In this video, the researcher is looking at debug logs from the phone itself, not network traffic logs showing remote communication. He clearly shows that keystrokes and URLs are being passed to the IQ software running on the phone, but presents no evidence that the data is actually sent to anything outside of the phone.
Has anyone determined what the IQ software does with all this information besides writing it to the debug logger? Is it actually sent somewhere, or saved to persistent storage on the phone? (I'm no Android expert, but I'm under the impression that debug messages are discarded when there's no debugger attached.)
Having this software running in the background is sneaky and certainly makes spying more possible than it would be otherwise, but it's not necessarily the huge immediate privacy violation that everyone seems to be assuming it is.
The article's suggestion of address hashes is kinda bogus, and especially dangerous if the hashed addresses are known to be customers. Assuming a spammer/phisher already has eleventy billion addresses, this is a hash collision attack. All the spammer has to do is hash their list and look for matches. Instant customer list.
That's the intended usage of the list of hashes: for each address that the marketer already has, they can determine whether it's the address of an existing customer so they can exclude it from the ad campaign. No technological measures can avoid the fact that if you want an advertiser to exclude your customers from an ad campaign, you have to give them a way to determine who your customers are. Only trust (and trustworthiness) can resolve that.
But hashing the list would at least prevent the marketer from learning new addresses that they didn't already know about, so it's better than giving them the raw list.
I don't know how timing is normally done for auto races, but I've been part of the staff at a few track & field events, such as the Nike Indoor Nationals, and seen how the timing is done there. There's a special camera that captures a single column of pixels, carefully aligned with the finish line, that records a rapid sequence of images whenever something changes in its field of view. The software assembles all these one-pixel-wide images into a single image whose horizontal axis is time rather than space. You can clearly see each runner, though arms and legs often look a little curved since they're moving as they pass through the plane of the finish line. In particular, the ID number tags worn by each runner are clearly visible.
Recognition isn't automatic, but it doesn't need to be. The operator just clicks on the front of each runner's shoulder (the part that "counts" for finishing the race) and reads the number from the runner's ID tag, and the time value associated with that column of pixels is recorded as that runner's finish time. So there's a human delay involved in matching the time measurements to the runners, but no human delay in the measurements themselves.
The company that did the timing at the races where I worked was CFPI Timing, and the tech page on their website has lots of details. Apparently the camera system I described is made by FinishLynx.
3D at the movies use polarized light, and each eye gets their usual 24fps. No flickering because there is no "black" in between each frame.
RealD uses polarized light, but through a single projector, running at 144fps, switching "sides" six times per (24fps) film frame. Your eyes see left-right-left-right-left-right for each still picture before moving on to the next.
Since each eye sees black while the other eye is seeing a picture, RealD does flicker. It's 144fps flicker, which most people don't notice, but some people are sensitive enough to be bothered by it.
It's the same song, but performed by different singers. The in-game version was performed by (I think) an a cappella group at Stanford; the album version is performed by Ron Ragin and the Soweto Gospel Choir.
Basically, the artist re-recorded the song with more professional talent. Compare:
Patents protect inventions like McCoy's. Copyrights protect works of creative expression, such as books and music. They're two very different things.
Since a copyright protects only a specific expression (rather than an "idea"), a Tetris-like game shouldn't infringe Tetris copyrights unless the developer copied actual graphics, music, code, etc. from the original Tetris game. A patent on falling-block games, if one existed, would cover Tetris clones, but this isn't an allegation of patent infringement.
Is that true of IMAX as well? I was under the impression that IMAX is still mostly film-based, though it's been a few years since I've actually seen an IMAX projection system. (The Tuttleman IMAX Theater at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia has a big glass wall that lets the public see the projection room with the big reels in the center; I'd be sad if they're no longer present.)
Speaking of IMAX, you mentioned the polarizing filter needing power to sync with the projector. That's true of RealD 3D, which uses a single digital projector alternating between the left and right pictures (three times each) for every frame. Do you know if it's also true of IMAX 3D, or does that use dual projectors to show both pictures at the same time? I've been wondering whether IMAX might be better than RealD for some people who get headaches watching 3D movies, if it avoids the temporal dithering needed when using a single projector.
I assume the "special reflecting screen" is one that doesn't alter the polarization of the light it reflects.
Switching from ext3 to ext4 resolved this for me. Since ext4 allocates files in extents of up to 256MB, deleting even a very large file involves freeing just a handful of extents, rather than a huge number of individual 4k blocks.
Another advantage of ext4 is much faster fsck times on large filesystems — minutes rather than hours.
By the way, do you know what language did they use to program gnome-shell? Javascript.
The JavaScript is the high-level "business logic" that manipulates nodes in a scene graph to move things around on the screen. The actual scene-graph library, Clutter, is written in C and renders via OpenGL.
I think it's a pretty reasonable design decision, actually. High-level behavior in a high-level language that's easy to maintain, lower-level implementation details in efficient compiled native code. It's similar to what browser-based apps like Google Maps do, with Clutter taking the place of the HTML DOM.
DoS is any attack that deliberately prevents people from being able to use the system, without actually damaging the system. Flooding the system with service requests is just one way of doing that. Sending commands to hang everyone's terminal is another.
I can't count the number of times I've heard Starcraft noises in TV shows.
Hey, I heard the Sonic the Hedgehog ring-pickup sound at a convenience store two days ago, as the sound that the barcode scanner makes when it scans an item.
Plain UDF 2.01, the kind you'd use on a hard drive or USB flash drive, is readable in Windows XP (I tested this recently), and is read/write in Vista and Win7. It's also supported in recent versions of OSX.
Unless one needs to support old operating systems, UDF seems like a reasonable choice.
You have to use window manager hacks to get any extra utility from these cards at all on a X11 desktop, where newer versions of Windows and OS X have hardware/GPU accelerated rendering and compositing APIs. Where are those in X11?
By "window manager hacks" you mean switching to a compositing window manager like Compiz, right? What Compiz (or any compositing manager) does is not really very different from what its counterparts in Windows and OS X do. What you're complaining about is the fact that X11 allows a choice of window managers, and not all X11-based desktops use a compositing one yet, as opposed to the Windows and Mac platforms where there's essentially only one window manager available (it's built-in) and it's a compositing one.
As for new APIs, not really. Applications don't have to do anything different to display themselves on a composited desktop instead of a non-composited one. All the work for that is done by one program, the compositing manager, and the X enhancements needed to make its job possible (a new X11 protocol extension and a new GLX extension) were implemented in Xorg several years ago.
At this point, the lack of out-of-the-box compositing on Linux desktops is due mostly to accelerated 3D drivers (for the most common GPUs) not being installed by default for licensing reasons, not some fundamental problem with X.
Since those X11 extensions are hacks onto X11 to enable such exposure, I'd say the GP is right. X11 doesn't expose that kind of stuff.
They're not hacked on, you're just misunderstanding what the word "extension" means in X11 terminology. X11 extensions are named groups of commands that an X server can optionally implement. The core X protocol includes commands for checking what extensions are available, so that applications can use those additional commands when they're supported, or work around the lack of them (or just display an error message) if not.
This is a designed-in extensibility mechanism, not some afterthought kluge. Many "standard" facilities are provided through X11 extensions, such as displaying anti-aliased text (with the RENDER extension, though it can also be done in a slower way if RENDER isn't available), overlay-based video playback (with the XVideo extension), changing screen resolutions (RANDR), turning off the monitor to save power when idle (DPMS), and OpenGL (GLX).
OpenGL, by the way, has a similar extension mechanism, and that's what allowed it to support new GPU features (such as multitexturing and pixel shaders) as they were developed, without requiring a whole new version of the core OpenGL spec.
Desktop compositing in X11 is done by asking the X server to give each window an offscreen area of video memory to draw itself into, rather than drawing directly on the screen, and then asking the OpenGL implementation to make these offscreen areas accessible as OpenGL textures. The compositing manager paints the windows onto the screen by putting these textures on rectangles, applying whatever visual effects it wants to display (like the Compiz cube), using normal OpenGL drawing operations. The command to make the X server redirect window drawing to offscreen pixmaps is provided by the COMPOSITE extension, and exposing those pixmaps as OpenGL textures is done with a GLX command, GLX_EXT_texture_from_pixmap.
I've used Compiz and Beryl, they both crash regularly and slow my laptop significantly (a couple years old, but runs Vista just fine). Gnome-Shell looks ok, but it isn't exactly out yet (you can get a preview from live.gnome.org) so it's hard to compare it.
If Compiz is unstable, that's an application bug that doesn't really have anything to do with the design of X11. The compositor in Metacity (the GNOME window manager) is pretty stable (I've been using it for several years), and its scenegraph-based successor (called Mutter) is the foundation for Gnome-Shell.
Americans won't stand for it. They want to know NOW damnit, not tomorrow.
I don't think the American public would really be all that upset if the election results didn't come in until the next morning. I suspect it's actually the news media that wants the results ASAP, in order to get everyone watching the election day evening news so that they can charge more for ad space.
That much? I bought one at an anime convention about a year ago -- original Japanese Super Famicom cartridge with box, manual, and holographic cards -- and I don't think I paid more than $30 for it.
The X server and your application are running in different processes, so communication between them can't be done with function calls. But for clients running locally, pipes haven't been used in a long time -- Xorg uses shared memory for transferring messages efficiently between the client and the server.
The "basic set of menu-bar, scrollbar, list, tabs etc." are provided by toolkits such as GTK and Qt, which are used by most modern applications. These work fine already; building a toolkit into the X server itself wouldn't bring any benefit, and would just complicate the protocol.
Cut-and-paste and drag-and-drop work fine for me in GNOME, and I believe they work well in KDE too. The toolkits provide this functionality to applications for free.
Windows can resolve names using a legacy protocol called NetBIOS, which remains in use only because Windows still uses it for file and printer sharing. NetBIOS is pretty old (1983), doesn't really fit into the standard Internet protocol stack, and these days is basically a Microsoft-specific protocol in terms of how and why it's used. I'd rather not use NetBIOS if I can avoid it.
Bonjour, on the other hand, uses Multicast DNS, which is developed by the IETF and is a clean extension of the standard Internet naming architecture (that is, DNS) to support serverless operation on a LAN. This is a much better way of doing things, since it uses an existing well-understood and widely-supported protocol, rather than doing everything in a completely different way like NetBIOS does.
Apple supports Multicast DNS out-of-the-box on OSX with Bonjour, and current Linux distributions support it out-of-the-box with a similar program called Avahi. Networked appliances like printers are already supporting it too. Windows, unfortunately, is late to the party, lacking any out-of-the-box support for Multicast DNS, even in Vista. In the interest of not having to install additional software (namely Samba) on everything else just to cater to Windows' needs, and to keep the ugly legacy NetBIOS protocol off my network, I install Bonjour for Windows instead.
Of course you can uncheck the unwanted apps before continuing, and that's what I do, but the point is that it shouldn't be necessary. People expect an update to replace software that's already installed on the system; it should not, by default, also install other unrelated things that many users don't actually want.
As for "how can anyone not notice when you don't have Safari and something involving Safari pops up on the screen", I'd wager most Windows users don't even know what Safari is, and have no way to asses whether it's something they want or not. Many won't even recognize it as a new installation, or that the default setting is not necessarily what they want; they'll assume that they need it, because it's checked by default in an update window, and accept it.
This happens with Bonjour too. If you install Bonjour for Windows (something that ought to be installed on every Windows box, IMO), you'll be offered iTunes and QuickTime as "updates" later.
Calling installation of a new unrelated application an "update" is pretty underhanded.
I didn't play Ico until after I'd played Sands of Time, and at face value it seems like essentially a precursor to Sands of Time with graphics that aren't quite as nice. It has more depth to it, though much of it is left unexplained -- I wanted to know more about the backstory, like why that castle was there and how the tradition of sacrificing horned children there came about.
Another poster commented on the use of light and shadow in Ico, and that's something I found very interesting as well. It's not just the artwork, but the environment and the characters too: the Queen and her minions are shadowy and evil, but the gates of the castle are operated by giant beams of sunlight, and Yorda practically glows. I feel like there must be there some significance to that, but it's left a mystery by the game; I have to settle for my own speculation.
BTW, Yorda isn't mute: she does speak a few times during the game. She just doesn't talk much because she and Ico don't understand each other's language. (The Japanese version has an option to make her words understandable on the second play-through, but that feature didn't make it into the US and European releases. You can find her translated dialogue on the web though.)
Slashdot Mirror
Software creator's good name is tarnished because people installed their software and got malware as a result. Not good.
People get malware, period. Also not good.
In this video, the researcher is looking at debug logs from the phone itself, not network traffic logs showing remote communication. He clearly shows that keystrokes and URLs are being passed to the IQ software running on the phone, but presents no evidence that the data is actually sent to anything outside of the phone.
Has anyone determined what the IQ software does with all this information besides writing it to the debug logger? Is it actually sent somewhere, or saved to persistent storage on the phone? (I'm no Android expert, but I'm under the impression that debug messages are discarded when there's no debugger attached.)
Having this software running in the background is sneaky and certainly makes spying more possible than it would be otherwise, but it's not necessarily the huge immediate privacy violation that everyone seems to be assuming it is.
That's the intended usage of the list of hashes: for each address that the marketer already has, they can determine whether it's the address of an existing customer so they can exclude it from the ad campaign. No technological measures can avoid the fact that if you want an advertiser to exclude your customers from an ad campaign, you have to give them a way to determine who your customers are. Only trust (and trustworthiness) can resolve that.
But hashing the list would at least prevent the marketer from learning new addresses that they didn't already know about, so it's better than giving them the raw list.
I don't know how timing is normally done for auto races, but I've been part of the staff at a few track & field events, such as the Nike Indoor Nationals, and seen how the timing is done there. There's a special camera that captures a single column of pixels, carefully aligned with the finish line, that records a rapid sequence of images whenever something changes in its field of view. The software assembles all these one-pixel-wide images into a single image whose horizontal axis is time rather than space. You can clearly see each runner, though arms and legs often look a little curved since they're moving as they pass through the plane of the finish line. In particular, the ID number tags worn by each runner are clearly visible.
Recognition isn't automatic, but it doesn't need to be. The operator just clicks on the front of each runner's shoulder (the part that "counts" for finishing the race) and reads the number from the runner's ID tag, and the time value associated with that column of pixels is recorded as that runner's finish time. So there's a human delay involved in matching the time measurements to the runners, but no human delay in the measurements themselves.
The company that did the timing at the races where I worked was CFPI Timing, and the tech page on their website has lots of details. Apparently the camera system I described is made by FinishLynx.
RealD uses polarized light, but through a single projector, running at 144fps, switching "sides" six times per (24fps) film frame. Your eyes see left-right-left-right-left-right for each still picture before moving on to the next.
Since each eye sees black while the other eye is seeing a picture, RealD does flicker. It's 144fps flicker, which most people don't notice, but some people are sensitive enough to be bothered by it.
It's the same song, but performed by different singers. The in-game version was performed by (I think) an a cappella group at Stanford; the album version is performed by Ron Ragin and the Soweto Gospel Choir.
Basically, the artist re-recorded the song with more professional talent. Compare:
Patents protect inventions like McCoy's. Copyrights protect works of creative expression, such as books and music. They're two very different things.
Since a copyright protects only a specific expression (rather than an "idea"), a Tetris-like game shouldn't infringe Tetris copyrights unless the developer copied actual graphics, music, code, etc. from the original Tetris game. A patent on falling-block games, if one existed, would cover Tetris clones, but this isn't an allegation of patent infringement.
The GP is a reference to powerplants in SimCity, not in the real world.
Is that true of IMAX as well? I was under the impression that IMAX is still mostly film-based, though it's been a few years since I've actually seen an IMAX projection system. (The Tuttleman IMAX Theater at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia has a big glass wall that lets the public see the projection room with the big reels in the center; I'd be sad if they're no longer present.)
Speaking of IMAX, you mentioned the polarizing filter needing power to sync with the projector. That's true of RealD 3D, which uses a single digital projector alternating between the left and right pictures (three times each) for every frame. Do you know if it's also true of IMAX 3D, or does that use dual projectors to show both pictures at the same time? I've been wondering whether IMAX might be better than RealD for some people who get headaches watching 3D movies, if it avoids the temporal dithering needed when using a single projector.
I assume the "special reflecting screen" is one that doesn't alter the polarization of the light it reflects.
Switching from ext3 to ext4 resolved this for me. Since ext4 allocates files in extents of up to 256MB, deleting even a very large file involves freeing just a handful of extents, rather than a huge number of individual 4k blocks.
Another advantage of ext4 is much faster fsck times on large filesystems — minutes rather than hours.
By the way, do you know what language did they use to program gnome-shell? Javascript.
The JavaScript is the high-level "business logic" that manipulates nodes in a scene graph to move things around on the screen. The actual scene-graph library, Clutter, is written in C and renders via OpenGL.
I think it's a pretty reasonable design decision, actually. High-level behavior in a high-level language that's easy to maintain, lower-level implementation details in efficient compiled native code. It's similar to what browser-based apps like Google Maps do, with Clutter taking the place of the HTML DOM.
DoS is any attack that deliberately prevents people from being able to use the system, without actually damaging the system. Flooding the system with service requests is just one way of doing that. Sending commands to hang everyone's terminal is another.
I can't count the number of times I've heard Starcraft noises in TV shows.
Hey, I heard the Sonic the Hedgehog ring-pickup sound at a convenience store two days ago, as the sound that the barcode scanner makes when it scans an item.
Plain UDF 2.01, the kind you'd use on a hard drive or USB flash drive, is readable in Windows XP (I tested this recently), and is read/write in Vista and Win7. It's also supported in recent versions of OSX. Unless one needs to support old operating systems, UDF seems like a reasonable choice.
You have to use window manager hacks to get any extra utility from these cards at all on a X11 desktop, where newer versions of Windows and OS X have hardware/GPU accelerated rendering and compositing APIs. Where are those in X11?
By "window manager hacks" you mean switching to a compositing window manager like Compiz, right? What Compiz (or any compositing manager) does is not really very different from what its counterparts in Windows and OS X do. What you're complaining about is the fact that X11 allows a choice of window managers, and not all X11-based desktops use a compositing one yet, as opposed to the Windows and Mac platforms where there's essentially only one window manager available (it's built-in) and it's a compositing one.
As for new APIs, not really. Applications don't have to do anything different to display themselves on a composited desktop instead of a non-composited one. All the work for that is done by one program, the compositing manager, and the X enhancements needed to make its job possible (a new X11 protocol extension and a new GLX extension) were implemented in Xorg several years ago.
At this point, the lack of out-of-the-box compositing on Linux desktops is due mostly to accelerated 3D drivers (for the most common GPUs) not being installed by default for licensing reasons, not some fundamental problem with X.
Since those X11 extensions are hacks onto X11 to enable such exposure, I'd say the GP is right. X11 doesn't expose that kind of stuff.
They're not hacked on, you're just misunderstanding what the word "extension" means in X11 terminology. X11 extensions are named groups of commands that an X server can optionally implement. The core X protocol includes commands for checking what extensions are available, so that applications can use those additional commands when they're supported, or work around the lack of them (or just display an error message) if not.
This is a designed-in extensibility mechanism, not some afterthought kluge. Many "standard" facilities are provided through X11 extensions, such as displaying anti-aliased text (with the RENDER extension, though it can also be done in a slower way if RENDER isn't available), overlay-based video playback (with the XVideo extension), changing screen resolutions (RANDR), turning off the monitor to save power when idle (DPMS), and OpenGL (GLX).
OpenGL, by the way, has a similar extension mechanism, and that's what allowed it to support new GPU features (such as multitexturing and pixel shaders) as they were developed, without requiring a whole new version of the core OpenGL spec.
Desktop compositing in X11 is done by asking the X server to give each window an offscreen area of video memory to draw itself into, rather than drawing directly on the screen, and then asking the OpenGL implementation to make these offscreen areas accessible as OpenGL textures. The compositing manager paints the windows onto the screen by putting these textures on rectangles, applying whatever visual effects it wants to display (like the Compiz cube), using normal OpenGL drawing operations. The command to make the X server redirect window drawing to offscreen pixmaps is provided by the COMPOSITE extension, and exposing those pixmaps as OpenGL textures is done with a GLX command, GLX_EXT_texture_from_pixmap.
I've used Compiz and Beryl, they both crash regularly and slow my laptop significantly (a couple years old, but runs Vista just fine). Gnome-Shell looks ok, but it isn't exactly out yet (you can get a preview from live.gnome.org) so it's hard to compare it.
If Compiz is unstable, that's an application bug that doesn't really have anything to do with the design of X11. The compositor in Metacity (the GNOME window manager) is pretty stable (I've been using it for several years), and its scenegraph-based successor (called Mutter) is the foundation for Gnome-Shell.
I don't think the American public would really be all that upset if the election results didn't come in until the next morning. I suspect it's actually the news media that wants the results ASAP, in order to get everyone watching the election day evening news so that they can charge more for ad space.
That much? I bought one at an anime convention about a year ago -- original Japanese Super Famicom cartridge with box, manual, and holographic cards -- and I don't think I paid more than $30 for it.
When were U.S. citizens given rights to privacy over a public infrastructure such as phone lines
Katz vs. United States, which established that private telephone calls are protected by the Fourth Amendment.
The X server and your application are running in different processes, so communication between them can't be done with function calls. But for clients running locally, pipes haven't been used in a long time -- Xorg uses shared memory for transferring messages efficiently between the client and the server.
The "basic set of menu-bar, scrollbar, list, tabs etc." are provided by toolkits such as GTK and Qt, which are used by most modern applications. These work fine already; building a toolkit into the X server itself wouldn't bring any benefit, and would just complicate the protocol.
Cut-and-paste and drag-and-drop work fine for me in GNOME, and I believe they work well in KDE too. The toolkits provide this functionality to applications for free.
Windows can resolve names using a legacy protocol called NetBIOS, which remains in use only because Windows still uses it for file and printer sharing. NetBIOS is pretty old (1983), doesn't really fit into the standard Internet protocol stack, and these days is basically a Microsoft-specific protocol in terms of how and why it's used. I'd rather not use NetBIOS if I can avoid it.
Bonjour, on the other hand, uses Multicast DNS, which is developed by the IETF and is a clean extension of the standard Internet naming architecture (that is, DNS) to support serverless operation on a LAN. This is a much better way of doing things, since it uses an existing well-understood and widely-supported protocol, rather than doing everything in a completely different way like NetBIOS does.
Apple supports Multicast DNS out-of-the-box on OSX with Bonjour, and current Linux distributions support it out-of-the-box with a similar program called Avahi. Networked appliances like printers are already supporting it too. Windows, unfortunately, is late to the party, lacking any out-of-the-box support for Multicast DNS, even in Vista. In the interest of not having to install additional software (namely Samba) on everything else just to cater to Windows' needs, and to keep the ugly legacy NetBIOS protocol off my network, I install Bonjour for Windows instead.
Of course you can uncheck the unwanted apps before continuing, and that's what I do, but the point is that it shouldn't be necessary. People expect an update to replace software that's already installed on the system; it should not, by default, also install other unrelated things that many users don't actually want.
As for "how can anyone not notice when you don't have Safari and something involving Safari pops up on the screen", I'd wager most Windows users don't even know what Safari is, and have no way to asses whether it's something they want or not. Many won't even recognize it as a new installation, or that the default setting is not necessarily what they want; they'll assume that they need it, because it's checked by default in an update window, and accept it.
Bonjour for Windows isn't bad. It's useful (lets you resolve "hostname.local" names on the LAN) and doesn't take over other stuff on your system.
It does (by default) install Apple Software Update, though, which will later offer you iTunes, QuickTime, and (apparently now) Safari as "updates".
This happens with Bonjour too. If you install Bonjour for Windows (something that ought to be installed on every Windows box, IMO), you'll be offered iTunes and QuickTime as "updates" later.
Calling installation of a new unrelated application an "update" is pretty underhanded.
I didn't play Ico until after I'd played Sands of Time, and at face value it seems like essentially a precursor to Sands of Time with graphics that aren't quite as nice. It has more depth to it, though much of it is left unexplained -- I wanted to know more about the backstory, like why that castle was there and how the tradition of sacrificing horned children there came about.
Another poster commented on the use of light and shadow in Ico, and that's something I found very interesting as well. It's not just the artwork, but the environment and the characters too: the Queen and her minions are shadowy and evil, but the gates of the castle are operated by giant beams of sunlight, and Yorda practically glows. I feel like there must be there some significance to that, but it's left a mystery by the game; I have to settle for my own speculation.
BTW, Yorda isn't mute: she does speak a few times during the game. She just doesn't talk much because she and Ico don't understand each other's language. (The Japanese version has an option to make her words understandable on the second play-through, but that feature didn't make it into the US and European releases. You can find her translated dialogue on the web though.)