Funny thing, your second link to "cell phone encryption" lead to this Wired article which documents a flaw in the encryption used, thereby rendering most of it useless for current "secure phones".
They have no right to listen, and no reason to be suspiscious. I happen to live in a two-party state where recording of phone calls has to be known to all parties on the call. Since they're not notifying me or the other party on the calls I make, their use of the data they may glean, is inadmissible and against the law.
Just encrypt everything, locking down your conversations, speak in code, use encrypted SMS messages and so on.
Don't let them in, because they have no right or reason to be there. Period.
They want to make it hard for us to enjoy our freedoms, then I'm more than happy to make them earn their right to violate them by making it ridiculously hard to decrypt/brute/crack any encryption that I may use.
As you know, solar panels capture their energy from the VISIBLE light spectrum, hence the loss and cost.
But there is actually work being done to capture the other 6 spectrums of light in one panel. This means you can capture the infrared (nighttime), ultraviolet (cloudy) and other spectrums.
You can also point your solar panel at a streetlamp and get energy as well, but not as much as bright, cloud-free daytime sunlight can for you of course.
Even with a solar panel that is only 20% efficient, that's 20% less money you're spending on something else to stay powered for that duration.
It's free money, I don't know why more people aren't taking advantage of it.
Because by the time the next conference happens, the US will have already shut its borders for anyone "suspect" of leaving the country to attend this conference, from attending.
And do you think they'll let you back into the country?
"What is the nature of your visit?"
"I'm speaking at a hacking conference."
"A what? Turn around and get back on the plane and don't come back."
I described in detail how to install, boot and use the USB key as a bootable Linux distribution, and also how to use the USB key in Windows (or Linux) with TrueCrypt, using some fancy tricks to auto-prompt for the password upon insertion of the key, how to use a slew of PortableApps on the key, and even a launchable menu to find and access them.
This was almost a full year ago. IronKey, whatever it is, is nothing new.
The next step is the paper ballot is taking to the reading station. The ballot is read in by another computer with a scanner. This computer scans the text and reduces it to a set of simple vote codes. These vote codes are checksummed and that is compared against the bar codes.
What happens when the barcode incorporates a boolean value which says "When this vote is confirmed, display the user's vote to the user, and record the opposite vote electronically"?
# You voted for the "rigged" candidate, pre-chosen to win the election
0 = Display vote 'X' to the user and record vote 'X' electronically
# You voted for the one pre-chosen to lose the election
1 = Display vote 'X' to the user and record vote 'Y' electronically
I recently bought a Watts-Up Pro Power Analyzer/Power Meter from SMARTHOME and have been going through my house and office, measuring the consumption of various devices. What I found, was surprising.
First and foremost, my 21" Hitachi CRT from about 9 years ago, draws 70W-75W while powered on and displaying white pixels or any varied background.
I compared that with my 24" Gateway FPD2485W, and it is consuming 90W with any setting, even on the lowest brightness setting. Yes, my LCD draws 20W MORE than my CRT.
My dehumidifier consumes 600W when its on full tilt.
My toaster oven consumes 1300W while cooking 2 slices on the toast setting.
My office fan consumes 140W on speed setting 3.
My entire office, including all chargers, devices, an AMD64/4600+ machine, Palm, flatbed scanner, speakers, iPod, etc. draws 282W total. 90W of that is the 24" LCD.
This myth that using black pixels is going to save money is simply not true... and definitely not true on LCD screens, which consume more watts than similarly-sized CRTs.
I highly recommend picking up a Watts-Up Pro (over the Kill-A-Watt, because the Kill-a-Watt can't work with devices using inverters or generators), and look at your power consumption. My monthly power bill is $180 here, and I'm looking to reduce that as much as I can. I've already replaced every bulb in the house and office with CFLs, which dropped the cost quite a bit. Then the town decided to increase the cost of power, which negated the whole CFL push. Sigh.
Watts-Up can show me exactly what my devices are using, graphed over time, and it can display the actual cost of each watt I consume, in real-time. Definitely worth the purchase price.
Yes, it's called a default homepage. You build a local index.html that includes the links you want (you call them Favorites, but we in the non-Windows world call them Bookmarks) and load that as your default homepage in FF-Slim.
This is not an issue at all. History might be a problem, but you can always use 'about:cache' or 'about:history' to derive that.
But OpenOffice has a long, long way to go. The fit and finish, polish and performance of Microsoft Office to this point, is unparalleled. I'm not a Microsoft fanboy, but I'm not a Microsoft hater either. I'm just a realist.
When OpenOffice can step up its interface, design, compatibility, and market share, then we might have something to talk about. But as we sit right now, Microsoft Office is the only game in town that does what it does.
Can you point me to where you made your $73 million dollar donation to help fund that effort?
Seriously, Oo.org has come a LONG way in a very short period of time, even after the Sun splitoff, with barely any real funding (and even StarOffice was a side project for Sun).
Pour equivalent amounts of funding and manpower into Oo.org, and you'll see it surpass Microsoft Office in shorter time than it takes MS to release a new version. Oh, and it will end up being more compatible with more formats (MS and non-MS), and still take less time to load and use less overall memory.
Microsoft asserts that OpenOffice.org is not 100% compatible with their products. Microsoft, however, has apparently decided not to support the OpenOffice.org formats either, for which they have no excuse: the standards for OpenOffice.org documents are published and publicly available, whereas Microsoft makes it a habit to sue people for reverse engineering their own document formats.
I, for one am glad that NZ has decided to move back to Microsoft Office. It is one less non-contributor to the overall community and body of effort making Open Source successful for the rest of us. If they're not going to help improve OSS, then they're just in the way.
I work on Open Source in my spare time because it's fun. The more you start telling me what I should be doing with MY spare time, I'll just go find something else more fun to do instead.
For all that OO tries, it just isn't as compatible with MS Office formats as it needs to be for me to use it. I always have formatting errors with word documents, sometimes I have entire excel spreadsheets that are useless, and I just can't have that.
Microsoft asserts that OpenOffice.org is not 100% compatible with their products. Microsoft, however, has apparently decided not to support the OpenOffice.org formats either, for which they have no excuse: the standards for OpenOffice.org documents are published and publicly available, whereas Microsoft makes it a habit to sue people for reverse engineering their own document formats.
I ran the scanner across the 7,745 directories and 99,364 files found on one of my Windows machines, and it failed to detect:
VLC
Firefox (how could you fail to detect THIS one?!)
Cygwin
Audacity
Gallery Remote
burnatonce
Synergy
..and several other not-so-popular OSS packages I have installed.
I'm sure it works great for a narrow subset of OSS software, but the broad category of software I have installed, should have been detected. I wouldn't trust this.
...you need to give your name, email, location and some more before downloading the beast.
The interesting thing is that they're filtering based on "business email". I put in my gmail address, and it barked that I needed a business email address. I used another, non-commercial address, and it accepted it without incident. Checking their Javascript, we see:
regstr =/msn.com|earthlink.com|gmail.com|yahoo.com|comcast.com|aol.com|hotmail.com/i; if (emailstr.match(regstr) != null) { alert("Please provide a business email address. If you do have received this message in error, please contact us at sales@openlogic.com."); return false; }
For example, Linksys used the Linux kernel on its routers, got forced to publish the source and now you have 3rd party firmware for those devices.
You spelled agreed to publish wrong.
When someone uses GPL code, they agree to the license that binds that code. If they ignore that license, there is no "forcing" them to publish anything. They agreed to the license, then violated it of their own free will. Bringing them back into compliance is simply making sure they stay within the laws they agreed to uphold when they began using the code.
There's an alternative solution if you don't agree to the terms of the license: Don't use the code, and do it some other way.
Something tells me you're not a New York City bicycle commuter. Nor have you likely ever found yourself in the middle of an avenue downtown in the heat of Summer suddenly gasping for oxygen... a result of fumes from high vehicle congestion converting to ozone, rendering the atmosphere anaerobic.
As a city cyclist with decades of miles under my... er, pedals, let's ponder something for a moment:
If they charge a "toll" for any traffic south of 86th, and EVERYONE pays it, how does that help the traffic? How does that help the oxygen situation? How does that help security at all?
Answer: It doesn't.
It just lines the coffers for them to continue to bankroll more money to fund surveillance, pay teams of people to review and persue surveillance footage, etc. Traffic won't lighten, oxygen won't improve, it won't get better.
Unless I'm flat-out wrong, and the money is being directly funded into hybrids and other exhaust-cleansing projects for traffic on those routes, but I don't see those being bandied about in this context.
So whomever it was that decided to put TPB on that list, has in fact _increased_ the distribution of child porn.
Perhaps that was the point?
If you claim that they're being delisted because of child pornography, and then the masses decides to revolt against that by uploading gigabytes of child porn, you just validated your original (false at the onset) assertion. Now they CAN take TPB down, because they are, in fact, a party to distributing child pornography.
But as TPB removes it, they'll have to then start looking into benign-named torrents that may contain child pornography instead. An ebook on faucet repair in a 1gb.rar file? Are you sure?
I think porn sites cooperate already a lot more then most. Maybe they'll lead the charge.
They lead that charge in a lot more ways than you think.
They gross more revenue in one year than ALL of the commercial movie studios combined (Sony, Paramount, Warner, MGM, Universal).
They are pioneering technologies via the web that many people haven't seen yet, and many that are commonplace (streaming video, java-based "live" chat, webcams, Skype chat, others). I've spoken to an adult film star about how her studio was getting involved in SecondLife. They have actual scripted restraints that you wear in real-life, which are manipulated by commands from your avatar in SecondLife. The same goes for "egg" vibrators which are controlled remotely, via SecondLife commands and avatars.
They are making the push for FIOS and other higher-bandwidth services to be deployed into regional areas (using funding from #1 above). This puts more videos into the... erm... hands, of their customers "on-demand".
They produce more "relevant" content that people are willing to watch on a regular basis.
I used to work and manage a video store many years ago, and the statistics still hold, and are very strong. Despite what many believe (and you can look this up), women are the highest volume of adult entertainment subscribers. I've seen it many times over many years while working at the video store. Men would come in and rent one discrete adult video, but women would come in and rent 4, 5, 6 at a time, consistently.
The adult industry has fueled the increase in our regional and residential broadband, they've fueled the technologies that we all use every day, and they make more money than the commercial studios can even dream of.
Watch them closely, they're always on the cutting edge of what works.
If on the other hand information is being submitted to the web site (such as this comment), then merely knowing the URL doesn't tell you what was posted at all.
But capturing the POST data (which would have to happen anyway, in the context of the transaction across the routers, through the wire-level sniffers), would certainly have that data.
Again, its like me walking through your house, and saying I only looked at your walls, but not at anything else in your residence, after I opened your door with the knob. The fact that we allow them to "open the door", means anything they "see" inside, is impossible to prove or disprove, therefore... we shouldn't even allow them to open the door.
But because people don't understand the technologies, they just let them in.
Then the government will just have the NSA super computers brute force it in a matter of minuets AND you get thrown in jail.
Not quite.
I can generate a key that would take them longer than several lifetimes to crack, and encrypt my data with that. By the time they crack it, assuming they can brute force it, the data they get will be out of date and useless.
Remember, computers are still limited by physics, and we know what the maximum speed is; the speed of the electron.
I think that his honor missed something here. He seems to be saying that knowing the address of a web page is like knowing the address on an envelope, and in either case the contents is not being snooped upon.
The difference ends in the description.
If I was going to snoop on the contents of an envelope, it would be obvious that it was opened (except in the case of a professional de-sealing, of course).
With the URL of a webpage (or the IP it originates from), it is more akin to a postcard than an envelope. How can you tell if I've only looked at the front of the postcard to read the address, and not flipped it over to read the back?
Answer: You can't, and therefore, this can't be trusted or allowed.
Let them keep asking for them. Keep saying NO! If they jail you for it, go. If they keep asking, keep saying NO.
Stand up for what you know is wrong, and let millions of others do the same.
Remember, we put our government into place to represent our best interests. When they fail to do so, they should step down themselves, or we should replace them.
Now we can all begin converting our internal infrastructure to using very strong, protocol-based encryption, end-to-end. Bittorrent for http, secure, anonymous, private networks wrapped around our standard applications and more.
Begin now, if you're not using strong encryption.. you should be. Don't let the government WE put into place, tell you what YOU can do with your own Internet time.
If the government we put into place is not representing your best interests, its time to replace them with one that does.
Slashdot Mirror
Funny thing, your second link to "cell phone encryption" lead to this Wired article which documents a flaw in the encryption used, thereby rendering most of it useless for current "secure phones".
I have only three words...
Encrypt, encrypt, encrypt!
They have no right to listen, and no reason to be suspiscious. I happen to live in a two-party state where recording of phone calls has to be known to all parties on the call. Since they're not notifying me or the other party on the calls I make, their use of the data they may glean, is inadmissible and against the law.
Just encrypt everything, locking down your conversations, speak in code, use encrypted SMS messages and so on.
Don't let them in, because they have no right or reason to be there. Period.
They want to make it hard for us to enjoy our freedoms, then I'm more than happy to make them earn their right to violate them by making it ridiculously hard to decrypt/brute/crack any encryption that I may use.
As you know, solar panels capture their energy from the VISIBLE light spectrum, hence the loss and cost.
But there is actually work being done to capture the other 6 spectrums of light in one panel. This means you can capture the infrared (nighttime), ultraviolet (cloudy) and other spectrums.
You can also point your solar panel at a streetlamp and get energy as well, but not as much as bright, cloud-free daytime sunlight can for you of course.
Even with a solar panel that is only 20% efficient, that's 20% less money you're spending on something else to stay powered for that duration.
It's free money, I don't know why more people aren't taking advantage of it.
Because by the time the next conference happens, the US will have already shut its borders for anyone "suspect" of leaving the country to attend this conference, from attending.
And do you think they'll let you back into the country?
"What is the nature of your visit?"
"I'm speaking at a hacking conference."
"A what? Turn around and get back on the plane and don't come back."
I did a talk for my local LUG back in September of 2006 describing exactly how to do this using TrueCrypt for Linux and Windows
I described in detail how to install, boot and use the USB key as a bootable Linux distribution, and also how to use the USB key in Windows (or Linux) with TrueCrypt, using some fancy tricks to auto-prompt for the password upon insertion of the key, how to use a slew of PortableApps on the key, and even a launchable menu to find and access them.
This was almost a full year ago. IronKey, whatever it is, is nothing new.
What happens when the barcode incorporates a boolean value which says "When this vote is confirmed, display the user's vote to the user, and record the opposite vote electronically"?
# You voted for the "rigged" candidate, pre-chosen to win the election
0 = Display vote 'X' to the user and record vote 'X' electronically
# You voted for the one pre-chosen to lose the election
1 = Display vote 'X' to the user and record vote 'Y' electronically
Easily solved... and you didn't mention anything about security, so let me help. I wrote about it previously.
I've been moving more and more of my data off to TrueCrypt on Linux/Windows or GELI on the FreeBSD side to lock things down. So far, it works great.
I recently bought a Watts-Up Pro Power Analyzer/Power Meter from SMARTHOME and have been going through my house and office, measuring the consumption of various devices. What I found, was surprising.
First and foremost, my 21" Hitachi CRT from about 9 years ago, draws 70W-75W while powered on and displaying white pixels or any varied background.
I compared that with my 24" Gateway FPD2485W, and it is consuming 90W with any setting, even on the lowest brightness setting. Yes, my LCD draws 20W MORE than my CRT.
My dehumidifier consumes 600W when its on full tilt.
My toaster oven consumes 1300W while cooking 2 slices on the toast setting.
My office fan consumes 140W on speed setting 3.
My entire office, including all chargers, devices, an AMD64/4600+ machine, Palm, flatbed scanner, speakers, iPod, etc. draws 282W total. 90W of that is the 24" LCD.
This myth that using black pixels is going to save money is simply not true... and definitely not true on LCD screens, which consume more watts than similarly-sized CRTs.
I highly recommend picking up a Watts-Up Pro (over the Kill-A-Watt, because the Kill-a-Watt can't work with devices using inverters or generators), and look at your power consumption. My monthly power bill is $180 here, and I'm looking to reduce that as much as I can. I've already replaced every bulb in the house and office with CFLs, which dropped the cost quite a bit. Then the town decided to increase the cost of power, which negated the whole CFL push. Sigh.
Watts-Up can show me exactly what my devices are using, graphed over time, and it can display the actual cost of each watt I consume, in real-time. Definitely worth the purchase price.
And topless males!
The obvious solution is to ban topless beaches in a gender-neutral way. Shirts for men and shirts for women will have to be required.
Yes, it's called a default homepage. You build a local index.html that includes the links you want (you call them Favorites, but we in the non-Windows world call them Bookmarks) and load that as your default homepage in FF-Slim.
This is not an issue at all. History might be a problem, but you can always use 'about:cache' or 'about:history' to derive that.
Can you point me to where you made your $73 million dollar donation to help fund that effort?
Seriously, Oo.org has come a LONG way in a very short period of time, even after the Sun splitoff, with barely any real funding (and even StarOffice was a side project for Sun).
Pour equivalent amounts of funding and manpower into Oo.org, and you'll see it surpass Microsoft Office in shorter time than it takes MS to release a new version. Oh, and it will end up being more compatible with more formats (MS and non-MS), and still take less time to load and use less overall memory.
Microsoft asserts that OpenOffice.org is not 100% compatible with their products. Microsoft, however, has apparently decided not to support the OpenOffice.org formats either, for which they have no excuse: the standards for OpenOffice.org documents are published and publicly available, whereas Microsoft makes it a habit to sue people for reverse engineering their own document formats.
I, for one am glad that NZ has decided to move back to Microsoft Office. It is one less non-contributor to the overall community and body of effort making Open Source successful for the rest of us. If they're not going to help improve OSS, then they're just in the way.
I work on Open Source in my spare time because it's fun. The more you start telling me what I should be doing with MY spare time, I'll just go find something else more fun to do instead.
Microsoft asserts that OpenOffice.org is not 100% compatible with their products. Microsoft, however, has apparently decided not to support the OpenOffice.org formats either, for which they have no excuse: the standards for OpenOffice.org documents are published and publicly available, whereas Microsoft makes it a habit to sue people for reverse engineering their own document formats.
I ran the scanner across the 7,745 directories and 99,364 files found on one of my Windows machines, and it failed to detect:
I'm sure it works great for a narrow subset of OSS software, but the broad category of software I have installed, should have been detected. I wouldn't trust this.
The interesting thing is that they're filtering based on "business email". I put in my gmail address, and it barked that I needed a business email address. I used another, non-commercial address, and it accepted it without incident. Checking their Javascript, we see:
Tsk, tsk!
You spelled agreed to publish wrong.
When someone uses GPL code, they agree to the license that binds that code. If they ignore that license, there is no "forcing" them to publish anything. They agreed to the license, then violated it of their own free will. Bringing them back into compliance is simply making sure they stay within the laws they agreed to uphold when they began using the code.
There's an alternative solution if you don't agree to the terms of the license: Don't use the code, and do it some other way.
As a city cyclist with decades of miles under my... er, pedals, let's ponder something for a moment:
If they charge a "toll" for any traffic south of 86th, and EVERYONE pays it, how does that help the traffic? How does that help the oxygen situation? How does that help security at all?
Answer: It doesn't.
It just lines the coffers for them to continue to bankroll more money to fund surveillance, pay teams of people to review and persue surveillance footage, etc. Traffic won't lighten, oxygen won't improve, it won't get better.
Unless I'm flat-out wrong, and the money is being directly funded into hybrids and other exhaust-cleansing projects for traffic on those routes, but I don't see those being bandied about in this context.
Perhaps that was the point?
If you claim that they're being delisted because of child pornography, and then the masses decides to revolt against that by uploading gigabytes of child porn, you just validated your original (false at the onset) assertion. Now they CAN take TPB down, because they are, in fact, a party to distributing child pornography.
But as TPB removes it, they'll have to then start looking into benign-named torrents that may contain child pornography instead. An ebook on faucet repair in a 1gb .rar file? Are you sure?
They lead that charge in a lot more ways than you think.
I used to work and manage a video store many years ago, and the statistics still hold, and are very strong. Despite what many believe (and you can look this up), women are the highest volume of adult entertainment subscribers. I've seen it many times over many years while working at the video store. Men would come in and rent one discrete adult video, but women would come in and rent 4, 5, 6 at a time, consistently.
The adult industry has fueled the increase in our regional and residential broadband, they've fueled the technologies that we all use every day, and they make more money than the commercial studios can even dream of.
Watch them closely, they're always on the cutting edge of what works.
But capturing the POST data (which would have to happen anyway, in the context of the transaction across the routers, through the wire-level sniffers), would certainly have that data.
Again, its like me walking through your house, and saying I only looked at your walls, but not at anything else in your residence, after I opened your door with the knob. The fact that we allow them to "open the door", means anything they "see" inside, is impossible to prove or disprove, therefore... we shouldn't even allow them to open the door.
But because people don't understand the technologies, they just let them in.
Personally (and if you read my blog entry on it), its a cost I'm willing to bear.
What I believe in, and my morals are not subject to compromise.
Not quite.
I can generate a key that would take them longer than several lifetimes to crack, and encrypt my data with that. By the time they crack it, assuming they can brute force it, the data they get will be out of date and useless.
Remember, computers are still limited by physics, and we know what the maximum speed is; the speed of the electron.
The difference ends in the description.
If I was going to snoop on the contents of an envelope, it would be obvious that it was opened (except in the case of a professional de-sealing, of course).
With the URL of a webpage (or the IP it originates from), it is more akin to a postcard than an envelope. How can you tell if I've only looked at the front of the postcard to read the address, and not flipped it over to read the back?
Answer: You can't, and therefore, this can't be trusted or allowed.
As I wrote about almost exactly 2 years ago to the day, this is our calling.
How do we answer?
Withhold your keys, indefinitely.
Let them keep asking for them. Keep saying NO! If they jail you for it, go. If they keep asking, keep saying NO.
Stand up for what you know is wrong, and let millions of others do the same.
Remember, we put our government into place to represent our best interests. When they fail to do so, they should step down themselves, or we should replace them.
Great news comes in strange forms sometimes...
Now we can all begin converting our internal infrastructure to using very strong, protocol-based encryption, end-to-end. Bittorrent for http, secure, anonymous, private networks wrapped around our standard applications and more.
Begin now, if you're not using strong encryption.. you should be. Don't let the government WE put into place, tell you what YOU can do with your own Internet time.
If the government we put into place is not representing your best interests, its time to replace them with one that does.
Lock everything down and keep prying eyes out.