Apparently the newer Chevy models have sensors which determine the "tire pressure" by judging the alignment of the wheels against each other. Assuming that all four tires are properly aligned, if one is rotating out of sync with the others, low tire pressure is a proper diagnosis... But if the alignment is off, the "Low Tire Pressure" warning displays incessantly.
Yes, I know this as I have a Chevy myself. Had it happen to me in fact, although in my case it actually was a leak in the tire. Newer Ford's use a different system with tire pressure monitors actually embedded in the tire, at the valve stem. Less chance of a false positive, more sensitive, but every time you change the tire you've got to reprogram the car with the ID's of the tire sensors. They sell a special tool to shops to do this.
I like Chevy's system better. Although the LTP light does come on if there's an alignment issue, at least you know there's an alignment issue or a low tire.:)
I was once told that AutoZone has a 4 terabyte database hanging around somewhere. Any idea if this is true?
Don't know anything about a 4 terabyte DB. Not sure I'd be able to talk about it if I did.;)
Well, it's also all listed in the service manuals. Unfortunately, you have to pay to get a copy of those too.
It's not that the data isn't freely available, it's just that all the places where you can get it you have to pay for it. Of course, a lot of these codes are online. Search google for example...
Should they include a full out service manual with the purchase of the car? That's debatable. I remember when I bought my C64 way back when, it came with a complete guide to actually programming the thing and had some of the system calls and such. You don't get anything similar with a PC.. You're lucky to get a 4 page glossy on setting the thing up.
If you don't want to buy your own reader, drive by an AutoZone and ask them to read it for you. Guy will come out to your car and plug the thing in and check the codes and even explain what it means (assuming he knows what it means, which I'm sure varies from person to person). It's a useful way to determine if you actually need service or if it's just complaining about the gas cap or low oil or something.
Disclaimer: I work for AutoZone and have for about 2 months now. However, I'm trying hard not to be a shill, sort of thing. Still, if you don't feel like dropping $100 on a reader, this is an alternative you'll want to look into.
... you just have to pay for it. One place you can get this sort of stuff, off the top of my head, is ALLDATA. There's many others, I'm sure.
The info is out there and many of the car companies do indeed offer it. They just don't much advertise it. They're too busy making cars to be selling information about them. Don't chalk this up to malice so fast, is what I'm saying. Mark it down as stupidity instead. It seems more likely.
So basically you're saying there's no security for WiFi to a knowledgeable intruder?
Yes, and then again, no.
First off, security in any wireless communication is done using encryption. And any encryption can be broken if you're willing to devote the necessary resources to doing so. In that sense, there's no security insofar as it can always be broken.
But like everything else in the world, there's levels of security.. The goal is not to make it unbreakable, the goal is to set the bar high enough to keep people out unless they're willing to devote those resources necessary to get in.
WEP is secure enough for most people. If you want it to be a step further, you can use WPA (a lot of new SoHo equipment supports it) and/or encrypt your communications on the network using secure protocols like SSH and using VPN's and so forth.
All I was saying was that a lot of the things people think add security to their network (specifically, turning off SSID broadcasts and enabling MAC filtering) really add no security whatsoever. When you're doing something to add security, it's a damn good idea to understand what you're doing and why it's more secure instead of simply working on faith.
MAC Filtering and disabling SSID broadcasts are not adding any real security. The reason to do both of these is to prevent accidental wireless network connections.. If you're using WEP, which is a couple notches above both of these, then you're not really adding anything by doing these as well, you're just making more hassle for yourself. If someone can break WEP (even using a script to do so), then they are technologically capable enough to bypass your MAC filter and SSID non-broadcasting stuff in under 30 seconds, so what's the point? Leave 'em be if you have WEP enabled. It's simpler to work with them that way. Makes it easier for you and doesn't hurt at all.
Leaving SSID broadcast turned on means you show up in lists of available networks.. so when your friends come over and turn on their XP machines, they see your network as one of the available ones. They still need the WEP key to connect though.
MAC Filtering means that you have to specify which wireless cards can connect to your network. But an intruder who's cracked your WEP can sniff the traffic on the network anyway, and see all the MACs on the whole thing. So he changes his MAC address and is on in seconds. No security here at all. But filtering MACs is really good to prevent that guy down the street from connecting by accident. But then so is WEP, so if you have WEP, why bother with MAC Filtering? Again, easier to leave it off and let your friend who brought his laptop over connect without you having to modify the settings in the access point. He still needs the WEP key, as usual, so you're still safe.
You're talking about cooking as a creative and expressive medium, and that's perfectly valid. If you're trying to create something new, something you haven't tried before, then yes, you're absolutely spot on.
On the other hand, if you're cooking because you're hungry and you want to eat, then it's a bit of a different story.
Cooking is the act of preparing something (as food), usually by the application of heat. Beyond that, any definition you read into it is your own. Cooking as art and cooking as a way to get rid of hunger are both acceptable uses of the word.
Cooking as art is creative. Cooking as hunger-elimination is usually not. Day in and day out, I gotta eat, and I usually use the second definition. Once I know how to prepare a thing, I can prepare that thing the same way virtually every time (hey, I'm only human, I screw it up sometimes). If I want to create something different though, then I can do that as well. But I don't often have that kind of time.
You shouldn't need to be a super crypto-wireless-hacker guru to use a computer or wireless setup. Engineers should be designing these things to not only be simplier but more robust. Having a better and safer system has nothing to do with the "savy" user and everything to do with the manufacturers.
You have a good point, but that point only goes so far.
Security that is easy to do is not secure. That's almost an axiom, really. Especially when you're talking about cryptography of any form.
The main thing being complained at in the article was the necessary step of entering a 26 digit hexadecimal key on your devices. While I grant you that this could be easier to do and more standardized, the fact of the matter is that that key *is* your security. If you make it shorter or less random looking or even generated by a psuedo random generator, it's suddenly much less secure. The need to enter that key won't change. The ease of entering that key might, but you're still going to need big keys to be secure. Just a fact of life, or rather, of mathematics.
Okay, the whole setup could be simpler. I grant you that. But then we're still talking about something that is really under development. WEP has been around a while now, but new routers and wireless AP's and such are coming out every day. Protocols are still in flux. Before you can make a thing easy to do, you have to make it work properly, and that's still in the process of happening. 802.11 is only a few years old. Look again in 5 years, see how its ease of use is then.
If you have a real need for security, then you'd likely be using secure protocols anyway. A bank, to pick your example, should be using secure protocols even over their wired network. You think someone won't tap the wire somewhere?
In this case, assuming your application level protocols are secure, using wireless is not really any less secure than using wired. So they can get on the network. Big deal, they still have to crack the uber-strong encryption that the applications are using to get anything useful.
Now, I grant you that security isn't as tight as it should be in most places where it should be uber-strong. Still, wireless is not any more inherently insecure than wired, realistically. Both can be tapped. Sure, wireless goes through walls, but wired is in the walls and most people don't know anything about where those wires really do go to...
I would consider a robot to be any mechanical device that can semi-autonomously perform a higher level task. By "higher level", I mean like "wash the dishes", but at the same time, not a dishwasher.
A dishwasher will get the dirt off your dishes, but the high level directive to "wash the dishes" includes loading the dishes, unloading the dishes, putting them away into cabinents or other storage locations, etc, etc. In the same way, "wash the clothes" means to wash them, dry them, fold them if you're into that sort of thing, put them away, etc.
The roomba vacuum is a robot because it can vacuum the floor, move from room to room, navigate around obstacles, etc, etc. It's more than just a vacuum cleaner. My vacuum cleaner can vacuum the floor, but it can't do all the associated parts of the high level task of "vacuuming" by itself. The roomba can.
I have pants and shirts that I'd theoretically iron.
It could do pants, in theory. Just put a differently shaped blow up plastic thing on it.
No creases though. It's not ironing them so much as it is heating the garment to dry it while keeping the garment inflated to maximum size, thus preventing wrinkles.
Pricewise, it'll drop eventually. I mean, let's be serious here.. it's a hot air blower attached to a plastic bag. You could probably build one with suitable effort.
Point is... you not only have to weigh the risks of being cracked, but the risks of what happens when you are cracked.
True, but then you have to use some sanity in this one too.
If it's a spammer, and he's simply using your bandwidth, you might notice pretty quickly as speeds drop or your ISP complains at you. Okay, the results are bad, but changing the WEP key is enough to stop this quickly.. Although maybe you can track the bastard down and break his legs or something. Forward the anti-spam cause, you know?:)
Somebody pulling a scam.. well, not much impact on you there. Unless you're the one being scammed.
Guy leeching kiddie porn: Main impact on you would be is if they trace the guy to your IP and you get framed.. Of course, unless you have kiddie porn, they're not going to find anything on your system, and anybody capable of tracing someone down like this might think of a wireless device being used here. And realistically, if this hypothetical pervert was paranoid enough to use someone else's bandwidth, he's likely to break it up by moving from AP to AP around town. So seems unlikely they'd track it to you anyway.
As far as someone getting your info from your network, well, secure your shit. Okay, okay, that's easy to say and harder to do, but nevertheless it's a good idea to keep stuff secure even though it's inside the firewall.
Anyway, none of these guys are top on the list of "will spend a lot of time to crack an WEP". Why? Because unsecured boxes are better targets. Think about it, they're easy to access and the owner of them likely won't notice the extra usage on the box. A secure AP means that the guy running it at least somewhat knows what he's doing. Maybe he can just read the instructions, but still he's more likely to notice an intrusion than someone with an unsecured AP with default passwords...
The risks just don't seem all that likely, realistically.
If you have WEP, then anybody capable of cracking into the WEP is going to be capable of sniffing your MAC and duplicating it using their card. It's not particularly difficult to do or anything.
Now, if you're just trying to keep out the neighbors from accidently connecting to your network, MAC filtering is fine. But it should not be considered a real security measure by any means.
I also see a lot of people thinking that turning off the SSID broadcast actually does something useful. It doesn't, really. The SSID is contained within every single packet that goes over the network, and anybody with a sniffer can find your SSID in seconds, regardless of broadcast being on or not. If you turn off broadcast, what you're really doing is making it harder for people to connect to you accidentally, much like with the MAC filtering. Broadcast SSID's are what things like the Windows XP wireless config screen use to show the "available networks". Turn that off and you won't appear there, but anybody using a sniffer or AirSnort or what have you isn't looking at that screen anyway.
Using 112/128 bit WEP? Leave SSID broadcast on and MAC filtering off, because it makes no real difference. It also makes it easier for other people to connect to your network after you have given them the WEP key and want them to connect. And if somebody is capable of cracking your WEP, then having MAC filtering on and SSID broadcast off won't even slow them down.
but I want my visitors to be able to connect via my home network without sophisticated configuration on their side (and of course, without telling them my WEP password).
I just keep mine on a sticky note attached to the AP itself. Any of my visitors who need access to my wireless (and there have been quite a few) are tech savvy enough to be able to configure a WEP key.. If they're not, then I think I would find that they probably don't need access that badly. Never happened yet though.
Couple of years ago when 802.11b was kinda new, i did some testing of this sort of thing.
The fast crack using weak frames worked then. It doesn't work much now, if the boxes are using newer hardware.
The slow crack where you get enough packets to figure out the key worked then and now, but in order to actually do it back then I had to set up some continous traffic to get enough packets to make it work. We're talking millions of packets here, and it just takes forever to see enough to do it, with 112/128 bit WEP.
Can they get in? Sure. Will they get in? They're going to have to really want in pretty badly or live nearby and be bored enough to capture for a long period of time. And if they just want free network access, they'll find the easier target like the unsecured one down the street. Or pay the 3 bucks at the nearest hotspot for the hours worth of access.
WEP is not secure, but in 99% of cases, it's secure *enough*.
Well, you could probably nail them for anti-competitive behavior if they specifically targetted the competition by lowering its priority levels or some such thing. But raising their own priorities is harder to argue against in court, sort of thing.
See, if they directly lowered the competition's priority, they're essentially doing it in a seemingly unrelated service area. Take VoIP over a cable modem. If the cable modem people lowered priorities to packets to a competing VoIP service (instead of a VoIP service run by the same company as the cable modem company), then they're using one system to hurt their competition in another system. You could argue that because they sell the two separately (VoIP vs. internet access), they are in fact separate and such an act is a violation of some law or other.
However, while the problem is more complex, I don't think it's intractable.
I don't think it's intractable, I simply think that any solution is going to require an input data set that's so large as to make the whole thing self-defeating.
In other words, there's no solution to the problem because the only possible solutions are bigger in scope than simpler solutions to the original problem (immersive storytelling) you're trying to solve in the first place. To create a system capable of doing it you need some new models, and a hell of a lot of data input. More input there than to simply create the huge immersive story to being with.
Disagree. Again with the 3D graphics example. Apples are tasty, can be cut into wedges, and rot if they're left out in the sun too long. However, if you're trying to present an exciting chase scene, in which an apple cart gets knocked over, a 3D engine can abstract apples down to a model, texture map, and collision mesh.
You also need to know that Apples are sold in carts on the street. And that this only happens in certain scenarios, most likely where you get cobblestone streets. That sort of thing. And all this other stuff that you need for telling the "story". I'm not talking about rendering the apple bouncing down the pavement here, but how in the world do you program a computer to come up with the option of knocking over a cart and possibly pissing off the apple seller and that has an impact on whether the apple seller is nice or mean to you later in the game?
The "story" cannot be programmatically created in such a fashion, without a huge amount of knowledge of real world type data. The visuals can, but the story is why you make the visuals a certain way, not how to render the things.
Anyone who engages in debate and refuses to make a single constructive point is a waste of time.
You're correct. However all my points have been raised and ignored. Fair enough, I didn't expect to change anybody's mind here.
Why is it that after a concise and clear description of the foundations of the opposing point you suddenly decide it's not worth arguing after all?
Because it becomes clear that you won't be swayed. You've made it perfectly clear that your objection rely on your assumptions. I've explained to you my assumptions already, I've already answered the points you raised in your last post, and yet you continue to raise them. It's no longer worth arguing because I've already argued it and you rejected all the arguments. So I'm finished with the thread.
One thing I've learned from arguing on online forums is when to cut loose. I'm cutting loose. There's nothing left unsaid. There's no point in continuing. See how it works?
And some patient programmer no doubt explained that such a thing would be impossible. Since each screen was hand-drawn by artists, you'd need thousands of artists spending years to draw pictures of a given room from every possible vantage point. And you'd need to ship gigabytes of image data with the game.
Okay, but there's a bit of a difference here, as I see it. This theoretical programmer was mistaken. First off, each screen was created by artists, true, but it was then rendered by computer. So creating those thousands of screens was simply a matter of creating the scene and throwing processor power at the problem. We didn't have the processor power at home to do it in real-time back then, we do now, and thus you can go buy RealMyst and there you go. Computer graphics pros use the computer as a design tool and then use a rendering engine to create the final product.
But storytelling isn't a process that lends itself to "rendering" by computer in the same way. Right now, storytellers don't use computer power to actually write the story that they designed. At best, they use word processors and certain tools to help them with spelling errors or grammar problems or what have you. They still use it as a tool to help them do the creation and not as an engine to actually create the final product, is what I'm getting at.
If we had the equivalent of a rendering engine for story telling, then you'd be on to something. So far, we don't. It requires a pretty fundamental leap to get to that point, after which your arguement might apply, and we'd be able to throw processor power at the problem to solve it in much the same way that being able to walk thru Myst was solved.
And that's just for storytelling in general. To apply this sort of thing to a gaming environment, you have to think of a way to create storylines, not just to create actual words and such. This involves concepts, ideas, a whole host of fundamental knowledge of "how the world works". None of which computers actually understand. A computer is good at crunching symbols in a logical fashion using rules that we define for it, but it has no concept of the meaning of those symbols or the reasoning behind those rules. To do what you're thinking would require such a massive input of data about, well, everything on the planet, that I don't think it'll happen anytime soon.
It's not that we can't do it, it's that it's a job that's too big for estimation on a time scale. There's more effort and logic involved in creating this sort of thing than pretty much all the programming ever done by all of humanity up to this point.
Hmm.. Well, the best AP's I know of are the Cisco's and they're all dual antenna. They also cost about a grand a pop, but still...
In any case, the best resource I know of for this sort of basic info is the NetStumbler forums. They have a FAQ section in the forum separated by categories and such, and it seems like it'd be useful for newbit type questions and such. Give it a read through. It's not a "ask a question get an answer" type of forum, they're just using the forum software to hold the FAQ, sort of thing.
Re:I doubt there will be immersive storylines
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Thirty Years in Computing
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· Score: 2, Interesting
But of course, we know this isn't the case. Even school children are capable of inventing fanciful, novel stories. The path to interactive storytelling is collaboration between the player and the computer to produce a narrative which is both interesting to the player and dramatically compelling. The narrative is a product of this process, it is not the process itself.
The problem is that storytelling is hard. It's easy to create a story. It's tough to create a compelling and interesting story. And it seems to be damn near impossible to do it without knowing what the main character is actually going to do.
This is why we don't have any good examples of immersive fiction yet. Think about it, you're basically telling the creator of the game to create a compelling and interesting story without knowing exactly what the main character in the story (the player) is actually going to do. This seems pretty hard to me, and is likely why most attempts have ended up as just more complicated versions of choose your own adventure. They come up with perhaps a dozen ways the story could go, max, then program those in using branch points. At some point in the game, you can either go do this or go do that and thus the branch is chosen. But after replaying it several times, you run out of branches.
To create something truly compelling, you'd need a lot more freedom of action. However, the program is fixed. It can't change. So anything it does must be scripted in advance. This means that truly immersive storytelling is, in fact, impossible without some form of artifical intelligence, to let the story actually change according to an unlimited number of actions.
Now, that's obviously too far. So since we're not going to let the computer tell the story, we have to let the programmer of the computer do it. This means that the possible lines are fixed. Now, if someone were to spend a hell of a lot of time on it, they could possible come up with several dozen branches at each chosen branch point in the story, and thus give the illusion of truly immersive story by sheer number of possible things to do. After about 30 possible choices at a branch point, the human brain can't really tell the difference anyway, unless they're presented with options of things to say like console games do, and such. But if the choices were actual actions that the player carried out, 30 would be more than enough.
The problem with this is that it's such a big job. If you're going to provide that kind of freedom of action, you're looking at writing thousands of similar but separate stories. And no cheating like many games do, where no matter which branch you take, the impact is slight at best and the story remains mostly unchanged. We're hoping for replay factor here. We want total changes in the storyline. Some cheating this way is okay, because things happen that way sometimes through no act of your own, but still, too much of this and you lose the point of doing it on a large scale in the first place.
Immersive storytelling is simply a hard, hard thing to do. I don't think that technology will solve this problem either, because it's not a problem with the technology. We can do it now, for that matter. It's simply a matter of spending enough time actually writing the thing out on a grand enough scale to make it seem to be unlimited. But that's still big enough to prevent it from really happening so far.
Single antenna? Eww. Most access point or router/AP combo units I've seen have two antennas on them, spaced half a wavelength apart (or rather, half a wavelength plus some number of wavelengths if it happens to be more convienent).
With only a single "dirt cheap black plastic stick" antenna, you can get dead zones where reflected signals cancel out actual signals, and yes, placement is a big problem in some cases then. A two antenna setup with diversity enabled gives you both antennas to get signal on, and drastically reduces the dead zone phenomenon. Doesn't totally eliminate it, but it does help a lot.
Sounds like you may want to try a different device altogether. If you're having dead zone issues, then yeah, moving the thing a few centimeters in any direction could have an impact. I didn't know they still made single antenna AP's though.
With regard to usage, you said yourself that you've never said the word and I have never seen it used outside of Slashdot. That isn't widespread.
I have not used it in conversation, but mainly because I don't have any friends of nerdish tendancies like myself with whom I would talk about this sort of thing.
However, I have seen it in many, many places throughout this interweb thing, mostly in online forums when discussing virii in general. It's fairly widespread, from my perspective. You are free to disagree, of course.
It is less communicative than the one it replaces and less conforming to English conventions, so harder for people to learn. It has no worth, limited support, and is clearly founded on a misconception.
All of these are your opinion, and I disagree with each and every one of them. However, it's not worth debating them over, really. You're free to think as you wish. Nevertheless, virii *is* a real word and I will continue using it as such.
My old physics teacher used to say something similar but decidely geeky.
"It's not the fall that kills you, it's the massive acceleration against your direction of movement."
He was a cool guy. Used to get bored and make soap bubble fireballs using the gas outlets in the chemistry lab. For halloween he brought in a rigged pumpkin he'd carved up that blew fire out of the front of the thing. Said it scared children real good. I enjoyed that year of school.:)
I would say you have a faulty antenna or fauly unit in some fashion. Placement does matter, but not that much. Not if it has two antennas and diversity enabled on the AP. I'd try a different box and see how that works.
Because IE is a big security hole, a lousy browser, and easily infected with all kinds of spyware.
The only problem with this is that it's demonstrably not true.
Admittedly, I am a clueful user of computers, but I most often use IE on the various Windows boxen around here. Why? Because it's good enough. Never had a problem with spyware, never had a browser hijack experience, and I've been surfing with IE ever since they integrated it into Windows. It's just easier than dealing with other alternative browsers. I'm not interested in surfing for it's own sake, I'm interested in gaining access to information on the internet, and IE serves that purpose as well as any other.
But the point I'm making here is that while there do exist security holes and such, if you are a clued user who installs updates regularly, doesn't say "yes" to every pop up that appears, etc, etc, then you generally don't have these sorts of problems on Win boxes with IE.
Yes, I've removed a browser hijacker from somebody's system, but no, they were not a clueful user of the system. Most people are not the kind of people who update regularly, but using different software isn't really a solution to this problem..
Slashdot Mirror
Apparently the newer Chevy models have sensors which determine the "tire pressure" by judging the alignment of the wheels against each other. Assuming that all four tires are properly aligned, if one is rotating out of sync with the others, low tire pressure is a proper diagnosis... But if the alignment is off, the "Low Tire Pressure" warning displays incessantly.
:)
;)
Yes, I know this as I have a Chevy myself. Had it happen to me in fact, although in my case it actually was a leak in the tire. Newer Ford's use a different system with tire pressure monitors actually embedded in the tire, at the valve stem. Less chance of a false positive, more sensitive, but every time you change the tire you've got to reprogram the car with the ID's of the tire sensors. They sell a special tool to shops to do this.
I like Chevy's system better. Although the LTP light does come on if there's an alignment issue, at least you know there's an alignment issue or a low tire.
I was once told that AutoZone has a 4 terabyte database hanging around somewhere. Any idea if this is true?
Don't know anything about a 4 terabyte DB. Not sure I'd be able to talk about it if I did.
Well, it's also all listed in the service manuals. Unfortunately, you have to pay to get a copy of those too.
It's not that the data isn't freely available, it's just that all the places where you can get it you have to pay for it. Of course, a lot of these codes are online. Search google for example...
Should they include a full out service manual with the purchase of the car? That's debatable. I remember when I bought my C64 way back when, it came with a complete guide to actually programming the thing and had some of the system calls and such. You don't get anything similar with a PC.. You're lucky to get a 4 page glossy on setting the thing up.
If you don't want to buy your own reader, drive by an AutoZone and ask them to read it for you. Guy will come out to your car and plug the thing in and check the codes and even explain what it means (assuming he knows what it means, which I'm sure varies from person to person). It's a useful way to determine if you actually need service or if it's just complaining about the gas cap or low oil or something.
Disclaimer: I work for AutoZone and have for about 2 months now. However, I'm trying hard not to be a shill, sort of thing. Still, if you don't feel like dropping $100 on a reader, this is an alternative you'll want to look into.
... you just have to pay for it. One place you can get this sort of stuff, off the top of my head, is ALLDATA. There's many others, I'm sure.
The info is out there and many of the car companies do indeed offer it. They just don't much advertise it. They're too busy making cars to be selling information about them. Don't chalk this up to malice so fast, is what I'm saying. Mark it down as stupidity instead. It seems more likely.
So basically you're saying there's no security for WiFi to a knowledgeable intruder?
Yes, and then again, no.
First off, security in any wireless communication is done using encryption. And any encryption can be broken if you're willing to devote the necessary resources to doing so. In that sense, there's no security insofar as it can always be broken.
But like everything else in the world, there's levels of security.. The goal is not to make it unbreakable, the goal is to set the bar high enough to keep people out unless they're willing to devote those resources necessary to get in.
WEP is secure enough for most people. If you want it to be a step further, you can use WPA (a lot of new SoHo equipment supports it) and/or encrypt your communications on the network using secure protocols like SSH and using VPN's and so forth.
All I was saying was that a lot of the things people think add security to their network (specifically, turning off SSID broadcasts and enabling MAC filtering) really add no security whatsoever. When you're doing something to add security, it's a damn good idea to understand what you're doing and why it's more secure instead of simply working on faith.
MAC Filtering and disabling SSID broadcasts are not adding any real security. The reason to do both of these is to prevent accidental wireless network connections.. If you're using WEP, which is a couple notches above both of these, then you're not really adding anything by doing these as well, you're just making more hassle for yourself. If someone can break WEP (even using a script to do so), then they are technologically capable enough to bypass your MAC filter and SSID non-broadcasting stuff in under 30 seconds, so what's the point? Leave 'em be if you have WEP enabled. It's simpler to work with them that way. Makes it easier for you and doesn't hurt at all.
Leaving SSID broadcast turned on means you show up in lists of available networks.. so when your friends come over and turn on their XP machines, they see your network as one of the available ones. They still need the WEP key to connect though.
MAC Filtering means that you have to specify which wireless cards can connect to your network. But an intruder who's cracked your WEP can sniff the traffic on the network anyway, and see all the MACs on the whole thing. So he changes his MAC address and is on in seconds. No security here at all. But filtering MACs is really good to prevent that guy down the street from connecting by accident. But then so is WEP, so if you have WEP, why bother with MAC Filtering? Again, easier to leave it off and let your friend who brought his laptop over connect without you having to modify the settings in the access point. He still needs the WEP key, as usual, so you're still safe.
You're talking about cooking as a creative and expressive medium, and that's perfectly valid. If you're trying to create something new, something you haven't tried before, then yes, you're absolutely spot on.
On the other hand, if you're cooking because you're hungry and you want to eat, then it's a bit of a different story.
Cooking is the act of preparing something (as food), usually by the application of heat. Beyond that, any definition you read into it is your own. Cooking as art and cooking as a way to get rid of hunger are both acceptable uses of the word.
Cooking as art is creative. Cooking as hunger-elimination is usually not. Day in and day out, I gotta eat, and I usually use the second definition. Once I know how to prepare a thing, I can prepare that thing the same way virtually every time (hey, I'm only human, I screw it up sometimes). If I want to create something different though, then I can do that as well. But I don't often have that kind of time.
You shouldn't need to be a super crypto-wireless-hacker guru to use a computer or wireless setup. Engineers should be designing these things to not only be simplier but more robust. Having a better and safer system has nothing to do with the "savy" user and everything to do with the manufacturers.
You have a good point, but that point only goes so far.
Security that is easy to do is not secure. That's almost an axiom, really. Especially when you're talking about cryptography of any form.
The main thing being complained at in the article was the necessary step of entering a 26 digit hexadecimal key on your devices. While I grant you that this could be easier to do and more standardized, the fact of the matter is that that key *is* your security. If you make it shorter or less random looking or even generated by a psuedo random generator, it's suddenly much less secure. The need to enter that key won't change. The ease of entering that key might, but you're still going to need big keys to be secure. Just a fact of life, or rather, of mathematics.
Okay, the whole setup could be simpler. I grant you that. But then we're still talking about something that is really under development. WEP has been around a while now, but new routers and wireless AP's and such are coming out every day. Protocols are still in flux. Before you can make a thing easy to do, you have to make it work properly, and that's still in the process of happening. 802.11 is only a few years old. Look again in 5 years, see how its ease of use is then.
It's commercial use that's a Problem...
If you have a real need for security, then you'd likely be using secure protocols anyway. A bank, to pick your example, should be using secure protocols even over their wired network. You think someone won't tap the wire somewhere?
In this case, assuming your application level protocols are secure, using wireless is not really any less secure than using wired. So they can get on the network. Big deal, they still have to crack the uber-strong encryption that the applications are using to get anything useful.
Now, I grant you that security isn't as tight as it should be in most places where it should be uber-strong. Still, wireless is not any more inherently insecure than wired, realistically. Both can be tapped. Sure, wireless goes through walls, but wired is in the walls and most people don't know anything about where those wires really do go to...
I would consider a robot to be any mechanical device that can semi-autonomously perform a higher level task. By "higher level", I mean like "wash the dishes", but at the same time, not a dishwasher.
A dishwasher will get the dirt off your dishes, but the high level directive to "wash the dishes" includes loading the dishes, unloading the dishes, putting them away into cabinents or other storage locations, etc, etc. In the same way, "wash the clothes" means to wash them, dry them, fold them if you're into that sort of thing, put them away, etc.
The roomba vacuum is a robot because it can vacuum the floor, move from room to room, navigate around obstacles, etc, etc. It's more than just a vacuum cleaner. My vacuum cleaner can vacuum the floor, but it can't do all the associated parts of the high level task of "vacuuming" by itself. The roomba can.
I have pants and shirts that I'd theoretically iron.
It could do pants, in theory. Just put a differently shaped blow up plastic thing on it.
No creases though. It's not ironing them so much as it is heating the garment to dry it while keeping the garment inflated to maximum size, thus preventing wrinkles.
Pricewise, it'll drop eventually. I mean, let's be serious here.. it's a hot air blower attached to a plastic bag. You could probably build one with suitable effort.
Point is... you not only have to weigh the risks of being cracked, but the risks of what happens when you are cracked.
:)
True, but then you have to use some sanity in this one too.
If it's a spammer, and he's simply using your bandwidth, you might notice pretty quickly as speeds drop or your ISP complains at you. Okay, the results are bad, but changing the WEP key is enough to stop this quickly.. Although maybe you can track the bastard down and break his legs or something. Forward the anti-spam cause, you know?
Somebody pulling a scam.. well, not much impact on you there. Unless you're the one being scammed.
Guy leeching kiddie porn: Main impact on you would be is if they trace the guy to your IP and you get framed.. Of course, unless you have kiddie porn, they're not going to find anything on your system, and anybody capable of tracing someone down like this might think of a wireless device being used here. And realistically, if this hypothetical pervert was paranoid enough to use someone else's bandwidth, he's likely to break it up by moving from AP to AP around town. So seems unlikely they'd track it to you anyway.
As far as someone getting your info from your network, well, secure your shit. Okay, okay, that's easy to say and harder to do, but nevertheless it's a good idea to keep stuff secure even though it's inside the firewall.
Anyway, none of these guys are top on the list of "will spend a lot of time to crack an WEP". Why? Because unsecured boxes are better targets. Think about it, they're easy to access and the owner of them likely won't notice the extra usage on the box. A secure AP means that the guy running it at least somewhat knows what he's doing. Maybe he can just read the instructions, but still he's more likely to notice an intrusion than someone with an unsecured AP with default passwords...
The risks just don't seem all that likely, realistically.
If you have WEP, then anybody capable of cracking into the WEP is going to be capable of sniffing your MAC and duplicating it using their card. It's not particularly difficult to do or anything.
Now, if you're just trying to keep out the neighbors from accidently connecting to your network, MAC filtering is fine. But it should not be considered a real security measure by any means.
I also see a lot of people thinking that turning off the SSID broadcast actually does something useful. It doesn't, really. The SSID is contained within every single packet that goes over the network, and anybody with a sniffer can find your SSID in seconds, regardless of broadcast being on or not. If you turn off broadcast, what you're really doing is making it harder for people to connect to you accidentally, much like with the MAC filtering. Broadcast SSID's are what things like the Windows XP wireless config screen use to show the "available networks". Turn that off and you won't appear there, but anybody using a sniffer or AirSnort or what have you isn't looking at that screen anyway.
Using 112/128 bit WEP? Leave SSID broadcast on and MAC filtering off, because it makes no real difference. It also makes it easier for other people to connect to your network after you have given them the WEP key and want them to connect. And if somebody is capable of cracking your WEP, then having MAC filtering on and SSID broadcast off won't even slow them down.
but I want my visitors to be able to connect via my home network without sophisticated configuration on their side (and of course, without telling them my WEP password).
I just keep mine on a sticky note attached to the AP itself. Any of my visitors who need access to my wireless (and there have been quite a few) are tech savvy enough to be able to configure a WEP key.. If they're not, then I think I would find that they probably don't need access that badly. Never happened yet though.
Couple of years ago when 802.11b was kinda new, i did some testing of this sort of thing.
The fast crack using weak frames worked then. It doesn't work much now, if the boxes are using newer hardware.
The slow crack where you get enough packets to figure out the key worked then and now, but in order to actually do it back then I had to set up some continous traffic to get enough packets to make it work. We're talking millions of packets here, and it just takes forever to see enough to do it, with 112/128 bit WEP.
Can they get in? Sure.
Will they get in? They're going to have to really want in pretty badly or live nearby and be bored enough to capture for a long period of time. And if they just want free network access, they'll find the easier target like the unsecured one down the street. Or pay the 3 bucks at the nearest hotspot for the hours worth of access.
WEP is not secure, but in 99% of cases, it's secure *enough*.
Well, you could probably nail them for anti-competitive behavior if they specifically targetted the competition by lowering its priority levels or some such thing. But raising their own priorities is harder to argue against in court, sort of thing.
See, if they directly lowered the competition's priority, they're essentially doing it in a seemingly unrelated service area. Take VoIP over a cable modem. If the cable modem people lowered priorities to packets to a competing VoIP service (instead of a VoIP service run by the same company as the cable modem company), then they're using one system to hurt their competition in another system. You could argue that because they sell the two separately (VoIP vs. internet access), they are in fact separate and such an act is a violation of some law or other.
However, while the problem is more complex, I don't think it's intractable.
I don't think it's intractable, I simply think that any solution is going to require an input data set that's so large as to make the whole thing self-defeating.
In other words, there's no solution to the problem because the only possible solutions are bigger in scope than simpler solutions to the original problem (immersive storytelling) you're trying to solve in the first place. To create a system capable of doing it you need some new models, and a hell of a lot of data input. More input there than to simply create the huge immersive story to being with.
Disagree. Again with the 3D graphics example. Apples are tasty, can be cut into wedges, and rot if they're left out in the sun too long. However, if you're trying to present an exciting chase scene, in which an apple cart gets knocked over, a 3D engine can abstract apples down to a model, texture map, and collision mesh.
You also need to know that Apples are sold in carts on the street. And that this only happens in certain scenarios, most likely where you get cobblestone streets. That sort of thing. And all this other stuff that you need for telling the "story". I'm not talking about rendering the apple bouncing down the pavement here, but how in the world do you program a computer to come up with the option of knocking over a cart and possibly pissing off the apple seller and that has an impact on whether the apple seller is nice or mean to you later in the game?
The "story" cannot be programmatically created in such a fashion, without a huge amount of knowledge of real world type data. The visuals can, but the story is why you make the visuals a certain way, not how to render the things.
Anyone who engages in debate and refuses to make a single constructive point is a waste of time.
You're correct. However all my points have been raised and ignored. Fair enough, I didn't expect to change anybody's mind here.
Why is it that after a concise and clear description of the foundations of the opposing point you suddenly decide it's not worth arguing after all?
Because it becomes clear that you won't be swayed. You've made it perfectly clear that your objection rely on your assumptions. I've explained to you my assumptions already, I've already answered the points you raised in your last post, and yet you continue to raise them. It's no longer worth arguing because I've already argued it and you rejected all the arguments. So I'm finished with the thread.
One thing I've learned from arguing on online forums is when to cut loose. I'm cutting loose. There's nothing left unsaid. There's no point in continuing. See how it works?
And some patient programmer no doubt explained that such a thing would be impossible. Since each screen was hand-drawn by artists, you'd need thousands of artists spending years to draw pictures of a given room from every possible vantage point. And you'd need to ship gigabytes of image data with the game.
Okay, but there's a bit of a difference here, as I see it. This theoretical programmer was mistaken. First off, each screen was created by artists, true, but it was then rendered by computer. So creating those thousands of screens was simply a matter of creating the scene and throwing processor power at the problem. We didn't have the processor power at home to do it in real-time back then, we do now, and thus you can go buy RealMyst and there you go. Computer graphics pros use the computer as a design tool and then use a rendering engine to create the final product.
But storytelling isn't a process that lends itself to "rendering" by computer in the same way. Right now, storytellers don't use computer power to actually write the story that they designed. At best, they use word processors and certain tools to help them with spelling errors or grammar problems or what have you. They still use it as a tool to help them do the creation and not as an engine to actually create the final product, is what I'm getting at.
If we had the equivalent of a rendering engine for story telling, then you'd be on to something. So far, we don't. It requires a pretty fundamental leap to get to that point, after which your arguement might apply, and we'd be able to throw processor power at the problem to solve it in much the same way that being able to walk thru Myst was solved.
And that's just for storytelling in general. To apply this sort of thing to a gaming environment, you have to think of a way to create storylines, not just to create actual words and such. This involves concepts, ideas, a whole host of fundamental knowledge of "how the world works". None of which computers actually understand. A computer is good at crunching symbols in a logical fashion using rules that we define for it, but it has no concept of the meaning of those symbols or the reasoning behind those rules. To do what you're thinking would require such a massive input of data about, well, everything on the planet, that I don't think it'll happen anytime soon.
It's not that we can't do it, it's that it's a job that's too big for estimation on a time scale. There's more effort and logic involved in creating this sort of thing than pretty much all the programming ever done by all of humanity up to this point.
Hmm.. Well, the best AP's I know of are the Cisco's and they're all dual antenna. They also cost about a grand a pop, but still...
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In any case, the best resource I know of for this sort of basic info is the NetStumbler forums. They have a FAQ section in the forum separated by categories and such, and it seems like it'd be useful for newbit type questions and such. Give it a read through. It's not a "ask a question get an answer" type of forum, they're just using the forum software to hold the FAQ, sort of thing.
Link: http://forums.netstumbler.com/forumdisplay.php?f=
But of course, we know this isn't the case. Even school children are capable of inventing fanciful, novel stories. The path to interactive storytelling is collaboration between the player and the computer to produce a narrative which is both interesting to the player and dramatically compelling. The narrative is a product of this process, it is not the process itself.
The problem is that storytelling is hard. It's easy to create a story. It's tough to create a compelling and interesting story. And it seems to be damn near impossible to do it without knowing what the main character is actually going to do.
This is why we don't have any good examples of immersive fiction yet. Think about it, you're basically telling the creator of the game to create a compelling and interesting story without knowing exactly what the main character in the story (the player) is actually going to do. This seems pretty hard to me, and is likely why most attempts have ended up as just more complicated versions of choose your own adventure. They come up with perhaps a dozen ways the story could go, max, then program those in using branch points. At some point in the game, you can either go do this or go do that and thus the branch is chosen. But after replaying it several times, you run out of branches.
To create something truly compelling, you'd need a lot more freedom of action. However, the program is fixed. It can't change. So anything it does must be scripted in advance. This means that truly immersive storytelling is, in fact, impossible without some form of artifical intelligence, to let the story actually change according to an unlimited number of actions.
Now, that's obviously too far. So since we're not going to let the computer tell the story, we have to let the programmer of the computer do it. This means that the possible lines are fixed. Now, if someone were to spend a hell of a lot of time on it, they could possible come up with several dozen branches at each chosen branch point in the story, and thus give the illusion of truly immersive story by sheer number of possible things to do. After about 30 possible choices at a branch point, the human brain can't really tell the difference anyway, unless they're presented with options of things to say like console games do, and such. But if the choices were actual actions that the player carried out, 30 would be more than enough.
The problem with this is that it's such a big job. If you're going to provide that kind of freedom of action, you're looking at writing thousands of similar but separate stories. And no cheating like many games do, where no matter which branch you take, the impact is slight at best and the story remains mostly unchanged. We're hoping for replay factor here. We want total changes in the storyline. Some cheating this way is okay, because things happen that way sometimes through no act of your own, but still, too much of this and you lose the point of doing it on a large scale in the first place.
Immersive storytelling is simply a hard, hard thing to do. I don't think that technology will solve this problem either, because it's not a problem with the technology. We can do it now, for that matter. It's simply a matter of spending enough time actually writing the thing out on a grand enough scale to make it seem to be unlimited. But that's still big enough to prevent it from really happening so far.
Single antenna? Eww. Most access point or router/AP combo units I've seen have two antennas on them, spaced half a wavelength apart (or rather, half a wavelength plus some number of wavelengths if it happens to be more convienent).
With only a single "dirt cheap black plastic stick" antenna, you can get dead zones where reflected signals cancel out actual signals, and yes, placement is a big problem in some cases then. A two antenna setup with diversity enabled gives you both antennas to get signal on, and drastically reduces the dead zone phenomenon. Doesn't totally eliminate it, but it does help a lot.
Sounds like you may want to try a different device altogether. If you're having dead zone issues, then yeah, moving the thing a few centimeters in any direction could have an impact. I didn't know they still made single antenna AP's though.
With regard to usage, you said yourself that you've never said the word and I have never seen it used outside of Slashdot. That isn't widespread.
I have not used it in conversation, but mainly because I don't have any friends of nerdish tendancies like myself with whom I would talk about this sort of thing.
However, I have seen it in many, many places throughout this interweb thing, mostly in online forums when discussing virii in general. It's fairly widespread, from my perspective. You are free to disagree, of course.
It is less communicative than the one it replaces and less conforming to English conventions, so harder for people to learn. It has no worth, limited support, and is clearly founded on a misconception.
All of these are your opinion, and I disagree with each and every one of them. However, it's not worth debating them over, really. You're free to think as you wish. Nevertheless, virii *is* a real word and I will continue using it as such.
My old physics teacher used to say something similar but decidely geeky.
:)
"It's not the fall that kills you, it's the massive acceleration against your direction of movement."
He was a cool guy. Used to get bored and make soap bubble fireballs using the gas outlets in the chemistry lab. For halloween he brought in a rigged pumpkin he'd carved up that blew fire out of the front of the thing. Said it scared children real good. I enjoyed that year of school.
I would say you have a faulty antenna or fauly unit in some fashion. Placement does matter, but not that much. Not if it has two antennas and diversity enabled on the AP. I'd try a different box and see how that works.
Because IE is a big security hole, a lousy browser, and easily infected with all kinds of spyware.
The only problem with this is that it's demonstrably not true.
Admittedly, I am a clueful user of computers, but I most often use IE on the various Windows boxen around here. Why? Because it's good enough. Never had a problem with spyware, never had a browser hijack experience, and I've been surfing with IE ever since they integrated it into Windows. It's just easier than dealing with other alternative browsers. I'm not interested in surfing for it's own sake, I'm interested in gaining access to information on the internet, and IE serves that purpose as well as any other.
But the point I'm making here is that while there do exist security holes and such, if you are a clued user who installs updates regularly, doesn't say "yes" to every pop up that appears, etc, etc, then you generally don't have these sorts of problems on Win boxes with IE.
Yes, I've removed a browser hijacker from somebody's system, but no, they were not a clueful user of the system. Most people are not the kind of people who update regularly, but using different software isn't really a solution to this problem..