Most likely they would use an RF -> IR device that you plunk in front of the IR components to be controlled. I used to use an IR extender that I picked up about 10 years ago that used RF to do the "extending." It's a trivial device.
Um, then you would go to a manual backup called a "key". Every electronic lock system I have EVER seen has manual operation. Probably would violate fire code if it didn't.
I had this in a house 18 years ago. Problem is that a relay (solenoid actually) doesn't understand the concept of "dim", and they ARE noisy. We had the box in the basement and you could hear the solenoids on most of the first floor of the house. Being mechanical, they DO fail.
Not only is this simplistic, it doesn't retrofit well, and only addresses a small portion of home control issues. I mean really, ON/OFF lighting control only is pathetic, not to mention mostly useless. It was mainly designed for commercial use to centrally control lighting with a timer system. Most large retail stores use this kind of thing.
Yes and no. There are multiple competeting "standards", but very few are actually open, or actually have broad industry support. Crap like X-10 is a dead end as it's extremely limited, prone to interfearence, unreliable, has no security, etc. Also, the "smart home" technology is NOT going to cost you "hundreds of thousands." If you DID end up with an obsolete system, you can replace it. All that X-10 crap comes out pretty quick.
Lonworks on the other hand is VERY reliable, secure, OPEN, mature, works over many media such as RF, IR, twisted pair, power line, fiber, etc. Lonworks nodes are peers. Any node can control / communicate with any other node. Each node has a global unique ID much like an ethernet card's MAC address (except that it's longer.) The TYPES on control is virtually unlimited - it's not just "On, Off, Dim up and down." It's used in commercial and industrial environments as well as residential, so it's not going away anytime soon. Every house in Italy is being wired together with Lonworks.
So it depends on what technology you go with. You can go with a dedicated residential nitch technology, or something more universal with massive industry support. THAT will define whether you have a white elephant that becomes obsolete in a couple years or not.
I think you are overestimating the maintenance issues. Solid state electronics are quite reliable. Look at your clock radio. I've had the same one for 20 years or so. They just last forever. Node cost is something like $20, so it's similar. Your dishwasher, refrig, or furnace will probably die from a mechanical failure before electronic failure. A smart appliance could actually end up saving you money because it may be able to tell when a part is close to failure before it causes a domino type cascading failure in other parts. Not to mention that it can call your repair service for you when it DOES fail.
Large companies can take advantage of cheaper power rates at different times of the day. With a smart meter and smart home, you will be able to do so as well. We wouldn't HAVE a power issue in california if we could manage even just half our electical usage. In a situation where you have variable rates depending on the current grid load / market, a smart home investment could pay for itself in just a few years.
This is a technology I've been keeping an eye on for over 10 years. It's solid at this point.
Use Lonworks compatible hardware. It's an open standard. They have been around for over 10 years and the technology is being embedded into just about everything.
DON'T get the cheap kit. The tools are shit. The case isn't even useful. Jensen tools are OK, but you are paying for a bunch of stuff you will NEVER use.
Your best bet is to get an empty case and fill it yourself with GOOD tools that you will actually USE. See other posts for a list. While you can just toss your stuff in a bag, it's nice to be organized and have the tools where you expect them. Also, you can quickly see if you are missing anything after finishing a job.
Um, a crescent wrench is fully adjustable... They don't come in "standard and metric". They come in different sizes like 4" handles on up to huge 24" "take the axel off a tractor" sizes.
The problem is that those kits come with crappy / useless tools. The damn things are made with really soft steel, and have crappy handles. The first tough screw you run into ruins the screwdriver. Get some good Vermont American or high-end craftsman screw / nut drivers. Buy them individually, cause you only need a couple of the smaller ones. You also find that you need a few other things that these kits don't have.
Get a good 1/4" driver handle (magnetic) and a bunch of bits (good ones), with hex heads, torx, phillips, standard, security/tamper-proof bits - real handy. (see http://www.wihatools.com/pro_BitSets.htm BTW, Wiha carries ESD safe sets too.) Even though these sets come with phillips / slotted bits, make sure you get NORMAL screwdrivers as mentioned above. Trust me on this. You end up using your #2 phillips and 1/4" nut drivers more than any other tools in the bag.
Another "nice to have" is a little cordless screwdriver.
I've NEVER used an IC remover in the past 8 years. Everything is surface mount anyway. I guess they may have been useful in the 8088 days when memory was socketed chips. Soldering irons are just as useless. Some of those kits come with those crappy vaccuums - don't EVEN bother. Those things are a joke.
Throw in a good wire cutter, needle nose, bent needle nose, normal pliers, telescoping magnetic pickup, dental mirror, small flashlight, anti-static wrist strap, and that should do it for a good basic set for PC work.
For supplies, a can of Air, wire ties, motherboard-sized ESD bag, electrical tape, and anti-static cleaning wipes.
Past that, it depends on exactly what you do. Do you need to make custom RS-232 cables? Network cables? Fix / clean a printer? A good IT tech usually has quite a few tools as he ends up working on just about everything.
First, cisco uses NORMAL ethernet cards in their PIX products. It's just an intel chip for example (RTFA or open the cover on your pix). Second, the pix uses a normal intel processor, and a slow one at that. It is NOT specialized. Their Routers and switches are DIFFERENT from their Pixs and LocalDirectors.
Read this carefully: A PIX IS A PC. THAT'S IT. They put some flash on it, a custom BIOS, and Ta Da! The difference in PIX products is how much memory they have, number and type of interfaces, processor speed, and availability of encryption co-processor boards (standard PCI cards, BTW.) Cisco is using more standard PC parts because it reduces their costs dramatically.
Unless you have a REALLY f-ing fast net connection, a standard linux box will handle all the packet mangling you want at full wire speed. Anything OC3 or slower can be EASILY handled by a standard PC. Beaf it up a bit and it can handle OC12 or more.
People use cisco hardware because of BRANDING, the fact that it works (and quite reliably at that), the great support, etc. Yeah, in a middle to large corporate environment I'm gonna use Cisco or some other brand of dedicated network hardware for a variety of reasons (hell, I have a PIX 515UR at home even), but it's NOT because a PC based firewall can't handle the load. That excuse is just plain WRONG.
In some cases, iptables wins, and in others the pix wins. For example, if you are dealing with NAT, the pix supports lots of specialized protocols like realplayer that iptables does NOT. I'm seriously trying to replace my PIX with iptables, but the limitations in iptables just make it impossible at the moment.
Couple other points is that the pix is MUCH easier to configure, and (with the right license) things like VPN's are much easier to setup. It also has great failover support that's TRIVIAL to work with.
I use 2 lines of defense. The PIX is on the edge, and iptables on the interior. Iptables also lets me do other things pretty easily like a transparent caching proxy with privacy controls and ad blocking.
Um, no. You can buy the HARDWARE on ebay, but the license is NOT transferable. Read the license agreement. You will HAVE to buy a new license if you want to be legal. In addition, you may be subject to an "inspection fee". In order to get support on it, you will need to send it back to cisco and get it recertified which costs serious $$$s.
Cisco does this to pretty much kill the resale market. Bottom line is that if you decide to buy a used box, you REALLY need to know what you are getting into.
It's not really a word, but since it has no spaces in it, it would be usually be counted by word cout programs as a single word. I say usually because it contains punctuation. Some apps consider certain punctuation characters as a space. Consider "his/her" for example being 2 words, but 1234.45 is a single entity, so www.example.com would most likely be considered one entity, and http://www.example.com would be two, or four.
But we are getting a little off topic:-)
Basically, keyloggers kill ALL privacy regardless of the use of transport level security, and SSL is no longer secure anyway if you use IE due to flaws in the SSL code in Windows.
The real answer is that if you expect ANY privacy at all, don't conduct your private business while at work. You may also want to consider working for a company that respects it's workers and their privacy instead of working for one that considers employees as "property".
Won't help you if you are using IE due to this flaw since you can spoof hotmail or any other SSL based site and noone will be the wiser. It allows for a trivial "Man in the middle" attack. Some nice security guys on BugTraq providede a nice tool for spying on all SSL sessions. Note that Microsoft doesn't seem to even care to fix this flaw that basically makes SSL useless as a privacy tool.
... And before that (from the same company) there was the "dump memory & CPU state to disk" Copy Master card for the Apple ][. Seems that most games only checked copy protection when booted. After they were running, they just accessed data files. So the disks created by the copymaster board booted into the running game, overlaying the entire computer memory and state from the snapshot image.
Bottom line is that there are many creative ways to crack this nut. It's just another case of history repeating itself. Not ONE copy protection scheme has not been cracked (on open architecture systems like personal computers anyway.) Why? Simply because the program has to work. If it can load, it can be cracked. Sometimes by software ICE, sometimes by hardware, a program can be traced, it's secrets revealed.
Seems all the posts here talk about the need to get around copy protection. Bottom line is that I won't use software that is protected in any manor. I refuse to jump through hoops or have artificial limitations placed on my ability to use software, or make backups of software. Any company that attempts to restrict my ability to make legit backups or transfer a "license" to an alternate machine will find me going to their competitors.
Of course opensource has none of these problems.
I USED to use Windows along side Linux on a regular basis, but it was clear with XP that MS was tightening the screws. Now I only rarely use Windows at all, and only when I need to run software that has no linux counterpart. I've purchased my last MS product with Win2K. I will never upgrade. Instead, I will move to Linux for 100% of my work. The EULA's just make life with MS untenable.
only oral conversations can be considered "extremely private".
I guess you are just fucked if you are deaf and need to communicate via non-verbal communications methods.
Sorry, but distinctions on person to person communications based on the type of communications is WRONG. IM type applications should be just as protected. Keep in mind that some IM systems allow voice chat in addition to text. Of course, modems don't work well for voice, so people without access to high-speed connections are at a disadvantage as far as their rights to privacy goes.
could you not think of ways in which internet logs could possibly be useful in a criminal investigation?
There is no question that log files can be useful in criminal investigations. There is also no question that if we made searches and wiretaps legal without a warrent, that we would catch more criminals. Hell, we should just do roadblocks on all major roads, bug everyone's bedrooms, put spycams in all bathrooms, stripsearch all people leaving stores, etc. JUST IN CASE something illegal may have happened. When E911 goes active, better make sure you keep a record of the location of every cell phone for 6 months just in case it could be useful in a future investigation. Just think of all the missing children we could find with that!
The technology available today allows governments and others to basically monitor all communications, movements, activities, buying habits, etc. of everyone. Let's just scrap any illusion of privacy and freedom and implant a device into every person that monitors everything they hear, see, and tracks their location. We are basically doing that anyway via external mechanisms. Let's go one step further and analyze behavior of children and throw the ones with a propensity for criminal behavior (based on standardized testing and observations by teachers) straight into jail and that way we will prevent crime from happening in the first place.
Yeah, that seems way over the top, but we are getting there step by step. The government cannot be trusted to implement limits on itself. It never has in the past, and never will in the future. It's up to use to say "Enough is Enough."
Why is it that so many seem to forget all the lessons that history teaches us?
Sigh. Yeah, this trend is disturbing. How quickly we forget the lessons history teaches us - Hoover's FBI, McCarthy, etc. Instead of branding people communists, we are branding them terrorists, and now potential criminals.
The problem is so much worse today with virtually limitless databases. Any info can be agregated, sorted, fold-spindle-and mutilated. We have instant recall of any fact for the past 20 years or so. Agencies are now "cooperating" with each other to make sure the government knows everything about us, including the last time and place we took a dump.
We are fucked. Time for the "freedom ship"
These "lists" have been around covertly for quite some time, but when it's out in the open and vocally supported by "the Man" it's time to worry.
The pr0n industry is bigger than all of the major sports leagues combined in terms of overall revenues. Much larger in fact. Just on print and videos alone, not including the net. It has always been so.
You MUST be young.
The porn business really took off around 30 - 40 years ago after several court decisions made most porn legal (in the US.) With the advent of the VCR, porn exploded. It has NOT "always been so."
Slashdot Mirror
So did you try Misterhouse? It has voice recognition. Uses the IBM Viavoice dev kit on Linux.
Most likely they would use an RF -> IR device that you plunk in front of the IR components to be controlled. I used to use an IR extender that I picked up about 10 years ago that used RF to do the "extending." It's a trivial device.
Um, then you would go to a manual backup called a "key". Every electronic lock system I have EVER seen has manual operation. Probably would violate fire code if it didn't.
I had this in a house 18 years ago. Problem is that a relay (solenoid actually) doesn't understand the concept of "dim", and they ARE noisy. We had the box in the basement and you could hear the solenoids on most of the first floor of the house. Being mechanical, they DO fail.
Not only is this simplistic, it doesn't retrofit well, and only addresses a small portion of home control issues. I mean really, ON/OFF lighting control only is pathetic, not to mention mostly useless. It was mainly designed for commercial use to centrally control lighting with a timer system. Most large retail stores use this kind of thing.
Yes and no. There are multiple competeting "standards", but very few are actually open, or actually have broad industry support. Crap like X-10 is a dead end as it's extremely limited, prone to interfearence, unreliable, has no security, etc. Also, the "smart home" technology is NOT going to cost you "hundreds of thousands." If you DID end up with an obsolete system, you can replace it. All that X-10 crap comes out pretty quick.
Lonworks on the other hand is VERY reliable, secure, OPEN, mature, works over many media such as RF, IR, twisted pair, power line, fiber, etc. Lonworks nodes are peers. Any node can control / communicate with any other node. Each node has a global unique ID much like an ethernet card's MAC address (except that it's longer.) The TYPES on control is virtually unlimited - it's not just "On, Off, Dim up and down." It's used in commercial and industrial environments as well as residential, so it's not going away anytime soon. Every house in Italy is being wired together with Lonworks.
So it depends on what technology you go with. You can go with a dedicated residential nitch technology, or something more universal with massive industry support. THAT will define whether you have a white elephant that becomes obsolete in a couple years or not.
I think you are overestimating the maintenance issues. Solid state electronics are quite reliable. Look at your clock radio. I've had the same one for 20 years or so. They just last forever. Node cost is something like $20, so it's similar. Your dishwasher, refrig, or furnace will probably die from a mechanical failure before electronic failure. A smart appliance could actually end up saving you money because it may be able to tell when a part is close to failure before it causes a domino type cascading failure in other parts. Not to mention that it can call your repair service for you when it DOES fail.
Large companies can take advantage of cheaper power rates at different times of the day. With a smart meter and smart home, you will be able to do so as well. We wouldn't HAVE a power issue in california if we could manage even just half our electical usage. In a situation where you have variable rates depending on the current grid load / market, a smart home investment could pay for itself in just a few years.
This is a technology I've been keeping an eye on for over 10 years. It's solid at this point.
Use Lonworks compatible hardware. It's an open standard. They have been around for over 10 years and the technology is being embedded into just about everything.
Add to that:
Tomsrtbt floppy
Linuxcare Bootable Business Card CD
Ghost
Paritition Magic
Sigh. Nothing beats a REAL tool set. They guy is talking about building PC's. A SAK or leatherman is fine for "emergency" use, but not everyday use.
DON'T get the cheap kit. The tools are shit. The case isn't even useful. Jensen tools are OK, but you are paying for a bunch of stuff you will NEVER use.
Your best bet is to get an empty case and fill it yourself with GOOD tools that you will actually USE. See other posts for a list. While you can just toss your stuff in a bag, it's nice to be organized and have the tools where you expect them. Also, you can quickly see if you are missing anything after finishing a job.
crescent wrench (get one metric and one standard)
Um, a crescent wrench is fully adjustable... They don't come in "standard and metric". They come in different sizes like 4" handles on up to huge 24" "take the axel off a tractor" sizes.
The problem is that those kits come with crappy / useless tools. The damn things are made with really soft steel, and have crappy handles. The first tough screw you run into ruins the screwdriver. Get some good Vermont American or high-end craftsman screw / nut drivers. Buy them individually, cause you only need a couple of the smaller ones. You also find that you need a few other things that these kits don't have.
Get a good 1/4" driver handle (magnetic) and a bunch of bits (good ones), with hex heads, torx, phillips, standard, security/tamper-proof bits - real handy. (see http://www.wihatools.com/pro_BitSets.htm BTW, Wiha carries ESD safe sets too.) Even though these sets come with phillips / slotted bits, make sure you get NORMAL screwdrivers as mentioned above. Trust me on this. You end up using your #2 phillips and 1/4" nut drivers more than any other tools in the bag.
Another "nice to have" is a little cordless screwdriver.
I've NEVER used an IC remover in the past 8 years. Everything is surface mount anyway. I guess they may have been useful in the 8088 days when memory was socketed chips. Soldering irons are just as useless. Some of those kits come with those crappy vaccuums - don't EVEN bother. Those things are a joke.
Throw in a good wire cutter, needle nose, bent needle nose, normal pliers, telescoping magnetic pickup, dental mirror, small flashlight, anti-static wrist strap, and that should do it for a good basic set for PC work.
For supplies, a can of Air, wire ties, motherboard-sized ESD bag, electrical tape, and anti-static cleaning wipes.
Past that, it depends on exactly what you do. Do you need to make custom RS-232 cables? Network cables? Fix / clean a printer? A good IT tech usually has quite a few tools as he ends up working on just about everything.
God, this is so full of crap I just HAD to rebut.
First, cisco uses NORMAL ethernet cards in their PIX products. It's just an intel chip for example (RTFA or open the cover on your pix). Second, the pix uses a normal intel processor, and a slow one at that. It is NOT specialized. Their Routers and switches are DIFFERENT from their Pixs and LocalDirectors.
Read this carefully: A PIX IS A PC. THAT'S IT. They put some flash on it, a custom BIOS, and Ta Da! The difference in PIX products is how much memory they have, number and type of interfaces, processor speed, and availability of encryption co-processor boards (standard PCI cards, BTW.) Cisco is using more standard PC parts because it reduces their costs dramatically.
Unless you have a REALLY f-ing fast net connection, a standard linux box will handle all the packet mangling you want at full wire speed. Anything OC3 or slower can be EASILY handled by a standard PC. Beaf it up a bit and it can handle OC12 or more.
People use cisco hardware because of BRANDING, the fact that it works (and quite reliably at that), the great support, etc. Yeah, in a middle to large corporate environment I'm gonna use Cisco or some other brand of dedicated network hardware for a variety of reasons (hell, I have a PIX 515UR at home even), but it's NOT because a PC based firewall can't handle the load. That excuse is just plain WRONG.
In some cases, iptables wins, and in others the pix wins. For example, if you are dealing with NAT, the pix supports lots of specialized protocols like realplayer that iptables does NOT. I'm seriously trying to replace my PIX with iptables, but the limitations in iptables just make it impossible at the moment.
Couple other points is that the pix is MUCH easier to configure, and (with the right license) things like VPN's are much easier to setup. It also has great failover support that's TRIVIAL to work with.
I use 2 lines of defense. The PIX is on the edge, and iptables on the interior. Iptables also lets me do other things pretty easily like a transparent caching proxy with privacy controls and ad blocking.
Um, no. You can buy the HARDWARE on ebay, but the license is NOT transferable. Read the license agreement. You will HAVE to buy a new license if you want to be legal. In addition, you may be subject to an "inspection fee". In order to get support on it, you will need to send it back to cisco and get it recertified which costs serious $$$s.
Cisco does this to pretty much kill the resale market. Bottom line is that if you decide to buy a used box, you REALLY need to know what you are getting into.
If you have migrated from version to version, something is probably
.galeon directory tree. It will recreate it.
fucked up in your old config files.
Backup your bookmarks and settings, and delete the
Galeon is faster than hell here on a wimpier machine.
It's not really a word, but since it has no spaces in it, it would be usually be counted by word cout programs as a single word. I say usually because it contains punctuation. Some apps consider certain punctuation characters as a space. Consider "his/her" for example being 2 words, but 1234.45 is a single entity, so www.example.com would most likely be considered one entity, and http://www.example.com would be two, or four.
:-)
But we are getting a little off topic
Basically, keyloggers kill ALL privacy regardless of the use of transport level security, and SSL is no longer secure anyway if you use IE due to flaws in the SSL code in Windows.
The real answer is that if you expect ANY privacy at all, don't conduct your private business while at work. You may also want to consider working for a company that respects it's workers and their privacy instead of working for one that considers employees as "property".
Won't help you if you are using IE due to this flaw since you can spoof hotmail or any other SSL based site and noone will be the wiser. It allows for a trivial "Man in the middle" attack. Some nice security guys on BugTraq providede a nice tool for spying on all SSL sessions. Note that Microsoft doesn't seem to even care to fix this flaw that basically makes SSL useless as a privacy tool.
... And before that (from the same company) there was the "dump memory & CPU state to disk" Copy Master card for the Apple ][. Seems that most games only checked copy protection when booted. After they were running, they just accessed data files. So the disks created by the copymaster board booted into the running game, overlaying the entire computer memory and state from the snapshot image.
Bottom line is that there are many creative ways to crack this nut. It's just another case of history repeating itself. Not ONE copy protection scheme has not been cracked (on open architecture systems like personal computers anyway.) Why? Simply because the program has to work. If it can load, it can be cracked. Sometimes by software ICE, sometimes by hardware, a program can be traced, it's secrets revealed.
Seems all the posts here talk about the need to get around copy protection. Bottom line is that I won't use software that is protected
in any manor. I refuse to jump through hoops or have artificial limitations placed on my ability to use software, or make backups of software. Any company that attempts to restrict my ability to make legit backups or transfer a "license" to an alternate machine will find me going to their competitors.
Of course opensource has none of these problems.
I USED to use Windows along side Linux on a regular basis, but it was clear with XP that MS was tightening the screws. Now I only rarely use Windows at all, and only when I need to run software that has no linux counterpart. I've purchased my last MS product with Win2K. I will never upgrade. Instead, I will move to Linux for 100% of my work. The EULA's just make life with MS untenable.
only oral conversations can be considered "extremely private".
I guess you are just fucked if you are deaf and need to communicate via non-verbal communications methods.
Sorry, but distinctions on person to person communications based on the type of communications is WRONG. IM type applications should be just as protected. Keep in mind that some IM systems allow voice chat in addition to text. Of course, modems don't work well for voice, so people without access to high-speed connections are at a disadvantage as far as their rights to privacy goes.
could you not think of ways in which internet logs could possibly be useful in a criminal investigation?
There is no question that log files can be useful in criminal investigations. There is also no question that if we made searches and wiretaps legal without a warrent, that we would catch more criminals. Hell, we should just do roadblocks on all major roads, bug everyone's bedrooms, put spycams in all bathrooms, stripsearch all people leaving stores, etc. JUST IN CASE something illegal may have happened. When E911 goes active, better make sure you keep a record of the location of every cell phone for 6 months just in case it could be useful in a future investigation. Just think of all the missing children we could find with that!
The technology available today allows governments and others to basically monitor all communications, movements, activities, buying habits, etc. of everyone. Let's just scrap any illusion of privacy and freedom and implant a device into every person that monitors everything they hear, see, and tracks their location. We are basically doing that anyway via external mechanisms. Let's go one step further and analyze behavior of children and throw the ones with a propensity for criminal behavior (based on standardized testing and observations by teachers) straight into jail and that way we will prevent crime from happening in the first place.
Yeah, that seems way over the top, but we are getting there step by step. The government cannot be trusted to implement limits on itself. It never has in the past, and never will in the future. It's up to use to say "Enough is Enough."
Why is it that so many seem to forget all the lessons that history teaches us?
Worse than that. You could have a crowbar in the back seat of your car. Get pulled over and be busted for possession of "burglary tools."
Sigh. Yeah, this trend is disturbing. How quickly we forget the lessons history teaches us - Hoover's FBI, McCarthy, etc. Instead of branding people communists, we are branding them terrorists, and now potential criminals.
The problem is so much worse today with virtually limitless databases. Any info can be agregated, sorted, fold-spindle-and mutilated. We have instant recall of any fact for the past 20 years or so. Agencies are now "cooperating" with each other to make sure the government knows everything about us, including the last time and place we took a dump.
We are fucked. Time for the "freedom ship"
These "lists" have been around covertly for quite some time, but when it's out in the open and vocally supported by "the Man" it's time to worry.
The pr0n industry is bigger than all of the major sports leagues combined in terms of overall revenues. Much larger in fact. Just on print and videos alone, not including the net. It has always been so.
You MUST be young.
The porn business really took off around 30 - 40 years ago after several court decisions made most porn legal (in the US.) With the advent of the VCR, porn exploded. It has NOT "always been so."
Yeah, I like to use the crusty dishes over and over again too. Once the green fuzz is about an inch high, it's time to wash. :-)
Must be all that Pot. Kills the short term memory. :-)
.