HDCP is the content protection in HDMI. If it's cracked then any device be they laptops, satellite boxes, blu ray players, AV receivers, consoles, media streamers are affected.
What does it mean in practice? Well that someone can rip a clean HD image & audio from the video output at the back of the device. Great, but hardly groundshaking since most devices have component outputs anyway. With regard to Blu Rays no one is going to bother with ripping the HDMI when solutions like AnyDVD HD already offer the ability to rip the raw data straight from the disk. I think it is probably streaming devices that need worry more.
I also expect that many devices watermark the content as it is output. So if you were to rip the content you may well find it has your unique id plastered all over it.
The only way you're going to make browsing innocuous is by using stego. There are only so many ways you can hide 2-way communication in stego with http and if the software falls into the hands of the authorities you can guarantee they'll find out what they are.
The details on haystack are hard to come by so this is pure speculation but something that read encrypted cookies or flash shared objects would suit the bill. If these were issued by some ubiquitous ad site then you could be browsing virtually anywhere and have the means communicate. For example an "advertiser" (i.e. the US government) delivers particular ads based on geolocation and then uses encrypted cookies / shared object data to form a back channel. Problem is as soon as someone in authority gets the software they will know this and probably be able to identify people who are using it with relative ease.
Yes you could google that and doubtless you would find articles offering contradictory opinions, or hedging and suggesting you might like dist X for this reason, dist Y for that reason etc.
Windows is not faultless (e.g. Premium Home, Business, Ultimate or the XP vs Vista debate), but at the end of the day it's a single operating system. Which version you choose basically boils down to the money in your pocket with the default being "free" with the PC. There are no pros or cons vs some other version of Windows because there is no other version of Windows at least as far as consumers care.
At least Ubuntu gets where Linux needs to be, but I wonder if its all too late to matter.
How dare Japan employ people who vet what items someone may or may not put on their own plane. If only there were some analogy I could draw a comparison to...
I can't think of many ways you could make "innocuous" requests which really mask requests to banned sites. Data has to flow to and from the computer via the proxy which means it is subject to all kinds of traffic analysis.
Plain text is obviously out. Encrypted data is going to look suspicious. This implies the system probably has to use stego. Data hidden in plain site amongst other data.
For example, imagine if Doubleclick were complicit with Haystack, they could send certain cookies in an embedded iframe that only a Haystack local proxy with the right key could decrypt. To everyone else it would look like a typical ad cookies - encrypted garble. The Haystack app could also encrypt and send back a payload in the other direction by submitting another cookie. As long as authorities didn't compare the send / receive cookies for equality, this traffic could ride piggyback on top of any website.
I think whatever it is, it may start off successfully but the more people who use it, the more it will begin to stand out like a sore thumb. Iranian authorities will even run the app for themselves and see how it's sending & receiving data. Then it's a relatively simple matter to trace which IP addresses which are using it and send around the goons with the rubber hoses.
If you were a comedian, you couldn't come up with something better than that. Are these people really that stupid?
Yes they are. Wikipedia sets a standard for NPOV that fundamentalists has no hope of comprehending let alone meeting. So they set up their own wiki which represents some of the nuttiest, illogical, nonsensical and laughably wrong articles you will ever see gathered in one single site. It's the motherlode of stupid.
It's interesting to see what a game looks like with raytracing, but I don't see any practical use for this tech until they can make it happen in a normal GPU.
The problem with ray tracing is that if you have 1280x720 display then you're going to have to fire off at least 921,600 rays which must be intersected with objects and these in turn split into more rays as they reflect / refract around the screen. In a complex scene you may end up firing millions of rays. And I say at least because at 1 ray per pixel the picture quality will be awful. A ray might miss an edge completely so you get weird ragged edges and patterns blinking in and out. The normal way to address ragged edges is to fire more rays per pixel so you might end up firing 4,5,6 pixels in a ray, and you might jitter (randomize them) to minimize weird effects on patterns. Then if you want shadows and stuff to not like shit you have to think about diffusion & radiosity. Then you have effects like fog, clouds, smoke, fire etc. to worry about.
So you've possibly got to be rendering 5,000,000+ rays per frame in a highly complex scene and do so fast enough to deliver at least 30fps.
Done properly it would look awesome, but the calculation required to get acceptable results is enormous.
You'd think if people were going to waste money on a game, they'd at least pick a good game, and one which capped how much they could spend. Or at least pick a gambling game where there was *some* chance of a return on their money. Zynga really is an evil company and for the life of me I do not understand why Google or anybody else would have anything to do with them. Zynga are not the only provider of these godawful titles, and even if they were, social networking sites would probably be better off without these parasites.
But beware, the rule of thumb is: if your guy in the sky is green and lives in a starship, you get locked away. If your guy in the sky has a badass beard and a jewish son, you get a tax exception.
Governments also tend to frown on people who have been instructed by their god to go out and kill women. Even though they have as much evidence to support their claim as the people who get the tax breaks.
Android isn't locked down at all. It's open souce so you can do pretty much anything you please with it. Of course, most vendors probably want to bundle the google apps because they add value, but there is nothing to stop Bing, Yahoo or someone else producing analogous apps.
It has been years since I owned a console (Turbografx 16), after reading about the power of the Cell, I wanted to get a PS3. Not just for games but for Linux! However it turned out one couldn't full harness the power of the PS3 with Linux. So, I didn't get one. Thru the years, I'd check and see if any breakthrus were made or if Sony changed their stance. Well, with the release of the Slim models, the stance changed all right.
Not strictly true. The major thing restricted by the hypervisor in Other OS was the GPU which was largely 2D, however the Cell processor was largely free and available. People were bitching about how the GPU while all the time there were 6 free SPUs just SITTING THERE DOING NOTHING. Think of how much use Mesa or x264 or any other computationally expensive operation could have made of those SPUs. It would have been nice if the GPU were opened up further and some progress had been made to that end, but the reason Other OS got canned was through the actions of hackers trying to root the machine. Sony's actions may have been heavy handed but it's entirely understandable why they did what they did.
I doubt they would for fear of class actions, but they could certainly flag a device. Imagine for example that Sony patched the bug but put logging in whenever it detected an attack. Next time you connect to PSN, the log could go with it, notifying Sony of the precise time and dates you tried to use an exploit. Sony could easily wield the banhammer on such people, preventing the machine from ever being used to connect to PSN again. The threat of removal of PSN access would be an extremely effective deterrent.
I expect Sony has quite a few effective tricks left. Some are carrot, some are stick:
Patch the cause of this bug so it doesn't work anymore. Plan B would be to sniff for USB attacks and flag the system
Ensure hack doesn't work on new models (duh)
Mandatory updates to firmware. Some of these could contain things people want such as 3D support. If Sony were smart they might even toss in MKV support.
Random game & firmware checks which flag hacked software or signs of hacking such as iso files
Increase the amount of multiplayer content & after sale support in games (free content, patches etc.) things the pirates will never get.
Permabans by the shovelful for anyone stupid enough to put their PS3 online.
Changes to the TRC so games are required to fill every last byte of disc space with junk, repeated characters, corrupted data. The purpose being to make it hard for iso rippers & file sharers by making isos 25 or 50gb each.
I'm sure there are other measures, the purpose of which is to diminish the value in modding a PS3 and making it a hassle if you do.
There are laws requiring everyone to drive in the rightmost lane currently available (the "Rechtsfahrgebot"), and in contrast to the States or Britain where these laws also exist in principle, virtually everyone actually obeys them.
British drivers are told to keep to the left and generally do. You can only overtake by pulling out the right so if you are impeding traffic by being in the wrong lane. It's not like the US where it's a free-for-all.
There are occasions where a long line of traffic will get "stuck" in the right hand lane, usually because the person at the front won't pull over and no one else can pass them. Other times there may be stretches of roads with lots of junctions, lanes peeling in and out and cars weave around. But usually things are quite civil and motorists follow the rules.
Why do people put every single tidbit of info possible into the info section of their profile?
Stupidity and / or naivety. It simple does not occur to some people that exposing their personal details on the internet equivalent of a Times Square billboard is a terrible thing to do.
All versions of Windows from XP up have very decent media layers. There is absolutely no reason whatsoever to inflict Quicktime on Windows any more. If iTunes absolutely had to use its own codecs & filters, there is no reason they have to be exposed outside of the application
If you're looking for open source alternatives to iTunes: CDex, VLC and handbrake
Don't forget Songbird. It looks enough like iTunes to be non-intimidating but is very noticeably more responsive. The laughable part is Songbird UI is mostly Javascript & XML since it's based on Gecko and it's still faster than the POS known as iTunes.
I think the reason iTunes is so awful, at least on Windows, has to do with its look and feel. It has a wretched OS X like behaviour which suggests some genius in Apple decided that they make iTunes run on Windows by porting Cocoa & Objective C with an Aqua like UI, all compiled with gcc and as a consequence performance is in the toilet. At one point iTunes was a very nimble and handy music manager. These days it is a bloated slug.
I expect even if a class action suit were to win, that the payout would be miniscule vs the loss of confidence and lost revenue that piracy would have happened.
If they turned the code over to Google I am sure it could be fixed. But as long as programming is in the hands of those bloat-ware bone-heads at Adobe it will suck just as bad as every Adobe product you have ever seen. You really have to wonder what the serve in the cafeteria for EVERY product they make to be so universally terrible.
Problems with Flash have frequently been problems with Flash runs on. For example OS X doesn't allow windowed plugins so all Flash movies must repaint with the full participation of the browser (i.e. plugin says "paint me", and browser does when it feels like it). Another major issue is access to hardware acceleration (or not) and for video the ability to extract data in RGB format - Linux traditionally suffers this problem. Another issue is the browser, if Flash knows it's not visible it can dial back the framerate to save CPU, but some browsers don't give it the info to make that determination.
When Flash has full hardware acceleration and the hooks it needs to tap into the browser, performance is generally very good. I have no idea how far along Flash is with Android, but it would not surprise me if it isn't hardware accelerated, or some other issue with the browser is slowing it down. Maybe the first release is simply about getting it out there and optimization will occur in subsequent releases.
Still, it works adequately in most cases and I see no reason performance couldn't be identical to HTML video content on the same device if both built-in and Flash players use the same acceleration. But it does need cooperation from Google / Android and Adobe to make it work.
Yes perhaps Sony overreacted but given the stakes I am not surprised by what they did. If removing Other OS nipped a viable attack in the bud before it could be refined then it was the right thing from their point of view to do. On the one hand they risk pissing off a relatively small number of homebrewers, on the other they potentially averted their platform collapsing under the weight of piracy. It's obvious which way it would go.
Anyway I don't see their reaction as absolving the people who caused it. It was the people trying to root / crack the platform who shat in the pool everyone else was enjoying. They're the people to blame when the pool gets closed.
OtherOS was a fully functional Linux operating system, capable of running emulators, games, development, browsers, tapping the Cell processor, multimedia players etc. etc. I ran it for quite some time and liked it. Yes it ran on a hypervisor, yes the GPU access wasn't all that it was cracked up to be but it was a massively better platform for homebrew than any console has ever offered out of the box. Things like GPU and video could also have been markedly improved simply contributing patches to Mesa / x264 etc. that made use of the 6 free SPUs that were sitting there doing nothing by default. Also, significant progress was being made on the real GPU front and Sony wasn't acting particularly concerned about it.
It was only when someone tried to "root" the hypervisor that Sony canned it. It's shit that Other OS went and completely understandable why it had to go. You can lay the removal firmly and squarely at the feet of people motivated to crack the box, not Sony.
As for Sony approved games, what do you expect. It's a console. It's priced, sold and purchased by people on those terms. Sony can and will lay the smackdown on anyone they detect who mods their PS3 which I expect will include anyone stupid enough to log into PSN with a mod.
The claim that people mod to run homebrew or "backups" is horseshit. It's overwhelmingly for piracy. Genuine homebrewers should be the people getting most angry here since they had an OS until others took it away.
Flash performance seems fine for non video content. I suspect it's not so good for video for the usual reasons when people complain about Flash on a particular platform - it's not making full use of hardware acceleration that is (or could be made) available to it. I expect performance will improve, but just having the choice is better than having no choice at all.
It's also worth pointing out when people whine about flash, that when it does make use of the hardware (assuming the OS lets it use the hardware), performance is excellent. I expect that if Flash were able to make use of the same APIs that drive HTML video that performance would be identical. Not surprisingly.
Slashdot Mirror
What does it mean in practice? Well that someone can rip a clean HD image & audio from the video output at the back of the device. Great, but hardly groundshaking since most devices have component outputs anyway. With regard to Blu Rays no one is going to bother with ripping the HDMI when solutions like AnyDVD HD already offer the ability to rip the raw data straight from the disk. I think it is probably streaming devices that need worry more.
I also expect that many devices watermark the content as it is output. So if you were to rip the content you may well find it has your unique id plastered all over it.
The details on haystack are hard to come by so this is pure speculation but something that read encrypted cookies or flash shared objects would suit the bill. If these were issued by some ubiquitous ad site then you could be browsing virtually anywhere and have the means communicate. For example an "advertiser" (i.e. the US government) delivers particular ads based on geolocation and then uses encrypted cookies / shared object data to form a back channel. Problem is as soon as someone in authority gets the software they will know this and probably be able to identify people who are using it with relative ease.
Windows is not faultless (e.g. Premium Home, Business, Ultimate or the XP vs Vista debate), but at the end of the day it's a single operating system. Which version you choose basically boils down to the money in your pocket with the default being "free" with the PC. There are no pros or cons vs some other version of Windows because there is no other version of Windows at least as far as consumers care.
At least Ubuntu gets where Linux needs to be, but I wonder if its all too late to matter.
I always knew left handers had no souls.
I would not be surprised at all if the sheer profusion of dists have scared off a lot of people unsure even where to start.
How dare Japan employ people who vet what items someone may or may not put on their own plane. If only there were some analogy I could draw a comparison to...
Plain text is obviously out. Encrypted data is going to look suspicious. This implies the system probably has to use stego. Data hidden in plain site amongst other data.
For example, imagine if Doubleclick were complicit with Haystack, they could send certain cookies in an embedded iframe that only a Haystack local proxy with the right key could decrypt. To everyone else it would look like a typical ad cookies - encrypted garble. The Haystack app could also encrypt and send back a payload in the other direction by submitting another cookie. As long as authorities didn't compare the send / receive cookies for equality, this traffic could ride piggyback on top of any website.
I think whatever it is, it may start off successfully but the more people who use it, the more it will begin to stand out like a sore thumb. Iranian authorities will even run the app for themselves and see how it's sending & receiving data. Then it's a relatively simple matter to trace which IP addresses which are using it and send around the goons with the rubber hoses.
Yes they are. Wikipedia sets a standard for NPOV that fundamentalists has no hope of comprehending let alone meeting. So they set up their own wiki which represents some of the nuttiest, illogical, nonsensical and laughably wrong articles you will ever see gathered in one single site. It's the motherlode of stupid.
The problem with ray tracing is that if you have 1280x720 display then you're going to have to fire off at least 921,600 rays which must be intersected with objects and these in turn split into more rays as they reflect / refract around the screen. In a complex scene you may end up firing millions of rays. And I say at least because at 1 ray per pixel the picture quality will be awful. A ray might miss an edge completely so you get weird ragged edges and patterns blinking in and out. The normal way to address ragged edges is to fire more rays per pixel so you might end up firing 4,5,6 pixels in a ray, and you might jitter (randomize them) to minimize weird effects on patterns. Then if you want shadows and stuff to not like shit you have to think about diffusion & radiosity. Then you have effects like fog, clouds, smoke, fire etc. to worry about.
So you've possibly got to be rendering 5,000,000+ rays per frame in a highly complex scene and do so fast enough to deliver at least 30fps.
Done properly it would look awesome, but the calculation required to get acceptable results is enormous.
You'd think if people were going to waste money on a game, they'd at least pick a good game, and one which capped how much they could spend. Or at least pick a gambling game where there was *some* chance of a return on their money. Zynga really is an evil company and for the life of me I do not understand why Google or anybody else would have anything to do with them. Zynga are not the only provider of these godawful titles, and even if they were, social networking sites would probably be better off without these parasites.
Governments also tend to frown on people who have been instructed by their god to go out and kill women. Even though they have as much evidence to support their claim as the people who get the tax breaks.
If the OS doesn't matter, why not put chromeOS on top of Android. Combine the two ideas and allow web apps and native apps to live side by side.
Android isn't locked down at all. It's open souce so you can do pretty much anything you please with it. Of course, most vendors probably want to bundle the google apps because they add value, but there is nothing to stop Bing, Yahoo or someone else producing analogous apps.
Not strictly true. The major thing restricted by the hypervisor in Other OS was the GPU which was largely 2D, however the Cell processor was largely free and available. People were bitching about how the GPU while all the time there were 6 free SPUs just SITTING THERE DOING NOTHING. Think of how much use Mesa or x264 or any other computationally expensive operation could have made of those SPUs. It would have been nice if the GPU were opened up further and some progress had been made to that end, but the reason Other OS got canned was through the actions of hackers trying to root the machine. Sony's actions may have been heavy handed but it's entirely understandable why they did what they did.
I doubt they would for fear of class actions, but they could certainly flag a device. Imagine for example that Sony patched the bug but put logging in whenever it detected an attack. Next time you connect to PSN, the log could go with it, notifying Sony of the precise time and dates you tried to use an exploit. Sony could easily wield the banhammer on such people, preventing the machine from ever being used to connect to PSN again. The threat of removal of PSN access would be an extremely effective deterrent.
I'm sure there are other measures, the purpose of which is to diminish the value in modding a PS3 and making it a hassle if you do.
British drivers are told to keep to the left and generally do. You can only overtake by pulling out the right so if you are impeding traffic by being in the wrong lane. It's not like the US where it's a free-for-all.
There are occasions where a long line of traffic will get "stuck" in the right hand lane, usually because the person at the front won't pull over and no one else can pass them. Other times there may be stretches of roads with lots of junctions, lanes peeling in and out and cars weave around. But usually things are quite civil and motorists follow the rules.
Stupidity and / or naivety. It simple does not occur to some people that exposing their personal details on the internet equivalent of a Times Square billboard is a terrible thing to do.
All versions of Windows from XP up have very decent media layers. There is absolutely no reason whatsoever to inflict Quicktime on Windows any more. If iTunes absolutely had to use its own codecs & filters, there is no reason they have to be exposed outside of the application
Don't forget Songbird. It looks enough like iTunes to be non-intimidating but is very noticeably more responsive. The laughable part is Songbird UI is mostly Javascript & XML since it's based on Gecko and it's still faster than the POS known as iTunes.
I think the reason iTunes is so awful, at least on Windows, has to do with its look and feel. It has a wretched OS X like behaviour which suggests some genius in Apple decided that they make iTunes run on Windows by porting Cocoa & Objective C with an Aqua like UI, all compiled with gcc and as a consequence performance is in the toilet. At one point iTunes was a very nimble and handy music manager. These days it is a bloated slug.
I expect even if a class action suit were to win, that the payout would be miniscule vs the loss of confidence and lost revenue that piracy would have happened.
Problems with Flash have frequently been problems with Flash runs on. For example OS X doesn't allow windowed plugins so all Flash movies must repaint with the full participation of the browser (i.e. plugin says "paint me", and browser does when it feels like it). Another major issue is access to hardware acceleration (or not) and for video the ability to extract data in RGB format - Linux traditionally suffers this problem. Another issue is the browser, if Flash knows it's not visible it can dial back the framerate to save CPU, but some browsers don't give it the info to make that determination.
When Flash has full hardware acceleration and the hooks it needs to tap into the browser, performance is generally very good. I have no idea how far along Flash is with Android, but it would not surprise me if it isn't hardware accelerated, or some other issue with the browser is slowing it down. Maybe the first release is simply about getting it out there and optimization will occur in subsequent releases.
Still, it works adequately in most cases and I see no reason performance couldn't be identical to HTML video content on the same device if both built-in and Flash players use the same acceleration. But it does need cooperation from Google / Android and Adobe to make it work.
Anyway I don't see their reaction as absolving the people who caused it. It was the people trying to root / crack the platform who shat in the pool everyone else was enjoying. They're the people to blame when the pool gets closed.
It was only when someone tried to "root" the hypervisor that Sony canned it. It's shit that Other OS went and completely understandable why it had to go. You can lay the removal firmly and squarely at the feet of people motivated to crack the box, not Sony.
As for Sony approved games, what do you expect. It's a console. It's priced, sold and purchased by people on those terms. Sony can and will lay the smackdown on anyone they detect who mods their PS3 which I expect will include anyone stupid enough to log into PSN with a mod.
The claim that people mod to run homebrew or "backups" is horseshit. It's overwhelmingly for piracy. Genuine homebrewers should be the people getting most angry here since they had an OS until others took it away.
It's also worth pointing out when people whine about flash, that when it does make use of the hardware (assuming the OS lets it use the hardware), performance is excellent. I expect that if Flash were able to make use of the same APIs that drive HTML video that performance would be identical. Not surprisingly.