How will this actually work? Will I be able to set up my own RTT relay server and run RTT sessions with people on their phones, or will this purely be a phone-company-controlled system?
That's a good point, though it seems like a lot of effort to get a device into a random, unknown network at a random, unknown time.
To me, it merely emphasizes that being able to replace the OS/Firmware oneself is important, and should be done with any new device.
Doesn't really matter if Spyware McWebcam put a malware OS on the device if I'm just going to overwrite with a good firmware of my own choosing before putting it on my network.
Same goes for full computers, too, along with "smartphones" and tablets, which seem like they'd be bigger targets. One could do a lot more harm with a backdoored iPhone or Android device returned as "new, unopened" than a webcam.
I was wondering exactly that. "So, someone with physical access to your webcam can crack it open and analyse the firmware? Gosh. I'm frightened. Someone who has connected to your internal network and knows you have a specific model of IP webcam and happens to have a canned custom firmware that they can upload to it (if you've not changed the default admin password)? Slightly frightened, but not much. But 'getting root' so I can modify and more fully control my own low-cost IP cameras? Tell me more!"
I've been working for an organization that uses Dentrix. My impression of it is...not very favorable.
It seems like someone wrote a basic customer-tracking database for Windows that happened to be focussed on dental patients, and then Henry Schein bought them and built the rest by "buying" (or "licensing") connections to a pile of other third-party software. In addition to MS-SQL and Microsoft Office, this seems to include Adobe Flash in places, "integrators" for at least two different third-party imaging software packages, a messaging system, and who knows what else.
Looking at the CERT notice, I'm guessing they "bought" (/"licensed") their special "proprietary encryption" as a package from Faircom and just bolted it on without any further examination. They were probably happily going along continuing to brag about their encryption because Faircom was, and they figured Faircom could be blamed for it.
It doesn't help that "Dental-patient record tracking software" isn't a particularly big niche, so there's likely very little competition and any half-assed thing they throw together will continue to generate license fees because Big Multibillion-Dollar Corporation can easily outmarket the very few competitors they may have (and who may not actually be any better). Many years ago, I worked for a proprietary retail inventory-and-point-of-sale software developer. Their product was also a rickety pile of smouldering crap, but it still seemed to be better than most of their few competitors back then. Horrifying, but I suspect Henry Schein is in an analogous situation (compounded by being a massive conglomerate).
That's what you get for not paying attention to the privacy-policy changes.
You had 24 hours to uncheck "Will you marry Facebook, inc.?" in your settings. If you failed to do so, you're engaged to it. I think they'll be doing a mass wedding next year.
Your only hope now is to hurry up and pre-emptively start divorce proceedings before the prenuptial agreement gets added to the terms of service...
Do you realize what this means? ISIS could be in your power lines radicalizing your toaster right now and you'd never even know it until your toast started catching fire!
"Either QC or the production process or both appear to be nearly fatally flawed for Samsung"
I'd lean towards this explanation, and not just in the matter of OLED displays. Over the years, I've noticed a trend of faulty hardware from Samsung. Samsung refrigerator/freezer whose temperature control is prone to go nuts after power outages (usually it stops bothering to cool the contents despite the temerature controls working and showing the current temerature accurately, though on one occasion getting stuck "on" and freezing everything in the fridge. Also, the ice maker ironically freezes up so it can't make ice), camera with a lens/focussing flaw that renders everything outside of a small circle in the center of every photo out-of-focus (sent in in for RMA, got it back unchanged a few weeks later with a note to make sure the battery was fully charged when using, WTF?), Galaxy "Mesmerize" (Galaxy S for US Cellular) whose 3G/wifi/gps/bluetooth radio would regularly completely die until the phone was power-cycled (its replacement actually was okay). My current phone is a Galaxy S4 (running Optimized CyanogenMod 12.1) that I'm actually pretty pleased with, but its USB port failed within a few months and I can't transfer data over it (it still charges and I can easily transfer data via sftp, so I haven't gotten around to getting the $5 replacement port and ripping the phone apart to fix it yet).
Samsung's Quality Control sucks. If I'd had the option of any other rootable phone from another manufacturer when I got the S4 I'd have gone with it instead, but US Cellular's selection is pretty meager. I'm just glad "have to use something other than USB to transfer files" is the only real problem I've had with it.
Are the cameras actually "infected" with it or do they just have copies of the install payload in their storage? I wouldn't have expected something like a small embedded camera device to actually be running Microsoft Windows.
(Yes, I know there's a "Windows Embedded" and they could, I just wouldn't expect it.)
"Why would a designer of a mobile phone bother with the frequencies, which a human can neither produce nor hear anyway? It certainly increases the costs of both the design and each individual device"
I think it's more an accidental ability of tiny little cheap electret microphones and piezoelectric speakers, rather than something designers explicitly asked for.
The designers of smartphones and tablets mostly want "cheap" and "as small as possible". It just happens that smaller audio components have an easier time with higher frequency sounds (and a harder time with lower frequencies). It doesn't really matter that they're not necessarily "good" at playing or recording, say, 22khz tones, for this hypothetical technology they just need to be barely capable of getting the microphone to pick up that there is a signal out there in that range. Almost no humans would even be able to notice a sort of 22kHz "Morse code" message around them in a quiet room, let alone one with typical background noise.
It's actually kind of a nifty concept with some interesting potential, but of course as the story illustrates it's to be used for evil here.
"The encryption is in a QR code that's printed on the label, but isn't rewritable."
That seems to be the key point.
My guess is that the handful of bits in the label will be used in different ways by each company that adopts it, and it will be something like "the first three bits indicate which facility was the last to handle it, with 000 indicating that it has been sent to the pharmacy, the next five bits indicate which employee in this production line last handled the tagged object", etc., with the barcode specifying which internal-to-the-company algorithm was used to shift the bits around before storing them on the rewritable tag.
It's not that anyone who had blank tags and the equipment to write to them couldn't exactly copy any particular tag they got their hands on, but that it shouldn't be feasible for anyone to synthesize a valid fake label, so nobody can get a bunch of manufactured-by-flybynightco-in-china fake tablets or even a pile of "legitimate" pills snuck out of the factory in somebody's socks, stick them in a bottle, and label them to look like they've been legitimately packaged and shipped from the company (for example).
I hate the ongoing assumption that "media" just mean "internet TV".
Anyway, this appears to be specifically about developing a legally-free video codec. Anyone who's skeptical that it can be done should be pointed to the previous similar project to develop an audio codec: opus, which has been done, successfully, for a couple of years now and was developed in a similar fashion by a similar coalition of companies (and driven largely by Xiph/Mozilla's work as looks like this video codec will probably be, with input from other relevant tech). Opus is extremely successful technically (I don't think there is any other general-purpose lossy audio codec - free or proprietary - that opus doesn't handily beat), and has been moderately successful in the market (uptake by forward-looking developers was fast, Google supports it, Cisco supports it, and even friggin' MICROSOFT has committed to it now...)
My only complaint about opus so far is that Google's webm-only video fixation keeps them from remembering to support.opus audio files often. Android "Lollipop" and later has native opus codec support but still doesn't recognize.opus files as media. (VLC for Android does, though...) Chrome had a long delay in getting opus audio enabled for the same reason. Jerks. (Chrome does support.opus now, though, and has for a while).
If work on the video codec goes anywhere near as well for this coalition as it did for Opus audio, it ought to be very successful. Maybe more so, given that much of this coalition was also involved with opus and perhaps have learned some useful lessons on how to run projects like this.
(Admittedly, that's still an "if", but I'm actually optimistic here.)
I'm sure LOOL will be released Real Soon Now! I've already pre-ordered my copy.
(Seriously though - unlike Duke Nukem, one can actually verify that LOOL is being actively developed. I realize they've been talking about LOOL for like half a decade now without a real release, but I actually think they'll really release it now that they have some collaborators working on it.)
"the removal of Brandon Eich because he held a non-progressive belief.
Eich removed himself, and it's a good thing, because his response to the overblown controversy was to try to hide from it and hope it went away. His inability to cope pretty well proved that he wasn't fit to be CEO of Mozilla, whose problem is largely the same (unwillingness/inability to engage with its public any more) to begin with.
On top of that, the last thing I remember about Eich's activity at Mozilla was him enthusiastically cheerleading the possibility of shoving OTOY's special proprietary video codec for remote-desktop use into Firefox. This is the same kind of proprietary 3rd-party off-topic crap that has people throwing tantrums with Pocket right now. Eich was all on-board with this sort of thing, it would seem, and was an active part of this harmful tumor of corporate culture. Having him in charge would not have made things better.
It looks like it folds out, like a sofa-bed.
I'm not sure it's too comfortable though - the one photo they have with people in it, they don't look very happy.
If you can't even command respect from the spirits inhabiting your own equipment, you shouldn't be in IT to begin with.
(I actually used to have a "sacred rubber voodoo chicken" that I'd bring with me when someone was having a problem that had a quick solution that I knew about before I arrived on-site. Wait until they look away, click the button that fixes the problem, and then when they turn back, shake the rubber chicken at the computer. "That should do it, let me know if the spirits get disobedient again.")
Some years back, I remember seeing a story (I think it was actually here on/.) that one of the big companies (Samsung?) had gotten a patent on teleportation.
Unless there's some sort of game they play with "continuations" of patents to keep them going forever (like at least one of the remaining patents around.mp3 encoding) it seems like most of these sorts of patents should expire before there's even a working prototype. Is this just parasitism by company IP lawyers and associated corporate baggage trying to justify their pay?
(From the link above:)"This application is a continuation of application Ser. No. 08/650,896, filed on May 17, 1996, (now abandoned) which was a continuation of application Ser. No. 08/519,620, filed on Sep. 25, 1995, (now abandoned) which was a continuation of application Ser. No. 07/977,748, filed on Nov. 16, 1992, (now abandoned), which was a continuation of application Ser. No. 07/816,528, filed on Dec. 30, 1991, (now abandoned), which was a continuation of application Ser. No. 07/640,550, filed on Jan. 14, 1991, (now abandoned), which was a continuation of application Ser. No. 07/177,550, filed on Apr. 4, 1991, (now abandoned) as international application serial No. PCT/DE87/00384, filed Aug. 29, 1987, claiming priority to foreign appl. No. P3629434.9, filed Aug. 29, 1986."
(Adjusts Aluminum Foil Deflector Beanie to block out the Bilderberg mind-control rays)
THEY don't want IPv6 implemented, because IPv6 easily ensures that everyone and their evil twin can have a fully-accessible IP address, allowing them to directly communicate with each other without paying extra rent to the ISP for a "server" or "special" (routable) IPv4 address.
If users' systems can directly communicate with each other, there's far less need for centralized sites for everything where it can be controlled (for example, YouTube for video). Deep packet inspection is an option to spy on people looking for copyright trespassers or subversives, but with encryption becoming more readily available, that gets harder, too.
When anybody who wants to can set up (or even buy "canned") a media appliance running something like "MediaGoblin" to share audio, video, text, photos, etc., or VoIP servers like Mumble or various WebRTC-based systems for conferences and "phone calls" and other audio, servers for federated instant-messaging systems or "social media" platforms, etc. etc., and just assign those systems one of the overflowing bucket of publically-routable IPv6 addresses that everyone can have, it'll remove a huge amount of control that big media and telecommunications corporations (and governments) currently have. They don't want that.
Don't try to tell me it's not true, I can hear 'em talking about it on the radios the CIA implanted in my teeth.
But, seriously, my lazy, cheap, asshat phone company can't/won't give me more than one publically-accessible static IP address, probably really because of the ancient crappy DSL modem/router they force us to use and not being willing to have their executives skip lunch for one or two days to pay for the infrastructure upgrades.
Note that this doesn't necessarily mean it's not a secret conspiracy on a global scale overall, though...
It seems (still) potentially very useful, and the federation stuff seems like a bigger deal that it might initially sound like (instead of needing one person or organization to provide a huge server and mirrors for a big collection of media and user accounts, smaller groups and individuals can "federate" more manageably-sized small server instances that they each run). Also, native pump.io (which is more or less a very extensible "microblogging" standard if I understand right) support ought to mean you won't need a special "mediagoblin" client to use it outside of the web interface, you'll be able to use whatever general pump.io client software you might already be using on other services at the same time (again, assuming I understood that right).
It's one backend that handles a whole lot of different kinds of "media", so you don't need to install a "photo gallery" and a "video server" and a "document server" and so on separately. It takes whatever supported variety of media you give it and converts it to a "web-friendly" open format as needed. As their wiki currently shows: "In the future, there will be all sorts of media types you can enable, but in the meanwhile there are six additional media types: video, audio, raw image, ascii art, STL/3d models, PDF and Document." (Last I heard, it additionally supports a "blog post" sort of type i.e. HTML text. If MediaGoblin takes off I suspect someone would get around to adding.epub as a supported type as well.)
I'd probably be more familiar with it except of the two media types I could potentially get a lot of use out of it for myself, photos/still images seem to be very well supported but I've already got a much-easier-to-install piwigo instance running for those, and audio support is kind of a kludgy mess at the moment. MediaGoblin would otherwise likely be a great (nigh-ideal, even) system for building a sound-effects library and/or podcast-hosting.
To support audio, you have to install scipy and one or two other modules as I recall (in addition to the rest of the python stuff MediaGoblin needs), though it has nothing to do with the actual audio - from what I remember of what I could glean from trying to poke around in the source (disclaimer, I am NOT very experienced at all at python or even "object-oriented" programming in general) every bit of uploaded audio is currently transcoded twice - once to ogg vorbis, which is only used to generate the still-image "thumbnail" graphic in the form of a spectrogram (that's what scipy et al is for) rather than e.g. extracting "cover art" from the metadata or generating a simple image via gd or something. Then that's discarded and the audio is re-transcoded to "webm audio" rather than.ogg or.opus. As far as I know (see previous disclaimer...) there's no ability to read "tags" from pre-existing metadata, either.
I wish I had a better grasp of python - I know gstreamer has (undocumented?) support for reading and writing media metadata tags, if I knew what I was doing I'd try to come up with some patches for the audio thumbnail/tags support, but since I can't even figure out where one would go in the sourcecode to change the output format (to.opus or.ogg) I suspect the amount of guidance I'd need from the people that know what they're doing would make me more of an irritant than a help...
Slashdot Mirror
This seems like something ideal for OpenStreetMap.
How will this actually work? Will I be able to set up my own RTT relay server and run RTT sessions with people on their phones, or will this purely be a phone-company-controlled system?
Sounds a bit like part of KDEConnect's functionality, which I've been enoying for a while now.
How primitive. REAL propaganda streams over the internet now.
To me, it merely emphasizes that being able to replace the OS/Firmware oneself is important, and should be done with any new device.
Doesn't really matter if Spyware McWebcam put a malware OS on the device if I'm just going to overwrite with a good firmware of my own choosing before putting it on my network.
Same goes for full computers, too, along with "smartphones" and tablets, which seem like they'd be bigger targets. One could do a lot more harm with a backdoored iPhone or Android device returned as "new, unopened" than a webcam.
I was wondering exactly that. "So, someone with physical access to your webcam can crack it open and analyse the firmware? Gosh. I'm frightened. Someone who has connected to your internal network and knows you have a specific model of IP webcam and happens to have a canned custom firmware that they can upload to it (if you've not changed the default admin password)? Slightly frightened, but not much. But 'getting root' so I can modify and more fully control my own low-cost IP cameras? Tell me more!"
It seems like someone wrote a basic customer-tracking database for Windows that happened to be focussed on dental patients, and then Henry Schein bought them and built the rest by "buying" (or "licensing") connections to a pile of other third-party software. In addition to MS-SQL and Microsoft Office, this seems to include Adobe Flash in places, "integrators" for at least two different third-party imaging software packages, a messaging system, and who knows what else.
Looking at the CERT notice, I'm guessing they "bought" (/"licensed") their special "proprietary encryption" as a package from Faircom and just bolted it on without any further examination. They were probably happily going along continuing to brag about their encryption because Faircom was, and they figured Faircom could be blamed for it.
It doesn't help that "Dental-patient record tracking software" isn't a particularly big niche, so there's likely very little competition and any half-assed thing they throw together will continue to generate license fees because Big Multibillion-Dollar Corporation can easily outmarket the very few competitors they may have (and who may not actually be any better). Many years ago, I worked for a proprietary retail inventory-and-point-of-sale software developer. Their product was also a rickety pile of smouldering crap, but it still seemed to be better than most of their few competitors back then. Horrifying, but I suspect Henry Schein is in an analogous situation (compounded by being a massive conglomerate).
You had 24 hours to uncheck "Will you marry Facebook, inc.?" in your settings. If you failed to do so, you're engaged to it. I think they'll be doing a mass wedding next year.
Your only hope now is to hurry up and pre-emptively start divorce proceedings before the prenuptial agreement gets added to the terms of service...
Do you realize what this means? ISIS could be in your power lines radicalizing your toaster right now and you'd never even know it until your toast started catching fire!
I'd lean towards this explanation, and not just in the matter of OLED displays. Over the years, I've noticed a trend of faulty hardware from Samsung. Samsung refrigerator/freezer whose temperature control is prone to go nuts after power outages (usually it stops bothering to cool the contents despite the temerature controls working and showing the current temerature accurately, though on one occasion getting stuck "on" and freezing everything in the fridge. Also, the ice maker ironically freezes up so it can't make ice), camera with a lens/focussing flaw that renders everything outside of a small circle in the center of every photo out-of-focus (sent in in for RMA, got it back unchanged a few weeks later with a note to make sure the battery was fully charged when using, WTF?), Galaxy "Mesmerize" (Galaxy S for US Cellular) whose 3G/wifi/gps/bluetooth radio would regularly completely die until the phone was power-cycled (its replacement actually was okay). My current phone is a Galaxy S4 (running Optimized CyanogenMod 12.1) that I'm actually pretty pleased with, but its USB port failed within a few months and I can't transfer data over it (it still charges and I can easily transfer data via sftp, so I haven't gotten around to getting the $5 replacement port and ripping the phone apart to fix it yet).
Samsung's Quality Control sucks. If I'd had the option of any other rootable phone from another manufacturer when I got the S4 I'd have gone with it instead, but US Cellular's selection is pretty meager. I'm just glad "have to use something other than USB to transfer files" is the only real problem I've had with it.
Are the cameras actually "infected" with it or do they just have copies of the install payload in their storage? I wouldn't have expected something like a small embedded camera device to actually be running Microsoft Windows. (Yes, I know there's a "Windows Embedded" and they could, I just wouldn't expect it.)
I think it's more an accidental ability of tiny little cheap electret microphones and piezoelectric speakers, rather than something designers explicitly asked for.
The designers of smartphones and tablets mostly want "cheap" and "as small as possible". It just happens that smaller audio components have an easier time with higher frequency sounds (and a harder time with lower frequencies). It doesn't really matter that they're not necessarily "good" at playing or recording, say, 22khz tones, for this hypothetical technology they just need to be barely capable of getting the microphone to pick up that there is a signal out there in that range. Almost no humans would even be able to notice a sort of 22kHz "Morse code" message around them in a quiet room, let alone one with typical background noise.
It's actually kind of a nifty concept with some interesting potential, but of course as the story illustrates it's to be used for evil here.
It's possible - you don't really need to make the AI any smarter if you can just make the "consumers" dumber instead.
"The encryption is in a QR code that's printed on the label, but isn't rewritable."
That seems to be the key point.
My guess is that the handful of bits in the label will be used in different ways by each company that adopts it, and it will be something like "the first three bits indicate which facility was the last to handle it, with 000 indicating that it has been sent to the pharmacy, the next five bits indicate which employee in this production line last handled the tagged object", etc., with the barcode specifying which internal-to-the-company algorithm was used to shift the bits around before storing them on the rewritable tag.
It's not that anyone who had blank tags and the equipment to write to them couldn't exactly copy any particular tag they got their hands on, but that it shouldn't be feasible for anyone to synthesize a valid fake label, so nobody can get a bunch of manufactured-by-flybynightco-in-china fake tablets or even a pile of "legitimate" pills snuck out of the factory in somebody's socks, stick them in a bottle, and label them to look like they've been legitimately packaged and shipped from the company (for example).
I hate the ongoing assumption that "media" just mean "internet TV".
Anyway, this appears to be specifically about developing a legally-free video codec. Anyone who's skeptical that it can be done should be pointed to the previous similar project to develop an audio codec: opus, which has been done, successfully, for a couple of years now and was developed in a similar fashion by a similar coalition of companies (and driven largely by Xiph/Mozilla's work as looks like this video codec will probably be, with input from other relevant tech). Opus is extremely successful technically (I don't think there is any other general-purpose lossy audio codec - free or proprietary - that opus doesn't handily beat), and has been moderately successful in the market (uptake by forward-looking developers was fast, Google supports it, Cisco supports it, and even friggin' MICROSOFT has committed to it now...)
My only complaint about opus so far is that Google's webm-only video fixation keeps them from remembering to support .opus audio files often. Android "Lollipop" and later has native opus codec support but still doesn't recognize .opus files as media. (VLC for Android does, though...) Chrome had a long delay in getting opus audio enabled for the same reason. Jerks. (Chrome does support .opus now, though, and has for a while).
If work on the video codec goes anywhere near as well for this coalition as it did for Opus audio, it ought to be very successful. Maybe more so, given that much of this coalition was also involved with opus and perhaps have learned some useful lessons on how to run projects like this.
(Admittedly, that's still an "if", but I'm actually optimistic here.)
(Seriously though - unlike Duke Nukem, one can actually verify that LOOL is being actively developed. I realize they've been talking about LOOL for like half a decade now without a real release, but I actually think they'll really release it now that they have some collaborators working on it.)
I wonder, how will this editor compare to LibreOffice Online ("LOOL"), when it's finally released?
Eich removed himself, and it's a good thing, because his response to the overblown controversy was to try to hide from it and hope it went away. His inability to cope pretty well proved that he wasn't fit to be CEO of Mozilla, whose problem is largely the same (unwillingness/inability to engage with its public any more) to begin with.
On top of that, the last thing I remember about Eich's activity at Mozilla was him enthusiastically cheerleading the possibility of shoving OTOY's special proprietary video codec for remote-desktop use into Firefox. This is the same kind of proprietary 3rd-party off-topic crap that has people throwing tantrums with Pocket right now. Eich was all on-board with this sort of thing, it would seem, and was an active part of this harmful tumor of corporate culture. Having him in charge would not have made things better.
How many write-cycles before they start breaking down? Is it better than current SSD/Flash?
It looks like it folds out, like a sofa-bed. I'm not sure it's too comfortable though - the one photo they have with people in it, they don't look very happy.
Frankly, this is all pointless, IP6 fixes this for... more or less, ever...
If my (insert profanity here) ISP ever gets off its cheap, lazy butts and makes IPv6 available to me...
(I actually used to have a "sacred rubber voodoo chicken" that I'd bring with me when someone was having a problem that had a quick solution that I knew about before I arrived on-site. Wait until they look away, click the button that fixes the problem, and then when they turn back, shake the rubber chicken at the computer. "That should do it, let me know if the spirits get disobedient again.")
Unless there's some sort of game they play with "continuations" of patents to keep them going forever (like at least one of the remaining patents around .mp3 encoding) it seems like most of these sorts of patents should expire before there's even a working prototype. Is this just parasitism by company IP lawyers and associated corporate baggage trying to justify their pay?
(From the link above:)"This application is a continuation of application Ser. No. 08/650,896, filed on May 17, 1996, (now abandoned) which was a continuation of application Ser. No. 08/519,620, filed on Sep. 25, 1995, (now abandoned) which was a continuation of application Ser. No. 07/977,748, filed on Nov. 16, 1992, (now abandoned), which was a continuation of application Ser. No. 07/816,528, filed on Dec. 30, 1991, (now abandoned), which was a continuation of application Ser. No. 07/640,550, filed on Jan. 14, 1991, (now abandoned), which was a continuation of application Ser. No. 07/177,550, filed on Apr. 4, 1991, (now abandoned) as international application serial No. PCT/DE87/00384, filed Aug. 29, 1987, claiming priority to foreign appl. No. P3629434.9, filed Aug. 29, 1986."
THEY don't want IPv6 implemented, because IPv6 easily ensures that everyone and their evil twin can have a fully-accessible IP address, allowing them to directly communicate with each other without paying extra rent to the ISP for a "server" or "special" (routable) IPv4 address.
If users' systems can directly communicate with each other, there's far less need for centralized sites for everything where it can be controlled (for example, YouTube for video). Deep packet inspection is an option to spy on people looking for copyright trespassers or subversives, but with encryption becoming more readily available, that gets harder, too.
When anybody who wants to can set up (or even buy "canned") a media appliance running something like "MediaGoblin" to share audio, video, text, photos, etc., or VoIP servers like Mumble or various WebRTC-based systems for conferences and "phone calls" and other audio, servers for federated instant-messaging systems or "social media" platforms, etc. etc., and just assign those systems one of the overflowing bucket of publically-routable IPv6 addresses that everyone can have, it'll remove a huge amount of control that big media and telecommunications corporations (and governments) currently have. They don't want that.
Don't try to tell me it's not true, I can hear 'em talking about it on the radios the CIA implanted in my teeth.
But, seriously, my lazy, cheap, asshat phone company can't/won't give me more than one publically-accessible static IP address, probably really because of the ancient crappy DSL modem/router they force us to use and not being willing to have their executives skip lunch for one or two days to pay for the infrastructure upgrades.
Note that this doesn't necessarily mean it's not a secret conspiracy on a global scale overall, though...
It seems (still) potentially very useful, and the federation stuff seems like a bigger deal that it might initially sound like (instead of needing one person or organization to provide a huge server and mirrors for a big collection of media and user accounts, smaller groups and individuals can "federate" more manageably-sized small server instances that they each run). Also, native pump.io (which is more or less a very extensible "microblogging" standard if I understand right) support ought to mean you won't need a special "mediagoblin" client to use it outside of the web interface, you'll be able to use whatever general pump.io client software you might already be using on other services at the same time (again, assuming I understood that right).
It's one backend that handles a whole lot of different kinds of "media", so you don't need to install a "photo gallery" and a "video server" and a "document server" and so on separately. It takes whatever supported variety of media you give it and converts it to a "web-friendly" open format as needed. As their wiki currently shows: "In the future, there will be all sorts of media types you can enable, but in the meanwhile there are six additional media types: video, audio, raw image, ascii art, STL/3d models, PDF and Document." (Last I heard, it additionally supports a "blog post" sort of type i.e. HTML text. If MediaGoblin takes off I suspect someone would get around to adding .epub as a supported type as well.)
I'd probably be more familiar with it except of the two media types I could potentially get a lot of use out of it for myself, photos/still images seem to be very well supported but I've already got a much-easier-to-install piwigo instance running for those, and audio support is kind of a kludgy mess at the moment. MediaGoblin would otherwise likely be a great (nigh-ideal, even) system for building a sound-effects library and/or podcast-hosting.
To support audio, you have to install scipy and one or two other modules as I recall (in addition to the rest of the python stuff MediaGoblin needs), though it has nothing to do with the actual audio - from what I remember of what I could glean from trying to poke around in the source (disclaimer, I am NOT very experienced at all at python or even "object-oriented" programming in general) every bit of uploaded audio is currently transcoded twice - once to ogg vorbis, which is only used to generate the still-image "thumbnail" graphic in the form of a spectrogram (that's what scipy et al is for) rather than e.g. extracting "cover art" from the metadata or generating a simple image via gd or something. Then that's discarded and the audio is re-transcoded to "webm audio" rather than .ogg or .opus. As far as I know (see previous disclaimer...) there's no ability to read "tags" from pre-existing metadata, either.
I wish I had a better grasp of python - I know gstreamer has (undocumented?) support for reading and writing media metadata tags, if I knew what I was doing I'd try to come up with some patches for the audio thumbnail/tags support, but since I can't even figure out where one would go in the sourcecode to change the output format (to .opus or .ogg) I suspect the amount of guidance I'd need from the people that know what they're doing would make me more of an irritant than a help...