Whether that means NSA et al. have working attacks on well-known cryptographic systems in use today is anyone's guess. We simply don't know. Logically, it is thus not safe to assume that they don't.
If someone were to tell you a certain algorithm could be broken you would probably shop around for something more secure. Now if that person who told you the algorithm could be broken was trying to convince you to use it anyway, you would be suspicious of that person, wouldn't you? Now imagine if that same person told you a certain algorithm could be broken and tried to shove it down your throat. What would you do then?
A. Obey.
B. Use something widely known to be more secure.
C. Have an end-justifies-the-means attitude and use something widely known to be more secure.
If you answered A, you're a pink sheep.
If you answered B, you're a criminal.
If you answered C, you're a terrorist.
If the government gives the public A and forbids B, they will end up throwing a lot of money at trying to crack C. The best thing to do is let the public have B and not let it out that B can be cracked.
The gun people have a saying ``If guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns.'' They're right, in a general sense, but this catch-cry is a two-edged sword. If guns (or truly secure encryption) is outlawed, ordinary people who must use them for their reasonable daily business will be, by definition, outlaws.
And if a new Gestapo were ever to go door to door and confiscate all guns, they might as well confiscate all machine shop equipment, too, since gun barrels, parts, etc. can be fabricated at machine shops. You think thousands of computer programmers getting laid off from their dot-bomb jobs slowed the economy? Imagine how fast and hard America's economy would crash if no machine shop work could be done.
If strong encryption were outlawed and the new Gestapo were to tap communications and discover an algorithm they can't break, they won't bother feeding it to a new Colossus to try and crack it, they'll simply kick the door in, and confiscate all computers. But it's too late, the message has been sent. Essentially what they did was to take the machine shop away after it made the guns.
Then the message telling the recipient how to blow up Gestapo headquarters will be sent via one-time pad over shortwave radio (remember "numbers" stations??)
Basic moral to the story, where there's a will, there's a way.
Okay... Somebody brief me here... WTF is "Black and Tans" or "Blank and Tans" or whatever? A swill beer? A cheap rot-gut brand of whisky? Mixing whisky and beer (a.k.a. a boilermaker)?
Suppose you had a file that you knew was encrypted. Is there a way to analyze the data and at least tell which algorithm was used (e.g. Triple-DES or Blowfish), whether or not you have the intention (or computing horsepower) to crack it?
Encryption algorithms don't hide secrets from people, people hide secrets from people.
Just imagine the implications if firearms and ammunition could be replicated and distributed as easily as programs like GnuPG can. Gun laws would be moot (like they aren't already!), and in a sense the Second Amendment would be like the GPL, because who's gonna stop someone from having a GPL'ed piece of software?
If liberals treated the Second Amendment the way they treat the rest of the Constitution, everybody would be required to own a gun, ESPECIALLY criminals.
I have seen some stories about how Usama bin Ladin uses messages embedded in jpgs and posts coded messages on porn sites and sports chat sites.
Last night, I found thousands and thousands of posts on alt.binaries.misc with the message header "***** make kaka here now." with ***** being replaced with names (e.g. Bob, Skunkie, Vrodok, etc. No, Osama wasn't one of the names.) I tried to open a couple up, and they contained gibberish unlike the regular base64 coding. Encrypted messages? Anybody else seen these? Does anyone know how to decode these? Maybe it's just a coincidence and it's kiddie pr0n, but maybe it's not. Somebody definitely make kaka here now.
The article says the pulp from recycled secret documents is often sold to tissue manufacturers. ROFL! The saying "Wipe thine ass with what is written" has just gotten even funnier!
In 1988, football fans literally caused an earthquake when Louisiana State University's quarterback threw a touchdown pass on a fourth-and-nine with 1 minute, 41 seconds remaining in the game, to beat Auburn 7-6. 79,431 cheering fans inside Tiger Stadium ("Death Valley") jumping to their feet all at once caused an earthquake that registered around 3 or so on the seismograph inside the nearby geological sciences building.
But in the years since, the seismograph has fallen to the budget axe, and Tiger Stadium has been expanded to hold over 90,000. So if a "squeaker" of a game like that ever was to happen again, the resulting earthquake may topple the Louisiana state capitol building and ring bells in Alabama, but no one on campus will know how strong it was...
One theory on Gulf War Syndrome I've heard is that when pallet loads of diet sodas were flown out and left out in the desert heat, the artificial sweetner aspartame (Nutrasweet) in the sodas decomposed into methanol, yes, wood alcohol. There's not enough in a single can to cause any immediate effects, but the effects of methanol poisoning is cumulative, causing symptoms that are very similar to fibromyalgia or chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS). That's just a theory, I don't know whether or not any study has been done on those who suffer from GWS to see if they drank a lot of diet sodas while they were over there.
But another theory from the cDc website http://www.cultdeadcow.com/cDc_files/cDc-0355.txt is that GWS is caused by all the smoke from burning the shit from latrines...
Remember the scene in the movie Escape from Los Angeles where at the end they set off "bombs" that didn't kill anybody but instead destroyed all electronic devices, computers, and communications networks of the world by a huge burst of radio waves? These weapons are real, and exist today, according to a recent article in Popular Mechanics.
Electromagnetic pulse is what kills all your electronics whenever lightning strikes close by. In the 1960's, tests of atomic bombs exploding at very high altitudes over the South Pacific would disrupt communications worldwide and cause power outages as far away as Hawaii, and the cause was found to be an intense burst of radio frequency noise when the bomb exploded.
These effects were studied, and new electronic warfare weapons were built that could produce electromagnetic pulses to disable the electronic devices of the enemy without using atomic bombs. Of course, the Russians were also onto this, and captured MIGs were found to contain miniature vacuum tubes in their flight control systems, since they were immune to the type of electromagnetic pulse that would destroy the P-N junctions and CMOS layers of semiconductor electronics.
According to the article, electromagnetic pulse weapons can be made that are millions of times stronger than lightning bolts, and will destroy all electronics and even melt electrical wiring, no matter how much surge protection is used. All engines will cease to run (except maybe diesel engines with all mechanical controls), and all airplanes will be unflyable. Power grids will be totally wiped out. Even small items such as pagers, PDAs and calculators will be useless, even if enclosed in a Faraday cage. Better save those slide rules and Underwood typewriters.
While these weapons are harmless to life and very environmentally friendly in the short run, people will have to pitch out all their useless electronics, thus filling up the landfills very quick.
Slide rule? How 'bout a late 1960's vintage desktop calculator complete with neon "nixie tube" number display. Or if space doesn't permit, a 1972 vintage HP-35 pocket calculator.
My sister worked in the accounting department of a large hospital, and downstairs the gift shop occasionally sold large glass vases containing a "stopper" made of a water plant rooted in colorful marbles, and the plants roots dangled in the water in the vase, which contained a betta. The gift shop always sold out of these quickly, and I found out why when I went to visit her one day. She and half the other accountants had one of these plant/aquarium combos in each of their cubicles.
So the thread drifts from armories to blacksmiths to tool and die makers and other professions where knowledge of metallurgy is essential: How would all this compare to making tools? I always understood forged wrenches were better than cast ones, and broke a few el-cheapo cast pot-metal wrenches in my time. Imagine carpentry tools made of Damascus steel, how would they fare against say, titanium coated drill bits and carbide tipped saw blades? And in oil refineries, the work crews often use tools made of a non-sparking brass alloy to prevent explosions in areas with flammable vapors in the air. How do they get brass as hard as drop-forged steel? (This reminds me of the copper tools used by the Egyptians that were supposedly as hard as steel- how could they carve huge granite and limestone blocks with copper tools?)
I'm using Win98 with @home, and Zone Alarm as the firewall. I usually get maybe 10-20 hits a day, but just like everyone else, when I saw this article I pulled up the log and I was banged over 400 times within the course of 4 hours, the vast majority coming from 65.2.x.x. I wouldn't be concerned, but what if there's a crIII worm that does affect Win 98 machines? Luckily I have Linux on a second partition, and I even got @home working with it. (Just in the course of typing this message I got hit another 5 times, and the receive light is flickering like a worn out neon light.)
The shop classes I took as a budding geek in high school were always well stocked with good trash. The AC/Refrigeration class was full of refrigerators found along the road that the class repaired and sold for profit, and the computer science class was well stocked with old computers (mainly from the days of TRS-80's and Apple II's- I was an 80's teen). The A/V room had surplus broken U-Matic videocassette recorders (Remember those? U-Matic was to video tapes what 8" floppies were to computers. These tapes were 3/4 inch wide in a cartridge the size of a textbook.) I ended up carting away old copiers, green monochrome monitors, mechanical adding machines, etc. one day when I helped my old shop teacher clean out the storeroom. Being blessed with a shed in the back yard, I started scrapping everything for motors, light bulbs, etc. I even removed individual components from circuit boards with a squeeze-bulb desoldering iron from RatShack, and categorized them and squirreled them away in plastic storage bins. Is that obsessive-compulsive or what?
AMF Harley-Davidson and Commodore Amiga
on
An Amiga Round-up
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· Score: 1
Wasn't there a time not too long ago when people thought AMF Harley-Davidson motorcycles were lousy rattle-traps that only hippies rode? And the only thing that kept them from going completely bust was a niche market, i.e. police departments? Well, in 1981 Harley Davidson bought out the rights to the name leaving AMF to make nothing but bowling alley equipment, and managed to re-establish itself without the name being owned by a huge conglomerate. Kinda sounds like the story of the Amiga name being owned by Commodore, then Escom, then Gateway, with a niche market, i.e. video production keeping them afloat. But now they're on their own. As the old Harley aficionados used to say, "The eagle soars alone."
Now look at Harley-Davidson. They're publicly traded, the company is a huge success, and people wait months for a new bike to be delivered. Police departments auction off older models for more than what they paid for them in the first place. Harley owners often form clubs and socialize with other Harley owners. This reminds me of the social gatherings centered around the Amiga: User groups, demo parties, etc.
The fact that they're still churning out updated OSes to run on hardware that hasn't been in production for almost a decade says something about the dedication of the company (and the robustness of the hardware.)
So what if Harleys have oversized, air cooled, out of balance engines that any Kawasaki Ninja can run circles around. People still buy them. The name has survived, and so has the Amiga name. I hope their future is as bright as Harley-Davidson.
On the subject of ammonia refrigerators, those Miracle-Gro feeders where you fill up the plastic canister with powdered Miracle-Gro and attach it to a hose get very cold when water starts mixing with the powder. This is because Miracle-Gro is mostly ammonium nitrate, which undergoes an endothermic reaction when mixed with water. There are instant cold packs available which contain a bit of ammonium nitrate and a small vial of water. Bend and snap (like a chem-light) and the water mixes with the ammonium nitrate and there you have it- instant cold. Heating ammonium nitrate drives the water off so it becomes solid again, and the process can be repeated. I think someone once developed an adsorption cycle refrigerator that used ammonium nitrate and water as the refrigerant.
Down in southern Louisiana, all dem Cajuns jus' love to boil dem mudbugs, and they do it with the simplest burner possible, often made from an old tire rim to which legs have been welded and a few pieces of iron rebar have been welded to the top to set a huge aluminum pot (or galvanized washtub) on.
The burner is made out of a sawed off chunk of thick black pipe with a smaller piece of pipe centered in the bottom with a pipe cap on the end and a hole drilled in the pipe cap. This makes a simple, yet effective venturi burner.
Fill the wash tub with water, hook it to a propane tank (use a looong hose and an adjustible regulator), light the burner and turn it on full blast. (If the pipe ain't glowing orange hot you ain't got the gas turned on enough, yet too much gas will cause it to flame out.) A standard gas grill sized tank oughta be enough to boil two sacks.
Then dump in lotsa salt and cayenne pepper, onions, potatoes, corn, garlic and lemons. (See recipe at http://www.neworleansweb.org/recipe4.html).
By the time the water's boiling, there oughta be a quarter inch thick layer of frost on the tank from that south Louisiana humidity, so go ahead and stick the tank in the other wash tub, you know, the one that was full of beer and ice, but now is only half full of warm beer and water because someone forgot to get an extra bag of ice.
Buzz, ring, honk, ahooga, anything but EEEEEEE
on
The Sound of Safety?
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· Score: 1
The cell phone ring has replaced fingernails on a chalkboard as the most annoying sound in a classroom. I'd like to see cell phones incorporate small analog buzzers. A 300-400 Hz "meeep" is much better on the ears than a hollow, tinny, high frequency piezoelectric squeaker. Actually any lower frequency sound would be more easily pinpointed because it travels through objects that would muffle or reflect high frequency sounds, e.g. clothing. I once had an old pager whose vibrating motor broke loose from its mount and it rattled loose inside the case, making a razz like the buzzer motor in the old "Operation" game. I found that sound to be just as easily heard yet less annoying than the beeper screech.
One of the things they cited was the fact that people couldn't avoid emergency vehicles because they were unsure as to where the sound was coming from.
What's even worse is when jackass radio commercial producers incorporate siren sounds into advertisements ("WEEEOOOWEEEOOOWEEEOOO THE SALE AT BIG BOB'S CAR LOT IS SO HOT WE HAD TO CALL THE FIRE DEPARTMENT!!!!!") and you pull over to let the invisible fire truck go by.
According to The CSound Book (http://mitpress.mit.edu/e-books/csound/fpage/pub/ csbook/csbook.html), pink noise is noise in which the power density decreases 3 dB per octave with increasing frequency (density proportional to 1/f) over a finite frequency range. Each octave contains the same amount of power.
Re:Ever wonder why a song wo't get out of your hea
on
The Sound of Safety?
·
· Score: 1
It's the Internal Walkman, according to Project Galactic Guide (http://www.galactic-guide.com/articles/6R54.html) . The Internal Walkman can be a source of frustration, especially after a trip to Disney World, where upon leaving you keep deliberately smashing your head against creosote covered telephone poles trying to rid the endless replaying of "It's a small world after all" on the Internal Walkman. The only way to rid your mind of such torture is to listen to something even worse, e.g. the "Popcorn" song.
Slashdot Mirror
Whether that means NSA et al. have working attacks on well-known cryptographic systems in use today is anyone's guess. We simply don't know. Logically, it is thus not safe to assume that they don't.
If someone were to tell you a certain algorithm could be broken you would probably shop around for something more secure. Now if that person who told you the algorithm could be broken was trying to convince you to use it anyway, you would be suspicious of that person, wouldn't you? Now imagine if that same person told you a certain algorithm could be broken and tried to shove it down your throat. What would you do then?
A. Obey.
B. Use something widely known to be more secure.
C. Have an end-justifies-the-means attitude and use something widely known to be more secure.
If you answered A, you're a pink sheep.
If you answered B, you're a criminal.
If you answered C, you're a terrorist.
If the government gives the public A and forbids B, they will end up throwing a lot of money at trying to crack C. The best thing to do is let the public have B and not let it out that B can be cracked.
The gun people have a saying ``If guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns.'' They're right, in a general sense, but this catch-cry is a two-edged sword. If guns (or truly secure encryption) is outlawed, ordinary people who must use them for their reasonable daily business will be, by definition, outlaws.
And if a new Gestapo were ever to go door to door and confiscate all guns, they might as well confiscate all machine shop equipment, too, since gun barrels, parts, etc. can be fabricated at machine shops. You think thousands of computer programmers getting laid off from their dot-bomb jobs slowed the economy? Imagine how fast and hard America's economy would crash if no machine shop work could be done.
If strong encryption were outlawed and the new Gestapo were to tap communications and discover an algorithm they can't break, they won't bother feeding it to a new Colossus to try and crack it, they'll simply kick the door in, and confiscate all computers. But it's too late, the message has been sent. Essentially what they did was to take the machine shop away after it made the guns.
Then the message telling the recipient how to blow up Gestapo headquarters will be sent via one-time pad over shortwave radio (remember "numbers" stations??)
Basic moral to the story, where there's a will, there's a way.
it took way to much time to try to save the people.
Yeah, that's what Saddam Hussein said, too.
Clubs/Bars -> dancing -> drinking -> SEX
Or Clubs/Bars -> drinking -> "dancing" -> making ass of self -> going home and spanking monkey
is what usually happens to socially clueless people like me. So on Saturdays it's usually:
fat pipe -> alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.* -> spank monkey -> save $$$ to blow on latest & greatest hardware.
Okay... Somebody brief me here... WTF is "Black and Tans" or "Blank and Tans" or whatever? A swill beer? A cheap rot-gut brand of whisky? Mixing whisky and beer (a.k.a. a boilermaker)?
Suppose you had a file that you knew was encrypted. Is there a way to analyze the data and at least tell which algorithm was used (e.g. Triple-DES or Blowfish), whether or not you have the intention (or computing horsepower) to crack it?
Encryption algorithms don't hide secrets from people, people hide secrets from people.
Just imagine the implications if firearms and ammunition could be replicated and distributed as easily as programs like GnuPG can. Gun laws would be moot (like they aren't already!), and in a sense the Second Amendment would be like the GPL, because who's gonna stop someone from having a GPL'ed piece of software?
If liberals treated the Second Amendment the way they treat the rest of the Constitution, everybody would be required to own a gun, ESPECIALLY criminals.
I have seen some stories about how Usama bin Ladin uses messages embedded in jpgs and posts coded messages on porn sites and sports chat sites.
Last night, I found thousands and thousands of posts on alt.binaries.misc with the message header "***** make kaka here now." with ***** being replaced with names (e.g. Bob, Skunkie, Vrodok, etc. No, Osama wasn't one of the names.) I tried to open a couple up, and they contained gibberish unlike the regular base64 coding. Encrypted messages? Anybody else seen these? Does anyone know how to decode these? Maybe it's just a coincidence and it's kiddie pr0n, but maybe it's not. Somebody definitely make kaka here now.
The article says the pulp from recycled secret documents is often sold to tissue manufacturers. ROFL! The saying "Wipe thine ass with what is written" has just gotten even funnier!
But in the years since, the seismograph has fallen to the budget axe, and Tiger Stadium has been expanded to hold over 90,000. So if a "squeaker" of a game like that ever was to happen again, the resulting earthquake may topple the Louisiana state capitol building and ring bells in Alabama, but no one on campus will know how strong it was...
But another theory from the cDc website http://www.cultdeadcow.com/cDc_files/cDc-0355.txt is that GWS is caused by all the smoke from burning the shit from latrines...
Electromagnetic pulse is what kills all your electronics whenever lightning strikes close by. In the 1960's, tests of atomic bombs exploding at very high altitudes over the South Pacific would disrupt communications worldwide and cause power outages as far away as Hawaii, and the cause was found to be an intense burst of radio frequency noise when the bomb exploded.
These effects were studied, and new electronic warfare weapons were built that could produce electromagnetic pulses to disable the electronic devices of the enemy without using atomic bombs. Of course, the Russians were also onto this, and captured MIGs were found to contain miniature vacuum tubes in their flight control systems, since they were immune to the type of electromagnetic pulse that would destroy the P-N junctions and CMOS layers of semiconductor electronics.
According to the article, electromagnetic pulse weapons can be made that are millions of times stronger than lightning bolts, and will destroy all electronics and even melt electrical wiring, no matter how much surge protection is used. All engines will cease to run (except maybe diesel engines with all mechanical controls), and all airplanes will be unflyable. Power grids will be totally wiped out. Even small items such as pagers, PDAs and calculators will be useless, even if enclosed in a Faraday cage. Better save those slide rules and Underwood typewriters.
While these weapons are harmless to life and very environmentally friendly in the short run, people will have to pitch out all their useless electronics, thus filling up the landfills very quick.
Then I guess I ain't normal. I can't keep a spider plant alive for nothin'. Amazingly enough, I don't have any problem with african violets.
Slide rule? How 'bout a late 1960's vintage desktop calculator complete with neon "nixie tube" number display. Or if space doesn't permit, a 1972 vintage HP-35 pocket calculator.
My sister worked in the accounting department of a large hospital, and downstairs the gift shop occasionally sold large glass vases containing a "stopper" made of a water plant rooted in colorful marbles, and the plants roots dangled in the water in the vase, which contained a betta. The gift shop always sold out of these quickly, and I found out why when I went to visit her one day. She and half the other accountants had one of these plant/aquarium combos in each of their cubicles.
So the thread drifts from armories to blacksmiths to tool and die makers and other professions where knowledge of metallurgy is essential: How would all this compare to making tools? I always understood forged wrenches were better than cast ones, and broke a few el-cheapo cast pot-metal wrenches in my time. Imagine carpentry tools made of Damascus steel, how would they fare against say, titanium coated drill bits and carbide tipped saw blades? And in oil refineries, the work crews often use tools made of a non-sparking brass alloy to prevent explosions in areas with flammable vapors in the air. How do they get brass as hard as drop-forged steel? (This reminds me of the copper tools used by the Egyptians that were supposedly as hard as steel- how could they carve huge granite and limestone blocks with copper tools?)
I'm using Win98 with @home, and Zone Alarm as the firewall. I usually get maybe 10-20 hits a day, but just like everyone else, when I saw this article I pulled up the log and I was banged over 400 times within the course of 4 hours, the vast majority coming from 65.2.x.x. I wouldn't be concerned, but what if there's a crIII worm that does affect Win 98 machines? Luckily I have Linux on a second partition, and I even got @home working with it. (Just in the course of typing this message I got hit another 5 times, and the receive light is flickering like a worn out neon light.)
The shop classes I took as a budding geek in high school were always well stocked with good trash. The AC/Refrigeration class was full of refrigerators found along the road that the class repaired and sold for profit, and the computer science class was well stocked with old computers (mainly from the days of TRS-80's and Apple II's- I was an 80's teen). The A/V room had surplus broken U-Matic videocassette recorders (Remember those? U-Matic was to video tapes what 8" floppies were to computers. These tapes were 3/4 inch wide in a cartridge the size of a textbook.) I ended up carting away old copiers, green monochrome monitors, mechanical adding machines, etc. one day when I helped my old shop teacher clean out the storeroom. Being blessed with a shed in the back yard, I started scrapping everything for motors, light bulbs, etc. I even removed individual components from circuit boards with a squeeze-bulb desoldering iron from RatShack, and categorized them and squirreled them away in plastic storage bins. Is that obsessive-compulsive or what?
Now look at Harley-Davidson. They're publicly traded, the company is a huge success, and people wait months for a new bike to be delivered. Police departments auction off older models for more than what they paid for them in the first place. Harley owners often form clubs and socialize with other Harley owners. This reminds me of the social gatherings centered around the Amiga: User groups, demo parties, etc.
The fact that they're still churning out updated OSes to run on hardware that hasn't been in production for almost a decade says something about the dedication of the company (and the robustness of the hardware.)
So what if Harleys have oversized, air cooled, out of balance engines that any Kawasaki Ninja can run circles around. People still buy them. The name has survived, and so has the Amiga name. I hope their future is as bright as Harley-Davidson.
On the subject of ammonia refrigerators, those Miracle-Gro feeders where you fill up the plastic canister with powdered Miracle-Gro and attach it to a hose get very cold when water starts mixing with the powder. This is because Miracle-Gro is mostly ammonium nitrate, which undergoes an endothermic reaction when mixed with water. There are instant cold packs available which contain a bit of ammonium nitrate and a small vial of water. Bend and snap (like a chem-light) and the water mixes with the ammonium nitrate and there you have it- instant cold. Heating ammonium nitrate drives the water off so it becomes solid again, and the process can be repeated. I think someone once developed an adsorption cycle refrigerator that used ammonium nitrate and water as the refrigerant.
The burner is made out of a sawed off chunk of thick black pipe with a smaller piece of pipe centered in the bottom with a pipe cap on the end and a hole drilled in the pipe cap. This makes a simple, yet effective venturi burner.
Fill the wash tub with water, hook it to a propane tank (use a looong hose and an adjustible regulator), light the burner and turn it on full blast. (If the pipe ain't glowing orange hot you ain't got the gas turned on enough, yet too much gas will cause it to flame out.) A standard gas grill sized tank oughta be enough to boil two sacks.
Then dump in lotsa salt and cayenne pepper, onions, potatoes, corn, garlic and lemons. (See recipe at http://www.neworleansweb.org/recipe4.html).
By the time the water's boiling, there oughta be a quarter inch thick layer of frost on the tank from that south Louisiana humidity, so go ahead and stick the tank in the other wash tub, you know, the one that was full of beer and ice, but now is only half full of warm beer and water because someone forgot to get an extra bag of ice.
The cell phone ring has replaced fingernails on a chalkboard as the most annoying sound in a classroom. I'd like to see cell phones incorporate small analog buzzers. A 300-400 Hz "meeep" is much better on the ears than a hollow, tinny, high frequency piezoelectric squeaker. Actually any lower frequency sound would be more easily pinpointed because it travels through objects that would muffle or reflect high frequency sounds, e.g. clothing. I once had an old pager whose vibrating motor broke loose from its mount and it rattled loose inside the case, making a razz like the buzzer motor in the old "Operation" game. I found that sound to be just as easily heard yet less annoying than the beeper screech.
What's even worse is when jackass radio commercial producers incorporate siren sounds into advertisements ("WEEEOOOWEEEOOOWEEEOOO THE SALE AT BIG BOB'S CAR LOT IS SO HOT WE HAD TO CALL THE FIRE DEPARTMENT!!!!!") and you pull over to let the invisible fire truck go by.
According to The CSound Book (http://mitpress.mit.edu/e-books/csound/fpage/pub/ csbook/csbook.html), pink noise is noise in which the power density decreases 3 dB per octave with increasing frequency (density proportional to 1/f) over a finite frequency range. Each octave contains the same amount of power.
It's the Internal Walkman, according to Project Galactic Guide (http://www.galactic-guide.com/articles/6R54.html) . The Internal Walkman can be a source of frustration, especially after a trip to Disney World, where upon leaving you keep deliberately smashing your head against creosote covered telephone poles trying to rid the endless replaying of "It's a small world after all" on the Internal Walkman. The only way to rid your mind of such torture is to listen to something even worse, e.g. the "Popcorn" song.