Use a different brand of scanner, like, say, the Symbol Technologies LS1004-I100.. which will read just about any barcode format I have thrown at it, including Code-39, I-2-5, Code-128, UPC-A, UPC-B,.. well, just about anything but Plessey and USPS.
With some minor changes to the drivers, you can duplicate the whole hack without using anything supplied from CueCat, thus slamming the door to any conceivable IP claim they might make. Ridiculous and unnecessary, perhaps, but even if they are clueless enough to think that people can't FIGURE OUT how their system works, this will at least convince the lawyers that they don't have even a shred of a case. Unless they're trying to imply that the whole concept of scanning a book and linking to an online catalog is their IP, in which case, well, they're going to lose.
What we should really be concerned about is the willingness of Yahoo to roll over for a corporation. If you went to them and said, "I want to know all the info you have on this person", they'd tell you to buzz off. Why is a corporation treated differently? In fact, this isn't even a criminal case; it's a civil suit, so it's not obstruction of justice to not release the necessary info.
If you went to them and said, "Hello, I'm John Dewey from Dewey, Cheatham, and Howe, and we are representing XYZ Inc. in a legal action against one of our former employees who may have used your system to commit a breach of contract against us -- can you send us a copy of your server logs from thus-and-such a date, and include information on the user or users that posted this? We could subpoena, but it would be such a hassle for everyone involved.. you know how it is..", I'm sure the response would be a lot more favorable. Yahoo isn't that stupid..
He signed an NDA, went on to do exactly what he agreed not to in the NDA, left enough traces to be identified, and is now being sued? Not surprising to me.. what I don't understand is why he was stupid or crazy enough to do it, and what he thought he could gain by it..
By far the most likely scenario to date is a malfunctioned torpedo launch (regardless of what type of torpedo) which blew out the torp tube and either started a fire in the forward torpedo room or short-circuited a bunch of stuff that led to either a warhead cookoff or rocket fuel explosion in one of the SS-N-19s.
Any possibility it could have been a self-start? I know the USN had some trouble with that a while back, and if one of the torpedoes self-started and detonated before they could do a 180, that would account for the 100kg explosion, with collateral damage to another weapon system being responsible for the second explosion..
A stupid idea, but that's the sort of thing that Key Escrow demands.
Not that Key Escrow was a particularly smart idea in and of itself.. personally, if my public key gets tagged with an ADK, I want to know about it. Of course, that would make it harder for the secret police to stay secret.
Then again, secret police aren't a particularly brilliant idea either..
So does this mean they'll stop bypassing perfectly good TCP/IP software built into the OS and using their own marginally stable code instead?;-)
sorry, couldn't resist..
..taming the technologists. There's a whole lot of fear out there coming from the people who don't understand what the "high-tech people" do, some of it whipped up by people who stand to gain from a crackdown, some of it just good old fashioned paranoia, and all of it itching for a way to get us under some sort of control before we "take over the world."
They don't realize we already have, and we will never really be stopped, and if they ever do, it's going to get ugly.
Have each 'moderator' give the site a +1 or -1 kick, possibly in various categories. Get enough people voting sites up and down and soon enough the scores will accumulate and yield a measurable index. Then filter by that index, setting a threshold as you see fit. Would work even better if the voting was done on several different subjects. One vote per site per IP address.. otherwise the script kiddies ruin the whole show..
An earlier poster pointed out the obvious: that the classic arcade games are easy to learn and hard to master. I'd like to add that they have a certain meditative quality when you do learn to master them. It's hard to describe, sort of a Zen-like link between the screen and your hands. Back when Tempest was still around, I used to end up on about the fourth or fifth series of levels and realize I hadn't even been paying conscious attention to the game. Hard to do that with Quake..
I don't think it's too much for the MPAA to say what platforms thier product can (and can't) run on.
I do.. some of us don't have the money to go out and buy a new computer every time someone decides to force us to use their platform of choice. If I buy it, I expect to have the right to enjoy personal use of it as I see fit.
If you made a certain line of clothing, wouldn't you want the option of who couldn't and who could wear them? Look at Tommy Hilfiger...he rightfully doesn't want African-Americans wearing his clothings.
Again, what right does he have to make this judgment? He may have strong personal feelings about who wears his clothes, but once they're sold that right ends, right at the cash register. Almost makes me wish I was black so I could buy a whole TH outfit and email the jerk a GIF of me wearing it.. oh well, I'm a Levi's kind of guy anyway..
DeCSS takes away a producers right to control his product.
There is no such right, or at least not after the first sale. It may upset their delicate sensibilities, but I can use my CD's and/or DVD's any way I see fit (piracy being the sole exception) after I buy them. I can use them as frisbees if I want to. (AOL disks are great for that..) I can smash them to pieces and make artworks with them if I want to. I can stand on the street corner and wave the DVD around and tell anyone I meet that the movie sucks if I want to. Once I buy the thing, they can't stop me. Anything else is bad news for us all -- trust me.
Those pictures of "interception stations" are strangely similar to every other large, white satellite dish yousee around. In fact, there is one of those on top of the building I'm in right now. Is this a conspiracy?
Some of this stuff [...] sounds sorta wrong. I believe that the technology is there, maybe not to do EVERY call, but to single calls out by region or randomly sampled conversations.
Yeah, the dishes look familiar, but have you seen an earth station that size anywhere but at an NSA facility? As someone who has had to set up TVRO's, I have to say I was surprised at what you can find on the GEO birds if you know what to look for. And to monitor all that, you need a large multi-receiver facility just like the one in the photo.
I do have one issue with the article, though -- the author dismisses the possibility of intercepting surface VHF/UHF communications a bit too quickly. The intel community has launched some fairly large paylods over the last several years, more than they would really need for visual surveillance. Earth orbit is a really nice place to pick up a lot of traffic that is normally limited by line of sight -- I would not be a bit surprised if some of their own satellites monitor things like AMPS cellphone traffic, pager transmitters, and other commercial radio services, and relay the signals to ground monitoring stations on a spot beam.
As for keyword/content filtering, well, it's a bit like drinking from a fire hose, but with specialized hardware it wouldn't be too difficult..
.. of boosters taking off plastered with more ads than a NASCAR stock car at Charlotte. At least it's one way to make money, and if it gets more launches televised, maybe people will get fired up about space flight again.
Then again, it gives 'space race' a whole new meaning..
Quite frankly, if a page won't load in Netscape, I'll go someplace else.. lot easier than putting up with MSIE's silliness most of the time, and if a site can't be bothered to make their code run on all the browsers, I'll go to their competitors. Simple enough..
There is no way to make e-voting work anonymously. If you don't want to have rampant overclocked script-powered election fraud, you have to have some way to get a one-time certificate that can be traced to the voter registration system, and anyone who has access to that system can figure out a way to intercept who gets those certificates and who they voted for. SSL only protects the voting data enroute to the server -- the admins that run the server could still compromise the whole thing.
And trust me, you don't want your local political machine to know for a fact you voted against them. Especially if they win..
By lucky coincidence I finished reading this book last week. I'm having my annual isn't-Apollo-fascinating binge.
Only annual? You mean it's not full time?;-)
I find I can't get enough of Apollo. Phrases like "Contact light!" and "Give me a go/no-go for ___" and "Master alarm!" and "Houston, what's the story on this 1201?" don't help.;-) And no, I didn't know at the time how close the crews were, several times, to not coming back alive -- I can probably be forgiven because I was 5 years old when Apollo 8 launched, and only 9 when Apollo 17 left the lunar surface -- which makes it all the more fascinating to read about. It's even more compelling when you remember that it happened in *1969*.. computer hardware was just a stone's throw from adding machines and the people in 30N had to do the whole job. Seeing how Kranz and the MCC team did it has always impressed the hell out of me. Somehow STS just doesn't seem to be as exciting.. maybe it's because the new MCC in 30S looks like a garden center..
Anyone remember the Cray-2? It used Fluorinert as a coolant, gallons and gallons of it.
I was interested to see that it does have a freezing point of sorts.. wonder if they ever determined exactly what temperature that was. (Also wonder if 3M will let them say exactly what temperature that was.. they freaked out one time when some friends of mine did a GC analysis of some Fluorinert and worked out an approximate chemical composition.. heheh..)
I don't mean to be disrespectful, but it seems that in the current technophilic age we can find a thousand articles with one theme: "we're too dumb to handle technology" which really means "those Other People are too dumb to handle technology."
One group of Other People I definitely don't want to see turned loose with this technology is the HMO/managed care crowd. Accountants being what they are, sooner or later someone is going to get the bright idea to determine insurability and coverage based on genetic assays. Hello, eugenics.
A little harsh maybe? Well, consider that medical coverage determines survival rate to a large degree, indigent care notwithstanding. If your HMO decides you're worth insuring, you're just going to get better care, period, and sooner or later you're going to end up in a medical-emergency situation where you'll live if you're covered and die if you're not. Thus, we are now selecting for insurability by HMO's. Throw HMO-mandated genetic viability testing, however accurate, into the mix, and suddenly your genetic makeup determines your survival in an *economic* environment as well as a physical one.
Bear in mind we haven't even touched applications of the same technology by employers on their employees. Don't think for a moment that an employer that tests you for drugs wouldn't be even happier testing you for genetic markers that *may* be linked to violent behavior, resistance to authority, a tendency to die young, or any number of other things that make you less economical to keep on the workforce. You do have the freedom to refuse the test.. but if you've ever refused to take a drug test, you know where that leads..
.. your last blood test was genetically tested and we have determined that your genotype is no longer supported. For an extra $49,000 one-time per-incident fee, we will upgrade you to the current version so your medical support can continue. If you do not wish to purchase additional support at this time, we will do our best to make your remaining few days as comfortable as possible, but without this upgrade it will be uneconomical for us to continue to treat you. Thank you for calling.
The web is based almost entirely on hyperlinks, but my point was that the concept of linking to other documents, or other points in the same document, should be pretty obviously public domain by now..
The idea may have been patented, but "linking" has existed to the earliest days of man. A bit before BT's time! The idea of placing a reference, rather than a complete description, appears in early forms of writing [...]
More importantly, the exact concept of an embedded link is embodied in the footnote[1], examples of which abound in printed literature, and cross references (see also dictionary, thesaurus) whose uses parallel hyperlinks almost exactly. The only thing new about a hyperlink is that it does the "page flipping," so to speak, for you -- you can go directly to the referenced material with one click -- and I have no intention of paying anyone royalties for the miniscule amount of value added by that feature. The important part of the concept would be recognized by anyone with any sense as prior art in the public domain.
In an ideal world, the USPTO would laugh this proposal all the way back across the pond. Trouble is, some equally harebrained schemes have already been granted patents, so I don't hold out much hope.. oh well, at least I can still use my radio..;-)
The simplest problem, and also probably least likely to affect the plane, is passive non-linear antenna radiation. Basically, an antenna connected to a non-linear passive device can re-transmit the incoming RF at sum/difference frequencies (IM distortion anyone?). Although these re-transmissions are far below the incoming RF signal strenth (and most likely the noise floor) and not likely to interfere with the aircraft.
*Way* below, in a properly designed receiver.. intermod is more of an issue with transmitters..
The bigger problem comes from a powered heterodyne radio receiver. Ie, a receiver (like a standard FM radio) that down-converts the incoming RF to an IF. The mixer on board the receiver doesn't have perfect isolation, so some of the produced IF (which is heartily amplified) will leak back through to the antenna, which can re-transmit. (FYI, a mixer multiplies the incoming RF with a synthesized LO (local oscillator) to produce output at the sum/difference of those two frequencies. Work out the trigonometry if ou're bored, it's pretty cool.) Once again, the re-transmitted IF power is pretty small, but it is produced, and may interfere with the aircraft's receivers. And seeing that most IF's are in the range of 10 MHz or so, there is much opportunity for interference, almost independent of device RF frequency. This is why many radios are not allowed during flights, even if they're receive only.
And this is also in the small to nonexistent range with a properly shielded receiver. (No, the cheap ones usually aren't.;-) And the laptop the guy next to you is pounding away on is radiating at least +30-40dB over what your LO and mixer are kicking out, and *his* peaks are at nice aviation-friendly numbers like 133MHz..;-)
Give me a break. My HT doesn't even radiate enough at LO or either IF freq to break squelch on a radio right next to it, and I've scanned it very thoroughly. As long as I don't hit the PTT, there's no way I'm interfering with the avionics.. trust me..
Anybody remember the big fuss over the guy that downloaded LANL's legacy codes onto his laptop and took them home? You'd think they'd have learned from that.. but apparently not.. maybe next time someone will download classified code onto a laptop and go home and plug it into their DSL on a static IP. Y'think?
geez, I know it makes it harder to do the research if somebody's always bugging you to fill out forms when you check things out, and we'd all like to work at home, wouldn't we?;-) but considering the consequences, it would be nice to see LANL get a *little* more serious about security, at least for the important stuff. Come on, folks, your taxes pay for this..
My experience has been that if you sell an OS with a computer, you have to include some way of getting at least that OS working after a hard disk reformat or failure. No matter how bombproof the OS is, you're still handing it to someone who doesn't know how its internals work, has no idea what's compatible with it, and is virtually certain to corrupt some critical piece of it and make the computer unbootable until your tech support walks them through fixing the problem. Fixing the problem will almost always involve reinstalling *something*, even if it's only a few hosed core OS files.
Apple can at least sort of guarantee that the hardware-specific install that ships with their *hardware* (which MS, AFAIK, doesn't make at all..) will be enough to do a fully functional reinstall on the Mac it's shipped with. I'm assuming Sun has similar arrangements with Solaris. Since MS doesn't build computers, how can they control what hardware the OS is built on without violating antitrust laws? Oh, that's right, they did..;-).. IANAL, but I can't see how they can possibly make a limited install work, especially when the OS is bundled with a third party CPU. You paid for a single user retail license, you should get a single user retail license, end of story. All else is BS.
.. punishing someone for something they have little or no control over.
Yeah, he may have provoked it in some way, but once someone decides to DoS a particular user, there's not much that user can do to stop it, even if someone happens to feel like they 'deserved' it somehow. By that logic, why not shut down a user's account because someone sends them email you don't approve of, or lock down their website because they're getting hits from the wrong part of the world?
Maybe I'm just being clueless here, but this sounds completely nuts to me. Even if this guy was an obnoxious luser, he still has rights, and he's definitely not the appropriate target for this response. IP block the guy who's trashing him, maybe block his subnet and/or notify his ISP, but the poor guy who's getting hit has very few options and shouldn't be punished for something he doesn't have the power to stop. Just my $.02..
Slashdot Mirror
Use a different brand of scanner, like, say, the Symbol Technologies LS1004-I100 .. which will read just about any barcode format I have thrown at it, including Code-39, I-2-5, Code-128, UPC-A, UPC-B, .. well, just about anything but Plessey and USPS.
With some minor changes to the drivers, you can duplicate the whole hack without using anything supplied from CueCat, thus slamming the door to any conceivable IP claim they might make. Ridiculous and unnecessary, perhaps, but even if they are clueless enough to think that people can't FIGURE OUT how their system works, this will at least convince the lawyers that they don't have even a shred of a case. Unless they're trying to imply that the whole concept of scanning a book and linking to an online catalog is their IP, in which case, well, they're going to lose.
He signed an NDA, went on to do exactly what he agreed not to in the NDA, left enough traces to be identified, and is now being sued? Not surprising to me .. what I don't understand is why he was stupid or crazy enough to do it, and what he thought he could gain by it ..
Then again, secret police aren't a particularly brilliant idea either
So does this mean they'll stop bypassing perfectly good TCP/IP software built into the OS and using their own marginally stable code instead? ;-)
sorry, couldn't resist ..
..taming the technologists. There's a whole lot of fear out there coming from the people who don't understand what the "high-tech people" do, some of it whipped up by people who stand to gain from a crackdown, some of it just good old fashioned paranoia, and all of it itching for a way to get us under some sort of control before we "take over the world."
They don't realize we already have, and we will never really be stopped, and if they ever do, it's going to get ugly.
Better idea ..
.. otherwise the script kiddies ruin the whole show ..
Have each 'moderator' give the site a +1 or -1 kick, possibly in various categories. Get enough people voting sites up and down and soon enough the scores will accumulate and yield a measurable index. Then filter by that index, setting a threshold as you see fit. Would work even better if the voting was done on several different subjects. One vote per site per IP address
more fun stuff here
An earlier poster pointed out the obvious: that the classic arcade games are easy to learn and hard to master. I'd like to add that they have a certain meditative quality when you do learn to master them. It's hard to describe, sort of a Zen-like link between the screen and your hands. Back when Tempest was still around, I used to end up on about the fourth or fifth series of levels and realize I hadn't even been paying conscious attention to the game. Hard to do that with Quake ..
I do have one issue with the article, though -- the author dismisses the possibility of intercepting surface VHF/UHF communications a bit too quickly. The intel community has launched some fairly large paylods over the last several years, more than they would really need for visual surveillance. Earth orbit is a really nice place to pick up a lot of traffic that is normally limited by line of sight -- I would not be a bit surprised if some of their own satellites monitor things like AMPS cellphone traffic, pager transmitters, and other commercial radio services, and relay the signals to ground monitoring stations on a spot beam.
As for keyword/content filtering, well, it's a bit like drinking from a fire hose, but with specialized hardware it wouldn't be too difficult
.. of boosters taking off plastered with more ads than a NASCAR stock car at Charlotte. At least it's one way to make money, and if it gets more launches televised, maybe people will get fired up about space flight again.
..
Then again, it gives 'space race' a whole new meaning
Quite frankly, if a page won't load in Netscape, I'll go someplace else .. lot easier than putting up with MSIE's silliness most of the time, and if a site can't be bothered to make their code run on all the browsers, I'll go to their competitors. Simple enough ..
There is no way to make e-voting work anonymously. If you don't want to have rampant overclocked script-powered election fraud, you have to have some way to get a one-time certificate that can be traced to the voter registration system, and anyone who has access to that system can figure out a way to intercept who gets those certificates and who they voted for. SSL only protects the voting data enroute to the server -- the admins that run the server could still compromise the whole thing.
..
And trust me, you don't want your local political machine to know for a fact you voted against them. Especially if they win
I find I can't get enough of Apollo. Phrases like "Contact light!" and "Give me a go/no-go for ___" and "Master alarm!" and "Houston, what's the story on this 1201?" don't help.
Anyone remember the Cray-2? It used Fluorinert as a coolant, gallons and gallons of it.
.. wonder if they ever determined exactly what temperature that was. (Also wonder if 3M will let them say exactly what temperature that was .. they freaked out one time when some friends of mine did a GC analysis of some Fluorinert and worked out an approximate chemical composition .. heheh ..)
I was interested to see that it does have a freezing point of sorts
A little harsh maybe? Well, consider that medical coverage determines survival rate to a large degree, indigent care notwithstanding. If your HMO decides you're worth insuring, you're just going to get better care, period, and sooner or later you're going to end up in a medical-emergency situation where you'll live if you're covered and die if you're not. Thus, we are now selecting for insurability by HMO's. Throw HMO-mandated genetic viability testing, however accurate, into the mix, and suddenly your genetic makeup determines your survival in an *economic* environment as well as a physical one.
Bear in mind we haven't even touched applications of the same technology by employers on their employees. Don't think for a moment that an employer that tests you for drugs wouldn't be even happier testing you for genetic markers that *may* be linked to violent behavior, resistance to authority, a tendency to die young, or any number of other things that make you less economical to keep on the workforce. You do have the freedom to refuse the test
.. your last blood test was genetically tested and we have determined that your genotype is no longer supported. For an extra $49,000 one-time per-incident fee, we will upgrade you to the current version so your medical support can continue. If you do not wish to purchase additional support at this time, we will do our best to make your remaining few days as comfortable as possible, but without this upgrade it will be uneconomical for us to continue to treat you. Thank you for calling.
In an ideal world, the USPTO would laugh this proposal all the way back across the pond. Trouble is, some equally harebrained schemes have already been granted patents, so I don't hold out much hope
Give me a break. My HT doesn't even radiate enough at LO or either IF freq to break squelch on a radio right next to it, and I've scanned it very thoroughly. As long as I don't hit the PTT, there's no way I'm interfering with the avionics
Anybody remember the big fuss over the guy that downloaded LANL's legacy codes onto his laptop and took them home? You'd think they'd have learned from that .. but apparently not .. maybe next time someone will download classified code onto a laptop and go home and plug it into their DSL on a static IP. Y'think?
;-) but considering the consequences, it would be nice to see LANL get a *little* more serious about security, at least for the important stuff. Come on, folks, your taxes pay for this ..
geez, I know it makes it harder to do the research if somebody's always bugging you to fill out forms when you check things out, and we'd all like to work at home, wouldn't we?
My experience has been that if you sell an OS with a computer, you have to include some way of getting at least that OS working after a hard disk reformat or failure. No matter how bombproof the OS is, you're still handing it to someone who doesn't know how its internals work, has no idea what's compatible with it, and is virtually certain to corrupt some critical piece of it and make the computer unbootable until your tech support walks them through fixing the problem. Fixing the problem will almost always involve reinstalling *something*, even if it's only a few hosed core OS files.
.. ;-) .. IANAL, but I can't see how they can possibly make a limited install work, especially when the OS is bundled with a third party CPU. You paid for a single user retail license, you should get a single user retail license, end of story. All else is BS.
Apple can at least sort of guarantee that the hardware-specific install that ships with their *hardware* (which MS, AFAIK, doesn't make at all..) will be enough to do a fully functional reinstall on the Mac it's shipped with. I'm assuming Sun has similar arrangements with Solaris. Since MS doesn't build computers, how can they control what hardware the OS is built on without violating antitrust laws? Oh, that's right, they did
.. punishing someone for something they have little or no control over.
..
Yeah, he may have provoked it in some way, but once someone decides to DoS a particular user, there's not much that user can do to stop it, even if someone happens to feel like they 'deserved' it somehow. By that logic, why not shut down a user's account because someone sends them email you don't approve of, or lock down their website because they're getting hits from the wrong part of the world?
Maybe I'm just being clueless here, but this sounds completely nuts to me. Even if this guy was an obnoxious luser, he still has rights, and he's definitely not the appropriate target for this response. IP block the guy who's trashing him, maybe block his subnet and/or notify his ISP, but the poor guy who's getting hit has very few options and shouldn't be punished for something he doesn't have the power to stop. Just my $.02