Googling doesn't automaticly mean she actually used google.
The quote actually is "searched on Google" (as opposed to "thought she..." which is used later on). I am complaining about what little info we have; it helps even less if we start throwing away. Maybe google means thepiratebay, maybe Openoffice means Microsoft Office and maybe XX EUR means free.
Also the summary says:
It has really made me think about recommending it to any more friends.
Of course the first point already made is that you can make it quite foolproof (better fools notwithstanding): recommend not to share personal info when downloading, send the direct link via email or even hand it out printed on paper and so on. But the second point is that you can replace "it" with ANYTHING (and I mean ANYTHING - Toyota cars, Sony HDTV, Nokia phones, a specific bank) and no matter how good "it" is there are always some people scammed using "it" if we're talking about something popular at all.
I wonder if we aren't talking about the same person as in "Woman Claims Ubuntu Kept Her From Online Classes". Maybe she moved to Germany and she tries to get Openoffice on her Ubuntu notebook not knowing it is already installed!
First of all what's the bloody site? I'm unable to find ANY sponsored link or adsense if I look for openoffice and such (even with a German IP and with different browsers). It could certainly help if we could read the conditions on the page. Then what information was provided? Did she pay already?
Most of the advice given here is without any pertinence to German law. Normally you would contact a lawyer but of course it's not worth it (Rechschutzversicherung would've helped if available). Not all letters can be ignored and software can be returned just in special cases. But most contracts established "at a distance" can be can be canceled without charges for the first 2 (or 4?) weeks.
And after all it should be clear that no real information should be provided when you don't want to pay. There are tons of scams like this. If you don't open your eyes you open your wallet.
1) Hey, we Americans "travel". How do you think we escaped Europe?
2) We travel, just not so much outside of North America (which is 5 times+ larger than Europe to begin with).
1) I didn't know Christopher Columbus was "American" 2) How is it North America 5 times+ larger than Europe?! Area-wise it is only 2.42x. Population-wise Europe is actually 38% larger. Plus there are some places in North America where citizens of certain nanny-state aren't allowed to go unless of course suspected of certain activities in which case it's fine if they're deported there without any charges.
"CNN is reporting that a new Italian law requires that all businesses offering public internet access, such as web cafes, to identify and record all customers. While supporters of this law trumpet its anti-terrorism potential, still others see no such advantage and bemoan this invasion of personal privacy. 'They must be able, if necessary, to track the sites visited by their clients. [...]"
And yes, the law is pretty much alive and well. Also you can't stay anywhere in Italy unless they copy your passport and send it to the police. Free wifi providers (think Starbucks like) have been already fined/prosecuted. You can't get a prepaid SIM card in many European countries without showing your passport and in some cases your "registration" (i.e. the fact that you're a local resident with a "registered address").
"Really, it makes sense. Imagine 2 million people download "punch a monkey" via the Google store. The malware, not surprisingly, racks up data access fees for customers."
We had PRECISELY this for Windows Mobile (and for mostly all platforms excluding iPhone) for many, many years. NOTHING of consequence happened. Yes, there was a Symbian worm that would spread itself via MMS and it would rack up your bill but it is only fitting. We had before that windows zombies that would dial-up premium numbers with the same result. Nothing REALLY big happened. There is something wrong when the trust and the tools provided by Microsoft seem "too much" and "too liberal" to be allowed for our own good.
Yes, in such a system anything will be true (as in "it is implied by the axioms" as in "it can be proved if we assume the axioms"). False implies anything. I don't think there is any "radically different logic base" that makes this any more useful, it's just some "corner case". It is worth mentioning that you might have an axiomatic system that it's not clearly contradictory (but still is) and everybody could just prove theorems "the old way" when it would be enough to show the contradiction and therefore prove any and all theorems of that axiomatic system (making it quite useless unless you remove/change some of the axioms).
If you want to find some unique characteristics of the encryption find something else, not verifiability. First of all the encryption CAN be unverifiable (it is not in this particular case but it can be in general). For example with truecrypt hidden drives: if there's still free space on the encrypted drive you never know if there's another hidden volume. If you get 3 passwords from the defendant you still don't know if there's a forth password and so on.
So the encryption is not necessary verifiable.
It also goes the other way around: the information from the defender's brain is sometimes (probably more often than not if he's guilty) verifiable. "Where is the body?", "Where is the murder weapon?". This is usually verifiable information. Still you're not allowed to get it from the defendant unless he gives it voluntarily.
I can install and run Truecrypt off of a USB Thumb drive or an SD card on a Win or Lin based PC. If you use a Windows PC to install the Win version of Trucrypt, and then plug the SD card into a Win-based PDA, would it not function normally? Admittedly, I am not well versed on PDA software installation, but it seems like it SHOULD work.
Anyone tried it yet?
I would say "not well versed on PDA software installation" is a major understatement. You manage to confuse yourself by using the ambiguous "Win-based PDA". To put it simply the hardware and software on "Win-based PDA"s has nothing to do with your XP, ok?
Why would Google want to put their services on each top-level domain? Just detect the web browser's language settings and present the German content.
THAT is the whole point: google never tried to take over gmail.de or g-mail.de or however is called. The "german" gmail claimed in court that somehow gmail.com used in Germany is affecting their trademark. The immediate effect (that was going on for years) was that you couldn't get a gmail.com (notice.com not DE) email if you come with a German IP - you would get a googlemail.com account instead and everything will be mostly transparent (gmail.com will go to googlemail.com, emails will reach you even if sent to name@gmail.com instead of name@googlemail.com and so on). Now it is even worse: gmail.com goes to this text page that says something like "you should go to mail.google.com but we are not allowed to give you a link here" (and presumably they can't redirect you automatically as before). YES, google is scared/forced not to to put a link to mail.google.com on gmail.com (of course they own both domains). Is this messed up or what?
Yesterday there was a crane operating near our office building... by remote control (we could see the operator with a the -big- remote)! I asked my colleagues "are you thinking what I'm thinking?". Of course they were not. I wasn't actually thinking only "oh, it would be just great to have one of THOSE remotes" but i was actually asking myself what board would be more appropriate to buy for using with GNU radio to try to reverse engineer one of those, what's the range, is there any encryption?
"I guess one could buy a bluetooth keyboard to go with the iPhone"
No, you couldn't. Don't assume iPhone would do anything that a windows mobile device does (for the last five years I might add). No, no, no. When Apple says bluetooth they mean precisely two (out of more than 20) profiles: Hands-Free Profile (HFP) and Headset Profile (HSP). That means NO keyboard (and "no" many other things like quality audio out - and no remote control for that matter, no serial profile=no bluetooth GPS, no file transfer over bluetooth, no [about 20 times more no]).
And why would "know how to drive" cancel the benefits you would get from ABS? Can you calculate and can you apply different breaking force to each wheel in those moments just before a (potential) crash? Also one of the features that comes on top of ABS (it is independent but I haven't seen it without ABS) is Emergency Brake Assist. EBA will detect the "urgency" of breaking by analyzing the speed and pressure applied to the pedal and decide if you are actually trying to stop ASAP (as opposed to just slowing down) and will completely break for you (of course until ABS engages). This works VERY well and apart from breaking sooner in all cases it will also save the (usually but not always women) drivers that just don't press the break hard enough even in an emergency situation.
I am too really really sick of what's happening with all this "think of the children" craze. I've been trying to buy some software from EA Store (some booster packs for Battlefield 2 not some hardcore p0rn) and they tell me I need to buy from 23:00 to 06:00 because of some "young protection regulations" (the pack has some logo with "Violence"). What's the danger here? I give them a valid CC, I am (well) over 14/18/21. Are they thinking I'm somehow watched by some teens and they don't want to take any chances?!
Also in Germany at least one ISP (Arcor) has been sued for providing access to porn without proper age verification (read proper GERMAN age verification). Oh and the nice tidbit is that those suing were the German porn "manufacturers". As a result Arcor has blacklisted some IP ranges (you can imagine how well that went) and afterwards they put in place some "DNS blackhole" (they were returning 127.0.0.1 for youporn.com for example). It seems that currently access to google is under threat (as you guessed you can find porn with google!): http://www.heise.de/english/newsticker/news/100074
Correct, what Palm did this century was bad. I don't know what happened recently with PalmOS but by 2004 they were still having no real support for this great invention named folders, no practical multitasking, internet access was a joke, grainy resolution and washy colors in most devices and even though the hardware was much less powerful than WinCE/mobile devices the battery life was even worse usually. At the same time Windows Mobile devices were sporting brilliant screens, "real" support for the file system, multitasking, a reasonable IP stack and heck even Internet Explorer out of the box. A good 2004 windows mobile PDA has better display than the iphone, it is easily (~100$ and dropping) expandable to at least 32GB via CF cards, will run all good navigation programs, will play basically anything (including most reasonable divx/xvid movies DIRECTLY without conversion with the great tcpmp player), can read directly your USB stick or external USB hdd and of course it will connect to hotspots and run Internet Explorer/Opera mobile/skype and so on. Any 2004 palm device is just gathering dust now unless you have a very specific application for it.
Speaking in theory to generate cryptographically useful pseudo random bits you need a seed only as big as a key for your favorite symmetrical algorithm. So we aren't talking about generating gigabytes of real random bytes (which would be indeed hard to get without any traffic) but about generating 10-20 bytes (during the whole previous life of the router!) random enough that you can't bruteforce it. Still you say how do you generate different pseudo random data with a device that is identical with the one in your lab. Well if the devices are identical and they are fed the same data yes they will give you the same output. However in order to reproduce this you will need:
- access to all data stored on the flash (not only mac, serial number but all saved credentials) - access to all start/stop times of the router during its lifetime down to mili/microsecond - access to all traffic the router saw ever (over wireless AND over wired network). This is harder than it looks as wireless traffic looks different to different receivers so you would need to physically modify the router and tap inside it to get the traffic
This is not dry theory, it is as real life as it gets (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urandom for reference). Even if you save the random seed only in the RAM you still don't have access to the ROM and to all the traffic the machine sees for that session (or if you do have access it is game over already).
Yes there might be bad implementations but this is far from broken even in a thought experiment. We know how to make it work and any *nix has a nice implementation already.
If you are after custom apps you just don't buy this device. The prices for N800-N810 are about the same as for Archos 605 30GB-160GB. A605 is mainly a video player. If you don't care about the massive storage and you want the 256M or so you can choose the Nokia tablet - sure (or one of the other many linux/wince/palmos devices). Heck, if you don't care about size you can go for the same price with a full blown desktop PC and have a better CPU, run more apps, better screen, input devices and so on.
Speaking about "why don't you buy" I am quite disappointed by the current offerings for this market (high end PDA/video player). High-end PDA market mid-2004 (!) specs (I think there are at least 5 devices that match more or less the specs below):
- WinCE/windows mobile (yes, it's M$ but if you need GPS maps for dodgy places this might be your only option - and nobody can complain about lack of apps, need to jailbreak anything, lack of SDK and so on - Hello Apple, are you listening?) - wifi (with WPA from day 0) - bluetooth - usb host (yes you can use your usb stick or external drive) - extremely sharp 640x480 display (the devices are much smaller compared to N800) - dual expansion slot (CF and SD with CFIO and SDIO, you can add odd peripherals like TV tuner, ethernet card). And of course you can use the existing under-100$ 16GB CF card or the announced 32GB or 64GB CF cards - 500-600+ MHz Intel CPU (non-x86). Twice as fast as what you get in most current devices. Forget youtube, that's peanuts-you can play 99% of the divxes and xvids you get DIRECTLY on the PDA without any conversion.
Again, the above specs are for mid-2004! Of course nobody cared at the time but it seems that the market is slowly picking up. However the dream device seems to be one of the new Intel ultra-small CPUs (x86 compatible) combined with one of these 30-80-160+GB hdds. And it will eventually come (or at least I hope so).
"Free speech is fine but I don't agree with having this tool available to non-professionals in a nice easily installed package."
Apart from the fact that what you self-contradict yourself (if free speech is fine then you can just "free speech" a script that installs any program "nice/easily" and that should be fine too) I should point out that fortunately (in my opinion) it doesn't matter if you agree or not. Well, unless you live in the only countries I know where "cracking tools" are banned: North Korea, China and Germany but then you might have other problems than easy access to cracking software. There are many things some people don't like other people to do but that's perfectly fine it they live it at that (it's NOT fine if they want for example to kill all people working in certain days of the week like some -popular I might add- religion wants).
"If you're calling my house, I have every right to know who you are. Can you seriously come up with a legitimate situation where you should be able to call me and me not be able to see who you are before I answer the phone?"
Well you obviously DON'T have "every right" to know who's calling you before you pick up the phone but you WOULD LIKE to have it.
First of all you can at most identify what's the phone calling you from the other side not WHO is on the other side. Let alone the fact that there are plenty of legitimate situations where people would prefer to call anonymously (whistle blowers, people seeking counseling, etc) there are even more situations where people who aren't anonymous would prefer you don't see the number they're calling from. These include all your business contacts who would prefer you to call them on the company number but sometimes work from home and would like to call you, your boos who might not want you to know he's calling from his mistress (who might be somebody you know) and so on. There are plenty of situations when I'm calling somebody and I don't want to be called back on that number (and even people who know me well are too lazy to look in their address books and just call me back on the number I called from which is not what I usually want)
Actually you're a bit hypocritical: if you don't believe there are legitimate situations where people are hiding their callerids why do you even bother? It's trivial (technically) to filter them out! Or you might be worried that you're missing important (legitimate) calls? Well, if you are then there you go, those are the legitimate calls performed with callerID blocked!
The left mouse key (from the integrated mousepad) was flaky on one of my personal notebooks, a low-end Inspiron. So I decided to call Dell (standard warranty, low end system, etc). I've had great experience 'til now with Dell (unlike many other people) - absolutely nothing went wrong ever - it is because I'm in Europe and they have a team of Eastern European guys who want a good "feedback" (in the email you receive afterwards) or because I know exactly what I want, I don't know. In any case they asked me what operating system it is - I said "Debian..... Linux but if you really want I can try in XP for you". The guy said "well, it doesn't matter, it's just a question in the script. Then they asked me to run some test from "the BIOS" - actually was from one of the "hidden" partitions that I was careful not to touch (but still I messed it up somehow because the test was stopping before doing the "more advanced" tests). He called some "higher power" and decided in the end that my laptop needs servicing and they'll send the packaging material to me then they'll arrange to pick it up and they'll have it serviced.
He asked me to back up my hdd but I told him clearly that they're not getting my hdd anyway...
This is EXACTLY what I had in mind - I even looked for those 2 stripes myself. After six years somebody else goes to the same semi-obscure reference. Spooky.
This is simply not true. Remember that in many places in Europe you need a license to _own_ a TV or radio (and very soon a PC) and there's some kind of police looking out for people with unregistered devices. But back to SIMs: in most places you need your passport to get a pre-paid SIM. But the Germans are over the top as always: you also need the residence registration (did I mention that you need to register yourself if you move somewhere in Germany, even as a German? - there's a 500 EUR fine for failing to do so in two weeks). The Italians were fine but they've got crazy: you need you passport for ANYTHING. Internet café, hotels, you name it. AND the data from the hotels is automatically forwarded to the Police, it's not like they will investigate if something happens - they want to have it just in case. With icafes there's another story: they have to keep a log with sites visited and such. The Dutch? Clinton was the one that got stoned in Amsterdam, free everything (drugs und such)? Well, let me put it in a simple way: the Dutch are looking up to Germany as an island of privacy and liberty.
Never mind the fact that even if you could buy a SIM card without ID you still need to use a different SIM AND phone (remember, each phone is unique) for each call in order to gain some privacy.
It can be done: no payphones with coins, only with prepaid cards or credit cards. And require ID for prepaid cards. In case this seems far fetched I should point out that this is already happening since before September 11 in Germany for prepaid mobile cards (SIM cards). Actually if you don't have a German ID with address they require both your passport and your registration (you are required to register in Germany if you live somewhere for longer than 2 weeks and the penalty for not doing it is 500 EUR, that's another story). If you are a honest tourist and you can't provide the registration, sorry - no card for you. Sure, if you go to the flee market the most popular items there are pre-paid cards and mobile phones; not because there's a huge demand for anonymous sim cards but only because this stuff is just popular. Ebay is also full with used cards or new cards bought by companies in bulk or as gifts/test samples. You can arrange to pick up the card in person and pay cash if you are paranoid. Even if they enforce the law and you can't find any cards a terrorist can still buy one with a fake id. Even if we assume that the German IDs are hard to fake you can still print the registration (yes, you can register online in some places and the registration is actually a pdf file) and present this registration with a fake passport from Mozambique. Will this stop some terrorists ? Maybe, I don't know - some terrorists might be really stupid. It won't stop all terrorists (or any smart terrorist - of which apparently the supply isn't short). It'll also inconvenience the hell out of all tourists that try to buy a pre-paid card (and also many locals who don't have all the paperwork at hand).
Slashdot Mirror
http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20081228
Googling doesn't automaticly mean she actually used google.
The quote actually is "searched on Google" (as opposed to "thought she..." which is used later on). I am complaining about what little info we have; it helps even less if we start throwing away. Maybe google means thepiratebay, maybe Openoffice means Microsoft Office and maybe XX EUR means free.
Also the summary says:
It has really made me think about recommending it to any more friends.
Of course the first point already made is that you can make it quite foolproof (better fools notwithstanding): recommend not to share personal info when downloading, send the direct link via email or even hand it out printed on paper and so on. But the second point is that you can replace "it" with ANYTHING (and I mean ANYTHING - Toyota cars, Sony HDTV, Nokia phones, a specific bank) and no matter how good "it" is there are always some people scammed using "it" if we're talking about something popular at all.
I wonder if we aren't talking about the same person as in "Woman Claims Ubuntu Kept Her From Online Classes". Maybe she moved to Germany and she tries to get Openoffice on her Ubuntu notebook not knowing it is already installed!
First of all what's the bloody site? I'm unable to find ANY sponsored link or adsense if I look for openoffice and such (even with a German IP and with different browsers). It could certainly help if we could read the conditions on the page.
Then what information was provided? Did she pay already?
Most of the advice given here is without any pertinence to German law. Normally you would contact a lawyer but of course it's not worth it (Rechschutzversicherung would've helped if available). Not all letters can be ignored and software can be returned just in special cases. But most contracts established "at a distance" can be can be canceled without charges for the first 2 (or 4?) weeks.
And after all it should be clear that no real information should be provided when you don't want to pay. There are tons of scams like this. If you don't open your eyes you open your wallet.
1) Hey, we Americans "travel". How do you think we escaped Europe?
2) We travel, just not so much outside of North America (which is 5 times+ larger than Europe to begin with).
1) I didn't know Christopher Columbus was "American"
2) How is it North America 5 times+ larger than Europe?! Area-wise it is only 2.42x. Population-wise Europe is actually 38% larger. Plus there are some places in North America where citizens of certain nanny-state aren't allowed to go unless of course suspected of certain activities in which case it's fine if they're deported there without any charges.
Quoting from http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/12/11/0512216&tid=158
"CNN is reporting that a new Italian law requires that all businesses offering public internet access, such as web cafes, to identify and record all customers. While supporters of this law trumpet its anti-terrorism potential, still others see no such advantage and bemoan this invasion of personal privacy. 'They must be able, if necessary, to track the sites visited by their clients. [...]"
And yes, the law is pretty much alive and well. Also you can't stay anywhere in Italy unless they copy your passport and send it to the police. Free wifi providers (think Starbucks like) have been already fined/prosecuted. You can't get a prepaid SIM card in many European countries without showing your passport and in some cases your "registration" (i.e. the fact that you're a local resident with a "registered address").
"Really, it makes sense. Imagine 2 million people download "punch a monkey" via the Google store. The malware, not surprisingly, racks up data access fees for customers."
We had PRECISELY this for Windows Mobile (and for mostly all platforms excluding iPhone) for many, many years. NOTHING of consequence happened. Yes, there was a Symbian worm that would spread itself via MMS and it would rack up your bill but it is only fitting. We had before that windows zombies that would dial-up premium numbers with the same result. Nothing REALLY big happened.
There is something wrong when the trust and the tools provided by Microsoft seem "too much" and "too liberal" to be allowed for our own good.
Yes, in such a system anything will be true (as in "it is implied by the axioms" as in "it can be proved if we assume the axioms"). False implies anything. I don't think there is any "radically different logic base" that makes this any more useful, it's just some "corner case". It is worth mentioning that you might have an axiomatic system that it's not clearly contradictory (but still is) and everybody could just prove theorems "the old way" when it would be enough to show the contradiction and therefore prove any and all theorems of that axiomatic system (making it quite useless unless you remove/change some of the axioms).
If you want to find some unique characteristics of the encryption find something else, not verifiability. First of all the encryption CAN be unverifiable (it is not in this particular case but it can be in general). For example with truecrypt hidden drives: if there's still free space on the encrypted drive you never know if there's another hidden volume. If you get 3 passwords from the defendant you still don't know if there's a forth password and so on.
So the encryption is not necessary verifiable.
It also goes the other way around: the information from the defender's brain is sometimes (probably more often than not if he's guilty) verifiable. "Where is the body?", "Where is the murder weapon?". This is usually verifiable information. Still you're not allowed to get it from the defendant unless he gives it voluntarily.
I can install and run Truecrypt off of a USB Thumb drive or an SD card on a Win or Lin based PC. If you use a Windows PC to install the Win version of Trucrypt, and then plug the SD card into a Win-based PDA, would it not function normally? Admittedly, I am not well versed on PDA software installation, but it seems like it SHOULD work. Anyone tried it yet?
I would say "not well versed on PDA software installation" is a major understatement. You manage to confuse yourself by using the ambiguous "Win-based PDA". To put it simply the hardware and software on "Win-based PDA"s has nothing to do with your XP, ok?
Why would Google want to put their services on each top-level domain? Just detect the web browser's language settings and present the German content.
THAT is the whole point: google never tried to take over gmail.de or g-mail.de or however is called. The "german" gmail claimed in court that somehow gmail.com used in Germany is affecting their trademark. The immediate effect (that was going on for years) was that you couldn't get a gmail.com (notice .com not DE) email if you come with a German IP - you would get a googlemail.com account instead and everything will be mostly transparent (gmail.com will go to googlemail.com, emails will reach you even if sent to name@gmail.com instead of name@googlemail.com and so on). Now it is even worse: gmail.com goes to this text page that says something like "you should go to mail.google.com but we are not allowed to give you a link here" (and presumably they can't redirect you automatically as before). YES, google is scared/forced not to to put a link to mail.google.com on gmail.com (of course they own both domains). Is this messed up or what?
Yesterday there was a crane operating near our office building... by remote control (we could see the operator with a the -big- remote)! I asked my colleagues "are you thinking what I'm thinking?". Of course they were not. I wasn't actually thinking only "oh, it would be just great to have one of THOSE remotes" but i was actually asking myself what board would be more appropriate to buy for using with GNU radio to try to reverse engineer one of those, what's the range, is there any encryption?
"I guess one could buy a bluetooth keyboard to go with the iPhone"
No, you couldn't. Don't assume iPhone would do anything that a windows mobile device does (for the last five years I might add). No, no, no. When Apple says bluetooth they mean precisely two (out of more than 20) profiles: Hands-Free Profile (HFP) and
Headset Profile (HSP). That means NO keyboard (and "no" many other things like quality audio out - and no remote control for that matter, no serial profile=no bluetooth GPS, no file transfer over bluetooth, no [about 20 times more no]).
And why would "know how to drive" cancel the benefits you would get from ABS? Can you calculate and can you apply different breaking force to each wheel in those moments just before a (potential) crash? Also one of the features that comes on top of ABS (it is independent but I haven't seen it without ABS) is Emergency Brake Assist. EBA will detect the "urgency" of breaking by analyzing the speed and pressure applied to the pedal and decide if you are actually trying to stop ASAP (as opposed to just slowing down) and will completely break for you (of course until ABS engages). This works VERY well and apart from breaking sooner in all cases it will also save the (usually but not always women) drivers that just don't press the break hard enough even in an emergency situation.
I am too really really sick of what's happening with all this "think of the children" craze. I've been trying to buy some software from EA Store (some booster packs for Battlefield 2 not some hardcore p0rn) and they tell me I need to buy from 23:00 to 06:00 because of some "young protection regulations" (the pack has some logo with "Violence"). What's the danger here? I give them a valid CC, I am (well) over 14/18/21. Are they thinking I'm somehow watched by some teens and they don't want to take any chances?!
Also in Germany at least one ISP (Arcor) has been sued for providing access to porn without proper age verification (read proper GERMAN age verification). Oh and the nice tidbit is that those suing were the German porn "manufacturers".
As a result Arcor has blacklisted some IP ranges (you can imagine how well that went) and afterwards they put in place some "DNS blackhole" (they were returning 127.0.0.1 for youporn.com for example). It seems that currently access to google is under threat (as you guessed you can find porn with google!): http://www.heise.de/english/newsticker/news/100074
Correct, what Palm did this century was bad. I don't know what happened recently with PalmOS but by 2004 they were still having no real support for this great invention named folders, no practical multitasking, internet access was a joke, grainy resolution and washy colors in most devices and even though the hardware was much less powerful than WinCE/mobile devices the battery life was even worse usually. At the same time Windows Mobile devices were sporting brilliant screens, "real" support for the file system, multitasking, a reasonable IP stack and heck even Internet Explorer out of the box. A good 2004 windows mobile PDA has better display than the iphone, it is easily (~100$ and dropping) expandable to at least 32GB via CF cards, will run all good navigation programs, will play basically anything (including most reasonable divx/xvid movies DIRECTLY without conversion with the great tcpmp player), can read directly your USB stick or external USB hdd and of course it will connect to hotspots and run Internet Explorer/Opera mobile/skype and so on. Any 2004 palm device is just gathering dust now unless you have a very specific application for it.
Speaking in theory to generate cryptographically useful pseudo random bits you need a seed only as big as a key for your favorite symmetrical algorithm. So we aren't talking about generating gigabytes of real random bytes (which would be indeed hard to get without any traffic) but about generating 10-20 bytes (during the whole previous life of the router!) random enough that you can't bruteforce it. Still you say how do you generate different pseudo random data with a device that is identical with the one in your lab. Well if the devices are identical and they are fed the same data yes they will give you the same output. However in order to reproduce this you will need:
- access to all data stored on the flash (not only mac, serial number but all saved credentials)
- access to all start/stop times of the router during its lifetime down to mili/microsecond
- access to all traffic the router saw ever (over wireless AND over wired network). This is harder than it looks as wireless traffic looks different to different receivers so you would need to physically modify the router and tap inside it to get the traffic
This is not dry theory, it is as real life as it gets (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urandom for reference). Even if you save the random seed only in the RAM you still don't have access to the ROM and to all the traffic the machine sees for that session (or if you do have access it is game over already).
Yes there might be bad implementations but this is far from broken even in a thought experiment. We know how to make it work and any *nix has a nice implementation already.
If you are after custom apps you just don't buy this device. The prices for N800-N810 are about the same as for Archos 605 30GB-160GB. A605 is mainly a video player. If you don't care about the massive storage and you want the 256M or so you can choose the Nokia tablet - sure (or one of the other many linux/wince/palmos devices). Heck, if you don't care about size you can go for the same price with a full blown desktop PC and have a better CPU, run more apps, better screen, input devices and so on.
Speaking about "why don't you buy" I am quite disappointed by the current offerings for this market (high end PDA/video player). High-end PDA market mid-2004 (!) specs (I think there are at least 5 devices that match more or less the specs below):
- WinCE/windows mobile (yes, it's M$ but if you need GPS maps for dodgy places this might be your only option - and nobody can complain about lack of apps, need to jailbreak anything, lack of SDK and so on - Hello Apple, are you listening?)
- wifi (with WPA from day 0)
- bluetooth
- usb host (yes you can use your usb stick or external drive)
- extremely sharp 640x480 display (the devices are much smaller compared to N800)
- dual expansion slot (CF and SD with CFIO and SDIO, you can add odd peripherals like TV tuner, ethernet card). And of course you can use the existing under-100$ 16GB CF card or the announced 32GB or 64GB CF cards
- 500-600+ MHz Intel CPU (non-x86). Twice as fast as what you get in most current devices. Forget youtube, that's peanuts-you can play 99% of the divxes and xvids you get DIRECTLY on the PDA without any conversion.
Again, the above specs are for mid-2004! Of course nobody cared at the time but it seems that the market is slowly picking up. However the dream device seems to be one of the new Intel ultra-small CPUs (x86 compatible) combined with one of these 30-80-160+GB hdds. And it will eventually come (or at least I hope so).
"Free speech is fine but I don't agree with having this tool available to non-professionals in a nice easily installed package."
Apart from the fact that what you self-contradict yourself (if free speech is fine then you can just "free speech" a script that installs any program "nice/easily" and that should be fine too) I should point out that fortunately (in my opinion) it doesn't matter if you agree or not. Well, unless you live in the only countries I know where "cracking tools" are banned: North Korea, China and Germany but then you might have other problems than easy access to cracking software. There are many things some people don't like other people to do but that's perfectly fine it they live it at that (it's NOT fine if they want for example to kill all people working in certain days of the week like some -popular I might add- religion wants).
"If you're calling my house, I have every right to know who you are. Can you seriously come up with a legitimate situation where you should be able to call me and me not be able to see who you are before I answer the phone?"
Well you obviously DON'T have "every right" to know who's calling you before you pick up the phone but you WOULD LIKE to have it.
First of all you can at most identify what's the phone calling you from the other side not WHO is on the other side. Let alone the fact that there are plenty of legitimate situations where people would prefer to call anonymously (whistle blowers, people seeking counseling, etc) there are even more situations where people who aren't anonymous would prefer you don't see the number they're calling from. These include all your business contacts who would prefer you to call them on the company number but sometimes work from home and would like to call you, your boos who might not want you to know he's calling from his mistress (who might be somebody you know) and so on. There are plenty of situations when I'm calling somebody and I don't want to be called back on that number (and even people who know me well are too lazy to look in their address books and just call me back on the number I called from which is not what I usually want)
Actually you're a bit hypocritical: if you don't believe there are legitimate situations where people are hiding their callerids why do you even bother? It's trivial (technically) to filter them out! Or you might be worried that you're missing important (legitimate) calls? Well, if you are then there you go, those are the legitimate calls performed with callerID blocked!
The left mouse key (from the integrated mousepad) was flaky on one of my personal notebooks, a low-end Inspiron. So I decided to call Dell (standard warranty, low end system, etc). I've had great experience 'til now with Dell (unlike many other people) - absolutely nothing went wrong ever - it is because I'm in Europe and they have a team of Eastern European guys who want a good "feedback" (in the email you receive afterwards) or because I know exactly what I want, I don't know. In any case they asked me what operating system it is - I said "Debian ..... Linux but if you really want I can try in XP for you". The guy said "well, it doesn't matter, it's just a question in the script. Then they asked me to run some test from "the BIOS" - actually was from one of the "hidden" partitions that I was careful not to touch (but still I messed it up somehow because the test was stopping before doing the "more advanced" tests). He called some "higher power" and decided in the end that my laptop needs servicing and they'll send the packaging material to me then they'll arrange to pick it up and they'll have it serviced.
...
He asked me to back up my hdd but I told him clearly that they're not getting my hdd anyway
This is EXACTLY what I had in mind - I even looked for those 2 stripes myself. After six years somebody else goes to the same semi-obscure reference. Spooky.
"Vista should be testing its incoming audio to detect whether it matches any outgoing audio that Vista is playing."
I guess you never saw a room with more than one computer in it.
This is simply not true. Remember that in many places in Europe you need a license to _own_ a TV or radio (and very soon a PC) and there's some kind of police looking out for people with unregistered devices.
But back to SIMs: in most places you need your passport to get a pre-paid SIM. But the Germans are over the top as always: you also need the residence registration (did I mention that you need to register yourself if you move somewhere in Germany, even as a German? - there's a 500 EUR fine for failing to do so in two weeks).
The Italians were fine but they've got crazy: you need you passport for ANYTHING. Internet café, hotels, you name it. AND the data from the hotels is automatically forwarded to the Police, it's not like they will investigate if something happens - they want to have it just in case. With icafes there's another story: they have to keep a log with sites visited and such.
The Dutch? Clinton was the one that got stoned in Amsterdam, free everything (drugs und such)? Well, let me put it in a simple way: the Dutch are looking up to Germany as an island of privacy and liberty.
Never mind the fact that even if you could buy a SIM card without ID you still need to use a different SIM AND phone (remember, each phone is unique) for each call in order to gain some privacy.
It can be done: no payphones with coins, only with prepaid cards or credit cards. And require ID for prepaid cards. In case this seems far fetched I should point out that this is already happening since before September 11 in Germany for prepaid mobile cards (SIM cards). Actually if you don't have a German ID with address they require both your passport and your registration (you are required to register in Germany if you live somewhere for longer than 2 weeks and the penalty for not doing it is 500 EUR, that's another story). If you are a honest tourist and you can't provide the registration, sorry - no card for you. Sure, if you go to the flee market the most popular items there are pre-paid cards and mobile phones; not because there's a huge demand for anonymous sim cards but only because this stuff is just popular. Ebay is also full with used cards or new cards bought by companies in bulk or as gifts/test samples. You can arrange to pick up the card in person and pay cash if you are paranoid.
Even if they enforce the law and you can't find any cards a terrorist can still buy one with a fake id. Even if we assume that the German IDs are hard to fake you can still print the registration (yes, you can register online in some places and the registration is actually a pdf file) and present this registration with a fake passport from Mozambique.
Will this stop some terrorists ? Maybe, I don't know - some terrorists might be really stupid. It won't stop all terrorists (or any smart terrorist - of which apparently the supply isn't short). It'll also inconvenience the hell out of all tourists that try to buy a pre-paid card (and also many locals who don't have all the paperwork at hand).
I think it's turtles all the way down:
d own
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtles_all_the_way_