If the cable box takes the cable connection in, and then broadcasts the internet connection over WiFi, how can a user put a firewall before the WiFi Access Point? (NOTE: I'm still on a dial-up connection, so this is based on what I've read -- not on what I've done.)
AFAIK, currently, a user's cable connection feeds into a cable modem which which feeds into a 10Base-T connection which could feed into a firewall which provides a "cleaned" connection to a hub / switch / router / WiFi / whatever.
Under the proposed arrangement with the built-in WiFi, it seems to me that each connected "device" would need its own firewall capability, with all the attendant issues in keeping them synchronized and up-to-date.
So I ask: How could a user insert a firewall into their proposed system?
-- The same thing, in two different places, soon isn't.
This company was mentioned on/. a while ago; I don't have THAT link, but here's a link to their home page at: Midcoast Internet Solutions (MIS). For more details, check out their about page which provides info on their dialup, ISDN. DSL, and wireless solutions.
MIS provides high-speed wireless internet access along the mid coast of Maine (USA). The up-front fee is kind of stiff, ($795; but there is a $300 discount with a one year commitment) but that gets you service at $50/month at speeds up to 20 times 56K dialup access. (Taken from their High Speed Wireless Internet Access page.
DISCLAIMER: I've not personally used this service, nor do I have any financial interest. But I did grow up in Maine and the thought of high-speed internet access in an area of breathtaking scenery (and much lower home prices than the Boston area where I am now) is VERY tempting.
With video games so popular these days, imagine a new genre: audio games!
Take today's LAN party for example: gamers haul around their high-powered PCs with the latest high-powered video card and bulky / hefty monitor. Given the exponentially lower bandwidth demands of audio versus video, it would be possible to constuct an audio game player with much less demanding equipment:
Audio game controller
Headphones
Game controller
The future? Imagine all this built into a cell phone! Just download the game from their cell network. Additional ideas come to mind with the addition of bluetooth and/or 3G networks.
The result? People might actually look forward to long and boring business meetings! =)
How would I know when I have been defamed (or slandered, libeled, etc.)?
Do I have to Google myself? I've lived a full life, so far. Attended college. Worked at a number of high-tech companies. Participated in several civic organizations. Traveled in Europe. Though I've tried not to, I'm sure I've ticked some people off along the way.
Now let's imagine that one of my former acquaintences gets a computer, creates a personal web page, and still holding a grudge, defames me on their web site.
My name is relatively uncommon, yet Google found well over 600 pages with my name on it (I didn't even know I'd been to Antarctica! =)... and that's for just one form of my name (First name, Last Name); I'm sure there'd be more if I searched for other variants (e.g. "Marty" instead of "Martin", include middle name, common misspellings of my last name, etc.) I would need to examine every one of these pages to see if any defamatory material had been published.
How often would I need to repeat this task? Monthly?
What if it were not indexed by Google, but WAS indexed by AltaVista?
How many different search engines must I search to make sure I didn't miss anything?
What if my name were "John Smith"? (Google reports about 336,000 matches!)
What if the attack were in a language in which I am not fluent? (e.g.: Spanish, Russian, or Hebrew.)
What if the attack appeared on Usenet instead of the world wide web?
What if the attack were presented as a GIF image whose "contents" were text."
Consider, too, what happens if my career path changes so that I came to have a highly-visibile role as, say, a CEO, Senator, recognized industry expert, or talk-show host? Far more references to my name that I'd have to search for defamation. Ditto if I were a witness to a gruesome crime or accident.
In the past, publication was difficult and required relatively large amounts of money (for the printing press, book binding machine, etc.) and specialized expertise (e.g. typesetting). That is no longer the case. The first liberating step was desktop publishing; now there's the World Wide Web. What will another 10 or 20 years bring? Consider a groundswell of interest in weblogs facilitated by text-to-speech web publishing using a cell phone for input.
IMHO, I think the court ruled as best they could in light of the circumstances of this particular case, but I can't help but think there's a far larger problem here that needs to be adressed.
What will probably happen is that people will initially have to be trained to use these machines. "Instead of using the term 'kicks ass' (which will translate as abusing a donkey...), use the term 'defeat'.
But given soldiers' interests, I suspect one of the early questions would be something along the lines of:
I've never heard of computers being a significant reservoir of any type of disease causing agent, but any microbiologists out there feel free to enlighten me.
IANAM (I am not a micrbiologist) but, when I was in college we had an outbreak of pink eye (conjunctivitis). No surprise, really. Take a bunch of students typing well into the wee hours of the morning. Tired, they would rub their eyes. One student with pink eye would get it started, and the late night students would propagate it across the rest of the keyboards over time. The school instituted a major push to disinfect the keyboards several times each day. Problem solved!
Whenever I start a new job and am using a company-supplied PC, I make it a point to spray the keyboard(s) for about 15-30 seconds with Lysol disinfectant. I give it another dose every couple of months or so. Maybe it's like the fictitious substance which keeps purple elephants at bay, but I've never come down with pink eye, and have caught fewer colds than my coworkers, so maybe there is something to it.
Not quite sure, but if the molecule stays in the kinked or relaxed state absent all light, could they not mount little mirrors on top that would swivel and then use this tech as a massive, persistent, extremely fast, storage mechanism? Sort of like a re-writeable CD but in solid state?
I'll grant you that's an interesting concept. it would be interesting to see what comes of further research! Unfortunately, given the current state of the art, they currently have some trouble with the persistent part:
Gaub acknowledged, however, that his molecular device is not ready for the marketplace. The chief impediment is that the molecule breaks after the experiment runs for a day.
That leads me to wonder what kind of duty cycle they were putting this through. Even if it would not hold up in applications such as RAM, maybe it would be okay for something like flash memory? Also, although they have been able to turn it on/off with different frequencies of light, are those the only stimuli that could cause it to toggle? What about gamma rays and other forms of background radiation?
I have some concerns about addressability, too. It's one thing to have millions of these that can all be turned on or off together with a broad beam of light... but how to do you address a single one of these? That's a single molecule that activates the spring! I'm not saying it's impossible, only that it's a non-trivial task to advance this to the point where its density would rival that of currently available DRAM chips!
There's much more detail on the history, design, and development of the device in this EE times article. I was especially struck by how they persevered. They started on this in 1990 and things did not go entirely smoothly:
"There were 50 to 75 major hurdles from the time we started," Vincent Chow said. "The biocompatibility side represented probably 40 percent of the issues. The other 60 percent were really in the electrical performance of our structures. That's because the final stimulation is an ionic stimulation. We're basically trying to interface a solar structure so that the microcurrents produced by the solar cell have a very high efficiency or functionality factor to stimulate the cells that are touching these particular areas."
This version of the device contains about 3500 light detecting cells. If this version works out okay, they are planning to develop a much larger version of the chip.
If the ASR chip is successful in restoring some degree of vision, Optobionics will make modifications to a final and significantly larger chip design. Some possible ideas, said Alan Chow, include placing openings in the chip to allow nourishment to flow between the outer and inner retina; and changing the direction of the electrical stimulation on an ongoing basis, a technique referred to as biphasic stimulation.
I was wondering how in the world it was powered. Come to find out, it's just a bunch of tiny solar cells according to this article at How Stuff Works. The light coming into the eye is focused on the retina. Solar cells convert light to electricity. Electricity stimulates optic nerves. Voila --Sight!
From the article: The device uses sensitive microphones to pick up codes embedded in television, radio and even streaming Internet broadcasts -- and it includes a motion detector to verify someone is actually wearing it.
Ummm, not necessarily. Consider the following scenario:
Record your favorite shows on your TiVo.
Before heading out to run some errands:
Initiate playback of these shows.
Move PPM from your belt to your dog's collar.
Lock dog in room with TV.
Run errands.
Move PPM back to your belt.
Watch ratings on favorite shows skyrocket!
Of course, in this case, the PPM stands for: Personal Pet Meter!
Of course, there's always directly hacking the PPM itself, but this is arguably more fun knowing that the ratings have gone to the dogs. =)
If you still want to do some hacking, then take advantage of the Record-And-Send feature of a RePlay PVR; this requires help from someone whose shows are NOT encoded for PPM detection.
Have your buddy send you a copy of a show.
Compare your recorded copy against his.
Reverse engineer their encoding scheme.
Determine encoding for favorite shows.
Program computer to output favorite shows' encodings through your sound card and speakers.
Attach PPM to dog's collar.
Enjoy boosted ratings.
For those who lack pets, you could always just continue to wear the PPM, but while the hacked encodings are playing, watch or listen to whatever you want -- while wearing headphones.
From the article: "It's one thing to see a rat running around like this, people don't get too emotional about that, but as soon as you get into dogs or work animals, people start getting real excited," he said.
I can see it now. Farmers having livestock (cows, horses, etc.) implanted with these devices so all they have to do is throw a switch and they are automatically commanded to come back to the barn for feeding / milking / slaughter / whatever. Add a GPS receiver, a livestock_id for each animal, and some software.
Or, use this to make sure that Man's Best Friend stays within the yard or comes back to you when out for a run at the park How about adding a small microphone and a clock so Spot is commanded to Not Bark At Night so you (and the neighbors!) can get some sleep?
I'm certain there are some people who would think these are Great Ideas ®
The immediate downside I see is there is no feedback loop. What if the AUC (Animal Under Control) breaks a leg, gets a deep cut, is threatened by a predator, or is otherwise incapacitated? The controller (human or automated) is unaware of this and keeps sending commands to "GO THIS WAY!!!" Shudder. I sure hope society works out the ethical considerations well before they overcome the technical limitations! Just because we can doesn't mean we should!
Sure, the expense is prohibitive, now. But there are some people for whom the expense is no object. The price of computers and other electronics have plummeted over the years. Power consumption requirements have dropped dramatically, too. I can well imagine that in 10 or so years, it would be possible to do this cheaply and easily.
So, if some day I wake up in a bathtub full of ice with a note beside me... instead of it saying my kidneys have been removed it'll say a remote control has been implanted in my brain. Let the urban legends begin! =)
I've got PC2100 ECC in my server at home, and I've turned ECC checking off in the BIOS. What I can't fathom is this: In the past several months I've gotten a couple of parity errors in my memory. However, instead of warning me in some way and allowing me to gracefully shut down, the error raises a non-maskable interrupt which halts the machine in its tracks, giving me a Blue Screen of Death and requiring a hard reset.
If you turned off ECC, then when there's a single bit error, the parity can detect it, but the ECC is not there to correct it -- and your computer raises an interrupt to flag it. MicroSoft takes that to be a Very Bad Thing and throws up a BSOD. Turn on the ECC and you'll be protected from single bit errors and keep on running. If you're interested, what follows is a brief summary of parity and ECC from my long-ago experience and memory (which does NOT have ECC; so if anything I've written is wrong, I'd apprecate corrections from those with more recent experiece/knowledge!)
But. ECC as implemented on PCs can't fix everything. It was years and years ago, but I once had to write some ECC routines to validate programs read into a diagnostic computer for VAXes and DEC-10s. Like in most things, there's a tradeoff between price, speed, and reliability.
First off, memory with no parity. (For the sake of example, I'll refer to storage units as bytes, but this could just as easily be applied to larger units of storage; e.g. 16 or 32 bit words.) A byte is stored simply as 8 bits. If there is an error writing or reading a bit from memory, there's no indication that anything is wrong. Your programs just keep running with bad values which, if in an instruction, can rapidly cause a crash. If the error is in data, someone's paycheck may be way off. Very Not Good.
Next, let's consider memory with parity. Parity comes in two forms: even parity and odd parity. For the sake of example, say we have "even parity". So, for a byte that contains an odd number of one bits, the parity bit would be set to one. If the byte contains an even number of one bits, then the parity bit would be set to zero. When a byte is read from memory, the parity is computed again and compared against the parity that was written when the byte was originally stored in memory. If the stored parity matches the calculated parity, all is well. If there is a discrepancy, it would raise an interrupt and you get the BSOD. But what happens if there are TWO bits that are in error? They'd cancel out each other in the parity calculation and it would appear things are okay. No BSOD, but things are not right.
Finally, let's look at memory with ECC Although there are various levels of ECC, generally what is implemented in PCs fits the mold of "single error correction, double error detection". So, if there is a single bit error in a memory access, the ECC can detect and fix it. This is done by storing even more bits in addition to the byte to be stored. These bits are computed in such a way that if there is a single bit error, the use of the extra bits can identify and fix> the bit that is in error. If there are two bits that are wrong (which would go unnoticed in the parity scheme) the ECC bits can be used to identify that there are two bits in error.
For the truly paranoid, or where uptime is absolutely mandatory, it's possible to construct ECCs such that any bit errors could be detected and corrected. But, the tradeoff is that it would take a lot more bits and it would take more time to perform these calculations -- on every single memory access. And, of course, it would cost a lot more to have all those extra bits around as well as the circuitry to perform the ECC calculations.
So, if a BSOD is just an incovenience for you, ignore the ECC. You'll get better performance at a lower cost for the memory. If you're developing accounting programs or some medical application, then the downtime from a BSOD would be a Majorly Bad Event. ECC would protect you from single bit errors and your application would keep running; definitely a Very Good Thing.
In short, unless you're doing something completely out of the ordinary for a home user, just stick with the usual parity-backed memory. Hope this helps!
Given the increasing globalization of the internet, it just hit me that all the EULAs and privacy policies I've seen are written in English. (Granted, I don't do much surfing on non-English pages.) This seems such an obvious loophole, but what if the EULA were written in a different language?
I'd assume there's a requirement that these agreements must be readable by the user... but some I've seen could as well have been written in a different language.
I wonder how long I'll need to wait for somebody to come out with an agreement written in one of these languages: Hacker, Bork! Bork! Bork!, Elmer Fudd, or Klingon;^)
This may be a usable tool in a simple, single-monitor configuration. What happens when a user has multiple PCs?
For example, my ideal work environment is one where I've got (at least) 3 PCs; each having its own monitor. The left-most system is where I do my coding and debugging. The middle system is where I run the application exactly as if I were a user (i.e. QA). The right-most system is where I run analysis tools on the output, log files, etc. (It may seem extravagent, but I've never seen a DESK with a 17-inch diagonal -- more/bigger monitors give me a larger "desk" on which to work.)
How in the world could I use this head-tracking mouse on such a setup? From what I read in the article the head-tracking system can become confused when there are other shiny things in its field of view (e.g. silver rings; I'd hate to imagine what dangling earrings would do!).
I'd need a head-tracking receiver for each PC and monitor, and I've only got one head;^) So, as I'm working away on the middle PC, these receivers on the other PCs are going to be reading my head motions and mousing all over the place! Okay, so I'd need to use the keyboard to actually "click" on anything, so that's not a problem, right?
Wrong! With all the tool-tips, ONMOUSEOVER, ONMOUSEOUT, etc. that we've got these days, I can easily imagine this scenario:
Working on one PC, I intentionally turn my head to move the "mouse" to, say, a hyperlink.
The other PCs are attentively watching my motions and move their mouse cursors, too.
As the other cursors are moving around, one moves its cursor over a tool bar and its tool-tip flashes on the screen.
So, I look over to see what happened.
The PCs see that I moved my head, so they move their cursors to follow my head movement, too, which in turn makes other tool-tips flash.
I turn my head to see what happened over there.
Lather, rinse, repeat.
By the end of the day, I'm going to have one very sore neck, a splitting headache, and accomplished nothing more than making a lot of things flash before my eyes. Sounds like all the benefits of a hangover with out the pleasure of getting drunk.:(
On the other hand, should these become popular, just think of all the fun you could have with your co-workers on April Fool's Day!
When something is sold as "advertising" but is nothing less than an attempt to trick or confuse a person into purchasing, downloading or installing your software, that's misrepresentation and/or fraud. Regardless of any 2pt fine-print at the bottom, or "user agreement" on the page. Hard to stop them, though.
I think you're on the right track there. Granted, IANAL, so I don't know the legal details of this. From my experience, what is needed is a sense of honesty in those who are planning, designing, and coding this stuff. Here's a definition that I've found to work really well for me:
Honesty: The absence of the intention to deceive.
There are some developers, somewhere, who actually are writing this code. Devising and implementing techniques that appear to be one thing but are actually something else. From the referenced article:
For example, when visiting a site a person may receive a pop-up box that appears as a security warning with the message: "Do you accept this download?" If the consumer clicks "Yes," an application is automatically installed.
It sure looks to me that there is an intention to deceive! If these were being honest, the prompt would be more along the lines of:
"Do you want to download a program whose sole purpose is to force you to view advertisements?"
I wonder how many users would click on "Yes" for that?
Unfortunately, there are people who are willing to follow this path. Not just advertising agencies lacking any moral scruples, either. What about struggling web sites that are just trying to meet the payroll for their employees after discovering they could not make a profit under their failed business plan? There's a desire to do what's right in getting paychecks to people who have families to support and bills to pay, and that pressure can lead people to step over the line of what they otherwise might do. It seems to me that as these practices becomes more widespread, there's less of an onus against them, leading to even even greater adoption of these techniques, which leads to even wider use, greater adoption,... lather, rinse, repeat.
Where's the sense of ethics and professionalism here? I offer, as food for thought, the ACM(*) Code of Ethics. NOTE: I am not suggesting everyone should mind heedlessly to these. What I have found in my own experience, though, is that reading through these has given me insights and perspectives on things that I otherwise would not have even considered.
As long as someone can take some programming classes, gain some technical expertise, and hire out as a programmer... well I believe there's more to it than just writing code. Though I hope otherwise, I have a feeling that it is going to take a lot more of these "products" getting a public black eye before there is a groundswell of support for anything different -- things are likely to get worse until they get better. If the $billions lost on Code Red and other worms and viruses has not been enough, just what WILL it take for things to change?
(*)"The ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) is the world's oldest and largest educational and scientific computing society. Since 1947 ACM has provided a vital forum for the exchange of information, ideas, and discoveries."
(Blargh, it's 0430 and I made one "little" change after previewing my post. Here it is with the bold tag closed; sorry for the "yelling.")
He since quit the organization, so we (the developers) can't get to him to find out where he got this code from.
Okay, so you've tried to search for the code, and came up empty... Did he die? If not, then I'd suggest you try to search for him! There's not a lot of info in your post, so some of these may not be appropriate -- don't know if he's still in the same city, state, or country, for that matter.
Call and/or write him at home (get his phone number and address from HR - Human Resources),
Check with the post office for a forwarding address,
Search google for his resume (get latest resume from HR; look for name and key words such as the name of your company) use contact info on it,
Use one of the on-line "Find Anyone" tools;
Hire a Private Investigator (PI),
That should be enough to get you started; I'm sure if you brainstorm you can come up with some other sources and/or techniques, too.
He since quit the organization, so we (the developers) can't get to him to find out where he got this code from.
Okay, so you've tried to search for the code,/b>, and came up empty... Did he die? If not, then I'd suggest you try to search for him! There's not a lot of info in your post, so some of these may not be appropriate -- don't know if he's still in the same city, state, or country, for that matter.
Call and/or write him at home (get his phone number and address from HR - Human Resources),
Check with the post office for a forwarding address,
Search google for his resume (get latest resume from HR; look for name and key words such as the name of your company) use contact info on it,
Use one of the on-line "Find Anyone" tools;
Hire a Private Investigator (PI),
That should be enough to get you started; I'm sure if you brainstorm you can come up with some other sources and/or techniques, too.
The best keyboard I have EVER used was on an IBM PS/2 Model P70. (That was a portable PS/2 with an orange-colored gas plasma display. The box had a 386 running at 20 MHz and weighed about 20 pounds!)
The keyboard had an extremely light feel to it, with tactile feedback; it took almost no effort to type and it NEVER, EVER missed a key I typed on it. I could absolutely fly on that keyboard and at the end of the day I had no fatigue at all!
I've been looking over the past several years for a keyboard like it and have had absolutely NO luck. If any/.'ers out there remember this wondeful keyboard, and can suggest a comparable one, I'd be forever grateful!
I have developed a set of debugging techniques over the years that seems to work in most every situation. It's a matter of looking at a problem from the proper level of abstraction and using the tools I already know how to use:
How do you find a needle in a haystack?
Look for a very long time (exhaustive search).
Improve the odds; make the haystack smaller (process of elimination)
Improve the odds; make the needle bigger (adding print statements to code)
Use a magnet! (think outside the box)
With all seriousness, pick up a good compass at a sporting goods store and do a survey of your office. Walk around the room and see if there are any deflections. Whether it's an electric current (which induces a magnet field) or an actual magnet in near proximity to the magnet, a good compass should point you in the right direction (pun intended!)
Things I have experienced in the past which affected my monitors, in no particular order:
Cheap speakers placed near monitor (speakers have magnets). Ditto for headphones!!
Small desk fan, even though 3 FEET away, had such a dirty magnetic field that it interfered with my monitor!
Power cable from the PC and/or monitor running alongside the video cable induced flicker (60 Hz) into the video signal; when I separated the power cables from the video cables, the problem diminished greatly.
Electrical cables (wires) IN THE WALL! It makes sense to set up the computer and monitor near an electrical outlet. One time, the electrical outlet into which my monitor was plugged was located directly below the back of my monitor. The power cable feeding that monitor was fed across a suspended ceiling and dropped down the wall to the outlet... immediately behind the yoke of my monitor! I moved the monitor 12 inches to the side and the problem disappeared.
If the monitor's video cable is replacable, try using a video cable with a choke coil on it.
Florescent lights' refresh rate (60 Hz) beating with the refresh rate of my monitor. I unscrewed the bulbs in the overhead florescent light fixtures and saw the problem go away.
One other thing to try is to bring the PC, monitor, and all peripherals home and see if the problem exists there, too. If so, then it's likely there's something flakey about your equipment. If they are okay, then it would indicate there's some environmental factors at your office.
Good luck! And please fill us in on what you find!
I'm thinking of what happens when the recipient of the e-mail summons has a spam filter in place which flags it as being spam? I could well imagine a case where a summons would list explicit samples of the material for which the recipient is charged, and these samples could trigger the user's and/or ISPs spam filter. Consider the bold text in this example.
You are hereby summoned to appear (insert legalese here) because you have been accused of engaging in a scheme which promises "clients" could make money fast and/or engage in on-line gambling in conflict with the laws of the United States of America.
The court could truthfully state the summons was sent. The "recipient" could truthfully claim s/he never received it. I'm NOT claiming this would be a valid way to claim non-receipt of the summons; only that this is an entirely possible scenario.
Worse, still, is someone attempting an [im]practical joke on an unsuspecting user while they are away from their computer -- set up private spam filters in their e-mail program to delete e-mail containing: ("Federal" OR "State") AND "court".
With April 1st approaching, I suspect this has given a number of people some interesting ideas for April Fool's Jokes.;^)
Though I have no first-hand experience in zero-G (man, don't I wish!), I would expect it would be difficult to play hacky sack there. Then again, It was hard for me to learn how to play hacky sack in normal gravity.;^)
But, that was not the point. The article contended that gravity may be hard-coded into the brain. My concern is that the experiment they used does not clearly test that hypothosis. This could simply be a learned response, that happened to have been learned under the influence of gravity.
The point is to have people learn a skill which they had never done before, some under the influence of gravity, and others in zero-G. I just used hacky sack as an example that did not require the individuals to UNLEARN something they already had gained some measure of expertise while in earth gravity. Feel free to use some other coordination challenging task that could involve gravity. Hacky sack involves hand-to-FOOT coordination which I discovered was much more difficult than I thought it would be. Not because it is that difficult, but because I was that inexperienced.
So, whether or not it's hacky sack, pick some coordination activity other than one in which the participants are already well-versed. Use the same instrumentation as was used in the article's experiment to monitor muscles, timing, feedback, and the like. Then, compare the results between the zero-G participants and the earth-bound participants. If the brain were really wired for gravity, then I would expect there would be clearly perceptible differences in the abilities, and the learning curves, of the two groups.
It's one thing to try and do something WITHOUT gravity, that I had originally learned how to do WITH gravity. That's what this experiment was attempting to do.
I'd be more interested in how well they did learning, for example, to play hacky sack (passing a small, bean-filled leather bag using only your feet). if they had no prior experience with the game, I'd be interested in seeing how well they did, learning it in zero-G; compared to others learning how to do it with normal gravity. That would be a more valid experiment in my book.
about a year ago, the Internet in my state near collapsed. It was all the problem of a very large mailing list managed by one of the major telecom companies of our state, aimed to thousands of lawyers.
If the internet in your state nearly collapsed, what's to keep this from being applied, maliciously, on a wider scale across a nation or the world?
Idea #1: Several e-mail worms exploited sending mail to all addresses in users' address books. The impact was rather dramatic. What if the e-mails were ALSO sent to mailing lists instead of just individual e-mail accounts?
Idea #2:Could a malicious user subscribe to a number of mailing lists, using different e-mail accounts, and then auto-forward all the accounts to each other? Maybe with a few auto-responders in the bunch? (Not sure of the specifics, here, but the idea is to get an e-mail that comes in, to automatically go back out to at least one, if not several, other accounts and/or mailing lists.)
Up until the time that the accounts are cross-forwarded, everything looks normal. Could even sign up these accounts with known spammers to get a good-sized stream of e-mail flowing.
At some point, just cross-forward / auto-respond / etc. the accounts and wait for the first e-mail to a mailing list to get the ball rolling. If enough lists are signed up, and accounts cross-forwarded... well, by the time it's figured out, there'd be so many people replying to the messages that the impact could be pretty massive.
Idea #3:Opt-in many large mailing lists to many known spammers.
These seem like obvious ideas to me, so I'm wondering if I'm missing something obvious? What's to kep these from happening?
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If the cable box takes the cable connection in, and then broadcasts the internet connection over WiFi, how can a user put a firewall before the WiFi Access Point? (NOTE: I'm still on a dial-up connection, so this is based on what I've read -- not on what I've done.)
AFAIK, currently, a user's cable connection feeds into a cable modem which which feeds into a 10Base-T connection which could feed into a firewall which provides a "cleaned" connection to a hub / switch / router / WiFi / whatever.
Under the proposed arrangement with the built-in WiFi, it seems to me that each connected "device" would need its own firewall capability, with all the attendant issues in keeping them synchronized and up-to-date.
So I ask: How could a user insert a firewall into their proposed system?
--
The same thing, in two different places, soon isn't.
This company was mentioned on /. a while ago; I don't have THAT link, but here's a link to their home page at: Midcoast Internet Solutions (MIS). For more details, check out their about page which provides info on their dialup, ISDN. DSL, and wireless solutions.
MIS provides high-speed wireless internet access along the mid coast of Maine (USA). The up-front fee is kind of stiff, ($795; but there is a $300 discount with a one year commitment) but that gets you service at $50/month at speeds up to 20 times 56K dialup access. (Taken from their High Speed Wireless Internet Access page.
DISCLAIMER: I've not personally used this service, nor do I have any financial interest. But I did grow up in Maine and the thought of high-speed internet access in an area of breathtaking scenery (and much lower home prices than the Boston area where I am now) is VERY tempting.
With video games so popular these days, imagine a new genre: audio games!
Take today's LAN party for example: gamers haul around their high-powered PCs with the latest high-powered video card and bulky / hefty monitor. Given the exponentially lower bandwidth demands of audio versus video, it would be possible to constuct an audio game player with much less demanding equipment:
The future? Imagine all this built into a cell phone! Just download the game from their cell network. Additional ideas come to mind with the addition of bluetooth and/or 3G networks.
The result? People might actually look forward to long and boring business meetings! =)
That, and some REALLY distracted car drivers. =(
Here are the Full Specifications as well as a link to the official 7650 page at Nokia.
How would I know when I have been defamed (or slandered, libeled, etc.)?
Do I have to Google myself?
I've lived a full life, so far. Attended college. Worked at a number of high-tech companies. Participated in several civic organizations. Traveled in Europe. Though I've tried not to, I'm sure I've ticked some people off along the way.
Now let's imagine that one of my former acquaintences gets a computer, creates a personal web page, and still holding a grudge, defames me on their web site.
My name is relatively uncommon, yet Google found well over 600 pages with my name on it (I didn't even know I'd been to Antarctica! =)... and that's for just one form of my name (First name, Last Name); I'm sure there'd be more if I searched for other variants (e.g. "Marty" instead of "Martin", include middle name, common misspellings of my last name, etc.) I would need to examine every one of these pages to see if any defamatory material had been published.
Consider, too, what happens if my career path changes so that I came to have a highly-visibile role as, say, a CEO, Senator, recognized industry expert, or talk-show host? Far more references to my name that I'd have to search for defamation. Ditto if I were a witness to a gruesome crime or accident.
In the past, publication was difficult and required relatively large amounts of money (for the printing press, book binding machine, etc.) and specialized expertise (e.g. typesetting). That is no longer the case. The first liberating step was desktop publishing; now there's the World Wide Web. What will another 10 or 20 years bring? Consider a groundswell of interest in weblogs facilitated by text-to-speech web publishing using a cell phone for input.
IMHO, I think the court ruled as best they could in light of the circumstances of this particular case, but I can't help but think there's a far larger problem here that needs to be adressed.
But given soldiers' interests, I suspect one of the early questions would be something along the lines of:
GI says: Can someone set us up with a Babe?
Translator says: Someone set us up the bomb! =)
IANAM (I am not a micrbiologist) but, when I was in college we had an outbreak of pink eye (conjunctivitis). No surprise, really. Take a bunch of students typing well into the wee hours of the morning. Tired, they would rub their eyes. One student with pink eye would get it started, and the late night students would propagate it across the rest of the keyboards over time. The school instituted a major push to disinfect the keyboards several times each day. Problem solved!
Whenever I start a new job and am using a company-supplied PC, I make it a point to spray the keyboard(s) for about 15-30 seconds with Lysol disinfectant. I give it another dose every couple of months or so. Maybe it's like the fictitious substance which keeps purple elephants at bay, but I've never come down with pink eye, and have caught fewer colds than my coworkers, so maybe there is something to it.
Once charmed by top-down programming, bottom-up programming seems strange.
I'll grant you that's an interesting concept. it would be interesting to see what comes of further research! Unfortunately, given the current state of the art, they currently have some trouble with the persistent part:
That leads me to wonder what kind of duty cycle they were putting this through. Even if it would not hold up in applications such as RAM, maybe it would be okay for something like flash memory? Also, although they have been able to turn it on/off with different frequencies of light, are those the only stimuli that could cause it to toggle? What about gamma rays and other forms of background radiation?
I have some concerns about addressability, too. It's one thing to have millions of these that can all be turned on or off together with a broad beam of light... but how to do you address a single one of these? That's a single molecule that activates the spring! I'm not saying it's impossible, only that it's a non-trivial task to advance this to the point where its density would rival that of currently available DRAM chips!
There's much more detail on the history, design, and development of the device in this EE times article. I was especially struck by how they persevered. They started on this in 1990 and things did not go entirely smoothly:
This version of the device contains about 3500 light detecting cells. If this version works out okay, they are planning to develop a much larger version of the chip.
I was wondering how in the world it was powered. Come to find out, it's just a bunch of tiny solar cells according to
this article at How Stuff Works.
The light coming into the eye is focused on the retina. Solar cells convert light to electricity. Electricity stimulates optic nerves. Voila --Sight!
Ummm, not necessarily. Consider the following scenario:
Of course, in this case, the PPM stands for: Personal Pet Meter!
Of course, there's always directly hacking the PPM itself, but this is arguably more fun knowing that the ratings have gone to the dogs. =)
If you still want to do some hacking, then take advantage of the Record-And-Send feature of a RePlay PVR; this requires help from someone whose shows are NOT encoded for PPM detection.
For those who lack pets, you could always just continue to wear the PPM, but while the hacked encodings are playing, watch or listen to whatever you want -- while wearing headphones.
I can see it now. Farmers having livestock (cows, horses, etc.) implanted with these devices so all they have to do is throw a switch and they
are automatically commanded to come back to the barn for feeding / milking / slaughter / whatever. Add a GPS receiver, a livestock_id for each animal, and some software.
Or, use this to make sure that Man's Best Friend stays within the yard or comes back to you when out for a run at the park How about adding a small microphone and a clock so Spot is commanded to Not Bark At Night so you (and the neighbors!) can get some sleep?
I'm certain there are some people who would think these are Great Ideas ®
The immediate downside I see is there is no feedback loop. What if the AUC (Animal Under Control) breaks a leg, gets a deep cut, is threatened by a predator, or is otherwise incapacitated? The controller (human or automated) is unaware of this and keeps sending commands to "GO THIS WAY!!!" Shudder. I sure hope society works out the ethical considerations well before they overcome the technical limitations! Just because we can doesn't mean we should!
Sure, the expense is prohibitive, now. But there are some people for whom the expense is no object. The price of computers and other electronics have plummeted over the years. Power consumption requirements have dropped dramatically, too. I can well imagine that in 10 or so years, it would be possible to do this cheaply and easily.
So, if some day I wake up in a bathtub full of ice with a note beside me... instead of it saying my kidneys have been removed it'll say a remote control has been implanted in my brain. Let the urban legends begin! =)
I've got PC2100 ECC in my server at home, and I've turned ECC checking off in the BIOS. What I can't fathom is this: In the past several months I've gotten a couple of parity errors in my memory. However, instead of warning me in some way and allowing me to gracefully shut down, the error raises a non-maskable interrupt which halts the machine in its tracks, giving me a Blue Screen of Death and requiring a hard reset.
If you turned off ECC, then when there's a single bit error, the parity can detect it, but the ECC is not there to correct it -- and your computer raises an interrupt to flag it. MicroSoft takes that to be a Very Bad Thing and throws up a BSOD. Turn on the ECC and you'll be protected from single bit errors and keep on running. If you're interested, what follows is a brief summary of parity and ECC from my long-ago experience and memory (which does NOT have ECC; so if anything I've written is wrong, I'd apprecate corrections from those with more recent experiece/knowledge!)
But. ECC as implemented on PCs can't fix everything. It was years and years ago, but I once had to write some ECC routines to validate programs read into a diagnostic computer for VAXes and DEC-10s. Like in most things, there's a tradeoff between price, speed, and reliability.
First off, memory with no parity. (For the sake of example, I'll refer to storage units as bytes, but this could just as easily be applied to larger units of storage; e.g. 16 or 32 bit words.) A byte is stored simply as 8 bits. If there is an error writing or reading a bit from memory, there's no indication that anything is wrong. Your programs just keep running with bad values which, if in an instruction, can rapidly cause a crash. If the error is in data, someone's paycheck may be way off. Very Not Good.
Next, let's consider memory with parity. Parity comes in two forms: even parity and odd parity. For the sake of example, say we have "even parity". So, for a byte that contains an odd number of one bits, the parity bit would be set to one. If the byte contains an even number of one bits, then the parity bit would be set to zero. When a byte is read from memory, the parity is computed again and compared against the parity that was written when the byte was originally stored in memory. If the stored parity matches the calculated parity, all is well. If there is a discrepancy, it would raise an interrupt and you get the BSOD. But what happens if there are TWO bits that are in error? They'd cancel out each other in the parity calculation and it would appear things are okay. No BSOD, but things are not right.
Finally, let's look at memory with ECC Although there are various levels of ECC, generally what is implemented in PCs fits the mold of "single error correction, double error detection". So, if there is a single bit error in a memory access, the ECC can detect and fix it. This is done by storing even more bits in addition to the byte to be stored. These bits are computed in such a way that if there is a single bit error, the use of the extra bits can identify and fix> the bit that is in error. If there are two bits that are wrong (which would go unnoticed in the parity scheme) the ECC bits can be used to identify that there are two bits in error.
For the truly paranoid, or where uptime is absolutely mandatory, it's possible to construct ECCs such that any bit errors could be detected and corrected. But, the tradeoff is that it would take a lot more bits and it would take more time to perform these calculations -- on every single memory access. And, of course, it would cost a lot more to have all those extra bits around as well as the circuitry to perform the ECC calculations.
So, if a BSOD is just an incovenience for you, ignore the ECC. You'll get better performance at a lower cost for the memory.
If you're developing accounting programs or some medical application, then the downtime from a BSOD would be a Majorly Bad Event. ECC would protect you from single bit errors and your application would keep running; definitely a Very Good Thing.
In short, unless you're doing something completely out of the ordinary for a home user, just stick with the usual parity-backed memory. Hope this helps!
Given the increasing globalization of the internet, it just hit me that all the EULAs and privacy policies I've seen are written in English. (Granted, I don't do much surfing on non-English pages.) This seems such an obvious loophole, but what if the EULA were written in a different language?
I'd assume there's a requirement that these agreements must be readable by the user... but some I've seen could as well have been written in a different language.
I wonder how long I'll need to wait for somebody to come out with an agreement written in one of these languages: Hacker, Bork! Bork! Bork!, Elmer Fudd, or Klingon ;^)
This may be a usable tool in a simple, single-monitor configuration. What happens when a user has multiple PCs?
For example, my ideal work environment is one where I've got (at least) 3 PCs; each having its own monitor. The left-most system is where I do my coding and debugging. The middle system is where I run the application exactly as if I were a user (i.e. QA). The right-most system is where I run analysis tools on the output, log files, etc. (It may seem extravagent, but I've never seen a DESK with a 17-inch diagonal -- more/bigger monitors give me a larger "desk" on which to work.)
How in the world could I use this head-tracking mouse on such a setup? From what I read in the article the head-tracking system can become confused when there are other shiny things in its field of view (e.g. silver rings; I'd hate to imagine what dangling earrings would do!).
I'd need a head-tracking receiver for each PC and monitor, and I've only got one head ;^) So, as I'm working away on the middle PC, these receivers on the other PCs are going to be reading my head motions and mousing all over the place! Okay, so I'd need to use the keyboard to actually "click" on anything, so that's not a problem, right?
Wrong! With all the tool-tips, ONMOUSEOVER, ONMOUSEOUT, etc. that we've got these days, I can easily imagine this scenario:
By the end of the day, I'm going to have one very sore neck, a splitting headache, and accomplished nothing more than making a lot of things flash before my eyes. Sounds like all the benefits of a hangover with out the pleasure of getting drunk. :(
On the other hand, should these become popular, just think of all the fun you could have with your co-workers on April Fool's Day!
When something is sold as "advertising" but is nothing less than an attempt to trick or confuse a person into purchasing, downloading or installing your software, that's misrepresentation and/or fraud. Regardless of any 2pt fine-print at the bottom, or "user agreement" on the page. Hard to stop them, though.
I think you're on the right track there. Granted, IANAL, so I don't know the legal details of this. From my experience, what is needed is a sense of honesty in those who are planning, designing, and coding this stuff. Here's a definition that I've found to work really well for me:
There are some developers, somewhere, who actually are writing this code. Devising and implementing techniques that appear to be one thing but are actually something else. From the referenced article:
It sure looks to me that there is an intention to deceive! If these were being honest, the prompt would be more along the lines of:
I wonder how many users would click on "Yes" for that?
Unfortunately, there are people who are willing to follow this path. Not just advertising agencies lacking any moral scruples, either. What about struggling web sites that are just trying to meet the payroll for their employees after discovering they could not make a profit under their failed business plan? There's a desire to do what's right in getting paychecks to people who have families to support and bills to pay, and that pressure can lead people to step over the line of what they otherwise might do. It seems to me that as these practices becomes more widespread, there's less of an onus against them, leading to even even greater adoption of these techniques, which leads to even wider use, greater adoption, ... lather, rinse, repeat.
Where's the sense of ethics and professionalism here? I offer, as food for thought, the ACM(*) Code of Ethics. NOTE: I am not suggesting everyone should mind heedlessly to these. What I have found in my own experience, though, is that reading through these has given me insights and perspectives on things that I otherwise would not have even considered.
As long as someone can take some programming classes, gain some technical expertise, and hire out as a programmer... well I believe there's more to it than just writing code. Though I hope otherwise, I have a feeling that it is going to take a lot more of these "products" getting a public black eye before there is a groundswell of support for anything different -- things are likely to get worse until they get better. If the $billions lost on Code Red and other worms and viruses has not been enough, just what WILL it take for things to change?
(*)"The ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) is the world's oldest and largest educational and scientific computing society. Since 1947 ACM has provided a vital forum for the exchange of information, ideas, and discoveries."
(Blargh, it's 0430 and I made one "little" change after previewing my post. Here it is with the bold tag closed; sorry for the "yelling.")
He since quit the organization, so we (the developers) can't get to him to find out where he got this code from.
Okay, so you've tried to search for the code, and came up empty... Did he die? If not, then I'd suggest you try to search for him! There's not a lot of info in your post, so some of these may not be appropriate -- don't know if he's still in the same city, state, or country, for that matter.
That should be enough to get you started; I'm sure if you brainstorm you can come up with some other sources and/or techniques, too.
Okay, so you've tried to search for the code,/b>, and came up empty... Did he die? If not, then I'd suggest you try to search for him! There's not a lot of info in your post, so some of these may not be appropriate -- don't know if he's still in the same city, state, or country, for that matter.
That should be enough to get you started; I'm sure if you brainstorm you can come up with some other sources and/or techniques, too.
The best keyboard I have EVER used was on an IBM PS/2 Model P70. (That was a portable PS/2 with an orange-colored gas plasma display. The box had a 386 running at 20 MHz and weighed about 20 pounds!)
The keyboard had an extremely light feel to it, with tactile feedback; it took almost no effort to type and it NEVER, EVER missed a key I typed on it. I could absolutely fly on that keyboard and at the end of the day I had no fatigue at all!
I've been looking over the past several years for a keyboard like it and have had absolutely NO luck. If any /.'ers out there remember this wondeful keyboard, and can suggest a comparable one, I'd be forever grateful!
I have developed a set of debugging techniques over the years that seems to work in most every situation. It's a matter of looking at a problem from the proper level of abstraction and using the tools I already know how to use:
How do you find a needle in a haystack?
With all seriousness, pick up a good compass at a sporting goods store and do a survey of your office. Walk around the room and see if there are any deflections. Whether it's an electric current (which induces a magnet field) or an actual magnet in near proximity to the magnet,
a good compass should point you in the right direction (pun intended!)
Things I have experienced in the past which affected my monitors, in no particular order:
One other thing to try is to bring the PC, monitor, and all peripherals home and see if the problem exists there, too. If so, then it's likely there's something flakey about your equipment. If they are okay, then it would indicate there's some environmental factors at your office.
Good luck! And please fill us in on what you find!
I'm thinking of what happens when the recipient of the e-mail summons has a spam filter in place which flags it as being spam? I could well imagine a case where a summons would list explicit samples of the material for which the recipient is charged, and these samples could trigger the user's and/or ISPs spam filter. Consider the bold text in this example.
The court could truthfully state the summons was sent. The "recipient" could truthfully claim s/he never received it.
I'm NOT claiming this would be a valid way to claim non-receipt of the summons; only that this is an entirely possible scenario.
Worse, still, is someone attempting an [im]practical joke on an unsuspecting user while they are away from their computer -- set up private spam filters in their e-mail program to delete e-mail containing: ("Federal" OR "State") AND "court".
With April 1st approaching, I suspect this has given a number of people some interesting ideas for April Fool's Jokes. ;^)
It's a bit hard to play it at all in zero-G
Though I have no first-hand experience in zero-G (man, don't I wish!), I would expect it would be difficult to play hacky sack there. Then again, It was hard for me to learn how to play hacky sack in normal gravity. ;^)
But, that was not the point. The article contended that gravity may be hard-coded into the brain. My concern is that the experiment they used does not clearly test that hypothosis. This could simply be a learned response, that happened to have been learned under the influence of gravity.
The point is to have people learn a skill which they had never done before, some under the influence of gravity, and others in zero-G. I just used hacky sack as an example that did not require the individuals to UNLEARN something they already had gained some measure of expertise while in earth gravity. Feel free to use some other coordination challenging task that could involve gravity. Hacky sack involves hand-to-FOOT coordination which I discovered was much more difficult than I thought it would be. Not because it is that difficult, but because I was that inexperienced.
So, whether or not it's hacky sack, pick some coordination activity other than one in which the participants are already well-versed. Use the same instrumentation as was used in the article's experiment to monitor muscles, timing, feedback, and the like. Then, compare the results between the zero-G participants and the earth-bound participants. If the brain were really wired for gravity, then I would expect there would be clearly perceptible differences in the abilities, and the learning curves, of the two groups.
It's one thing to try and do something WITHOUT gravity, that I had originally learned how to do WITH gravity. That's what this experiment was attempting to do.
I'd be more interested in how well they did learning, for example, to play hacky sack (passing a small, bean-filled leather bag using only your feet). if they had no prior experience with the game, I'd be interested in seeing how well they did, learning it in zero-G; compared to others learning how to do it with normal gravity. That would be a more valid experiment in my book.
If the internet in your state nearly collapsed, what's to keep this from being applied, maliciously, on a wider scale across a nation or the world?
Idea #1: Several e-mail worms exploited sending mail to all addresses in users' address books. The impact was rather dramatic. What if the e-mails were ALSO sent to mailing lists instead of just individual e-mail accounts?
Idea #2:Could a malicious user subscribe to a number of mailing lists, using different e-mail accounts, and then auto-forward all the accounts to each other? Maybe with a few auto-responders in the bunch? (Not sure of the specifics, here, but the idea is to get an e-mail that comes in, to automatically go back out to at least one, if not several, other accounts and/or mailing lists.)
Up until the time that the accounts are cross-forwarded, everything looks normal. Could even sign up these accounts with known spammers to get a good-sized stream of e-mail flowing.
At some point, just cross-forward / auto-respond / etc. the accounts and wait for the first e-mail to a mailing list to get the ball rolling. If enough lists are signed up, and accounts cross-forwarded... well, by the time it's figured out, there'd be so many people replying to the messages that the impact could be pretty massive.
Idea #3:Opt-in many large mailing lists to many known spammers.
These seem like obvious ideas to me, so I'm wondering if I'm missing something obvious? What's to kep these from happening?