Any web browser will warn strongly that the certificate is not issued by a trusted organization, but you said you don't need to prove your identity, so this should perfectly suit your needs.
You do realize that if you can't prove your identity, your clients are vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks, right? How's the browser to know if it's your server they're talking to, or to someone else who signed their own cert and is impersonating you (and proxying its transactions to you, logging or modifying them along the way)? Authority signed certificates give you this ability. Self-signed certificates do not provide complete transport-layer security.
This is not to say that the signing authority can't be free. It's about time someone did it.
Re:Info on what exactly SHA-1 is ...
on
SHA-1 Broken
·
· Score: 1
Thanks for the correction. I think I have my SHA-1 and DES stories mixed.
Re:Info on what exactly SHA-1 is ...
on
SHA-1 Broken
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
So SHA-1 was created by the NSA, and was broken nine years after it was released. Is there any chance that the NSA knew it had a secret weakness, and promoted it for that specific reason?
I don't know about this, but when SHA (the Secure Hash Algorithm) was submitted as an approved algorithm for government use, the NSA reviewed it and suggested a minor change. That modified algorithm is what we now know as SHA-1. It was a few years before public-sector cryptographers caught on to what the significance of the changes was (I wish I could explain it, but it is beyond me).
Wouldn't it be possible to write a script that reads the DVD bit by bit and places those same bits in the same order on a blank DVD? Since we are talking about digital media, isn't a bit-by-bit copy the same as the original?
Basically, no. CDs and DVDs have several layers of encoding for error correction purposes. The lowest level is 14 to 8 encoding. That is, every 8 bits are stored are 14 bits on the physical medium. Then there is the CIRC (Cross Interleaved Reed-Solomon Code), that is used to perform error correction on data sectors (a 2352 byte sector yields 2048 bytes of actual data). What Macromedia is probably doing is screwing with these values. They put in invalid 14-bit patterns that interact with RS Error Correction Codes, combined with some bad data here in there. Your DVD player, who's primary responsibility is to play at realtime, eats these errors with only minor glitches. Your computer DVD drive, who's primary responsibility is to deliver correct data, barfs on all this garbage and tries to read it again and again.
Even worse, you can't get the 14-bit pattern from your drive without tapping into the laser mechanism. This correction is done at the servo level, and never passed out to the host system (not even on the IIS port). Besides, since the disc contains invalid "bits", you can never get a true bit-for-bit copy.
This article glosses over one point that is very critical. That is, in an embedded system, the hardware is known at compile time, as well as all the details of initializing it. On a desktop PC, the hardware configuration is a mystery everytime you boot. Who knows, maybe the user decided to move their network card to a different PCI slot and now it has a different memory address, add a hard drive, remove a sound card, take out half the RAM. This makes the boot process far more complicated. The BIOS method of dealing with this situation is archaeic and painful to use, but it works. That is, you can boot even the dumbest OS (say, DOS, or that memtest86 iso) without having that PS know anything about the hardware.
Having written a few embedded bootloaders (and modified some others), I will say that booting an embedded device is far far easier than booting a device who's hardware (that is critical to booting) can change between boots.
You seem to be under the impression that there is something wrong with the phrase "curry favor" (perhaps believing that it should be "carry"). It's an English idiom, and while it doesn't literally make sense, it has entered the language and has been in common use for almost a century.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not suggesting that the slashdot editors can spell. But this time, they lucked out.
The BeOS sound subsystem, the Media Server as they call it, is a user-space daemon, not a driver. It is analogous to artsd, the KDE sound daemon (which can crash and restart successfully). The BeOS soundcard driver, similar to ALSA, if crashed would bring the OS down with it.
okay, i'm going to say this once so it's clear to everyone.
fuck the artists. i don't care about them. making money is their problem, not mine.
i care about *me*. i care about: 1) OWNING music that i purchase. moving it anywhere, copying it without restriction, giving it to my friends if i feel like it. never having it expire, not having to pay a subscription service to keep accessing it. 2) convenience and simplicity. when i feel like acquiring a song, i want to download it, now. i don't want to drive to the music store, i don't want to order from amazon and wait for a week. 3) money. i love my money, and i don't want to give it to anyone. i don't want to buy a cd for one song.
so, here are my options: a) buy a cd. satisfies 1. b) filesharing. satisfies 1, 2, 3. however, its fullfillment of 2 is becoming pretty weak. c) itunes and friends. satisfies 2 and 3 (more or less). d) a store that sells clear, high quality mp3s. satisfies 1 and 2. surely not as cheap as (b), but (c) seems to sufficiently meet the requirements of most people when it comes to cost. so i will say it's a weak 3.
out of these, and considering the decreasing convenience of filesharing, option d starts to look pretty damn good.
once again: fuck the artists. i just care myself.
Re:Openvms is downloadable too. Most reliable OS.
on
Solaris 10 Released
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Sure, except that it runs on VAX, Alpha, and IA64 (Itanium), none of which is easy to come by for the layman.
There are no plans to provide a native port of HP OpenVMS for any systems based on [IA32 or] AMD Opteron.
Re:Give DirecTV and Dish a little competition?!?!?
on
XM and Sirius Merger?
·
· Score: 2, Funny
Don't worry. If you look at the slash logos on top, you'll see the logo of Digital Electronics Corporation, and Albert Einstein's head. Now, what do DEC and Einstein have in common, besides being dead? That's right, absolutely nothing. This proves that neither the submitter, nor the slashdot editor, actually has any idea what they're doing. Therefore, this story is probably bullshit. QED.
I presume (though I don't really know) that Solaris needs to be built with Sun's C compiler. Is this compiler coming forth as an open source release too? If not, is it going to be freely available? If I remember correctly, you currently need to pay in order to get Sun's cc.
If it is coming, this is great news. A compiler highly optimized for Sparc may benefit all operating systems that run on it. Who knows, maybe their x86 compiler has some good features too. Sun's libc (probably highly optimized for Sparc) would be a nice thing to have. Anything else?
well, the funny think about the solaris killall command is it doesn't take any arguments. it just kills all processes that you own. in the best case scenario you just killed your login shell (and, y'know, oracle, and anything else you're running at the moment). but if you're root, well, you're going to have to go press the power button on the machine after the init process is killed.
I find some of the incompatibilities scary, like "reboot" and "halt", either had, or still have very different behavior on Solaris then they do on Linux.
Seriously, on Solaris, do NOT try to use the 'killall' command like you would in Linux. Especially if you're root. In fact, don't ever use it at all. I don't even know why it's there. I learned this the hard way, hopefully someone else will learn from my mistake.
Though I find the expectation that the Solaris tools be like Linux a little strange, given that SunOS/Solaris has existed before Linux.
As far as I know, it doesn't use its own format; that's just a journalistic gaffe.
Audible files come in either ".aa" files (Audible's homegrown DRM system) or iTunes DRM. The aa files are wrappers around low bitrate voice codecs (from voiceage, i believe) for formats 1-3, and format 4 is mp3 (32kbps, 22khz).
Are we asking questions just to sound smart?
on
Escape from the Universe
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
The universe is destined to end. Before it does, could an advanced civilisation escape via a "wormhole" into a parallel universe?
No. Anything that is reacheable from our universe is, by definition, part of the universe. The concept of "escape" has no meaning in this context.
If they do send an assassin after him, they'll just end up scarring one of his grandkids, turning him into a masked crime fighter out for revenge on the people that killed his grandfather.
Instead, I suggest trying to kill him with a massive dose of radiation.
I have a phatbox too (Nissan version). When you tell people it uses voice navigation, they automatically assume that you talk to it. But the way it talks to you is really ingenius. You don't need to look down to find the controls, because you already know where they are, and you don't need to read the display, because you hear the titles. Sure, pronounciation is not perfect, but I can figure out what it's saying, and would rather have that than be screaming "B-jork" (*you* you have to be mis-pronouncing it for it to understand what you want) in my loud car with the windows down. I guess that's why Audi and Volkswagen sell Phatboxes, It's a safety thing. Plus, you can't beat true integration with your native stereo.
Well, firmware updating does take care of dissemination of new software once it is created. However, have you ever tried writing new code and debugging it via flash updates? I have (while testing the in-system programming feature of one of our boards). Let me tell you, it is painful. And every time you screw something up that causes the software to fail, you have to wipe and rewrite the flash through a debugging interface. Otherwise, one typo and your camera is toast and you will have to desolder the flash and find a flash programmer, or you're back to your jtag/debugger interface. Is it possible? Yes. Is it a good idea? No. Not exactly the ideal solution to open-sourcing their firmware.
As an embedded systems engineer, I'll tell you why:
1) The firmware is highly hardware dependant. You will not be porting this to any other hardware, you won't use it anywhere else. It is of little use to anyone not using your same PCB. 2) There is proprietary, licensed software included, that cannot be redistributed. Particularly the following: (a) The focus control software (this is the DSP software that figures out when the image is in focus). (b) The CCD filtering software. (c) The OS, if any, may be licensed from a third party. 3) There is no way to interface to these devices without a proprietary hardware device costing possibly thousands of Dollars. For example, a common camera chip is the TI DSC24, which can be reprogrammed via a specific JTAG emulator, and requires TI's Code Composer Studio compiler to develop for the DSP part of it. Even if you had this stuff, you won't find a JTAG header on the production boards. This is not a Tivo hack, the number of people that would be able to actually apply a hack to this device is limited to the people who can solder a JTAG interface, or desolder the flash and reprogram it on a flash programmer. This means that even if one guy in Norway can do something cool with this camera, he can't share it with the world.
Slashdot Mirror
I can handle this problem easily, but would be impressed if you found a computer program that would do the same.
See, this sentence is grammatically correct in two ways, but one of them is not logical.
a computer would likely produce this:
TIME (flies) (as) AN ARROW and FRUIT (flies) (as) A BANANA.
when you really want:
TIME (flies) (as) AN ARROW and FRUIT FLIES (favor) A BANANA
Any web browser will warn strongly that the certificate is not issued by a trusted organization, but you said you don't need to prove your identity, so this should perfectly suit your needs.
You do realize that if you can't prove your identity, your clients are vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks, right? How's the browser to know if it's your server they're talking to, or to someone else who signed their own cert and is impersonating you (and proxying its transactions to you, logging or modifying them along the way)? Authority signed certificates give you this ability. Self-signed certificates do not provide complete transport-layer security.
This is not to say that the signing authority can't be free. It's about time someone did it.
Oh noes, it's EMS versus XMS all over again.
Thanks for the correction. I think I have my SHA-1 and DES stories mixed.
So SHA-1 was created by the NSA, and was broken nine years after it was released. Is there any chance that the NSA knew it had a secret weakness, and promoted it for that specific reason?
I don't know about this, but when SHA (the Secure Hash Algorithm) was submitted as an approved algorithm for government use, the NSA reviewed it and suggested a minor change. That modified algorithm is what we now know as SHA-1. It was a few years before public-sector cryptographers caught on to what the significance of the changes was (I wish I could explain it, but it is beyond me).
Wouldn't it be possible to write a script that reads the DVD bit by bit and places those same bits in the same order on a blank DVD? Since we are talking about digital media, isn't a bit-by-bit copy the same as the original?
Basically, no. CDs and DVDs have several layers of encoding for error correction purposes. The lowest level is 14 to 8 encoding. That is, every 8 bits are stored are 14 bits on the physical medium. Then there is the CIRC (Cross Interleaved Reed-Solomon Code), that is used to perform error correction on data sectors (a 2352 byte sector yields 2048 bytes of actual data). What Macromedia is probably doing is screwing with these values. They put in invalid 14-bit patterns that interact with RS Error Correction Codes, combined with some bad data here in there. Your DVD player, who's primary responsibility is to play at realtime, eats these errors with only minor glitches. Your computer DVD drive, who's primary responsibility is to deliver correct data, barfs on all this garbage and tries to read it again and again.
Even worse, you can't get the 14-bit pattern from your drive without tapping into the laser mechanism. This correction is done at the servo level, and never passed out to the host system (not even on the IIS port). Besides, since the disc contains invalid "bits", you can never get a true bit-for-bit copy.
This article glosses over one point that is very critical. That is, in an embedded system, the hardware is known at compile time, as well as all the details of initializing it. On a desktop PC, the hardware configuration is a mystery everytime you boot. Who knows, maybe the user decided to move their network card to a different PCI slot and now it has a different memory address, add a hard drive, remove a sound card, take out half the RAM. This makes the boot process far more complicated. The BIOS method of dealing with this situation is archaeic and painful to use, but it works. That is, you can boot even the dumbest OS (say, DOS, or that memtest86 iso) without having that PS know anything about the hardware.
Having written a few embedded bootloaders (and modified some others), I will say that booting an embedded device is far far easier than booting a device who's hardware (that is critical to booting) can change between boots.
al lo davar
You seem to be under the impression that there is something wrong with the phrase "curry favor" (perhaps believing that it should be "carry"). It's an English idiom, and while it doesn't literally make sense, it has entered the language and has been in common use for almost a century.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not suggesting that the slashdot editors can spell. But this time, they lucked out.
The BeOS sound subsystem, the Media Server as they call it, is a user-space daemon, not a driver. It is analogous to artsd, the KDE sound daemon (which can crash and restart successfully). The BeOS soundcard driver, similar to ALSA, if crashed would bring the OS down with it.
To me HURD is like, well, like a missed opportunity
I see HURD more like a bad simile.
okay, i'm going to say this once so it's clear to everyone.
fuck the artists. i don't care about them. making money is their problem, not mine.
i care about *me*. i care about:
1) OWNING music that i purchase. moving it anywhere, copying it without restriction, giving it to my friends if i feel like it. never having it expire, not having to pay a subscription service to keep accessing it.
2) convenience and simplicity. when i feel like acquiring a song, i want to download it, now. i don't want to drive to the music store, i don't want to order from amazon and wait for a week.
3) money. i love my money, and i don't want to give it to anyone. i don't want to buy a cd for one song.
so, here are my options:
a) buy a cd. satisfies 1.
b) filesharing. satisfies 1, 2, 3. however, its fullfillment of 2 is becoming pretty weak.
c) itunes and friends. satisfies 2 and 3 (more or less).
d) a store that sells clear, high quality mp3s. satisfies 1 and 2. surely not as cheap as (b), but (c) seems to sufficiently meet the requirements of most people when it comes to cost. so i will say it's a weak 3.
out of these, and considering the decreasing convenience of filesharing, option d starts to look pretty damn good.
once again: fuck the artists. i just care myself.
from their faq
Don't worry.
If you look at the slash logos on top, you'll see the logo of Digital Electronics Corporation, and Albert Einstein's head. Now, what do DEC and Einstein have in common, besides being dead? That's right, absolutely nothing. This proves that neither the submitter, nor the slashdot editor, actually has any idea what they're doing. Therefore, this story is probably bullshit.
QED.
I presume (though I don't really know) that Solaris needs to be built with Sun's C compiler. Is this compiler coming forth as an open source release too? If not, is it going to be freely available? If I remember correctly, you currently need to pay in order to get Sun's cc.
If it is coming, this is great news. A compiler highly optimized for Sparc may benefit all operating systems that run on it. Who knows, maybe their x86 compiler has some good features too. Sun's libc (probably highly optimized for Sparc) would be a nice thing to have. Anything else?
well, the funny think about the solaris killall command is it doesn't take any arguments. it just kills all processes that you own. in the best case scenario you just killed your login shell (and, y'know, oracle, and anything else you're running at the moment). but if you're root, well, you're going to have to go press the power button on the machine after the init process is killed.
holy shit... 300 KB/s in the first second of downloading and rising. it's like a reverse slashdotting.
I find some of the incompatibilities scary, like "reboot" and "halt", either had, or still have very different behavior on Solaris then they do on Linux.
Seriously, on Solaris, do NOT try to use the 'killall' command like you would in Linux. Especially if you're root. In fact, don't ever use it at all. I don't even know why it's there. I learned this the hard way, hopefully someone else will learn from my mistake.
Though I find the expectation that the Solaris tools be like Linux a little strange, given that SunOS/Solaris has existed before Linux.
As far as I know, it doesn't use its own format; that's just a journalistic gaffe.
Audible files come in either ".aa" files (Audible's homegrown DRM system) or iTunes DRM. The aa files are wrappers around low bitrate voice codecs (from voiceage, i believe) for formats 1-3, and format 4 is mp3 (32kbps, 22khz).
The universe is destined to end. Before it does, could an advanced civilisation escape via a "wormhole" into a parallel universe?
No. Anything that is reacheable from our universe is, by definition, part of the universe. The concept of "escape" has no meaning in this context.
Will Marvel hire an assassin to end the lawsuit?
If they do send an assassin after him, they'll just end up scarring one of his grandkids, turning him into a masked crime fighter out for revenge on the people that killed his grandfather.
Instead, I suggest trying to kill him with a massive dose of radiation.
I have a phatbox too (Nissan version). When you tell people it uses voice navigation, they automatically assume that you talk to it. But the way it talks to you is really ingenius. You don't need to look down to find the controls, because you already know where they are, and you don't need to read the display, because you hear the titles. Sure, pronounciation is not perfect, but I can figure out what it's saying, and would rather have that than be screaming "B-jork" (*you* you have to be mis-pronouncing it for it to understand what you want) in my loud car with the windows down. I guess that's why Audi and Volkswagen sell Phatboxes, It's a safety thing. Plus, you can't beat true integration with your native stereo.
Well, firmware updating does take care of dissemination of new software once it is created. However, have you ever tried writing new code and debugging it via flash updates? I have (while testing the in-system programming feature of one of our boards). Let me tell you, it is painful. And every time you screw something up that causes the software to fail, you have to wipe and rewrite the flash through a debugging interface. Otherwise, one typo and your camera is toast and you will have to desolder the flash and find a flash programmer, or you're back to your jtag/debugger interface. Is it possible? Yes. Is it a good idea? No. Not exactly the ideal solution to open-sourcing their firmware.
As an embedded systems engineer, I'll tell you why:
1) The firmware is highly hardware dependant. You will not be porting this to any other hardware, you won't use it anywhere else. It is of little use to anyone not using your same PCB.
2) There is proprietary, licensed software included, that cannot be redistributed. Particularly the following:
(a) The focus control software (this is the DSP software that figures out when the image is in focus).
(b) The CCD filtering software.
(c) The OS, if any, may be licensed from a third party.
3) There is no way to interface to these devices without a proprietary hardware device costing possibly thousands of Dollars. For example, a common camera chip is the TI DSC24, which can be reprogrammed via a specific JTAG emulator, and requires TI's Code Composer Studio compiler to develop for the DSP part of it. Even if you had this stuff, you won't find a JTAG header on the production boards. This is not a Tivo hack, the number of people that would be able to actually apply a hack to this device is limited to the people who can solder a JTAG interface, or desolder the flash and reprogram it on a flash programmer. This means that even if one guy in Norway can do something cool with this camera, he can't share it with the world.
It's about time Linux was ported to the Commodore-64. They said it couldn't handle all 64 Kilobytes of memory, but this shows otherwise.