In The Netherlands the license fee is about to be scrapped. In future public broadcasting will be paid for by the taxpayer directly. I suspect this is because according to the European Treaty on Civil and Political Rights (or something like that) there is a 'freedom to transmit and receive signals'.
So a license fee is really a no-no. Also license fees for receivers smack just a bit too much like the licenses one required from the Nazi German occupier's government in 1940-1945.. Only Nazi sympathizers, who could be trusted not to listen to allied propaganda, were allowed to own radios..
Ow BTW, the BBC also has a few digital channels in the UK, BBC Choice and BBC News 24 are two I can think of right now. On the competing side there's a national Channel 5, and I think Rupert Murdoch's BskyB and ITV are also in the digital TV game.. (digital TV != HDTV alas)
Also the BBC's output has declined in quality ENORMOUSLY in recent years. Almost their entire output exists of Interior Decorating, Antiques Roadshow and Fly On The Wall Documentaries. No wonder people start wondering WTF they're paying for.. --
Ok, so you give legitimate broadcasters a public/private key and do authentication. Of course, that's subject to replay attacks. So, you must include timestamping. But then you must have a synchronized timebase in your radio. So you synchronize the clock over the air. But you have to authenticate the time-signal. So you use public key crypto..... etc.;-)
Ok ok, so the pirates must use the same frequency as the traffic people, but as long as there are no traffic jams, they won't be broadcasting, so no interference..
All the DVDs I've personally seen aren't at all that much better than VHS. (Better than VHS on NTSC perhaps? I wouldn't know, but VHS on PAL isn't noticably worse than DVD.) Wear and tear on tapes, that's the worst factor of VHS, but as a geeky kinda nerd that I am, NOTHING irritates me more than seeing those icky digital compression artefacts on DVD..
And DVD is still bog-standard lo-fi non-hdtv.. DVD could have been the medium to push HDTV (which I'd like, definition is SO much more important than wide screens). But it isn't. Ouch.
DVD is here to stay though, digital television is, too.. But for film? 1280*1024 is hardly impressive if you're lucky enough to have a 21" monitor.. Let alone the big screen..
I can think of one benefit: no wear and tear on the film copies they play at theaters.. Becasue it seems that unless you get to the absolute first showing, there are scratches and blots and stuff all over the picture.. Sigh..
"No one was ever dragged from their car and shot execution style by a pissed off video game cartel."
That's what microsoft WANTS you to believe;-))
(Cartel, monopoly, what's the difference?) --
Collecting E-mail adresses? For spam?
on
Win an AIBO
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· Score: 3
Wait.. I have to enter my own e-mail adresss, and the more other e-mail adresses I submit, the better my chances of winning? So they want to collect e-mail adresses? What for? I can see only one purpose, and it's not legitimate.. It's called SPAM.
Last week, The Netherlands saw what IIRC was the first shooting in a school in recorded history. The background was a family dispute, revenging the family honor, the Turkish background of the kid is basically blamed for this incident.
Yet our kids watch the same shows and movies, with the difference that they're shown earlier in the evening on tv, and rated far less strictly (The only ratings are all ages, 12 and 16. Violence that is rewarded or excessive gore goes to rating 16, as does pornographic sex, pretty much everything else is fair game).
Only now are young people perceived to become more violent, but the media and games have been the same for years. So obviously there is some other factor that's to blame. My favorite would be unbridled capitalism, the demise of solidarity, and the coming-soon demise of social services and welfare, forcing people to look out for themselves and only themselves. Etc. etc. The breakdown of the social fabric of society has actually been blamed in Dutch media. No solutions are at hand though -- smaller classrooms, taking care of grandpa, all the obvious things are preceived to take to much time, effort and money, both privately, as well as publicly.
So maybe these are the things to look out for. No wonder kids don't learn how to solve disputes non-violently if they never even socially interact with their own family, but only with the tv.. (Which isn't the tv's fault!)
The only real solution against counterfeiting is incorporating good securityfeatures in banknotes. Dutch currency has such security features.
You can see some published ones here. The 25 guilder note (about USD 12.50) includes most security features according to these pages, but not all features are published. Also the 10 guilder note (USD 5) includes some additional features, also found in 100 and 1000 guilder notes(!)
Features include:
Shaded Watermark
Intaglio printing (tangible raised ink)
Register gauge (patterns on back and frontside match up)
0.3 mm micro lettering (hard to read:)
Fluoresent fibres (light up under a blacklight)
0.2 mm micro lettering (even harder to read or print)
and finally: Shiny Parts! foil that turns black when copied, and "holographic" planchettes that copiers don't produce.
The Dutch National Bank distributes leaflets at banks whenever a new note is introduced, but also lists these features on its website.
Another feature, not yet mentioned, is the type of paper used, which is easily distinguished from photocopier paper. And is washer-resistent;-) However, unlike old US banknotes, the type of paper and ink aren't the chief anti-counterfeiting measures.
Also note that Intaglio printing also makes it easy for the blind to identify banknotes!
IMNSHO Dutch banknotes are the prettiest and best-designed banknotesy in the world, and I rather lament the fact that they will be replaced by the ugly, bad, Euro, in 2002.. --
You get a challenge. You type in the numbers into a nice little 'calculator' (or even, hold it to the screen where a Java applet is blinking rapidly -- so the calculator's lightsensor picks up the challenge automatically), and then you enter the response. I know of at least two Dutch banks who use this (ABN-AMRO and SNS).
Obviously the calculator contains a shared secret, so you would want it to be tamperresistant.
Also the calculator could be stolen and the owner might not be quick enough in discovering this and reporting it -- a username/password combo are used to counter that. Of course the odds of your key getting stolen are not that big, so security of the password itself is a lesser matter.
Also you'd want user/password on the users application and store data encrypted on the harddrive (ABN-AMRO and SNS do NOT do this, sigh), but if you don't want to ship an app, you can leave client-side security to the users themselves. After all if people are abusing the computer in their own home, they have a far wider problem to think about than just their medical data...
Encrypted filesystems should really be included with operating systems, anyway..
Ow, and of course, all comms should be encrypted. Validity of a certificate is quite easily established by shipping a fingerprint with the calculator via registered mail (or have clients pick those up in person), which should saveguard against man in the middle attacks..
The nice thing about calculator-type tokens is that you don't need a smart-card or swipe-card interface on your computer, plus it works stand-alone, and can be made tamperresitant (of, if you're to belief cryptocard.com 'tamperproof'). --
Nah... A webserver should be named www(.subdomain.domain.tld), but www should just be a CNAME with the box having its own distinct name too, so that you can plug in a new box, change the CNAME, and can still use both boxen using their original name..
Yes, autorun sucks. Besides, I absolutely HATE it when windows pop-up in front of all my other windows, changing focus as well.. Especially when I'm just typing in my password in an x-term, only to see it appear, in plain view of anyone, in some stupid text-box of a pop-up (or some app I just clicked on a second ago, but am not using yet -- multitasking)..
OTOH, if people want it, why not have a README or index.html pop up whenever you insert new (automounted) media? ~/.autorunrc ? Heving that choice isn't bad. (Having it switched on by default, and having to install a patch to remove it ('tweakUI') (or tampering with device drivers) is very, very bad, tho'..)
Or how about "Prey", and then sue the Discovery Channel whenwever they air a wild-life documentary...
Ah, I could go on and on... Litigation-heaven!!:-))
(Yeah, I know, she didn't sue, she complained to a regulatory body)
--
Re:At last, a credible story to scare my boss ...
on
Hotmail Cracked Badly
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· Score: 1
Does Windows2000 EFS come with source?
If not, how can you tell it does anything different than, say, using your (hashed) username as a password to encrypt your files?
Now, if people had the sourcecode for hotmail.com, this sploit would have surfaced - and died - a lot sooner.. Before it went into a stable release, public website thingy, for example..
Interestingly enough, when the People Who Do These Things decided to create an "internal market" in Europe, they decided to ditch duties on items exported between member states. Just like the single currency, this is a smart rip-off of the internal market that the US have.
Of course, sales-tax (and other duties) still applies : but it is payable in the state where the seller resides.
Also, this only applies to goods for "personal use".
I personally don't see the point of sales-tax. If it didn't exist, you'd pay more income tax, but the way things are, you have a higher income, but you can't use it to buy more with it because it's too expensive (in The Netherlands sales-tax is 17.5%)[1]. So if you can't spend it, save it, right? But interest-rates are supposed to make you want to save (at least that's what they say on the news), not taxes.. Darn economists..
[1] income tax can be as high as 60%, but for most people is about 40% (that's excluding pensions, social security etc, which are paid before taxes, so in total The Man takes something like two-thirds..)
(Oh, I suddenly get where they got the within-US thing from : it's not ok to tax things being exported from a state, but it is ok to tax anything being imported into a(nother) US state.. )
The difference between the difference between Netscape and MSIE and the difference between *nix and Windows (NT) is what I call striking..
Somehow, when Microsoft throws incredible amounts of money and manpower at making a browser to be given away for free (albeit to kill off competition), they can make a top-notch product that performs well[1], but in the OS field they can't....
Maybe they felt threatened in the browser-market.. Threatened, say, by not having a monopoly?
[1] 'Well', as in 'speed', not security etc. Though in most cases the OS makes MSIE dangerous, not MSIE bugs themselves...
If you make a derivative work of non-GPL code, for example, Microsoft code, the owner will sue you to hell.
The GPL merely insures that code that has been made free, remains free -- it cannot even be incorporated in a non-free program. This is a Good Thing. If it weren't for this, Microsoft would steal all our goodies, bloat 'em up, blow GNU out of the market, and the resulting products could not even be improved by the people who made them in the first place. Not a nice scenario.
The GPL does not infect your code, you do, by being lazy and using some-one elses code. (Though, in the open source world, being lazy is a Good Thing)
How in the name of fsck do you waive a constitutional right? How in the name of fsck do you waive a human right? Check the Declaration. You can't.
And what is up with having to choose between either a fair trial, or a speedy one?? Do you also have to choose whether your punishment is either cruel or unusual?
Do not even make jokes about our constitutional, political, civil and human rights, because it ain't funny.
Decrypting is incredibly trivial ; in order to play the DVD or SDMI the playing device or software decrypts it anyway. You just have to find out how, either by reverse-engineering or social engineering (i.e. find some-one who knows to tell you without signing an NDA..)
Once the algorithm and key (remember, the playing device must have both to play the DVD in the first place![1]) are known, the so-called encryption is worthless, and anyone can circumvent it, even converting DVDs from one region to another, or to other formats, like MPEG.
This is a great example of security-through-obscurity. Watch and learn.
[1] which also means that retrieving the decrypted data from some part of the device or software should be trivial. Raw output has gotta go somewhere.
Oh, I just LOVE those classification guidelines.. Only things containing 'abhorrant' (?) sexual activities and detailed instruction of 'proscribed' drugs (so not heroine, no doctor proscibes heroin, but it does cover real medicines, since they are proscribed by doctors, ahem) are 'refused classification', but if someting is RC, no-one is allowed to see it.
So how do you know it actually does contain abhorrant sexual activities, or maybe it's just a video with a political message 'they' (Tasmanian politicians mainly, I believe) don't want you to know about.. For instance, an anti-cencorship message. Ahem. More conspiracies any-one?
Legally sane adults (i.e. voters) should be allowed to see and discuss anything. Full stop. And if politicians want to make life more difficult for kids ('protecting' them), they should check with the parents first. That's what they're there for. Duh.
Slashdot Mirror
In The Netherlands the license fee is about to be scrapped. In future public broadcasting will be paid for by the taxpayer directly. I suspect this is because according to the European Treaty on Civil and Political Rights (or something like that) there is a 'freedom to transmit and receive signals'.
So a license fee is really a no-no. Also license fees for receivers smack just a bit too much like the licenses one required from the Nazi German occupier's government in 1940-1945.. Only Nazi sympathizers, who could be trusted not to listen to allied propaganda, were allowed to own radios..
Ow BTW, the BBC also has a few digital channels in the UK, BBC Choice and BBC News 24 are two I can think of right now. On the competing side there's a national Channel 5, and I think Rupert Murdoch's BskyB and ITV are also in the digital TV game.. (digital TV != HDTV alas)
Also the BBC's output has declined in quality ENORMOUSLY in recent years. Almost their entire output exists of Interior Decorating, Antiques Roadshow and Fly On The Wall Documentaries. No wonder people start wondering WTF they're paying for..
--
Ok, so you give legitimate broadcasters a public/private key and do authentication. Of course, that's subject to replay attacks. So, you must include timestamping. But then you must have a synchronized timebase in your radio. So you synchronize the clock over the air. But you have to authenticate the time-signal. So you use public key crypto..... etc. ;-)
Ok ok, so the pirates must use the same frequency as the traffic people, but as long as there are no traffic jams, they won't be broadcasting, so no interference..
--
Maybe Compaq wants to use stinger as the alternative for WinCE on handhelds and other small non-PC devices?
Be-v-Ce?
--
All the DVDs I've personally seen aren't at all that much better than VHS. (Better than VHS on NTSC perhaps? I wouldn't know, but VHS on PAL isn't noticably worse than DVD.) Wear and tear on tapes, that's the worst factor of VHS, but as a geeky kinda nerd that I am, NOTHING irritates me more than seeing those icky digital compression artefacts on DVD..
And DVD is still bog-standard lo-fi non-hdtv.. DVD could have been the medium to push HDTV (which I'd like, definition is SO much more important than wide screens). But it isn't. Ouch.
DVD is here to stay though, digital television is, too.. But for film? 1280*1024 is hardly impressive if you're lucky enough to have a 21" monitor.. Let alone the big screen..
I can think of one benefit: no wear and tear on the film copies they play at theaters.. Becasue it seems that unless you get to the absolute first showing, there are scratches and blots and stuff all over the picture.. Sigh..
I guess things will never be perfect..
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That's what microsoft WANTS you to believe ;-))
(Cartel, monopoly, what's the difference?)
--
Wait.. I have to enter my own e-mail adresss, and the more other e-mail adresses I submit, the better my chances of winning? So they want to collect e-mail adresses? What for? I can see only one purpose, and it's not legitimate.. It's called SPAM.
yech!
--
Yet our kids watch the same shows and movies, with the difference that they're shown earlier in the evening on tv, and rated far less strictly (The only ratings are all ages, 12 and 16. Violence that is rewarded or excessive gore goes to rating 16, as does pornographic sex, pretty much everything else is fair game).
Only now are young people perceived to become more violent, but the media and games have been the same for years. So obviously there is some other factor that's to blame. My favorite would be unbridled capitalism, the demise of solidarity, and the coming-soon demise of social services and welfare, forcing people to look out for themselves and only themselves. Etc. etc. The breakdown of the social fabric of society has actually been blamed in Dutch media. No solutions are at hand though -- smaller classrooms, taking care of grandpa, all the obvious things are preceived to take to much time, effort and money, both privately, as well as publicly.
So maybe these are the things to look out for. No wonder kids don't learn how to solve disputes non-violently if they never even socially interact with their own family, but only with the tv.. (Which isn't the tv's fault!)
Food for thought?
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You can see some published ones here. The 25 guilder note (about USD 12.50) includes most security features according to these pages, but not all features are published. Also the 10 guilder note (USD 5) includes some additional features, also found in 100 and 1000 guilder notes(!)
Features include :
- Shaded Watermark
- Intaglio printing (tangible raised ink)
- Register gauge (patterns on back and frontside match up)
- 0.3 mm micro lettering (hard to read
:) - Fluoresent fibres (light up under a blacklight)
- 0.2 mm micro lettering (even harder to read or print)
- and finally: Shiny Parts! foil that turns black when copied, and "holographic" planchettes that copiers don't produce.
The Dutch National Bank distributes leaflets at banks whenever a new note is introduced, but also lists these features on its website.Another feature, not yet mentioned, is the type of paper used, which is easily distinguished from photocopier paper. And is washer-resistent ;-) However, unlike old US banknotes, the type of paper and ink aren't the chief anti-counterfeiting measures.
Also note that Intaglio printing also makes it easy for the blind to identify banknotes!
IMNSHO Dutch banknotes are the prettiest and best-designed banknotesy in the world, and I rather lament the fact that they will be replaced by the ugly, bad, Euro, in 2002..
--
Obviously the calculator contains a shared secret, so you would want it to be tamperresistant.
Also the calculator could be stolen and the owner might not be quick enough in discovering this and reporting it -- a username/password combo are used to counter that. Of course the odds of your key getting stolen are not that big, so security of the password itself is a lesser matter.
Also you'd want user/password on the users application and store data encrypted on the harddrive (ABN-AMRO and SNS do NOT do this, sigh), but if you don't want to ship an app, you can leave client-side security to the users themselves. After all if people are abusing the computer in their own home, they have a far wider problem to think about than just their medical data...
Encrypted filesystems should really be included with operating systems, anyway..
Ow, and of course, all comms should be encrypted. Validity of a certificate is quite easily established by shipping a fingerprint with the calculator via registered mail (or have clients pick those up in person), which should saveguard against man in the middle attacks..
The nice thing about calculator-type tokens is that you don't need a smart-card or swipe-card interface on your computer, plus it works stand-alone, and can be made tamperresitant (of, if you're to belief cryptocard.com 'tamperproof').
--
Two Words:
:-))
Mulder. Scully.
After all, they're both quitting the X-Files, so Paramount can just pay them obscene amounts of money and steal them!
--
Nah... A webserver should be named www(.subdomain.domain.tld), but www should just be a CNAME with the box having its own distinct name too, so that you can plug in a new box, change the CNAME, and can still use both boxen using their original name..
And so on for all possible services you run..
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So they make chips to ENcrypt things? But since they don't make chips to DEcrypt, they'll never be able to read their own stuff!! :-)
--
OTOH, if people want it, why not have a README or index.html pop up whenever you insert new (automounted) media? ~/.autorunrc ? Heving that choice isn't bad. (Having it switched on by default, and having to install a patch to remove it ('tweakUI') (or tampering with device drivers) is very, very bad, tho'..)
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So that's why your comment is so short? :-)
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Or.. Panda, and sue the World Wildlife Fund!
Or how about "Prey", and then sue the Discovery Channel whenwever they air a wild-life documentary...
Ah, I could go on and on... Litigation-heaven!! :-))
(Yeah, I know, she didn't sue, she complained to a regulatory body)
--
If not, how can you tell it does anything different than, say, using your (hashed) username as a password to encrypt your files?
Now, if people had the sourcecode for hotmail.com, this sploit would have surfaced - and died - a lot sooner.. Before it went into a stable release, public website thingy, for example..
--
GPL World Domination any-one?
--
OOPS
--
Of course, sales-tax (and other duties) still applies : but it is payable in the state where the seller resides.
Also, this only applies to goods for "personal use".
I personally don't see the point of sales-tax. If it didn't exist, you'd pay more income tax, but the way things are, you have a higher income, but you can't use it to buy more with it because it's too expensive (in The Netherlands sales-tax is 17.5%)[1]. So if you can't spend it, save it, right? But interest-rates are supposed to make you want to save (at least that's what they say on the news), not taxes.. Darn economists..
[1] income tax can be as high as 60%, but for most people is about 40% (that's excluding pensions, social security etc, which are paid before taxes, so in total The Man takes something like two-thirds..)
(Oh, I suddenly get where they got the within-US thing from : it's not ok to tax things being exported from a state, but it is ok to tax anything being imported into a(nother) US state.. )
--
Somehow, when Microsoft throws incredible amounts of money and manpower at making a browser to be given away for free (albeit to kill off competition), they can make a top-notch product that performs well[1], but in the OS field they can't....
Maybe they felt threatened in the browser-market.. Threatened, say, by not having a monopoly?
[1] 'Well', as in 'speed', not security etc. Though in most cases the OS makes MSIE dangerous, not MSIE bugs themselves...
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yuck
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The GPL merely insures that code that has been made free, remains free -- it cannot even be incorporated in a non-free program. This is a Good Thing. If it weren't for this, Microsoft would steal all our goodies, bloat 'em up, blow GNU out of the market, and the resulting products could not even be improved by the people who made them in the first place. Not a nice scenario.
The GPL does not infect your code, you do, by being lazy and using some-one elses code.
(Though, in the open source world, being lazy is a Good Thing)
--
And what is up with having to choose between either a fair trial, or a speedy one?? Do you also have to choose whether your punishment is either cruel or unusual?
Do not even make jokes about our constitutional, political, civil and human rights, because it ain't funny.
Here's two cents, go buy a clue.
--
Once the algorithm and key (remember, the playing device must have both to play the DVD in the first place![1]) are known, the so-called encryption is worthless, and anyone can circumvent it, even converting DVDs from one region to another, or to other formats, like MPEG.
This is a great example of security-through-obscurity. Watch and learn.
[1] which also means that retrieving the decrypted data from some part of the device or software should be trivial. Raw output has gotta go somewhere.
--
So how do you know it actually does contain abhorrant sexual activities, or maybe it's just a video with a political message 'they' (Tasmanian politicians mainly, I believe) don't want you to know about.. For instance, an anti-cencorship message. Ahem. More conspiracies any-one?
Legally sane adults (i.e. voters) should be allowed to see and discuss anything. Full stop. And if politicians want to make life more difficult for kids ('protecting' them), they should check with the parents first. That's what they're there for. Duh.
--