Apple are a hardware company, and a software company, and a media distribution company. Their big business success was in finding a way for those three functions to compliment each other, working together for cross-promotion.
OSX could be a serious contender, if Apple wished it to be - all they'd have to do is modify it to run on ordinary PC hardware. If hackers can make hackintoshes, it'd be a piece of cake for Apple's engineers. But doing that would all but kill the sales of macs, macbooks, and their pro counterparts and turn Apple's public image into 'high end, high price, high quality' into 'Yet another software company,' potentially lessening the demand for their very profitable phone/tablet line. It'd be a huge risk for the company, and one I can't imagine them taking unless the situation were most desperate. It isn't desperate all right now - they are raking in the cash.
And risk getting caught when the AV company puts out an update altering their detection. Not just embarassing - it could compromise an ongoing investigation when the suspect learns their computer is being monitored. Or worse, from the perspective of the police, it could lead to their abuse of the technology in fishing expeditions may be exposed to the public and get someone fired.
Which is why some schools have moved to open-to-the-corridoor facilities - the only privacy is in the cubicles themselves. The toilets have traditionally been the one place in a school where neither cameras not teachers may venture, and thus the place to go for bullying, gossip and dealing drugs.
Power is is measured at the substation on a per-phase meter. Each house is served one phase. So the measure is for one-third of the houses in the area served by the substation. There is some random noise from temperature variation, but given enough time to average out the missing power will eventually raise an alarm. Not just because the company wants to stop power theft, but because they work with law enforcement who are very interested in finding properties sucking up crazy amounts of power - they may be growing pot.
Smart meters would make low-tech small-scale theft a bit easier though: No meter reader means it gets much easier to hide the needles you have jabbed into the incoming power lines. Just so long as you're careful not to take too much for too long.
The traditional method of stealing power, tapping cables, gets caught when the company notices the power going into the street is greater than the sum of meter readings. Simply hacking your meter to under-report consumption would give the same result.
But hacking others on the same circuit too... that could work. For ever KWH you knock off your bill, add 1/10th of a KWH to ten of your neighbors. But you'd have to keep it balanced in real time, which makes it trickier again, the savings aren't worh it. It's the type of fraud a person would carry out only to prove it can be done.
For those who can't wear contacts, wait - eventually, if it's a success, google or a competitor will offer one that allows the easy addition of appropriate lenses.
This is a simulation, events. The summary doesn't say what the events are, but probably more complicated than just testing a key.
Besides, brute-forcing a key wouldn't be best done on general-purpose or even GPU. An ASIC would be the fastest, and you can be confident such chips would be easily within the capability of any major and a lot of not-to-major governments. So you're looking at a chip that can do, as a back-of-the-envelope, a key every cycle and clocked at 1.2GHz - standard for a lot of systems, as a sort of performance-per-watt peak. Times 64 cores per chip, times eight chips per PCI-e card, times eight processor cards per 2U case, times 42/3=14 systems per rack (leave space for cooling and switch), that's 1.2 * 64 * 8 * 8 * 14 = 68812 GK/s per rack.
At most it's a pump-and-dump. 1. Invest in something (goods, shares, bitcoins) 2. Spread hype or outright lies to cause the price to rise (eg, claim the company you just bought stock in got a massive contract) 3. Sell at the inflated price, and do so quickly before people realise the misinformation.
"people don't like paying, even pennies, up front for something but are happy to hand over things worth far more (personal information, viewing time etc) after they have become users."
So what you need is some sort of time-limited mode? Let the user run the software for free for a time, a month or so, then disable some or all functionality until payment is made.
Risk. That's how finance works: It's largely risk management. Going into the mining business is a risk: You might spend tens of thousands of dollars on an ASIC mining setup, only to see the value of bitcoins collapse suddenly (random fluctuations, another exchange DDoS causing a loss of confidence, a major government declaring bitcoin transfers a form of tax evasion). Then you're left with a lot of very expensive yet useless hardware. Alternatively, you could sell the hardware immediately: You may make less money, but if the bitcoin market collapses someone else ends up ruined.
It's always possible to get the audio un-DRMed with almost no loss of quality by just hooking a recorder up to the speaker cables and doing some basic electronics fiddling.
Trying to interleve colored pixels would lead to horrible interference problems degrading image quality. I was thinking of temporal interleave, like how a DLP projector does it. You'd need to be able to generate and display holograms at 75fps though. The hypothetical 'holoprojector' surface basically is just a DLP chip, but crazily more precise and many times larger.
But how would you handle addressing all those pixels? You'd also need either a supercomputer-in-a-box to render the image, or a storage medium with the speed and capacity to playback a prerecorded hologram.
Assuming you want motion, that is. If you can just print fixed pixels small enough, you can print holograms. This approach limits you still to monochromatic images - you need changeable pixels if you want to do the R-G-B interleave to simulate color images.
Your server is in a rack at a datacenter somewhere. They are on a mobile. 2GB is nothing to you, but a lot to them. Or just double your evil: Hotlink the image from another site run by someone you don't like. A little javascript and you can have the people visiting your fake pro-creationism blog sapping the bandwidth from scientology.org.
Oh, did the calculation wrong. Not 1.8KM, but only 0.36KM. Which is still more than enough to easily dodge any piece of space junk. Even if the thrusters are off, I suspect you could get enough delta-V by having someone suit up and hammer-throw refuse out the airlock.
This is space. If you know even an hour in advance, and can manage a delta-V of even one-tenth of a meter per second, you can shift your position by 1.8KM. There's no friction, so a gentle nudge will carry you a long way. The important part is to know in advance - there are programs to track space junk, but spotting pebbles, screws and paint-flecks is a bit much for even the best radar.
I wonder if you could launch a giant tank of expanding foam, or a similar but more space-friendly material, that slowly decomposes. Cheap enough to orbit a swarm of foamballs. Small bits of space junk would get lodged inside or at least slowed down in the process or punching a hole. Then the foamball, having a huge size and very little mass, will be slowed by atmospheric drag and fall out of orbit after a few years. Any fragments that break off and get left behind will slowly decompose under the influence of ultraviolet radiation into dust particles too fine to pose any hazard.
That sounds like it could work. Slashdotters, shoot it down!
This could be abused. Create a website taylored to appeal only to a particular social or political group your dislike, and hide somewhere an image tag - display size 1px by 1px, but actually referencing a two-gigabyte jpeg. While your victims are on your site browsing whatever you put up there, it's draining their credit with a ridiculously huge background download.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure you can. Easy:
1. Block everything except port 80.
2. Redirect port 80 to local HTTP proxy.
3. Disable CONNECT command on proxy.
You can still fight your way through that with hacky encapsulating packets inside HTTP requests, but performance will suck.
Apple are a hardware company, and a software company, and a media distribution company. Their big business success was in finding a way for those three functions to compliment each other, working together for cross-promotion.
OSX could be a serious contender, if Apple wished it to be - all they'd have to do is modify it to run on ordinary PC hardware. If hackers can make hackintoshes, it'd be a piece of cake for Apple's engineers. But doing that would all but kill the sales of macs, macbooks, and their pro counterparts and turn Apple's public image into 'high end, high price, high quality' into 'Yet another software company,' potentially lessening the demand for their very profitable phone/tablet line. It'd be a huge risk for the company, and one I can't imagine them taking unless the situation were most desperate. It isn't desperate all right now - they are raking in the cash.
And risk getting caught when the AV company puts out an update altering their detection. Not just embarassing - it could compromise an ongoing investigation when the suspect learns their computer is being monitored. Or worse, from the perspective of the police, it could lead to their abuse of the technology in fishing expeditions may be exposed to the public and get someone fired.
Which is why some schools have moved to open-to-the-corridoor facilities - the only privacy is in the cubicles themselves. The toilets have traditionally been the one place in a school where neither cameras not teachers may venture, and thus the place to go for bullying, gossip and dealing drugs.
Power is is measured at the substation on a per-phase meter. Each house is served one phase. So the measure is for one-third of the houses in the area served by the substation. There is some random noise from temperature variation, but given enough time to average out the missing power will eventually raise an alarm. Not just because the company wants to stop power theft, but because they work with law enforcement who are very interested in finding properties sucking up crazy amounts of power - they may be growing pot.
Smart meters would make low-tech small-scale theft a bit easier though: No meter reader means it gets much easier to hide the needles you have jabbed into the incoming power lines. Just so long as you're careful not to take too much for too long.
The traditional method of stealing power, tapping cables, gets caught when the company notices the power going into the street is greater than the sum of meter readings. Simply hacking your meter to under-report consumption would give the same result.
But hacking others on the same circuit too... that could work. For ever KWH you knock off your bill, add 1/10th of a KWH to ten of your neighbors. But you'd have to keep it balanced in real time, which makes it trickier again, the savings aren't worh it. It's the type of fraud a person would carry out only to prove it can be done.
So much energy, yet it just tastes so good.
Lawnmower Man 2 already used the 'eye-phone.' That movie used it as the name for a compact VR interface headset.
Contacts.
For those who can't wear contacts, wait - eventually, if it's a success, google or a competitor will offer one that allows the easy addition of appropriate lenses.
This is a simulation, events. The summary doesn't say what the events are, but probably more complicated than just testing a key.
Besides, brute-forcing a key wouldn't be best done on general-purpose or even GPU. An ASIC would be the fastest, and you can be confident such chips would be easily within the capability of any major and a lot of not-to-major governments. So you're looking at a chip that can do, as a back-of-the-envelope, a key every cycle and clocked at 1.2GHz - standard for a lot of systems, as a sort of performance-per-watt peak. Times 64 cores per chip, times eight chips per PCI-e card, times eight processor cards per 2U case, times 42/3=14 systems per rack (leave space for cooling and switch), that's 1.2 * 64 * 8 * 8 * 14 = 68812 GK/s per rack.
Get your schemes right. This is no Ponzi scheme.
At most it's a pump-and-dump.
1. Invest in something (goods, shares, bitcoins)
2. Spread hype or outright lies to cause the price to rise (eg, claim the company you just bought stock in got a massive contract)
3. Sell at the inflated price, and do so quickly before people realise the misinformation.
"people don't like paying, even pennies, up front for something but are happy to hand over things worth far more (personal information, viewing time etc) after they have become users."
So what you need is some sort of time-limited mode? Let the user run the software for free for a time, a month or so, then disable some or all functionality until payment is made.
Back in a moment, the nineties are calling.
Risk. That's how finance works: It's largely risk management. Going into the mining business is a risk: You might spend tens of thousands of dollars on an ASIC mining setup, only to see the value of bitcoins collapse suddenly (random fluctuations, another exchange DDoS causing a loss of confidence, a major government declaring bitcoin transfers a form of tax evasion). Then you're left with a lot of very expensive yet useless hardware. Alternatively, you could sell the hardware immediately: You may make less money, but if the bitcoin market collapses someone else ends up ruined.
Because if you're using it professionally in the office, it isn't your bill.
It's always possible to get the audio un-DRMed with almost no loss of quality by just hooking a recorder up to the speaker cables and doing some basic electronics fiddling.
Video is much harder though.
Trying to interleve colored pixels would lead to horrible interference problems degrading image quality. I was thinking of temporal interleave, like how a DLP projector does it. You'd need to be able to generate and display holograms at 75fps though. The hypothetical 'holoprojector' surface basically is just a DLP chip, but crazily more precise and many times larger.
But how would you handle addressing all those pixels? You'd also need either a supercomputer-in-a-box to render the image, or a storage medium with the speed and capacity to playback a prerecorded hologram.
Assuming you want motion, that is. If you can just print fixed pixels small enough, you can print holograms. This approach limits you still to monochromatic images - you need changeable pixels if you want to do the R-G-B interleave to simulate color images.
Can they do that? The music was actually from a Disney film, but sped up.
Your server is in a rack at a datacenter somewhere. They are on a mobile. 2GB is nothing to you, but a lot to them. Or just double your evil: Hotlink the image from another site run by someone you don't like. A little javascript and you can have the people visiting your fake pro-creationism blog sapping the bandwidth from scientology.org.
Oh, did the calculation wrong. Not 1.8KM, but only 0.36KM. Which is still more than enough to easily dodge any piece of space junk. Even if the thrusters are off, I suspect you could get enough delta-V by having someone suit up and hammer-throw refuse out the airlock.
This is space. If you know even an hour in advance, and can manage a delta-V of even one-tenth of a meter per second, you can shift your position by 1.8KM. There's no friction, so a gentle nudge will carry you a long way. The important part is to know in advance - there are programs to track space junk, but spotting pebbles, screws and paint-flecks is a bit much for even the best radar.
I wonder if you could launch a giant tank of expanding foam, or a similar but more space-friendly material, that slowly decomposes. Cheap enough to orbit a swarm of foamballs. Small bits of space junk would get lodged inside or at least slowed down in the process or punching a hole. Then the foamball, having a huge size and very little mass, will be slowed by atmospheric drag and fall out of orbit after a few years. Any fragments that break off and get left behind will slowly decompose under the influence of ultraviolet radiation into dust particles too fine to pose any hazard.
That sounds like it could work. Slashdotters, shoot it down!
This could be abused. Create a website taylored to appeal only to a particular social or political group your dislike, and hide somewhere an image tag - display size 1px by 1px, but actually referencing a two-gigabyte jpeg. While your victims are on your site browsing whatever you put up there, it's draining their credit with a ridiculously huge background download.
If you miss dancing hamsters, you need to improve your aim.