Probably because the idiot is in Estonia, or some other place where the laws of the U.S. are not particularly respected. If all he's doing is installing adware on American PCs, you don't honestly think the local police are going to give a sh!t, do you?
Actually, they probably would. They'd probably want a 25% cut.
I have a sense that much of the data will be nearly immutable and thus unable to reflect the real world. Hence useless.
Just because the data is wrong or useless doesn't mean it's not believed by the vast majority of data consumers. (And those consumers include other computer systems who have no access to the real world.) "So what if the shelves are empty, the computer says we have 20 vacuum cleaners in our store. But you can't find 'em? Well, they're in the vacuum cleaner aisle!" And if you are fortunate enough to have a drone walk with you to the vacuum cleaner aisle to witness the total lack of vacuum cleaners, they still will do nothing to repair the data.
What happens in this case is that the computers replenishing the shelves are never told to order more vacuum cleaners for this store, because they obviously already have 20. Regardless of whether people believe them or not, other computers will. It's stupid, but that store may not get vacuum cleaners back on the shelves until after the next inventory, six months away.
Everyone knows Futurology is a quack science perpetuated by wackos who can't even get published in a vanity journal.... And it's just a B.S. degree anyway.
But Bluetooth is only magical when it's turned on.
I have a handsfree car adaptor. When I turn the key in my vehicle, it powers up and tells the phone "hey, I'm your headset now." If I get a call while driving, I hit a button on the dashboard and I'm talking. But if the phone's Bluetooth were off, the magic is all gone.
I also carry a Palm. When I want to send an SMS, I chicken-scratch out my message in English and tap "send". If Bluetooth were off, I'd be digging out the phone and pressing shortcut buttons (or worse, thumbing in a lame "U WANT 2 GO 2 LNCH?" message.) Or if I want to surf from it, I'd be fishing the phone out for that, too. Neither of those are terribly magical uses, either.
If you're going to make the most of Bluetooth, you have to leave it on. Yes, it drains power. So my phone spends the night on a charger twice a week instead of once a week. Not a big hardship.
I tell you it won't affect my battery life at all, because I'd never bother installing one of these. They seem designed to do precisely one task: suck money from the wallets of the extremely gullible.
Hey, this is America. We were founded on the premise that smart people can take economic advantage of stupid people. If they can sell it hard enough, well, P.T. Barnum's law suggests that their customers will soon be parted from their money.
The key is unique to each physical copy. My TV set has public key #1234, private key ABCD. Your identical brand/model TV set has its own public key #2345, private key DEFG. So if I go hacking around and publish the secret value ABCD on the internet, (or, more likely, if I copy my HDCP chip and sell clones of it in a box labeled "DVIMAGIC") they can simply add public key #1234 to the KRL. It will not affect your TV -- just mine.
I have inherited a few pocket watches, one from each grandfather and one from my father. One grandfather left me his with art deco style digits and a seconds "wheel" hidden behind a window; unfortunately it was stamped-from-tin and doesn't really work well. The other grandfather left me a very nice "railroad watch" hearkening from the 1920s with a porcelain dial (although with only 11 jewels, it's not an "official" railroad watch which is supposed to have 17 jewels.) And my mother gave me my father's watch, which was newer and works well, but has a sculpted and too-ornate flip-open cover which I find uncomfortable to wear.
I used to wear the railroad watch daily, until disaster struck. I dropped it on the granite floor of a jewelry store (of all places) which broke the flywheel shaft. One jeweller quoted me $375 for a guaranteed repair (higher than its value when it was working,) so I took it to a different jeweler who "fixed" it for $100 (but it won't keep running.)
Anyway, when it was running it kept perfect time, never drifting by more than a few seconds a month. The fact that it was my grandfather's made it even more special to me. But hauling out an old pocket watch by the chain always caught people's attention, and it sparked a few conversations.
You can still buy mechanical pocket watches today, but I find the older watches more appealing. There's something about a hand lapped mechanism that makes you appreciate it more, even if it's hidden inside the case.
Even though there may be a lot of folks using/dependent on the app, there is no guarantee if the original maintainers go away, another group will take over the job.
Well, if IBM buys up Gnomovision, the chances are pretty good they're doing so for a business reason -- to make money. It doesn't make much sense for them to then give up the revenue stream by ceasing support. Therefore, I think they'd have every interest to continue maintenance. Why else would they have bought it in the first place?
Now, if the product turns out to be horribly written and they're spending too much time and money fixing it, well, then they chose poorly! But with an open source product, they certainly had the opportunity to fully examine the project prior to purchase, so I doubt they'd make that sort of mistake very often.
There is a variant of USB called USB PlusPower. It consists of an ordinary USB port with a high-current +5VDC, +12VDC or +24VDC port mounted directly above it. It is spec'd to deliver a max of 3 amps per connector, which would be plenty for virtually every home peripheral short of a laser printer.
USB PlusPower was developed in the late 1990s by IBM, Fujitsu and NCR in response to retailers' demands for self-powered cash register peripherals. Cash registers have several peripherals that require more power than USB alone can provide -- scanners, vacuum fluorescent displays, scales, PIN pads, printers and cash drawers all demand more current than a USB port can provide.
Most cash register stands have at most two electric outlets wired beneath them. In many locations electrical codes and fire codes prevent commercial building tenants from permanently using extension cords, octopusses or power strips. New outlets can cost anywhere from $100 to $1500 to $5000 each to install. So the retailers refused to accept a USB equipped cash register that required half a dozen wall warts, and told IBM (and the other vendors) to come up with a better solution. USB PlusPower allows the cash register's power supply to provide all the power required on all the devices, no rewiring required, no external power cables, no wall warts.
I'd love to see USB PlusPower ports on my home computer. A quick glance with the flashlight just revealed over a dozen wall warts under my desk. A charger for my camera, three powered USB hubs, speakers, cable modem, router/firewall, two scanners, three printers, a weather station, a TV tuner, a Palm charger plus a couple others I don't recognize at the moment. My power supply can deliver 500 watts, and it's currently drawing less than 200, so I know it's got ample capacity to drive the rest of this junk. There's just no good way today to get the power from it to the devices that could use it.
Sadly, the USB PlusPower spec seems firmly planted in the POS space, with no driving force to push it to the consumers' PCs. The spec itself is moribund, not having been touched since 1999. Now, if consumers could somehow unite to demand a replacement to the dozen wall warts we all seem to suffer from, we could have something like USB PlusPower start showing up on high-end machines and motherboards. That would be incredible.
Right, I see you missed my point as well. I'll rephrase it.
The original poster said "...DV over USB isn't standardized and would be vendor-specific." My point was "pretending that USB2 is somehow mystically prevented from becoming a digital video standard is shortsighted." And that's still true even if Firewire is technically much better suited to the task of carrying DV.
I was not saying "USB2 is better than Firewire." I'm saying that Best Buy and Walmart will be selling cheap-as-possible camcorders to average people who have no interest in Firewire, but do have USB2 ports. There certainly could be a standard developed to carry this low-quality video over USB2, and it could be done quickly without upgrades to peoples existing computers. I never said it was a great idea.
The proper transport for DV has always been FireWire
"Proper?" That's pretty shortsighted thinking there. One addition to the USB standard combined with a software driver release et voila! USB 2.0 would suddenly be the digital video transport of choice. All accomplished with no hardware changes to the vast majority of consumers' computers.
Here's the conversation at Ritz Photo to imagine: "Sure, I could sell you this digicam with firewire, but you'll need to have a firewire card installed into your computer. I also have this digicam that comes with USB, which your PC already has."
I'm not talking about cinematographers or television studios, or even the "prosumers" here. I'm talking about the 90% of camcorder buyers, Joe Sixpack out there buying a camcorder so he can tell people he's recording Junior's birthday, but really intends to shoot himself and the missus knockin' uglies.
To make lots of money, you build your hardware to sell lots of units at Best Buy. Firewire doesn't entice Joe Sixpack -- to him, it's a computer-geeky negative; especially when there's a known alternative.
Just to add more anecdotal evidence, my cable box has a USB 2.0 port for video streams, and no firewire port.
Since USB 2.0 and firewire are roughly (within an order of magnitude) comparable in performance, why would a product developer choose to use the far more expensive firewire chipset? Especially when that presents difficulties breaking into the low-end PC market, where firewire is far from ubiquitous? That's even the reason we assume the iPod went to USB, was to break into the PC market.
I think firewire is the Betamax of local connectivity. It may be technically superior, more convenient, [insert other advantages here] but it never had the industry backing of USB. Firewire will still hang around for a while because of the large amount of legacy video hardware using it, but it's only going to be present on higher-end PCs, kind of like a technologist's version of a VTEC sticker on a ricer. It's already a niche player, and the niche is growing smaller instead of larger.
Dvorak seems to be convinced by this bozo that the GUI is the reason people choose the Mac over the PC, or that people choose PCs over Macs because of the availability of peripherals and drivers.
Personally, I've always disliked the Mac look'n'feel, from the ugly Chicago fonts of old to the top-of-screen mighty morphin' menu.
But Mac OSX has always had something the PC hasn't -- stability. And that's because it's designed into the OS from the ground up. Windows has always felt like stability was "grafted in" somehow, and it's never been a comfortable fit.
Like most management, he gives no thought to stability or the correctness of the implementation. "As long as it's done, it's good enough." And it's that attitude that placed Windows exactly where it is, and why the Mac exists at all. It's not the "computer for the rest of us" -- it's the computer for the discerning crowd.
Well, it's really a matter of degree. To you, epoxying on that nut is obvious and trivial. To a photographer who barely recognizes he has chronic motion blur problems and solves them only by setting the camera down on a table, it's a revelation.
Some of his book sounds like it fits your description of hacking, while some of it is beneath your "worthiness" level. The line isn't so black and white for some people, especially the beginners for whom this book seems intended.
Anyway, do you really think titling it "Hacking Digital Cameras Plus 30 Simple Photography Tips" would have improved it any?:-)
Well, I didn't go into details of every device we tested, but trackballs are problematic as well. They're as big a dirt magnet as a mouse (perhaps bigger, being face up,) and take substantially longer for the average person to get used to. In our environment, that steep learning curve means a not insignificant amount of cost.
Besides, the purchase price for a trackball was higher than for a mouse, and the ongoing maintenance costs were highest of all input devices. They lost!
(A "watermark" is just a signature that's very difficult to remove.
Picking nits here, but a watermark is not a signature; it's just an identifying tag.)
My point is that it doesn't have to be removed -- just corrupted. Spread spectrum-style encoding, patterns in the noise floor, or modulating harmonic frequencies, whatever they use turns out to be irrelevant if you have access to the decoding algorithm. With it, you have all the instructions you need to corrupt the signal so it becomes unreadable, and a testing tool to ensure you did corrupt it successfully. That's why watermarking is the epitome of "security through obscurity" and is not strong -- its strength relies totally on the secrecy of the verification tool. If that tool is ever leaked, all the watermarks that were created can then be destroyed.
As for motive, there are several to question here. The one you specifically asked is "why destroy the watermark?" and the answer is easy and obvious: so you don't get caught distributing the media.
The next question to answer is why do people rip the media? The real answer is most likely money: if you're on Hollywood's preview list, I believe you can make serious cash selling pre-release copies of new movies to a pirate. So there's the incentive to rip them (and a strong incentive to destroy the watermarks.)
But that still doesn't answer the question of why the pirate would put it up on a torrent. Certainly he could make copies of the movie without the bother of setting up a torrent, so why would he?
Just a wild-ass guess here, but I suppose it could be that the torrent itself is the distribution mechanism from the originator to the pirate and/or from the pirate to the pirate's media copiers. Using a torrent would be no problem for the pirates because they'd have nothing to lose from the geeky competition for the files (and actually gain a fairly reliable network in the process.) And it decouples them from the original source and the producers of the black market DVDs and tapes. They just have to get the cash from the media producers and pay off the guy with the prerelease copy. A nice laundering operation that leaves no tracks! It's no wonder the MPAA wouldn't approve of an operation like that.
I had one of these when I was a little kid. I don't remember much about it now (that was a very long time ago), but I remember playing with it for hours on end. Definitely counts as my first computer!
Slashdot Mirror
Probably because the idiot is in Estonia, or some other place where the laws of the U.S. are not particularly respected. If all he's doing is installing adware on American PCs, you don't honestly think the local police are going to give a sh!t, do you?
Actually, they probably would. They'd probably want a 25% cut.
Puh-TAY-toe, Puh-TAH-toe.
I-15 came out of Utah. That's a good thing, or else a lot of people would still be stuck there.
Just because the data is wrong or useless doesn't mean it's not believed by the vast majority of data consumers. (And those consumers include other computer systems who have no access to the real world.) "So what if the shelves are empty, the computer says we have 20 vacuum cleaners in our store. But you can't find 'em? Well, they're in the vacuum cleaner aisle!" And if you are fortunate enough to have a drone walk with you to the vacuum cleaner aisle to witness the total lack of vacuum cleaners, they still will do nothing to repair the data.
What happens in this case is that the computers replenishing the shelves are never told to order more vacuum cleaners for this store, because they obviously already have 20. Regardless of whether people believe them or not, other computers will. It's stupid, but that store may not get vacuum cleaners back on the shelves until after the next inventory, six months away.
Well, the reviewer certainly had a degree in B.S.
I have a handsfree car adaptor. When I turn the key in my vehicle, it powers up and tells the phone "hey, I'm your headset now." If I get a call while driving, I hit a button on the dashboard and I'm talking. But if the phone's Bluetooth were off, the magic is all gone.
I also carry a Palm. When I want to send an SMS, I chicken-scratch out my message in English and tap "send". If Bluetooth were off, I'd be digging out the phone and pressing shortcut buttons (or worse, thumbing in a lame "U WANT 2 GO 2 LNCH?" message.) Or if I want to surf from it, I'd be fishing the phone out for that, too. Neither of those are terribly magical uses, either.
If you're going to make the most of Bluetooth, you have to leave it on. Yes, it drains power. So my phone spends the night on a charger twice a week instead of once a week. Not a big hardship.
Hey, this is America. We were founded on the premise that smart people can take economic advantage of stupid people. If they can sell it hard enough, well, P.T. Barnum's law suggests that their customers will soon be parted from their money.
You are not permitted to come within __one_subnet___ of ____her_name____.
The key is unique to each physical copy. My TV set has public key #1234, private key ABCD. Your identical brand/model TV set has its own public key #2345, private key DEFG. So if I go hacking around and publish the secret value ABCD on the internet, (or, more likely, if I copy my HDCP chip and sell clones of it in a box labeled "DVIMAGIC") they can simply add public key #1234 to the KRL. It will not affect your TV -- just mine.
They jumped off the Power PC architecture too soon. It'll take years for Intel to catch up to this one...
I used to wear the railroad watch daily, until disaster struck. I dropped it on the granite floor of a jewelry store (of all places) which broke the flywheel shaft. One jeweller quoted me $375 for a guaranteed repair (higher than its value when it was working,) so I took it to a different jeweler who "fixed" it for $100 (but it won't keep running.)
Anyway, when it was running it kept perfect time, never drifting by more than a few seconds a month. The fact that it was my grandfather's made it even more special to me. But hauling out an old pocket watch by the chain always caught people's attention, and it sparked a few conversations.
You can still buy mechanical pocket watches today, but I find the older watches more appealing. There's something about a hand lapped mechanism that makes you appreciate it more, even if it's hidden inside the case.
Well, if IBM buys up Gnomovision, the chances are pretty good they're doing so for a business reason -- to make money. It doesn't make much sense for them to then give up the revenue stream by ceasing support. Therefore, I think they'd have every interest to continue maintenance. Why else would they have bought it in the first place?
Now, if the product turns out to be horribly written and they're spending too much time and money fixing it, well, then they chose poorly! But with an open source product, they certainly had the opportunity to fully examine the project prior to purchase, so I doubt they'd make that sort of mistake very often.
Nope, I guess it IS just a scanner.
USB PlusPower was developed in the late 1990s by IBM, Fujitsu and NCR in response to retailers' demands for self-powered cash register peripherals. Cash registers have several peripherals that require more power than USB alone can provide -- scanners, vacuum fluorescent displays, scales, PIN pads, printers and cash drawers all demand more current than a USB port can provide.
Most cash register stands have at most two electric outlets wired beneath them. In many locations electrical codes and fire codes prevent commercial building tenants from permanently using extension cords, octopusses or power strips. New outlets can cost anywhere from $100 to $1500 to $5000 each to install. So the retailers refused to accept a USB equipped cash register that required half a dozen wall warts, and told IBM (and the other vendors) to come up with a better solution. USB PlusPower allows the cash register's power supply to provide all the power required on all the devices, no rewiring required, no external power cables, no wall warts.
I'd love to see USB PlusPower ports on my home computer. A quick glance with the flashlight just revealed over a dozen wall warts under my desk. A charger for my camera, three powered USB hubs, speakers, cable modem, router/firewall, two scanners, three printers, a weather station, a TV tuner, a Palm charger plus a couple others I don't recognize at the moment. My power supply can deliver 500 watts, and it's currently drawing less than 200, so I know it's got ample capacity to drive the rest of this junk. There's just no good way today to get the power from it to the devices that could use it.
Sadly, the USB PlusPower spec seems firmly planted in the POS space, with no driving force to push it to the consumers' PCs. The spec itself is moribund, not having been touched since 1999. Now, if consumers could somehow unite to demand a replacement to the dozen wall warts we all seem to suffer from, we could have something like USB PlusPower start showing up on high-end machines and motherboards. That would be incredible.
The original poster said "...DV over USB isn't standardized and would be vendor-specific." My point was "pretending that USB2 is somehow mystically prevented from becoming a digital video standard is shortsighted." And that's still true even if Firewire is technically much better suited to the task of carrying DV.
I was not saying "USB2 is better than Firewire." I'm saying that Best Buy and Walmart will be selling cheap-as-possible camcorders to average people who have no interest in Firewire, but do have USB2 ports. There certainly could be a standard developed to carry this low-quality video over USB2, and it could be done quickly without upgrades to peoples existing computers. I never said it was a great idea.
"Proper?" That's pretty shortsighted thinking there. One addition to the USB standard combined with a software driver release et voila! USB 2.0 would suddenly be the digital video transport of choice. All accomplished with no hardware changes to the vast majority of consumers' computers.
Here's the conversation at Ritz Photo to imagine: "Sure, I could sell you this digicam with firewire, but you'll need to have a firewire card installed into your computer. I also have this digicam that comes with USB, which your PC already has."
I'm not talking about cinematographers or television studios, or even the "prosumers" here. I'm talking about the 90% of camcorder buyers, Joe Sixpack out there buying a camcorder so he can tell people he's recording Junior's birthday, but really intends to shoot himself and the missus knockin' uglies.
To make lots of money, you build your hardware to sell lots of units at Best Buy. Firewire doesn't entice Joe Sixpack -- to him, it's a computer-geeky negative; especially when there's a known alternative.
Since USB 2.0 and firewire are roughly (within an order of magnitude) comparable in performance, why would a product developer choose to use the far more expensive firewire chipset? Especially when that presents difficulties breaking into the low-end PC market, where firewire is far from ubiquitous? That's even the reason we assume the iPod went to USB, was to break into the PC market.
I think firewire is the Betamax of local connectivity. It may be technically superior, more convenient, [insert other advantages here] but it never had the industry backing of USB. Firewire will still hang around for a while because of the large amount of legacy video hardware using it, but it's only going to be present on higher-end PCs, kind of like a technologist's version of a VTEC sticker on a ricer. It's already a niche player, and the niche is growing smaller instead of larger.
Personally, I've always disliked the Mac look'n'feel, from the ugly Chicago fonts of old to the top-of-screen mighty morphin' menu.
But Mac OSX has always had something the PC hasn't -- stability. And that's because it's designed into the OS from the ground up. Windows has always felt like stability was "grafted in" somehow, and it's never been a comfortable fit.
Like most management, he gives no thought to stability or the correctness of the implementation. "As long as it's done, it's good enough." And it's that attitude that placed Windows exactly where it is, and why the Mac exists at all. It's not the "computer for the rest of us" -- it's the computer for the discerning crowd.
Sure, that and "I just read Slashdot for the stories, honest."
Some of his book sounds like it fits your description of hacking, while some of it is beneath your "worthiness" level. The line isn't so black and white for some people, especially the beginners for whom this book seems intended.
Anyway, do you really think titling it "Hacking Digital Cameras Plus 30 Simple Photography Tips" would have improved it any? :-)
Besides, the purchase price for a trackball was higher than for a mouse, and the ongoing maintenance costs were highest of all input devices. They lost!
Picking nits here, but a watermark is not a signature; it's just an identifying tag.)
My point is that it doesn't have to be removed -- just corrupted. Spread spectrum-style encoding, patterns in the noise floor, or modulating harmonic frequencies, whatever they use turns out to be irrelevant if you have access to the decoding algorithm. With it, you have all the instructions you need to corrupt the signal so it becomes unreadable, and a testing tool to ensure you did corrupt it successfully. That's why watermarking is the epitome of "security through obscurity" and is not strong -- its strength relies totally on the secrecy of the verification tool. If that tool is ever leaked, all the watermarks that were created can then be destroyed.
As for motive, there are several to question here. The one you specifically asked is "why destroy the watermark?" and the answer is easy and obvious: so you don't get caught distributing the media.
The next question to answer is why do people rip the media? The real answer is most likely money: if you're on Hollywood's preview list, I believe you can make serious cash selling pre-release copies of new movies to a pirate. So there's the incentive to rip them (and a strong incentive to destroy the watermarks.)
But that still doesn't answer the question of why the pirate would put it up on a torrent. Certainly he could make copies of the movie without the bother of setting up a torrent, so why would he?
Just a wild-ass guess here, but I suppose it could be that the torrent itself is the distribution mechanism from the originator to the pirate and/or from the pirate to the pirate's media copiers. Using a torrent would be no problem for the pirates because they'd have nothing to lose from the geeky competition for the files (and actually gain a fairly reliable network in the process.) And it decouples them from the original source and the producers of the black market DVDs and tapes. They just have to get the cash from the media producers and pay off the guy with the prerelease copy. A nice laundering operation that leaves no tracks! It's no wonder the MPAA wouldn't approve of an operation like that.
I had one of these when I was a little kid. I don't remember much about it now (that was a very long time ago), but I remember playing with it for hours on end. Definitely counts as my first computer!
OK, here's one!