I'm not sure he should lose the tinfoil. Perhaps still crinkle it in his hands. People are retrieving documents from the copier storage. Considering how often security holes are found in networked devices, it isn't outside the bounds of believability that someone could read copied documents.
How much power will this thing take when all eight cores are running? Unless there is some significant breakthrough that MediaTek has yet to announce, this seems like a major issue for this chip, at least for mobile applications.
I almost brought up the same point about the cameras, but then I realized that if the goal is to keep broad surveillance from tracking him, cycling through disposable phones will do this unless Staples is turning over security camera footage to the NSA for facial recognition.
That's true. He's going through some amount of pain and expense to do so though.
We don't really know how much information is being correlated together from what sources. We do know that technology is getting ever more capable and even commercial companies are experimenting with facial recognition. Though there probably aren't large scale facial recognition projects running today, the spook agencies are filled with some pretty smart people who spend all day with big budgets thinking about how to get useful data. I wouldn't be surprised at some future revelation along those lines.
I'm not sure there are easy technical solutions to this Ask Slashdot question.
Do you know how much information the Staples inventory system has? Does it store things like the phone's Mobile Identification Number? It certainly logged the time the phone was sold and the location, perhaps flagging your cash transaction. Hopefully you smiled at the various cameras in-store and in the parking lot that recorded you driving up and buying the phone.;-)
Except most of the manufacturers won't want to expend the effort to keep their old products up-to-date. Look forward to drive-by hackings of your buggy car firmware. And new web technologies relegating your $60k+ car to the status of a 5 year old PC.
So not only will they reduce the quality and variety of TV programming, they'll make you pay for it.
"Comcast executives warned analysts in the call that TV programming costs could increase in the "low double digits" in 2013 -- inflation that likely will passed to Comcast's TV customers -- after increasing about 7 percent in 2012."
Arguably these may be considered a predecessor to visual development environments but HP workstations starting in the 1970s had integrated editing and compiling including fairly sophisticated graphics and built-in IO support for the entire range of HP peripherals from disks, printers and plotters to HP instruments. HP started with a proprietary language, HPL, but they also supported a BASIC dialect in the 80 series and a super-fast Pascal development environment in the 200 series. These systems were not cheap but they were amazingly capable.
This. At least for the general public. The whole idea of a "computer" is simply a result of how primitive they are. That the software that controls them requires the user to understand concepts such as operating system and application, networking and device drivers. People don't really ever want to know they are "running a word processor" or "launching a web browser". They want to accomplish specific things, like writing a note (or video chatting) with a friend, looking something up or watching a movie.
The technical crowd loves to complain about Apple's walled garden, but this is exactly the genius of Apple. They get that. They get that they have to evolve the thing called a computer into a thing that people don't ever have to fiddle with. That simply exists to provide useful services for their life. The other computer manufacturers understand that to a smaller degree and then wonder why their tablets aren't as successful.
The personal computer, as technical people know it, is going away. It's growing up into what the vast majority of people really want. And thank God. I'm glad I don't have to stand in front of my car turning a crank to get it running.
But all is not lost for technical people. There will always be ways to have your own device. The free software and maker movements will ensure that. In some ways things are better today than ever. In the 1980s (some consider the heyday of the open personal computer) we had the 8-bit IBM PC. Today we have a gamut of programmable devices ranging from Arduinos to $35 linux computers to set top boxes to multi-core, multi-cpu computers more powerful that super computers of the last century. All totally accessible.
Experiences must vary. Maker culture isn't overrated in my experience. A project at my local hackerspace just got some NASA funding. Other projects there include some pretty amazing art installations with heavy-duty FPGA-based circuitry and algorithms. The sharing of expertise is really useful and helpful. And it's heartening to see those with a lot of experience as engineers mentoring those who are new to electronics or mechanical design.
I've found 3d printers useful for prototyping plastic parts. One just needs to understand their limitations. Many people are just playing around with them now but they will continue to evolve and just like the evolution of the PC a wider and wider group of people will find the technology useful for solving real-world problems.
Sparkfun has created a fantastically successful business encapsulating electronic technology in a way that is useful for people to design their own custom electronic systems. The boom in inexpensive or free easy-to-use IDEs and cheap dev boards is bringing embedded computing to a huge audience. I still use expensive dev tools and environments for some jobs but it's really easy and fast to program an Arduino to do something simple. Spend some time looking at a site like hackaday or even instructables and you'll see a wide breadth of very creative maker creations.
From the article, the read-only registers may be configured to be written:
"At this point we went back to those JTAG registers which were non-updatable as well as FROW to check whether we could change their values. Once the backdoor feature was unlocked, many of these registers became volatile and the FROW was reprogrammable as a normal Flash memory. Actel has a strong claim that 'configuration files cannot be read back via JTAG or any other method' in the PA3 and in their other latest generation Flash FPGAs [18]. Hence, they claim, they are extremely secure because the readback access is not implemented. We discovered that in fact Actel did implement such an access, with a special key used for activation."
After reading the article, I'd bet that this "feature" of the FPGA is either for some manufacturing reason or was requested by customers (e.g. the US government) so that they can access/reprogram certain supposed read-only parts of the FPGA. I see nothing about any correlation with the Chinese using it as a backdoor.
He still doesn't get that what happened was the people who consume the content - content linked to by GOOG, content distributed by Wikipedia, and content licensed by RIAA and MPAA - who finally got off their duffs and exercised their rights as citizens to demand that their elected representatives actually represent them.
Exactly. Mr. Sherman's RIAA works to prop up a dying business model by attacking the business' customer. This protest may have been enabled by Wikipedia and others, but it was the consumer speaking. Consumers have proven they will pay for music, given a reasonable and fair business model. SOPA and PIPA were not about moving the industry more towards a reasonable and fair business model.
I see devices like this as a way for those who say they value the philosophy Linux represents to put their money where their mouth is. I'm pretty OS agnostic but I'm going to buy one. I like the idea of having a little self-contained Linux box that I can hack -- and via the USB ports and hopefully some internal TTL-level serial port - turn into all manner of cool controller and interface. It seems like a great tool for a hacker.
America has never been The Good Guy, it has just been a typical state out to get ahead at any cost... any cost, that is, short of allowing its citizens to discover that it is not The Good Guy.
That's why the diplomatic cable leaks are such a Big Deal, and the reason why Bradley Manning will get no popular sympathy. His revelations cause American citizens to feel cognitive dissonance ("We aren't the Good Guy? Really?")... and people deeply hate those who cause them cognitive dissonance.
I wish I had mod points because this is just about the most concise description of American reality I've seen in a while.
Hey Organic User, where did you find them in Tel Aviv? I have friends who live there and I would love to find some embedded linux platforms for less than what gumstix charges.
Yes, you are missing something. The entire article is available. You just have to click through it page by page. The PDF is a convenience for subscribers. You can make your own PDF with just a little work if that's what you need.
Actually the processor in these supports an LCD-based frame buffer. They offer boards which can "plug in" that allow you to wire an LCD to them directly. Linux works easily with these - X11 runs. But definitely for hardware capable people, not the casual user.
This may be true for you and a lot of hackers....but I've had to support complex software in the field and you cannot believe the pain it can be. I truly believe that there would be a significant cost to hardware manufacturers that I see no-one talking about in this debate. I guess I would try to figure out a way to generate a unique signature for my code and get that from the customer. If it wasn't right then no support...
I am developing hardware that uses embedded linux. While I appreciate everything the GPL has given us -- and as a matter of fact I will release some of my software under the LPGL license -- it makes sense to me why hardware manufacturers wouldn't necessarily embrace GPL v3. They may have some code that they license from others that prevent releasing the source. And a more practical reason is support. Providing support to complex devices in the field is already a huge pain. Having people contact you because the device doesn't work anymore and finding they have loaded some "custom" software on it would make support impossible. What good does an idealistically pure license do if it makes it impossible for companies to make a go at it?
My SO has had problems in the past two weeks sending email to seemly any AOL subscriber from her yahoo account. I have had no such problems. She gets a 421: SERVICE NOT AVAILABLE error message from a yahoo server. We did an experiment each sending a bunch of emails. She had 100% failure. I had 100% success. She tried sending to 6 different people. Both AOL and Yahoo customer service were useless (i guess what can you expect for a free service). Does anyone here have any ideas what could be going on?
I have one of these. It may not be for everyone but I bought it because:
- It uses nixie tubes. I think they are the nicest of all digital display technologies. I like the fully formed numbers and I like the 3-dimensional movement as the digits change. - It was designed and manufactured by one person. I think that is quite an accomplishment and makes for a much more personal and unique timepiece. - The designer released the firmware under the GPL. This is the only watch in the world that I know of that can be reprogrammed by its owner. The designer put a lot of neat features into the firmware and given the uC is a PIC this is no small feat. I'm surprised more./ers don't really appreciate this. - It is a fairly complex design including a 180 volt power supply and an accellerometer to trigger the display. There are several PCBs assembed together in 3D in this watch which I like. - It is large and not for everyday use. However the size and quality of the case make it stand out. I wear watches to be noticed and this one certainly is. I added a gel sheet to the watch which accents the display and obscures the battery making for a better display.
I've looked at most of the mass-produced "geek" watches and retro LED watches (ok so I did buy a Zeon) but most of them look and feel cheap. And there is nothing special about their design or function.
This watch is like an expensive two-seat sports car and can be appreciated as such. You take it out on the weekends for a fun. You don't take it to work everyday.
Probably isn't mask data but a bit pattern which configures the FPGA. This bit pattern could be used to configure an ASIC.
When I used to use FPGAs and PALs we were often interested in the very low level configuration of these devices with our programming (for speed or other logic optimization). I wonder if this ruling would affect customer use of that information.
I think he should have followed-up and seen how far he could get in the interview process. Be very polite to the head-hunter and see if he could score an interview at Microsoft's expense.
Now that would have been a laugh. Of course it might have been damaging to his ego if he actually started the interview and the people he spoke with didn't know who he was.
Typical slashdot....or perhaps just a boneheaded marketing plan by Lexmark. "Hey, let's put a $20 bill in specially marked packages and ask the consumer return the spent cartridge to us".
This isn't what is scary. What is scary is how this decision may embolden other companies to try nastier stuff. Well maybe more sad than scary since we can always refuse to buy.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not sure he should lose the tinfoil. Perhaps still crinkle it in his hands. People are retrieving documents from the copier storage. Considering how often security holes are found in networked devices, it isn't outside the bounds of believability that someone could read copied documents.
(PDF) http://www.willassen.no/svein/pub/copier-en.pdf
How much power will this thing take when all eight cores are running? Unless there is some significant breakthrough that MediaTek has yet to announce, this seems like a major issue for this chip, at least for mobile applications.
I almost brought up the same point about the cameras, but then I realized that if the goal is to keep broad surveillance from tracking him, cycling through disposable phones will do this unless Staples is turning over security camera footage to the NSA for facial recognition.
That's true. He's going through some amount of pain and expense to do so though.
We don't really know how much information is being correlated together from what sources. We do know that technology is getting ever more capable and even commercial companies are experimenting with facial recognition. Though there probably aren't large scale facial recognition projects running today, the spook agencies are filled with some pretty smart people who spend all day with big budgets thinking about how to get useful data. I wouldn't be surprised at some future revelation along those lines.
I'm not sure there are easy technical solutions to this Ask Slashdot question.
Brian, I assume you paid in cash.
Do you know how much information the Staples inventory system has? Does it store things like the phone's Mobile Identification Number? It certainly logged the time the phone was sold and the location, perhaps flagging your cash transaction. Hopefully you smiled at the various cameras in-store and in the parking lot that recorded you driving up and buying the phone. ;-)
Except most of the manufacturers won't want to expend the effort to keep their old products up-to-date. Look forward to drive-by hackings of your buggy car firmware. And new web technologies relegating your $60k+ car to the status of a 5 year old PC.
So not only will they reduce the quality and variety of TV programming, they'll make you pay for it.
"Comcast executives warned analysts in the call that TV programming costs could increase in the "low double digits" in 2013 -- inflation that likely will passed to Comcast's TV customers -- after increasing about 7 percent in 2012."
http://investing.businessweek.com/research/stocks/news/article.asp?docKey=600-201302131211KRTRIB__BUSNEWS_2063_22042-1¶ms=timestamp%7C%7C02/13/2013%2012:11%20PM%20ET%7C%7Cheadline%7C%7CComcast%3A%20Rate%20hike%20likely%20to%20pay%20for%20programming%20%5BThe%20Philadelphia%20Inquirer%5D%7C%7CdocSource%7C%7CMcClatchy-Tribune%7C%7Cprovider%7C%7CACQUIREMEDIA%7C%7Cbridgesymbol%7C%7CUS;CMCSA&ticker=CMCSA
Arguably these may be considered a predecessor to visual development environments but HP workstations starting in the 1970s had integrated editing and compiling including fairly sophisticated graphics and built-in IO support for the entire range of HP peripherals from disks, printers and plotters to HP instruments. HP started with a proprietary language, HPL, but they also supported a BASIC dialect in the 80 series and a super-fast Pascal development environment in the 200 series. These systems were not cheap but they were amazingly capable.
http://www.hpmuseum.net/
This. At least for the general public. The whole idea of a "computer" is simply a result of how primitive they are. That the software that controls them requires the user to understand concepts such as operating system and application, networking and device drivers. People don't really ever want to know they are "running a word processor" or "launching a web browser". They want to accomplish specific things, like writing a note (or video chatting) with a friend, looking something up or watching a movie.
The technical crowd loves to complain about Apple's walled garden, but this is exactly the genius of Apple. They get that. They get that they have to evolve the thing called a computer into a thing that people don't ever have to fiddle with. That simply exists to provide useful services for their life. The other computer manufacturers understand that to a smaller degree and then wonder why their tablets aren't as successful.
The personal computer, as technical people know it, is going away. It's growing up into what the vast majority of people really want. And thank God. I'm glad I don't have to stand in front of my car turning a crank to get it running.
But all is not lost for technical people. There will always be ways to have your own device. The free software and maker movements will ensure that. In some ways things are better today than ever. In the 1980s (some consider the heyday of the open personal computer) we had the 8-bit IBM PC. Today we have a gamut of programmable devices ranging from Arduinos to $35 linux computers to set top boxes to multi-core, multi-cpu computers more powerful that super computers of the last century. All totally accessible.
Experiences must vary. Maker culture isn't overrated in my experience. A project at my local hackerspace just got some NASA funding. Other projects there include some pretty amazing art installations with heavy-duty FPGA-based circuitry and algorithms. The sharing of expertise is really useful and helpful. And it's heartening to see those with a lot of experience as engineers mentoring those who are new to electronics or mechanical design.
I've found 3d printers useful for prototyping plastic parts. One just needs to understand their limitations. Many people are just playing around with them now but they will continue to evolve and just like the evolution of the PC a wider and wider group of people will find the technology useful for solving real-world problems.
Sparkfun has created a fantastically successful business encapsulating electronic technology in a way that is useful for people to design their own custom electronic systems. The boom in inexpensive or free easy-to-use IDEs and cheap dev boards is bringing embedded computing to a huge audience. I still use expensive dev tools and environments for some jobs but it's really easy and fast to program an Arduino to do something simple. Spend some time looking at a site like hackaday or even instructables and you'll see a wide breadth of very creative maker creations.
From the article, the read-only registers may be configured to be written:
"At this point we went back to those JTAG registers which were non-updatable as well as FROW to check whether we could change their values. Once the backdoor feature was unlocked, many of these registers became volatile and the FROW was reprogrammable as a normal Flash memory. Actel has a strong claim that 'configuration files cannot be read back via JTAG or any other method' in the PA3 and in their other latest generation Flash FPGAs [18]. Hence, they claim, they are extremely secure because the readback access is not implemented. We discovered that in fact Actel did implement such an access, with a special key used for activation."
After reading the article, I'd bet that this "feature" of the FPGA is either for some manufacturing reason or was requested by customers (e.g. the US government) so that they can access/reprogram certain supposed read-only parts of the FPGA. I see nothing about any correlation with the Chinese using it as a backdoor.
Hacktivists Say Verizon Now Biggest Corporate Net Threat
He still doesn't get that what happened was the people who consume the content - content linked to by GOOG, content distributed by Wikipedia, and content licensed by RIAA and MPAA - who finally got off their duffs and exercised their rights as citizens to demand that their elected representatives actually represent them.
Exactly. Mr. Sherman's RIAA works to prop up a dying business model by attacking the business' customer. This protest may have been enabled by Wikipedia and others, but it was the consumer speaking. Consumers have proven they will pay for music, given a reasonable and fair business model. SOPA and PIPA were not about moving the industry more towards a reasonable and fair business model.
I see devices like this as a way for those who say they value the philosophy Linux represents to put their money where their mouth is. I'm pretty OS agnostic but I'm going to buy one. I like the idea of having a little self-contained Linux box that I can hack -- and via the USB ports and hopefully some internal TTL-level serial port - turn into all manner of cool controller and interface. It seems like a great tool for a hacker.
America has never been The Good Guy, it has just been a typical state out to get ahead at any cost... any cost, that is, short of allowing its citizens to discover that it is not The Good Guy.
That's why the diplomatic cable leaks are such a Big Deal, and the reason why Bradley Manning will get no popular sympathy. His revelations cause American citizens to feel cognitive dissonance ("We aren't the Good Guy? Really?")... and people deeply hate those who cause them cognitive dissonance.
I wish I had mod points because this is just about the most concise description of American reality I've seen in a while.
Hey Organic User, where did you find them in Tel Aviv? I have friends who live there and I would love to find some embedded linux platforms for less than what gumstix charges.
Yes, you are missing something. The entire article is available. You just have to click through it page by page. The PDF is a convenience for subscribers. You can make your own PDF with just a little work if that's what you need.
Actually the processor in these supports an LCD-based frame buffer. They offer boards which can "plug in" that allow you to wire an LCD to them directly. Linux works easily with these - X11 runs. But definitely for hardware capable people, not the casual user.
This may be true for you and a lot of hackers....but I've had to support complex software in the field and you cannot believe the pain it can be. I truly believe that there would be a significant cost to hardware manufacturers that I see no-one talking about in this debate. I guess I would try to figure out a way to generate a unique signature for my code and get that from the customer. If it wasn't right then no support...
I am developing hardware that uses embedded linux. While I appreciate everything the GPL has given us -- and as a matter of fact I will release some of my software under the LPGL license -- it makes sense to me why hardware manufacturers wouldn't necessarily embrace GPL v3. They may have some code that they license from others that prevent releasing the source. And a more practical reason is support. Providing support to complex devices in the field is already a huge pain. Having people contact you because the device doesn't work anymore and finding they have loaded some "custom" software on it would make support impossible. What good does an idealistically pure license do if it makes it impossible for companies to make a go at it?
My SO has had problems in the past two weeks sending email to seemly any AOL subscriber from her yahoo account. I have had no such problems. She gets a 421: SERVICE NOT AVAILABLE error message from a yahoo server. We did an experiment each sending a bunch of emails. She had 100% failure. I had 100% success. She tried sending to 6 different people. Both AOL and Yahoo customer service were useless (i guess what can you expect for a free service). Does anyone here have any ideas what could be going on?
I have one of these. It may not be for everyone but I bought it because:
./ers don't really appreciate this.
- It uses nixie tubes. I think they are the nicest of all digital display technologies. I like the fully formed numbers and I like the 3-dimensional movement as the digits change.
- It was designed and manufactured by one person. I think that is quite an accomplishment and makes for a much more personal and unique timepiece.
- The designer released the firmware under the GPL. This is the only watch in the world that I know of that can be reprogrammed by its owner. The designer put a lot of neat features into the firmware and given the uC is a PIC this is no small feat. I'm surprised more
- It is a fairly complex design including a 180 volt power supply and an accellerometer to trigger the display. There are several PCBs assembed together in 3D in this watch which I like.
- It is large and not for everyday use. However the size and quality of the case make it stand out. I wear watches to be noticed and this one certainly is. I added a gel sheet to the watch which accents the display and obscures the battery making for a better display.
I've looked at most of the mass-produced "geek" watches and retro LED watches (ok so I did buy a Zeon) but most of them look and feel cheap. And there is nothing special about their design or function.
This watch is like an expensive two-seat sports car and can be appreciated as such. You take it out on the weekends for a fun. You don't take it to work everyday.
Probably isn't mask data but a bit pattern which configures the FPGA. This bit pattern could be used to configure an ASIC.
When I used to use FPGAs and PALs we were often interested in the very low level configuration of these devices with our programming (for speed or other logic optimization). I wonder if this ruling would affect customer use of that information.
I think he should have followed-up and seen how far he could get in the interview process. Be very polite to the head-hunter and see if he could score an interview at Microsoft's expense.
Now that would have been a laugh. Of course it might have been damaging to his ego if he actually started the interview and the people he spoke with didn't know who he was.
Typical slashdot....or perhaps just a boneheaded marketing plan by Lexmark. "Hey, let's put a $20 bill in specially marked packages and ask the consumer return the spent cartridge to us".
This isn't what is scary. What is scary is how this decision may embolden other companies to try nastier stuff. Well maybe more sad than scary since we can always refuse to buy.