The key is: the hacker didn't access any personal data (no FTP/SAMBA access). While I think this is foolish, it is the main difference. There is another thing: in the Netherlands there are no usage caps (although there is a fair use policy 500 GB a month on a 30 Mbit line doesn't seem to violate it), so nothing of worth was stolen. However: that reasoning is flawed "But judge, although I shot a full machine gun clip at the crowd of innocent children, I din't hit anyone so I am not guilty of anything" (I know that's a heavy exaggeration).
How much data are you willing to expose due to simple wireless key decryption? Secure data should be on another server with separate authentication, IMHO. ''
It doesn't have to be useful data, you can store Goatse, Tubgirl and Lemonparty images there. Preferably unencrypted. Or pictures of your penis. I dare any lawyer to claim that's not private data... If you are so concerned with security you shouldn't put data you want to keep secure there. Just use an old 32 MB USB stick and put some data on it. Let them hack it, and use that act to be able to sue them.
In the Netherlands it's not illegal to use an unprotected network. The original reason was: You can accidentally use the wrong network if it's unprotected. The Acer Netmanager is the worst: Assume you have your network protected and your neighbor doesn't. The Acer Netmanager will not assume your network as default, but the strongest-signal unprotected network (and you can't change the default). So in order to use your own network you should manually select your network each time you reconnect (or remove the bleeping-bleep Netmanager with all the other Acer crapware). It can't be illegal to use an unprotected network, simply because it can happen by accident.
DVB means Digital Video Broadcasting Symbol rate is the speed at which the bytes are transferred. It's usually in Baud, so if you have ever played with a classical modem (14K4 for example, it means 14400 Baud) you should know something about it. Channels are multiplexed into a transponder. For example the Astra 1 at 19.2 E satellite (default here in NL) has a transponder 97 (12344 MHz, horizontal) with 25 channels on it (13 TV and 12 radio channels). These channels all have a different addresses (I believe they are called PID's). Video signals have even 2 (one for audio and one for video). There is some system that tells the receiver what addresses are taken at the moment and some system that creates a start (an adress 0). From the start point each channel is send when it's time slot is there. The receiver simply waits until the correct time slot and puts the data into the input buffer. Most satellites nowadays use Mpeg 2 encoding to compress the data. Due to this there is a lot of spare space on the satellite, although Astra 1 contains about 700 channels (radio + TV). What most people (including me) refer to as a satellite is usually a bunch of satellites. They are positioned in a geostationary orbit within an angle of 0.1 degree. The receiving disk people use is to small to distinguish between them, so it appears as one sat. The opening angle of a 60 cm dish is about 2 degrees. This determines the effective resolution. I believe communication satellites (sattelite groups) are never spaced less than 3 degrees apart, so it's quite easy to distinguish the sat. With a bigger disk (80 cm, 1 meter) you have a smaller opening angle, so you receive less noise and thus effectively a stronger signal. A bigger disk also has a larger area, and thus the absolute signal strength is higher as well. Off course you should not increase to a disk with an opening angle of less than 0.1 degree, or you won't be able to receive the complete group. The Astra 1 satellite (or group of satellite's if you will) sends at 10 to 12 GHz, with two polarisations (Horizotal and vertical antenna's give different signals). The frequency is way to high to send over a cheap cable, so it's downconverted. This is done by the LNBC, the small box on the receiving disk. This thing does a couple of tasks:
It contains the antenna's (two of them at 90 degree angles, one for the horizontal signal and one for the vertical signal)
It contains the converter to decrease the signal frequency to between 1 and 2 GHz
It receives data from the set top box (the thing in the living room) which polarization and which frequency band (high or low) it should take.
It selects the correct polarisation and frequency band and sends it over the cable
This LNBC is quite an interesting thing. It's a high frequency device (up to 12 GHz) but it is cheap (you can have one for less than EUR 20). Most of the parts are etched into the PCB. The signal is send over a relatively cheap (like 1 euro per meter) to the set-top box. There is a great variety in these: simple ones, versions with recording harddisks, versions that can display two different channels (PIP or different outputs), versions for HD signals. Even versions with Linux as main operating system (the Dreambox). In the receiver is usually a smartcard with encryption data. This can be directly into the receiver, but sometimes there is a PCMCIA-like "sleeve" (a module) in the receiver with the card in that. The receiver (or the module) decrypts the signal with the data from the smartcard. Both ways usually work There is a strange thing with brands: While Phillips and Nokia make satellite set-top boxes (sometimes called receivers) the best brands (IMHO) are not very well known in other fields (Topfield is a good brand. I have not heard of a non-"digital set-top box" product from them. They do have quite good cable receivers.). I am not sure why this is. Phillips receivers in the Netherlands are very locked-in devices and a Nokia receiver is something you
Therein lies a part of the problem. It's difficult to detect: Optical detection will not find translucent stuff (although it will detect cigarette buds. They use it already for that) and a gasschromatograph just isn't feasible (way to slow to use it to test each bottle). A good electronic nose isn't available, so they will have to assume the worst. Don't get me wrong: I prefer cleaning over throwing them away, but it's not all unicorns and rainbows.
They have another choice: simply state: "What the kids do in the evenings and other non-school time is the parent's responsibility. The principal has no control over these matters and as a result they have no responsibility." Yes I know it isn't that simple. However it should be.
Then again: letting kids choose not to go to school has to great a chance to have them go to crime or welfare once they are grown up. The autodidacts are a small group compared to the kids who would crash without school (and thus we should first be considerate of the greater group). It's sad they cannot function to their greatest potential, but sacrifices have to be made assuming you want to let all kids go to the same school. If you'd have the autodidacts go to a Montessori school (I only know it from my education, I haven't been to one myself) you could have them blossom to their maximum capacity, but normal kid's can't function in a Montessori school.
Get new outer tires. New anti-puncture tires can have a lot of glass before the kevlar anti-puncture layer is worn out. I remember a Dutch consumer TV program (I believe "Kassa") where they invited a couple of manufacturers that claimed their tire could not be punctured. They hammered thumbtacks into them (some they could not get fully in. Only in the rubber thread, not in the kevlar) placed them on a construction in glass and had a 150 kg (300 punds) guy ride on it for a couple of hours. No inner tires were damaged. If you buy a decent tire (about EUR 50 here) you can probably use it daily with an occasional bottle on the road (say: twice a day) for years. You will sooner wear the tread off from them.
In the Netherlands the brewers are all but required to have deposit on their bottles. I would guess 90% of the beer is in deposit bottles. However there is an environmental downside to reusing bottles: you have to clean them. This is not a simple cleaning process, as there are assholes who store things like paint thinner in bottles and redeposit them afterwards. Cigarette buds are quite common. You have to get everything out that someone could put into it (except for paint and other opaque stuff: the optical detection can see that) because there is no sure way to detect all those toxins (a gasschromatograph would be to expensive and a "electronic nose" isn't good enough yet) so you have to use a heavy cleaning agent to be sure your beer still tastes the same. Those cleaning agents are very bad for the environment. A degradable bottle that you could compost would be better. (recycling and cleaning is still better for the environment as normal throwaway bottles)
-- all those sci-fi plot twists from cosmic ray induced bit-flips in charge-dependent memory?
Not just a sci-fi plot. Bits can be flipped due to cosmic rays. Yeah they say they are not sure why the bit flipped. But this is starting to look ridiculously like a cosmic ray: in the collision zone of true cosmic particles and solar particle a bit flipped without good reason.
I would buy a nice girl a ring. However, if she keeps nagging for such things she is not a nice girl. This seems to be a girl that has been spoiled as a kid (nagging is a clear indicator of lazy parenting) and as such not worth my time nor my money. Buying a girl a ring may be useful as a relationship improvement, buying a gild a ring to ask her to marry you is simply required.
If your underwear sees enough daylight to get anything charged, then something is wrong. Now sexy underwear on a beautiful girl can charge important parts of me, but the surface covered by such underwear is usually very low, so solar panels would not give much electricity.
Think commercial and manufacturing uses, Refridgeration, Lighting, Heat, Servers, Electric Rail.
These uses may also move to the on-time instead of being put off.
I'd stock my freezer with water (as a cold-capacitor) if I knew the power would go off for hours. Better than letting my food defrost. The gained heat will have to be dumped in the "on" time.
If the server I need is offline atm, I will probably go back in a couple of hours, effectively moving the load instead of dropping it.
If your heating has been off for a couple of hours, a normal thermostat will try to get it back to the right temperature before switching off again.
If the light switches off at a point in the evening I'd probably go to bed and wake up early, using the power then.
The electric rail will use less, assuming they are as maxed out as people say they are, because there will be no way to handle the extra load when the power is on.
I believe GP's statement holds, albeit not because of batteries but of delayed usage.
To paraphrase: If you make breeder reactors illegal only the terrorists will have a steady supply of weapons grade plutonium
The key is: the hacker didn't access any personal data (no FTP/SAMBA access). While I think this is foolish, it is the main difference.
There is another thing: in the Netherlands there are no usage caps (although there is a fair use policy 500 GB a month on a 30 Mbit line doesn't seem to violate it), so nothing of worth was stolen.
However: that reasoning is flawed "But judge, although I shot a full machine gun clip at the crowd of innocent children, I din't hit anyone so I am not guilty of anything" (I know that's a heavy exaggeration).
It was 120 hours according to the Webwereld.nl article. The PC world and the Webwereld article seem to disagree on that.
How much data are you willing to expose due to simple wireless key decryption? Secure data should be on another server with separate authentication, IMHO. ''
It doesn't have to be useful data, you can store Goatse, Tubgirl and Lemonparty images there. Preferably unencrypted. Or pictures of your penis. I dare any lawyer to claim that's not private data...
If you are so concerned with security you shouldn't put data you want to keep secure there. Just use an old 32 MB USB stick and put some data on it. Let them hack it, and use that act to be able to sue them.
In the Netherlands it's not illegal to use an unprotected network. The original reason was: You can accidentally use the wrong network if it's unprotected. The Acer Netmanager is the worst: Assume you have your network protected and your neighbor doesn't. The Acer Netmanager will not assume your network as default, but the strongest-signal unprotected network (and you can't change the default). So in order to use your own network you should manually select your network each time you reconnect (or remove the bleeping-bleep Netmanager with all the other Acer crapware).
It can't be illegal to use an unprotected network, simply because it can happen by accident.
Symbol rate is the speed at which the bytes are transferred. It's usually in Baud, so if you have ever played with a classical modem (14K4 for example, it means 14400 Baud) you should know something about it.
Channels are multiplexed into a transponder. For example the Astra 1 at 19.2 E satellite (default here in NL) has a transponder 97 (12344 MHz, horizontal) with 25 channels on it (13 TV and 12 radio channels). These channels all have a different addresses (I believe they are called PID's). Video signals have even 2 (one for audio and one for video). There is some system that tells the receiver what addresses are taken at the moment and some system that creates a start (an adress 0). From the start point each channel is send when it's time slot is there. The receiver simply waits until the correct time slot and puts the data into the input buffer.
Most satellites nowadays use Mpeg 2 encoding to compress the data. Due to this there is a lot of spare space on the satellite, although Astra 1 contains about 700 channels (radio + TV).
What most people (including me) refer to as a satellite is usually a bunch of satellites. They are positioned in a geostationary orbit within an angle of 0.1 degree. The receiving disk people use is to small to distinguish between them, so it appears as one sat. The opening angle of a 60 cm dish is about 2 degrees. This determines the effective resolution. I believe communication satellites (sattelite groups) are never spaced less than 3 degrees apart, so it's quite easy to distinguish the sat. With a bigger disk (80 cm, 1 meter) you have a smaller opening angle, so you receive less noise and thus effectively a stronger signal. A bigger disk also has a larger area, and thus the absolute signal strength is higher as well. Off course you should not increase to a disk with an opening angle of less than 0.1 degree, or you won't be able to receive the complete group.
The Astra 1 satellite (or group of satellite's if you will) sends at 10 to 12 GHz, with two polarisations (Horizotal and vertical antenna's give different signals). The frequency is way to high to send over a cheap cable, so it's downconverted. This is done by the LNBC, the small box on the receiving disk. This thing does a couple of tasks:
This LNBC is quite an interesting thing. It's a high frequency device (up to 12 GHz) but it is cheap (you can have one for less than EUR 20). Most of the parts are etched into the PCB.
The signal is send over a relatively cheap (like 1 euro per meter) to the set-top box. There is a great variety in these: simple ones, versions with recording harddisks, versions that can display two different channels (PIP or different outputs), versions for HD signals. Even versions with Linux as main operating system (the Dreambox).
In the receiver is usually a smartcard with encryption data. This can be directly into the receiver, but sometimes there is a PCMCIA-like "sleeve" (a module) in the receiver with the card in that. The receiver (or the module) decrypts the signal with the data from the smartcard. Both ways usually work
There is a strange thing with brands: While Phillips and Nokia make satellite set-top boxes (sometimes called receivers) the best brands (IMHO) are not very well known in other fields (Topfield is a good brand. I have not heard of a non-"digital set-top box" product from them. They do have quite good cable receivers.). I am not sure why this is. Phillips receivers in the Netherlands are very locked-in devices and a Nokia receiver is something you
Therein lies a part of the problem. It's difficult to detect: Optical detection will not find translucent stuff (although it will detect cigarette buds. They use it already for that) and a gasschromatograph just isn't feasible (way to slow to use it to test each bottle). A good electronic nose isn't available, so they will have to assume the worst.
Don't get me wrong: I prefer cleaning over throwing them away, but it's not all unicorns and rainbows.
They have another choice: simply state: "What the kids do in the evenings and other non-school time is the parent's responsibility. The principal has no control over these matters and as a result they have no responsibility."
Yes I know it isn't that simple. However it should be.
Then again: letting kids choose not to go to school has to great a chance to have them go to crime or welfare once they are grown up. The autodidacts are a small group compared to the kids who would crash without school (and thus we should first be considerate of the greater group). It's sad they cannot function to their greatest potential, but sacrifices have to be made assuming you want to let all kids go to the same school.
If you'd have the autodidacts go to a Montessori school (I only know it from my education, I haven't been to one myself) you could have them blossom to their maximum capacity, but normal kid's can't function in a Montessori school.
Get new outer tires. New anti-puncture tires can have a lot of glass before the kevlar anti-puncture layer is worn out. I remember a Dutch consumer TV program (I believe "Kassa") where they invited a couple of manufacturers that claimed their tire could not be punctured. They hammered thumbtacks into them (some they could not get fully in. Only in the rubber thread, not in the kevlar) placed them on a construction in glass and had a 150 kg (300 punds) guy ride on it for a couple of hours. No inner tires were damaged. If you buy a decent tire (about EUR 50 here) you can probably use it daily with an occasional bottle on the road (say: twice a day) for years. You will sooner wear the tread off from them.
Just don't put my beer in a plastic bottle.
I produce some of my own beer. What's wrong with that?
In the Netherlands the brewers are all but required to have deposit on their bottles. I would guess 90% of the beer is in deposit bottles.
However there is an environmental downside to reusing bottles: you have to clean them. This is not a simple cleaning process, as there are assholes who store things like paint thinner in bottles and redeposit them afterwards. Cigarette buds are quite common. You have to get everything out that someone could put into it (except for paint and other opaque stuff: the optical detection can see that) because there is no sure way to detect all those toxins (a gasschromatograph would be to expensive and a "electronic nose" isn't good enough yet) so you have to use a heavy cleaning agent to be sure your beer still tastes the same.
Those cleaning agents are very bad for the environment. A degradable bottle that you could compost would be better. (recycling and cleaning is still better for the environment as normal throwaway bottles)
-- all those sci-fi plot twists from cosmic ray induced bit-flips in charge-dependent memory?
Not just a sci-fi plot. Bits can be flipped due to cosmic rays.
Yeah they say they are not sure why the bit flipped. But this is starting to look ridiculously like a cosmic ray: in the collision zone of true cosmic particles and solar particle a bit flipped without good reason.
We, in NL, use DD/MM/YYYY.
Mainly different demographics.
No it isn't!
I have cats as food. They do not go to my toilet because that would be gross.
I think just one zero is a bit arbitrarily. But then again: How many zeros do you want to add? Enough to hold until the heat-death of the universe?
But we can celebrate Pi day AND Steak and Blowjob day (can't really move that one, as it's connected to Valentine's day)!
I know which one I prefer, but (as I read /.) you have a quite good guess which one I could celebrate properly.
USA, The land of the free (providing you have lots of money for expensive lawyers)
woooosh
I would buy a nice girl a ring. However, if she keeps nagging for such things she is not a nice girl. This seems to be a girl that has been spoiled as a kid (nagging is a clear indicator of lazy parenting) and as such not worth my time nor my money. Buying a girl a ring may be useful as a relationship improvement, buying a gild a ring to ask her to marry you is simply required.
If your underwear sees enough daylight to get anything charged, then something is wrong. Now sexy underwear on a beautiful girl can charge important parts of me, but the surface covered by such underwear is usually very low, so solar panels would not give much electricity.
Think commercial and manufacturing uses, Refridgeration, Lighting, Heat, Servers, Electric Rail.
These uses may also move to the on-time instead of being put off.
I believe GP's statement holds, albeit not because of batteries but of delayed usage.