scale and keep justifying it, so I had to put a hard limit at 2 grand. It's only a TV, after all. Still, after you watch a Bond DVD from 8-10 feet on a 55" in HD, going back to small(er) analog can be very, very painful (to you and the disc:-).
Re:I STILL don't see the point of HDTV (yet)
on
I STILL Want My HDTV
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
> When a set + decoder costs over $2k (and up, as opposed to conventional TV sets being well under > $500 for a nice one)
Define nice. For under $500 you get a bulbous 32" set at best. If you want one of the newer flat (or even at least nearly flat) sets in the 32" to 36" category, it will cost you more than $1000. OTOH, once you get to 36" with an analog set, the low resolution of NTSC becomes REALLY apparent, especially with letterboxed DVDs.
So basically, once you're spending $1200 on an analog set, you might at well spend $1500-$2000 on an HDTV RPTV (check out the Panasonic PT47WX49, you can find it as low as $1500 online, currently $1799 at BB). In my opinion, at that price point an HDTV-ready set is worth it even just for the improved quality and wide aspect ratio of DVDs. In fact, at the moment I would say that the real appeal of HDTV sets lies in playback of DVDs rather than true HD programming, which is still pretty scarce (and expensive to record).
> Making one the size of a windshield has got to be prohibitely expensive, though...
Right, and that's the whole point of this research. How to essentially "bake" a sapphire of any size and shape (relatively cheaply, I would also assume).
Slashdot Mirror
That's what I also wanted to know--what's the ringer equivalence of the ATA-186? If it's 3 or higher, you should be able to hook up your entire home phoneline to the ATA-186 and service all your phones (provided they're all/mostly electronic and have a low RE).
SS transmissions still use discrete frequencies at any one point in time as they hop around the spectrum. Since SETI monitors wide portions of the spectrum simultaneously, you would actually be able to observe the hopping in real time as the different frequency bands become active with non-random signals. No matter what method of SS transmission you use, as soon as you send non-random data, this will be detectable at any frequency point of the used spectrum. Unless of course your objective is to not be observed and you hide your data in white noise (using steganographic techniques).
> C'mon, that's a seperable prefix verb if I ever saw one!
Not in German, since slash and dot by themselves have no German meaning. Even in English, a site doesn't get dotted in a slash sort of way, it gets slashdotted.
> Mein Gott! Unsere Site ist Slashdotted!! gewesen!
That be "Unsere Site ist geslashdottet worden!"
That's ok, it's just an indication of what HE does with P2P. If the only thing you do with apple pie is you-know-what, you might indeed find it hard to believe that some people actually just eat it.
> When I left Germany six years ago, there were still automated photoradar systems
I believe the original poster meant radar detectors as in "detectors of radar", those little black boxes on your dash that beep when they detect radar frequencies.
> BTW, what does AAMOF stand for
:-}
I made it stand for As A Matter Of Fact
> Hell, we still can't use radar retectors in some states
Hold your horses, cowboy. Just because you (might!) be allowed to intercept WEP traffic doesn't mean you can use radar detectors in Germany. In fact, you can't! You'll get a good spanking for that--in most of Europe, AAMOF.
> Is that "Chips and Dips" in German?
No, it's "dataprotection" and "datasecurity". Once you grasp (say, in the second or third class of German 101) that those apparently endlessly long German words are actually compound nouns composed of multiple simpler nouns--rather than atomic words that you can look up in a dictionary--their apparent length ceases to be all that amusing.
> the regulations came about to prevent a local market from losing advertising revenue to a
> remote market
So what this amounts to is a federally mandated right to a captive advertising audience. The traffic analogy to this would be that I'm only allowed to drive my car on major roads and highways that expose me to billboard advertising. Using smaller side roads without billboards would mean that the billboard advertisers are losing me as an ad target and should thus be illegal.
They have (had?) lots of those in Paris. When I visited one time in 1987, one of my cousins got stuck in one when the cleaning cycle started--I guess he opened the door and closed it again without exiting and the occupancy sensor malfunctioned. In any case, we outside had a much bigger laugh than he did inside.
> He said his dad bought the card to go with a laptop, which would definitely put it in the $100 - $150 range.
Not at all: $55 on sale, even regularly it was only $70. Of course, you can over-spend on anything if you choose the right brands (e.g. Belkin cables at most retailers: $40 for a 1394 cable? No problem!).
$115? I sure hope the camera was included in that. Generic 1394 cards can be had for under $30 (check NewEgg), and they're certainly not worth any more than that. They all use one of a couple of chipsets. Adding 1394 support to a PC is essentially a no-cost matter.
The i-Buddie is a joke, primarily considering the target prices. If its main selling point is that it does away with "expensive" batteries by requiring mains power, and uses cheaper desktop components, where exactly is the savings? The mentioned prices are as high as regular notebooks with true portability.
> I can only imagine dificulties of explaining this to average police officer, let along Joe Average. ;)
What's there to explain (unless I'm misunderstanding your question)? The police officer sticks your ID card in one reader slot, his ID badge in the other, and asks you to put your thumb on a fingerprint reader. The system grabs his credentials from his ID card, the encrypted fingerprint from your card, the unencrypted fingerprint from your thumb, and submits all three to a remote system via a secure transaction for verification. The response is a match/no match (or a confidence level or whatever), or an exception if the officer's credentials are invalid. All the officer has to understand is how to stick two cards into two slots and how to motivate you to stick your thumb on the reader.
This is just one possible scenario. The point is that all the extra technology involved doesn't necessarily have to unduly complicate procedures for the participants. It's a matter of coming up with a standardized infrastructure and a set of laws (criminalizing persistent storage of private keys by verifiers, for example) governing its use. It also doesn't mean that personal privacy has to be reduced. In fact, such technology could have the potential to enhance personal privacy and anonymity, since information that normally would be collected by humans (e.g. law enforcement officers) on pieces of paper or even just using their memory, and could thus easily be abused, is now beeing transferred between devices with the capacity to securely discard no longer needed information.
I believe he's talking just about the mobo, which can actually be had for even less (e.g. $115.95). Getting the complete barebones system for $150 would indeed be a steal.
> there is little physical difficulty aside from obtaining the necessary private keys
Well, you're making it sound like a walk in the park. That's the whole crux of the matter: you can't get to the data if you can't break the keys. And breaking the keys has conveniently been designed to be hard. Besides, there are other possibilities to foil surreptitious attacks on a card: upon x numbers of unsuccessful attempts to decrypt card information, it could self-destruct in some fashion (burn some critical fuses, erase the entire flash, etc). Some decent heuristics could be designed and refined over time to detect attacks on the card.
> When you say the government will hold your private key, well, I'm not convinced that's much
> better than wearing it on a t-shirt.
The government wouldn't have to hold your private keys at all (of course, the fact that they DO want to hold them is another matter). Pertinent information on the card would be encrypted with the public key of the legal authority in question: fingerprints with the fingerprinting public key of the DOJ, account information with the public key of your bank, etc. Plus, you could have successive rings of increasing authority: fingerprints might be accessible to any police station, while your criminal record might require more restrictive private keys which not every station would have access to.
Of course, law enforcement could then simply be cavalier with their private key governing fingerprint access, allowing third parties to become privy to it through negligence. This could be discouraged by introducing a system of checks and balances or disincentives, such as maybe requiring them to use that same key to encrypt some of their own sensitive data. Plus, there would be a procedural system in place to cope with compromised keys: once a key has been deemed compromised, citizens would have to have their cards updated with new keys (maybe at a local post office, police station, etc). There are plenty of such procedures in place today already (yearly license plate renewal, driver's license renewal etc).
Let's face it, advancing technology is a give-and-take thing: while providing many advantages that the "old ways" didn't, more often than not it complicates life even more. It's just a matter of accepting this and working hard(er) at the solutions.
> What "safeguards" could you possibly put into place here? If data is available via the card,
> it's available.
I suggest you inform yourself more about PKI technologies. If your argument is that PKI is insecure, fine, that's another story. But you seem to be simply implying that there's no (theoretical) way to protect information on a card conditionally, which is plain wrong. The fingerprint could be signed with a private key that only a certain government agency holds, and access to which requires search-warrant-type authorization by law inforcement. Furthermore, this access could be on a one-time basis, using some mechanism that ensures that law enforcement cannot store this key for future unauthorized use.
Of course, all these musing merely indicate technical possibilities. In order to be legally, ethically and morally viable, they will require a whole slew of new laws and regulations to dictate their proper use. Yes, governments have proved time and again that they can (and do) screw up such things, but in the end there's no way around it. New technology does happen, and it does get adopted, so the sooner we embrace that fact and start thinking about its ramifications (legal and otherwise), the better. Historical analogies abound, just look at the wiretapping laws. Can you still illegally wiretap? Sure, but the disincentives are strong enough that it's hardly a severe problem.
I've glanced at the article, and it seems like a lot of hot air: lots and LOTS of background and diagrams on LED technology, but relatively little detail on how LEDs could betray the data stream in current, modern equipment. Most current data transmissions around a PC occur in heavily encoded form (usually amplitude AND phase modulation). So there is no cable (other than the serial port cable) that you could just splice an LED into and simply read the data stream out. You would have to inject the LED somewhere into the device electronics where the data stream bits are flowing in decoded, truly serial fashion. Why bother, if from a firmware perspective it's much easier to toggle an LED control bit on at the start of a logical data group (packet or whatever), and off when you're done processing it?
There are a number of projectors available for under $2000, and while not HD, they should be fine for DVDs and DirecTV. I have seriously been considering a projector instead of an RPTV, but I've got a few questions:
1. How trouble-free are they in general? Considering an LCD projector is pretty solid state, are they fairly rugged? I've been considering putting it to dual-use as a presentation projector for my wife. She does occasional workshops and would love to be able to do PPT presentations from her notebook. In that case spending 2 grand might be more palatable to her.
2. Can you get by with a cheapo slide screen or such, or do you really need an expensive home theater screen? Reading avsforum and hometheaterspot you'd think you do, but then "experts" tend to get carried away with purism.
3. In real life, how much life can I expect from a bulb for mainly weekend viewing of 2-4 DVDs? Can you get 2-3 years out of it? In that case, $400 might not be so bad for a bulb. I can do the math (2000 hours divided by # of movies etc), but I suspect there might be other factors involved.
4. How good do DVDs actually look on a $2000 projector? Are there any hidden costs to be aware of? Such as separate scalers etc?
> Personally, I don't like the RPTV's that much. They're usually darker, and I don't think they
> view as well at angles.
I used to think the same way. I especially hate the burst of brightness in the center of the screen that shifts along as you move your head up and down. But HD sets do look much better than older analog RPTVs, plus in reality, once you sit down and watch, you're not moving around much anymore, and the shifting brightness isn't really an issue. Moving side-to-side isn't a problem with most sets.
> But if you're going to go over about 36-40 inches, that's pretty much the only thing short
> of flat panel.
That's the thing. Once you decide that you'd like a more panoramic TV, rear (and front) projection is the only affordable option. Plasma is way too expensive, has lower pixel counts, and from what I hear, has serious burn-in issues. I've considered front projection, but I hear that ambient lighting can seriously affect the picture (and my wife loves to multi-task while watching), plus the cost of replacement lamps scares me. OTOH, front projectors are MUCH more portable.
> If you're in the market for a higher-end set, it does make sense to consider HDTV instead
:-).
That's what I've been through just recently. I was set on getting a 36" inch analog TV. When my wife and I walked into BB and looked at the $1100 flat Toshiba set, it looked very nice. But then she saw the equivalent HD set next to it and was blown away by the sharpness (despite hardly being adjusted). So now she wanted a HD set. Well, the Toshiba model was $1899, plus it is 4:3, plus it weighs a ton, plus 36" isn't all that big for that money. Once you spend close to $2000, you might as well consider RPTVs, which will have considerably larger screens for the same money, be 16:9, and weigh comparatively less (or at least be on castors). So now I'm looking at a 55" Sharp set for $1999. The thing is, once you start considering trade-offs and value for money, it's easy to walk up the price scale and keep justifying it, so I had to put a hard limit at 2 grand. It's only a TV, after all. Still, after you watch a Bond DVD from 8-10 feet on a 55" in HD, going back to small(er) analog can be very, very painful (to you and the disc
> When a set + decoder costs over $2k (and up, as opposed to conventional TV sets being well under
> $500 for a nice one)
Define nice. For under $500 you get a bulbous 32" set at best. If you want one of the newer flat (or even at least nearly flat) sets in the 32" to 36" category, it will cost you more than $1000. OTOH, once you get to 36" with an analog set, the low resolution of NTSC becomes REALLY apparent, especially with letterboxed DVDs.
So basically, once you're spending $1200 on an analog set, you might at well spend $1500-$2000 on an HDTV RPTV (check out the Panasonic PT47WX49, you can find it as low as $1500 online, currently $1799 at BB). In my opinion, at that price point an HDTV-ready set is worth it even just for the improved quality and wide aspect ratio of DVDs. In fact, at the moment I would say that the real appeal of HDTV sets lies in playback of DVDs rather than true HD programming, which is still pretty scarce (and expensive to record).
> Making one the size of a windshield has got to be prohibitely expensive, though...
Right, and that's the whole point of this research. How to essentially "bake" a sapphire of any size and shape (relatively cheaply, I would also assume).
> The piece of sapphire crystal on my watch is perfectly transparent...
Except you can't buy it in the shape of your car's windshield.