As someone pointed out above, the EXIF info could be used to cure the Wal-Mart problem.
If everyone creating copyrighted work would put a notice in EXIF saying "copyright John Doe 2005", if you go ahead, modify that and put your own instead, then go to Wal-Mart and print the picture, nobody could sue WM, since the one who's guilty is clearly you.
In April 2004, UK-based Ollie Whitehouse, at that time working for security firm @Stake, showed that even Bluetooth devices in secure mode could be attacked.
He must be a relative to the Whitehouse family in Cryptonomicon and The Baroque Trilogy - everyone in that family was supposed to be a hacker, after all.;-)
I was born in a country in Eastern Europe that, during WWII, was first under german rule (not "officially" but effectively), then under russian rule. My father in law was a young boy by that time so he remembers both periods. He says the Germans were polite, civilized and helped the people (e.g. the military doctor who was giving pills to sick villagers). It was the russian bullets that he had to dodge (remember he being a child at the time), and it was the russian soldiers who stole cattle, were rough and bullied people around.
How ironic that this same country fell under communist dictatorship shortly thereafter, then declared Soviet Union "The Great Friend from the East." No wonder my parents' generation has a strong bias against Russia. Myself, I'm thinking it was just a freak artifact of the weird history of WWII - my generation is lacking this bias as our experience was different (and I do have russian friends - they're civilized, polite, friendly, reliable people).
I read the headlines, notice the Google thing, I am not surprised at all - I'm like "yeap, right on cue" - but then I'm like... hey, why I'm not surprised by this thing?:-) Such is Google, I guess...
OpenVPN: Easier to configure than most if not all IPSec-based solutions. Provides pretty much the same functionality, except for obscure bells and whistles. Has similar, if not better, security. Runs on pretty much all important platforms. Has a GUI for Windows, so that even dummies can use it. It Simply Works (TM).
If you're doing audio-only, then the bandwidth requirements are so low, an old dialup line would probably be enough (bandwidth-wise, not latency-wise). So don't worry about that.
As for big downloads killing your VoIP channels - the size of the file you're downloading does not matter. What matters is how many simultaneous downloads are happening at the same time. I.e., loading a large web page with lots of graphics is a lot worse than a single multi-GB DVD ISO. In any case, you can play a little bit with bandwidth control and prioritisation, either via the Linux firewall, or via whatever proxy you happen to use (Squid), etc.
Now, if you're doing audio/video - that's something to worry about, bandwidth-wise.
Well, you only have one analog line, but you have a lot of VoIP "lines" over your broadband connection.
A PBX @ home makes a lot of sense in conjunction with a DSL/cable link. Install maybe one or two analog phones on the PBX, but then deploy as many VoIP phones as you want - and not necessarily only in your house!;-) Then hook up to VoIP providers, etc. Its flexibility is virtually unlimited.
Well duh, it will be an "ongoing test" once millions of systems will start using the software.
Re:Why would the crackers tell them?
on
Hack IIS6 Contest
·
· Score: 1
Yeap. But that's what the organizers of the contest are trying to prevent - someone, maybe, will stumble upon the bad guys' "secret exploit" and reveal it.
I actually tested those appliances fairly thoroughly, and yes, they're good at killing SYN floods and stuff. But what they don't solve and, indeed, what they cannot solve, no matter how smart, is the problem of sheer volume - the problem of bandwidth. If the attacker overwhelms your pipe, or your ISP's pipe, or your ISP's ISP's pipe, then mission accomplished. You also have to have enough bandwidth to fight the attack, even if your servers can handle all those SYN packets per se.
Use remotely managed switches. When a system starts flooding, identify it, then disable the port on the switch. "Hi, we disabled your network connection because your system is infected with a virus and was attacking our network. We will re-enable your network connection after you'll clean up your system. Have a nice day."
You must still be living in a low-definition world. Come join us in the 21st century, then see how your precious MPEG-2 holds up.
It holds up pretty well, thanks, it's currently being used for HDTV distribution.:-P
In any case, you seem to speak about future trends, i was speaking about the current situation. The manufacturers of those cards simply looked at the market NOW and made a decision. The decision was to go with MPEG2. It makes sense NOW. Perhaps in the future the decision to use something else would make more sense.
You can store really spectacular program quality at as low as 8 Mbps; with MPEG-2, comparable program quality costs you 20 or 25 Mbps
You're either living in an ivory tower, or had the misfortune of using really crappy encoders. 10Mbps MPEG2 is pretty good for typical DVD content, or typical NTSC TV, if you use decent encoders. I watch a lot of 10Mbps MPEG2 content on TV and there's no quality loss that can be perceived; i also watch it on a high-quality computer monitor (the likes used by movie makers, it's an SGI monitor) and the artifacts cannot be seen when watching the show normally (yes, if you switch into hyper-analytical mode, they are visible, but if you're watching the SHOW, not the IMAGE, they simply vanish).
I have a feeling that this discussion could continue indefinitely, since i am speaking about reasonable decisions, while you seem to belong to the Seeker Of Perfection category (which seems quite populous in the "multimedia geek" group).
There's an extremely large installed base of DVD players which, all of them, are based on MPEG2. These cards encode directly to MPEG2 (actually, DVD-compatible MPEG2) because most of their users tend to record shows just to burn them to DVDs. Capturing to MPEG4, then transcoding to MPEG2 will induce quality loss. Also, the typical DVD MPEG2 bitrate is high enough so that there's essentialy no quality loss when encoding a typical TV show to DVD/MPEG2.
And no, the majority of normal people do not watch recorded TV shows on computers (where MPEG4 might make sense), they use DVD players for that. Hence, MPEG2.
Slashdot Mirror
As someone pointed out above, the EXIF info could be used to cure the Wal-Mart problem.
If everyone creating copyrighted work would put a notice in EXIF saying "copyright John Doe 2005", if you go ahead, modify that and put your own instead, then go to Wal-Mart and print the picture, nobody could sue WM, since the one who's guilty is clearly you.
(mod parent up)
Very good idea, it might actually work.
Frivolous suits should be a crime and the punishment should be the death penalty.
Is there any _truly_free_ "free version" for Windows? Player only? Player and encoder?
How about Linux?
(yeah, I know about xvid and ffmpeg, I'm just asking about DivX specifically)
Ah damn, sorry, nevermind.
Too much staring at the tube, too little rest for the poor brain.
He must be a relative to the Whitehouse family in Cryptonomicon and The Baroque Trilogy - everyone in that family was supposed to be a hacker, after all.
I was born in a country in Eastern Europe that, during WWII, was first under german rule (not "officially" but effectively), then under russian rule.
My father in law was a young boy by that time so he remembers both periods. He says the Germans were polite, civilized and helped the people (e.g. the military doctor who was giving pills to sick villagers).
It was the russian bullets that he had to dodge (remember he being a child at the time), and it was the russian soldiers who stole cattle, were rough and bullied people around.
How ironic that this same country fell under communist dictatorship shortly thereafter, then declared Soviet Union "The Great Friend from the East."
No wonder my parents' generation has a strong bias against Russia. Myself, I'm thinking it was just a freak artifact of the weird history of WWII - my generation is lacking this bias as our experience was different (and I do have russian friends - they're civilized, polite, friendly, reliable people).
History is strange.
I read the headlines, notice the Google thing, I am not surprised at all - I'm like "yeap, right on cue" - but then I'm like... hey, why I'm not surprised by this thing? :-)
Such is Google, I guess...
OpenVPN:
Easier to configure than most if not all IPSec-based solutions.
Provides pretty much the same functionality, except for obscure bells and whistles.
Has similar, if not better, security.
Runs on pretty much all important platforms.
Has a GUI for Windows, so that even dummies can use it.
It Simply Works (TM).
I will never go back to IPSec.
Yes. That's precisely one of the reasons why many people play with Asterisk.
But it can do a lot more than just that.
Because it's a lot more powerful and flexible? ;-)
Seriously, how many PBXes you can find lying around that have VoIP capabilities?
If you're doing audio-only, then the bandwidth requirements are so low, an old dialup line would probably be enough (bandwidth-wise, not latency-wise). So don't worry about that.
As for big downloads killing your VoIP channels - the size of the file you're downloading does not matter. What matters is how many simultaneous downloads are happening at the same time. I.e., loading a large web page with lots of graphics is a lot worse than a single multi-GB DVD ISO.
In any case, you can play a little bit with bandwidth control and prioritisation, either via the Linux firewall, or via whatever proxy you happen to use (Squid), etc.
Now, if you're doing audio/video - that's something to worry about, bandwidth-wise.
Well, you only have one analog line, but you have a lot of VoIP "lines" over your broadband connection.
;-) Then hook up to VoIP providers, etc. Its flexibility is virtually unlimited.
A PBX @ home makes a lot of sense in conjunction with a DSL/cable link. Install maybe one or two analog phones on the PBX, but then deploy as many VoIP phones as you want - and not necessarily only in your house!
Well duh, it will be an "ongoing test" once millions of systems will start using the software.
Yeap.
But that's what the organizers of the contest are trying to prevent - someone, maybe, will stumble upon the bad guys' "secret exploit" and reveal it.
"Tell me, mr. Anderson, what good is it to have a nice clean bathroom, when you can't take a dump?"
:-)
Oh wait... oops, wrong movie!
Well, in that case, yes, i guess so, if they're used by the top-tier providers and whatnot.
I actually tested those appliances fairly thoroughly, and yes, they're good at killing SYN floods and stuff.
But what they don't solve and, indeed, what they cannot solve, no matter how smart, is the problem of sheer volume - the problem of bandwidth. If the attacker overwhelms your pipe, or your ISP's pipe, or your ISP's ISP's pipe, then mission accomplished.
You also have to have enough bandwidth to fight the attack, even if your servers can handle all those SYN packets per se.
Use remotely managed switches.
;-)
When a system starts flooding, identify it, then disable the port on the switch.
"Hi, we disabled your network connection because your system is infected with a virus and was attacking our network. We will re-enable your network connection after you'll clean up your system. Have a nice day."
Very effective.
you join them
mwahahahahaha!!!
You must still be living in a low-definition world. Come join us in the 21st century, then see how your precious MPEG-2 holds up.
:-P
It holds up pretty well, thanks, it's currently being used for HDTV distribution.
In any case, you seem to speak about future trends, i was speaking about the current situation. The manufacturers of those cards simply looked at the market NOW and made a decision. The decision was to go with MPEG2. It makes sense NOW.
Perhaps in the future the decision to use something else would make more sense.
You can store really spectacular program quality at as low as 8 Mbps; with MPEG-2, comparable program quality costs you 20 or 25 Mbps
You're either living in an ivory tower, or had the misfortune of using really crappy encoders.
10Mbps MPEG2 is pretty good for typical DVD content, or typical NTSC TV, if you use decent encoders. I watch a lot of 10Mbps MPEG2 content on TV and there's no quality loss that can be perceived; i also watch it on a high-quality computer monitor (the likes used by movie makers, it's an SGI monitor) and the artifacts cannot be seen when watching the show normally (yes, if you switch into hyper-analytical mode, they are visible, but if you're watching the SHOW, not the IMAGE, they simply vanish).
I have a feeling that this discussion could continue indefinitely, since i am speaking about reasonable decisions, while you seem to belong to the Seeker Of Perfection category (which seems quite populous in the "multimedia geek" group).
There's an extremely large installed base of DVD players which, all of them, are based on MPEG2. These cards encode directly to MPEG2 (actually, DVD-compatible MPEG2) because most of their users tend to record shows just to burn them to DVDs.
Capturing to MPEG4, then transcoding to MPEG2 will induce quality loss.
Also, the typical DVD MPEG2 bitrate is high enough so that there's essentialy no quality loss when encoding a typical TV show to DVD/MPEG2.
And no, the majority of normal people do not watch recorded TV shows on computers (where MPEG4 might make sense), they use DVD players for that. Hence, MPEG2.
Air2PC
The file size argument is irrelevant, the price for blanc media is very low anyway, regardless of which format you're using.